Peru.
For centuries home of the high civilizations of the Andes.
Here the Sun ings of the Inca ruled over a vast empire,
which stretched for 2,000 miles along the mountain spine of South America.
In 1532, that empire was destroyed with tragic ease by the Spanish.
As their world crumbled around them,
Inca nobles retreated into the remote recesses of the mountains.
There they struggled to keep alive their culture in its final refuge.
The last city of the Incas Vilcabamba.
This is the story of two men
lured by the silent call of that last Inca hiding place.
One to rediscover it
the other to destroy it forever.
Machu Picchu.
For centuries, this spectacular Inca citadel lay forgotten,
hidden by the plunging ravines
and coiling mists of the mountain cloud forest.
The year is 1948.
Machu Picchu is visited by a retired American senator
a man, who in his youth, revealed it to the world.
He has done many things in his remarkable life,
but Hiram Bingham knows he will be remembered for one:
This astonishing archeological discovery.
Hiram Bingham is a sort of accidental archeologist.
He's been scorned by better trained excavators,
but he really doesn't care he's used to coping with bad press.
Back in Washington he'd been elected a Republican senator
in the Roaring Twenties.
His flamboyant style was perfectly in tune with the times.
A bribery scandal, an affair with the wife of another Congressman,
divorce, accusations that he'd embezzled his first wife's fortune
had all left him unscathed.
In 1929, he landed a Zeppelin on Capitol Hill as a publicity stunt.
Hiram loved headlines.
He was a very, very colorful character
a man of enormous energy, tremendous ambition.
He was capable of doing almost anything, and he had an attitude
that led him to believe he could accomplish whatever he set out to do.
Perhaps Hiram's adventurous life was the perfect reaction to his upbringing.
Born to pioneering Christian missionaries in the Hawaiian Islands,
Hiram was raised for a life of Puritan austerity.
In the world of his childhood, any extravagance,
lack of discipline, even dancing were strictly forbidden.
Not surprisingly, Hiram was eager to escape.
Resourceful and intelligent,
he saved and studied to get into school on the mainland.
Before long, he was headed for Yale.
Hiram threw himself into Yale college life.
Gone were the puritanical days of his Hawaiian childhood.
Suddenly, a new world of temptations was beckoning.
Intellectual excitement, adventure, and girls.
Dear Mother, what can I do?
I know it will hurt you to think that I dance,
but people here in the East do not understand why
anyone should not dance,
unless one is sick or lame.
I can see nothing wrong with it unless carried to excess.
Although reserved, Hiram was determined to enjoy himself.
Thanks to his charm,
he was soon moving freely in this atmosphere of wealth and privilege.
Before long, he met Alfreda Mitchell, heiress to the Tiffany fortune.
Alfreda was irresistible, wealthy, and from the high society
Hiram was now determined to be a part of.
In 1900, two years after they first met,
Hiram and Freda were married at the Mitchell's grand estate in New London.
Hiram took to wealth like a duck to water but there was a down side.
There was obviously an economic asymmetry.
The wife brought with her a set of expectations
about the style in which she should live,
and her side of the family was apparently very active
in making sure that those expectations were met.
He liked the money and status,
but hadn't banked on the pressures from his in laws.
Used to his independence,
Hiram soon began to feel like a bird in a gilded cage.
He had every prospect of a professorship at Yale,
but before long university life, too, started to feel suffocating.
Feeling hemmed in by academia, in laws,
and the pressures of domesticity,
Hiram soon started looking for an escape.
He decided field research for a book about Simon Bolivar
would be his ticket to some adventure.
In 1906, he said good bye to Alfreda and headed off for South America.
I feel the Bingham blood stirring in my veins
as I start for little known regions,
as nearly all my Bingham ancestors for ten generations have done before me.
Freda wasn't happy about the long separation imposed by his travels.
Hiram wrote soothing letters as if he wasn't either.
Dearly beloved, I love you with a love that increases
from day to day.
Let us not complain about our long separation
but rejoice in the opportunity to accomplish a good piece of work.
But thousands of miles away, Hiram was ecstatic.
He may have missed Alfreda,
but at last he met his true calling adventurer.
