The Real Indiana Jones

This Nosey Parker blog post first appeared on torontosun.com on May 24, 2009.

His name was Hiram Bingham — the Third.

He stood six-foot-four and he was a handsome, charming son-of-a-gun. Speaking of guns, he always carried a Winchester rifle and a Colt revolver as he criss-crossed South America, from the Andes mountains to the Amazon jungles, searching for lost cities and hidden treasure.

Slouch hat? Oh yeah. Bull whip? He didn't need one. He had his smile — and his guns.

Hiram Bingham was born in Hawaii in 1875, the son and grandson of missionaries (thus Hiram Bingham I and II — Hiram Bingham I being the guy who put the whole damn archipelego of beautiful semi-naked women in neck-to-ankle muu-muus for reasons of religious prurient prudery).

Like the fictitious Indiana Jones, Hiram Bingham led a double life as distinguished scholar and swashbuckling adventurer. Bingham taught South American history at Yale, Harvard and Princeton — he was one of the youngest academics ever appointed full professor at Yale — but throughout his life he listed his occupation in Who's Who In America as "Explorer."



Bingham escaped the genteel poverty and religious straightjacket of Hawaiian missionary life in his teens and worked his way through Yale, graduating in 1898. His academic career continued with a post-graduate degree from the University of California (Berkeley) in 1900 and his doctorate from Harvard in 1905.

But Bingham didn't have to take part-time jobs to pay his way through those later degrees. In 1899, the handsome, gangly young man-about-town married Alfreda Mitchell, heiress granddaughter of the fabulously wealthy New York jeweller Charles Tiffany (Breakfast at Tiffany's, Tiffany lampshades, etc.).

As well as giving Hiram seven sons during his infrequent stays at their New Haven, Conn. mansion, Alfreda also paid for his continuing studies and supported much of his early work as an explorer.

So by the time Hiram Bingham first set foot in South America in 1906 he was already a wealthy (or at least well-sponsored), fast-rising star in the world of Ivy League academics. That first visit whetted his appetite for further exploration of the relatively virgin continent of South America. Bingham returned in 1908, joining a local Peruvian expedition in search of lost Inca ruins (and their supposed hidden treasures) while mapping out his own future plans of exploration and discovery.

Returning to the U.S., he was unable to get academic backing for further South American forays, so he turned to his wife and several wealthy Yale classmates to finance his next adventure — the Yale Peruvian Expedition of 1911.

The goal of Bingham and his Yale pals was Vilcabamba, the "last Inca capital" hidden high in the Peruvian Andes where the Inca rulers had retreated as the Spanish conquistadors gnawed through their empire in the mid-1500s.

Bingham eventually found Vilcabamba, which had been destroyed and forgotten by the Spanish in 1572, but he also found an even greater treasure — Machu Picchu.



Now Bingham is officially listed as the "scientific" discoverer of Machu Picchu because the magnificent Inca city in the clouds was never really "lost." It had been abandoned by the Incas prior to the arrival of the Spaniards and so the conquistadors were not aware of its locale — or even its existence, apart from a few vague references in legends.

But the overgrown city was well-known to the descendants of Inca subjects living in the area, and the site had been visited by other Peruvians and Europeans (including a couple of British missionaries) before Bingham got there. In fact, when Bingham reached the mountaintop on July 24, 1911, several local farmers were cultivating the terraced fields built by the Incas four centuries earlier.

The difference was that Bingham presented this incredible, undisturbed masterpiece of Inca construction to the world. The others had kept their knowledge to themselves.

Following vague local stories, Bingham had not been expecting much when he climbed to Machu Picchu from the expedition's camp further down the mountain on that rainy July day in 1911. In fact, none of the other members of the expedition chose to make the trek and Bingham's main local guide sent an 11-year-old boy to show Bingham the way.

What Bingham found — apart from local farmers at work — was an overgrown city of sophisticated stone structures, undisturbed since the Incas had walked away from it hundreds of years earlier.


A photo taken by Hiram Bingham of Machu Picchu as he found it in 1911

It apparently took Bingham a while to realize what he had found. Notes of other members of the expedition indicate that he was not particularly excited about what he had seen when he returned to camp.

Bingham left several junior members of the group to begin clearing the Machu Picchu site while he pushed on to Vilcabamba — which he did "discover" (as with Machu Picchu, Vilcabamba was well-known locally and had been visited by 19th-Century Europeans prior to Bingham's arrival in 1911).