It was through the actual process of travel that he began to realize that
exploration rather than documentary research was what really drew him.
Bingham abandoned his academic research
to write a book about his travels.
When he reached Peru,
Bingham came face to face with the Inca world for the first time.
He was entranced.
Here was the remains of a civilization
as vast and sophisticated as ancient Egypt,
and yet little was known about it.
Its descendants still populated the Andes.
The ancient sites
which littered Peru spoke to him of a magnificent bygone world,
but he had no idea how to interpret what they said.
He had to find a method on the spot.
Fortunately, I had with me that extremely useful handbook,
"Hints to the Travelers," published by the Royal Geographic Society.
In one of the chapters I found out what should be done
when one is confronted by a prehistoric site:
Take careful measurements,
plenty of photographs, and describe as accurately as possible all finds.
He was soon eagerly examining Inca sites all over Peru.
One episode of Inca history fascinated him above all others Vilcabamba,
last stronghold of the Inca kings.
Sixteenth century chronicles recounted
how a core group of Inca nobles and priests
had escaped the carnage of conquest
and fled into the impenetrable high jungles
to the north of the Inca capital, Cuzco.
And there, at a place called Vilcabamba,
they'd constructed an Inca court in exile.
A palace, a temple, a final refuge of their world.
They had taken their sacred relics of gold with them.
Many had been lured by the accounts of Vilcabamba and gone in search of it.
None had ever succeeded in finding it.
Perhaps the relics and the gold were still there,
hidden in the jungle, waiting to be discovered.
Hiram was spellbound.
It was a treasure seeker's dream.
Suddenly, Hiram saw a fantastic adventure opening up before him:
He would discover Vilcabamba, lost city of the Incas,
and unearth its hidden treasures.
Hiram returned to the U.S.
And threw himself into fundraising and his researches on Vilcabamba.
He pored over maps and chronicles of the Conquest.
Based on these, Hiram made meticulous calculations of
where Vilcabamba must be.
After months of research, he was certain
the last refuge of the Incas had been in a remote place now
called Espiritu Pampa.
Now all he had to do was raise the money for the expedition.
He was too proud to be totally bankrolled by his wife's family.
He went down to the Yale Club in New York City, and he gave a speech.
A number of the people came forward.
When they saw the pictures of his earlier travels,
they became very excited.
Last night a classmate,
of whom I have seen very little, came over and talked with me.
When I told him about my plans and how I needed $1800
to pay for a topographer
he smiled and said,
"Eighteen hundred dollars? I'll give you that."
I could have shouted with joy.
The New York harbor on June 8th, 1911,
Hiram Bingham stood on the deck of a steamer
once again waving goodbye to his wife.
This time it was harder.
They had just had another son, Hiram IV.
I shall never forget how you looked as you stood on the wharf with Harry,
so brave and courageous, and yet so little and so appealing.
It did seem too cruel for words that I should be
leaving you all alone.
But soon he was back in Peru doing what he loved most.
In July 1911, he set off from Cuzco northwards
on the long journey to Espiritu Pampa.
Back in his element, Hiram was overjoyed.
He was also extraordinarily lucky.
After less than three weeks easy trekking down a newly opened road,
a local farmer told him about some old stone terraces
on a mountain nearby.
Hiram asked the man what the place was called.
He scribbled down the answer in his notebook Machu Picchu.
He decided to have a quick look at it the next day.
A young Indian boy led the party up onto a plateau a few hours away.
Hardly had we rounded the promontory
than we were confronted by an unexpected sight:
A great flight of beautifully constructed stone faced terraces,
perhaps a hundred of them.
I could scarcely believe my senses.
Would anyone believe what I had found?
Fortunately, I had a good camera.
He knew he'd found an Inca ruin of exceptional beauty,
but I think because of his lack of experience,
he didn't fully appreciate how unique the discovery was.
It was an entire city which had lain untouched
since the Incas had abandoned it almost 400 years before.
Not understanding what he had found, Hiram left two of his team
to start clearing and mapping the site
while he pressed on to his real goal, Vilcabamba.