Because the conquistadors had laid waste to Vilcabamba, the ruins were in far worse shape than the relatively untouched Machu Picchu complex and Bingham really only found a small corner of the last Inca capital. Bingham thought (erroneously) that what he had found was Vitcos, a regional military sub-capital. The massive sprawl of the city was not truly known until further serious archeological excavation was done in the early 1970s.

Bingham's appreciation for what he had found at Machu Picchu grew during that journey, and on his return to Machu Picchu to see what had already been uncovered by his team, he became positively euphoric


Machu Picchu revealed, stripped of overgrowth at the end of the 1911 expedition

NOTE: Bingham thought Machu Picchu was an Inca "fortress" and came to believe it was the real Vilcabamba, the last capital of the retreating nation. Machu Picchu is, however, quite close to the original Inca capital of Cuzco, and despite its rich and elaborate construction, Machu Picchu would have housed only about 600 people comfortably. The current leading academic belief is that Machu Picchu — with a milder climate than Cuzco — was a vacation estate for a ruling Inca emperor and his retinue of nobles, administrators and support staff. In effect, it was probably the equivalent of Windsor Castle during Queen Victoria's reign. When the Inca emperor died a century before the Spanish arrived, the estate was shut down and abandoned — as the estates of other emperors were known to have been abandoned when they died.

When he returned to the U.S., Bingham was able to parlay his find — complete with photos and breathless magazine accounts — into major financing for a new expedition in 1912, sponsored by Yale and the National Geographic Society.

The 1912 expedition was the one that thoroughly uncovered Machu Picchu's secrets and provided more than 4,000 artifacts (a current claim by the Peruvian government cites about 40,000 artifacts) for Bingham to triumphantly bring back for display at Yale.




The National Geographic Society devoted the entire April 1913 issue of its monthly journal, National Geographic magazine, to Bingham's 1912 expedition.

The incredible photos and irresistible stories of the dashing explorer/adventurer made Bingham an international star and created the template for the Indiana Jones type of freebooting/semi-respectable adventurer that has been part of modern pop culture's mythology for 100 years.



Bingham returned to explore other parts of the Andes in 1915, but most of the Machu Picchu recovery work he left to others. Bingham was not an archeologist — he was an explorer.

But that 1915 expedition pretty much ended Bingham's career as an explorer — although not as an adventurer.

He had developed an enthusiasm for aviation and, when the U.S. entered World War I in 1917, he joined the air service of the U.S. Army as a pilot (despite being over the normal age for duty). He rose to the rank of colonel, commanding the U.S. Expeditionary Force's main pilot training base in France.

After the war, Bingham gave up academics for politics. He became Republican lieutenant-governor of Connecticut in 1922, won election as governor of the state in November 1924 — and then as U.S. senator for the state in a December 1924 byelection to fill the seat left vacant by the suicide of Sen. Frank Bosworth Brandegee.

Bingham immediately took his Senate seat and then became governor of Connecticut for exactly two days — Jan. 7-8, 1925 — before resigning the governorship in favour of the Senate.

Bingham's Senate career was a mixed success. He was a strong advocate of aviation and was known as "the Flying Senator."

In these accompanying 1931 photos, you will see Bingham getting out of an autogiro, a cross between a helicopter and airplane, that had just flown him from the U.S. Capitol Building to a golf game at a suburban Washington course.





However he was also censured by the Senate in 1929 for unethical dealings with a lobbyist.

Bingham lost his bid for re-election in 1932 in the Roosevelt Democratic sweep and retired from politics.

Shortly afterwards, Alfreda divorced him — in part because of his womanizing and also because his administration of her fortune had become highly suspect.

Bingham got into business with rocky results, married a woman half his age in 1937 and wrote a bestseller in 1948 — Lost City of the Incas — based on his Machu Picchu expeditions four decades earlier.

Bingham died in 1956 at age 80. He was a legend four times over — a daring, charismatic explorer and adventurer, a writer who caught the public's imagination (and his self-promotion was certainly deserved), a war hero and a successful academic and politician with genuine star quality.

He was also a bit of a cad in his private life, a manipulator and conniver, and a highly self-involved egoist — all qualities that Bingham probably needed to become one the most extraordinary heroes of the 20th Century — the real Indiana Jones.