He forged on northwards
pushing his team through tangled... jungle and perilous ravines
sure he was heading toward greater discoveries
a fabulous lost city of temples and palaces
that would put any other Inca ruin to shame.
Finally, after weeks of arduous trekking,
he approached the area where he knew Vilcabamba must be.
For days his team hacked through dense underbrush and tangled vines.
To their great astonishment, they found nothing.
Espiritu Pampa was a desolate upland plateau
with a few unimpressive stone foundations and a lot of dense jungle.
It was a far cry from the magnificent city Bingham had imagined.
He was disappointed and confused.
Could this be Vilcabamba? Or had his calculations been wrong?
A perplexed Hiram turned back the expedition.
The men were exhausted and supplies were running out.
As his team trudged back to civilization, morale hit rock bottom.
I often wonder why under the sun I picked out a career
that would force me to spend so much of my time away
from my dear ones.
The future is not clear to me.
As Hiram headed back to the U.S. And Alfreda,
gloom and uncertainty hung over his whole project.
Once back in the U.S., Hiram's spirits revived,
and with them his dreams of Vilcabamba.
He rechecked his calculations of its position.
If it was not Espiritu Pampa, could it be Machu Picchu?
But Machu Picchu's position still seemed wrong.
He decided to return to Peru the following year
and investigate his find more thoroughly.
When he arrived in Machu Picchu again in the summer of 1912,
what the workmen had revealed was, quite simply, stunning.
It clearly was some sort of city its size, its spectacular location,
its magnificent terracing, all made him sure it was a royal city.
No one but a king could have insisted on having the lintels of his doorways
made of solid blocks of granite, each weighing three tons.
What a prodigious amount of patient work had to be employed.
Overcome with excitement, Hiram immediately began to speculate
that this must be the last refuge of the Inca kings.
Even if the location was wrong, everything else was so right.
Here in this breathtaking hideout,
the Inca rulers had surely sheltered the last remnants of their world.
Hiram devoted himself to his spectacular find at Machu Picchu.
It was his passport to worldwide fame.
National Geographic devoted an entire magazine
issue to Bingham and his work in Peru.
Suddenly, everybody knew about Machu Picchu and the man who uncovered it.
At a special National Geographic Society dinner he was honored
along with the world renowned discoverers
of the North and South Poles.
Hiram had finally achieved the fame he'd always wanted.
But his career as an excavator was not to last much longer.
He returned to Peru in 1915 to a storm of controversy.
For many Peruvians,
the apparent absence of spectacular gold
among Bingham's finds was deeply suspicious.
Rumors flew that Bingham had found gold
and was smuggling it out of the country.
Fed up, fearing arrest, Hiram packed and left Peru.
On his return to the U.S., he decided to abandon his excavations.
The first World War was raging.
He signed up as an aviator.
World War I offered him a very convenient way of extricating himself
from what had become an intractable situation in Peru.
He could honorably say that the world needed him
to become involved in the military effort
that, as a patriot, he should do that.
After a tour of duty in Europe,
Bingham had the perfect qualifications for a political career.
Yale man, world famous explorer, and now war hero.
He was elected in 1924 to the U.S. Senate with little difficulty.
His political star rose steadily through the 1920s,
but a bribery scandal and the Great Depression brought it down fast.
The political tide turned against Hiram and his buccaneering style.
He lost his Senate seat in 1932.
Before long, he lost Alfreda too,
and left taking a large part of her family's money with him.
Remarried, eager to make up for past mistakes,
he turned back to tend the one reputation he knew was secure,
discoverer of Machu Picchu.
He believed to his dying day that Machu Picchu was Vilcabamba.
As it turned out, here too he was mistaken.
Later discoveries made it clear
the real Vilcabamba was exactly where Hiram's first calculations had put it,
at Espiritu Pampa.
Beneath the tangled overgrowth of Espiritu Pampa's desolate jungle,
the remains of Vilcabamba had been lying only a few hundred yards
from where Hiram had searched.
Determined to dispel any lingering doubts
that Machu Picchu was not the last refuge of the Incas,
Hiram devoted many of the years up to his death in 1956
to his researches into Vilcabamba and its fall.
His studies took him back to the 16th century.
The bloodstained and tumultuous era of the Conquest
and to a brilliant, chilling, now largely forgotten man
who changed the course of Peru's history
Francisco de Toledo, administrator of genius,
passionate believer in the law, destroyer of Vilcabamba,
killer of the last Inca king.
Francisco de Toledo was born in 1515
into the high Spanish nobility in the town of Oropesa.
In the 16th century, you couldn't get much more privileged than this.
Spain was the wealthiest and most powerful nation on earth.
Its massive armies had subdued Moslems in the Middle East
and Protestants in Europe's north.
It was the powerhouse of the West.
The recent astonishing discoveries of a whole new continent
promised an inexhaustible supply of wealth, and it all belonged to Spain.
This was the confident, aggressive and opulent world
Francisco was born into.
But despite his family's position, his early life was not easy.
His mother died in childbirth, and young Francisco was raised by nuns.
He grew up isolated in a world of
austere Catholicism and fervent devotion.
Young Francisco took on the qualities of the religious world that shaped him.
He became tough minded, disciplined,
and an ardent believer in the justice of Christ.
His family had always been loyal servants of the Spanish crown,
so at 15 Francisco became a page at the royal palace.
In 1532, Francisco would have been at court for only two years
when he heard the astounding tales of Pizarro's conquest of Peru
and the astonishing ransom in gold of the Inca king, Atahuallpa.
These were reports from beyond the edge of the known world.
How could his imagination not be seized
by the faraway kingdom of Peru and its amazing riches?
Francisco joined a religious and military order
at the forefront of Spain's expansion.
He took the necessary vows
and dedicated his life to Christ, Spain and the law.
Toledo was brought up to be what we would consider a humanist.
He had training in the law, he could read Latin.
So, he was a man trained to be like,
today we would say a Harvard or a Yale man, ready to rule.
Francisco rose fast through the ranks.
By 1558, he'd become a permanent, powerful member of the royal household.
He was one of the chosen few present
at the bedside of ing Charles V when he died.
Francisco went on to serve the next king of Spain,
Philip I I,
who on taking the throne was confronted
with the devastating and unexpected realization
the empire was broke.
Overextended in Europe,
Spain had also financed decades of conquest
and exploration in the Americas.
Very little was coming back.
All that Inca and Aztec gold that had been melted down
turned out to be a drop in the ocean.
The real wealth of the colonies was in the hands of the 'encomenderos,'
the new Spanish overlords who had divided up the lands
and the Indians amongst themselves.
In a feeding frenzy
over the astonishing wealth of their newfound land,
the encomenderos had spawned Spain's very own Wild West,
where lawlessness and the sword ruled.
They were busy making themselves rich, and not paying tribute to the crown.
Philip realized he desperately needed someone
who could straighten out the colony in Peru
and get some revenues flowing back to Spain.
That man, he decided, was Francisco de Toledo.
In 1569, Francisco set sail for Peru
to take up the most challenging and important job
in the Spanish Empire, Viceroy of Peru.
The grueling journey took almost an entire year
across the barely charted waters of the Atlantic,
and then down the Pacific Coast of South America to Peru.
On November 30th, 1569,
Francisco arrived in the Spanish capital of Peru, Lima.
Anxious for his favor,
the local encomenderos gave him an enthusiastic welcome.
But in a letter to ing Philip, he secretly confided his disgust
for the anarchic little frontier town and its Spanish overlords.
The Spaniards in this kingdom have tried to fill their greedy hands
in the looting of ancient tombs and sacred worship sites.
And it is the most common thing for them to wildly flaunt their finds.
But this is what he'd been sent to put right.
The new viceroy threw himself into the task of reforming the delinquent colony.
It quickly became clear to him that
the colony was being pulled apart by two powerful forces.
On the one hand there were the encomenderos
who fought amongst themselves and enslaved the Indians.
On the other, there was the Church, which also felt it had a moral right
not only to Indian souls, but their labor.
The whole colony was feeding itself on Indian toil and Indian ignorance.
Not surprisingly,
the native population simmered with resentment and discontent.
Francisco could immediately see where he had to focus his reforms.
I am informed that the Indians are not free
as a result of their weakness,
and the great awe they have toward Spaniards.
It is, therefore, my duty as their protector
to see they are not cheated in their work.
Francisco also learned the Inca court in exile,
now established in Vilcabamba,
had already been at the center of the violent rebellion
which had raged for years.
When Toledo arrived to Peru, he was sympathetic to the Inca.
On the other hand, there had been this famous uprising of the Incas.
The Incas had retired to Vilcabamba
and they were threatening the whole process of the conquest.
Francisco had to somehow introduce order
into this volatile and chaotic situation.
He realized he could never put things right
unless he came to understand it in greater depth.
So he proposed something that, for the time,
was absolutely remarkable a research trip
to find out at first hand what was happening in the colony.
I saw clearly that I would not be able to govern the Spaniards
or the Indians with the zeal that I had for serving God or Your Majesty
unless I saw the land, traveled through it, and inspected it.
It was what we would do today in a social survey.
It was completely innovative.
The government up to that point was based on brutality and the use of arms.
What Toledo proposes is government based on knowledge,
which makes him a man ahead of his time.
So in 1570, Toledo set out on his remarkable voyages of investigation
through the remnants of the vast Inca Empire.
They would last for five years.
With translators and scribes,
he traveled from one end of the colony to the other,
interviewing Indians and Spanish alike, collecting data on population,
land holdings, resources and local history.
In the years of his travels,
he accumulated an astonishing 600,000 documents.
As Francisco listened to Indians talking,
he understood the magnitude of their catastrophe.
Not only had they been subjected to the encomenderos,
but they were dying by the hundreds of thousands.
A series of devastating epidemics of European diseases
to which they had no resistance
had already wiped out over half the Indian population of Peru.
In just 30 years since the arrival of Pizarro,
almost a million people had died of colds, flus,
measles and small pox.
In despair, many people were focusing unreal hopes of salvation
on the Inca court in exile.
Francisco started to believe that
Vilcabamba's hold on the Indian imagination had to be broken.
Francisco traveled on.
In the course of his research he covered all the territory
from what is now Quito in Ecuador to Bolivia.
And as he traveled, he learned something else.
The Inca Empire had been composed of many different tribes.
The Incas were just one of them
who had come to dominate the others only recently,
about 100 years before the arrival of the Spanish.
Just like the Spanish, they had waged fierce war to conquer the country.
There was no shortage of evidence of Inca brutality to weaker tribes.
The Incas are tyrants,
and as such, intruders in the government of these lands.
I think he was looking for arguments
in order to justify the Spanish conquest within this particular region.
And he saw that the excuse could be to blame
the Inca people as being tyrants,
as being dictators, as being people who had imposed themselves
with force on the populations they had conquered
in order to present the Spanish Conquest
as a sort of liberated process.
He wasn't wrong.
What happens is when you use the word 'tyrant'
it has a whole moral connotation.
The Incas were an authoritarian system,
with an imperial military force which was extremely violent, cruel,
and would use the sorts of torture which would scandalize us
if they were used in European wars.
As Francisco pondered the realities he had discovered on his voyages,
any doubts he might have had
about the legitimacy of the Spanish conquest evaporated.
With typical thoroughness,
he came up with a plan which was brilliantly argued,
utterly coherent and totally draconian.
His vision was of a great kingdom of stern justice in Peru.
He would impose Spain's authority
on the quarreling encomenderos and church alike.
He knew he would make enemies of both of them.
He did it anyway.
And he would totally reorganize the Indian world so it could experience
both the justice and authority of the Spanish crown.
The Indians were to be resettled from their remote villages
into more accessible towns
where they would pay taxes to Spain and be protected by her.
And he would insist that, as subjects of Spain, they had rights.
But there was one terrible price to pay
for Francisco's vision of a just social order in Peru
there would be no place for Vilcabamba.
There could not be two kings in the colony.
Vilcabamba and the remaining power of the Inca kings must be destroyed.
Unknown to Francisco, the Inca king he was deciding to destroy
was little more than a boy, Tupac Amaru.
Brought up by the Inca priestesses of Vilcabamba,
he was deeply religious and knew nothing of the outside world.
He was gentle, famously beautiful, charming, and it seems, not very smart.
Tupac Amaru was very young when he was crowned Inca.
Tupac Amaru is referred as an 'Uti'.
Uti is meant to be sort of not mentally retarded,
but not the quickest, not the brightest.
Tupac Amaru was a very young person.
I don't imagine him as being very well politically trained.
He was very young.
He was just a symbolic figure.
Tupac Amaru was an innocent, but that wasn't going to save him.
On June 16th, 1572, Spanish troops thundered towards Vilcabamba.
As they charge into the citadel,
Tupac Amaru manages to escape with his wife
who is expecting their first child.
They don't get far.
The bewildered young Tupac is dragged back to Cuzco,
and on September 21 st, 1572, condemned to death.
As Tupac Amaru is led through the streets to his execution,
the town is seething.
Everybody has fallen in love with the handsome young king,
not just Indians, but Spaniards too.
They all want Francisco to relent.
Francisco locks himself in his office and refuses to see anyone.
In the main square of Cuzco, Tupac Amaru rises to the execution block.
An eyewitness records the scene:
As the multitude of Indians saw that lamentable spectacle,
they deafened the skies making them reverberate
with their cries and wailing.
There are two versions of what happens next.
In one, Tupac quiets the crowd and says nobly,
"Mother Earth, witness how my enemies shed my blood."
In another, he makes a rambling, tearful speech
and renounces the Inca gods.
Everyone prays that Toledo will change his mind.
But from Toledo's closed office, there is a resounding silence.
Toledo writes to ing Philip:
What Your Majesty has ordered concerning the Inca has been done.
But His Majesty had not ordered the death of Tupac Amaru,
only a solution to the Indian problem.
From this moment the tide starts to turn against Francisco.
Toledo accomplished the mission that he had set out for himself.
That's why he wanted it to be so public and so theatrical,
to send a message, "This is over; this is it."
But it wasn't over.
As Tupac's head was mounted on a pike in Cuzco's central square,
the Inca king's faithful subjects held vigil all night.
And immediately the stories circulated that
Tupac Amaru's head became more beautiful with each passing minute.
As the centuries passed, it became more beautiful still.
Tupac Amaru was converted into
a Christ like figure of martyred innocence,
the symbol of native resistance to oppression.
For 500 years, almost every popular rebellion in Peru,
from the Great Indian uprisings of the 18th century,
led by Tupac Amaru I I,
to the urban guerrillas of the late 20th century, have invoked his name.
It's a tragic myth,
because everybody who invoked Tupac Amaru failed as well.
Tupac Amaru I I failed, the Peruvian Revolution of '68,
which relied on the image of the two Tupac Amarus, also failed.
As history turned Tupac Amaru into a tragic hero,
it turned Francisco into a caricature of the cruel Spaniard.
Forgotten were his stands for justice and the rights of Indians
against the brutal exploitation of the encomenderos,
he became famous for one thing:
Executing the innocent boy king, Tupac Amaru.
You've got to remember who was writing that history.
The history of Spain was written by priests,
the missionaries who hated Toledo.
I think he held everybody to the same standards.
In administrative terms, he did the right thing.
In terms of his conscience, only he can tell.
After a remarkably successful reform of the colony in Peru,
Francisco returned to Spain
expecting honors for his years of faithful service.
Instead, insults and disgrace were heaped on him.
The church had worked its influence on Philip.
The king who he had served with such brilliance and devotion
dismissed Francisco without an audience.
Go away to your house.
I sent you to serve a king, and you killed a king.
It was a devastating blow.
Mortally wounded, he returned to his family's home.
Six months later, Francisco de Toledo,
Fifth Viceroy of Peru, died a broken man.
His stern vision of a realm of justice in Peru never came to be.
The greed and corruption of the colony slowly reasserted itself.
The Indians were exploited as never before.
As the screws of colonial oppression tightened,
the memory of Francisco faded,
and Vilcabamba became the tragic myth
which would return to haunt Peru forever.