COUNTRY NOTES: Downtown in The Lost Cities of the Amazon

— By Nicholas Asheshov —

Some weeks ago two events, one of them startling, came together to pin-point the mysterious new conundrum of the Amazon.

The first was the appearance on a busy riverbank in the Madre de Dios of a few dozen members of a previously-isolated group of Indians.  They killed someone who had been trying to help them.

The naked Indians, seen on TV screens around the world, were described by anthropologists as descendants of an unbroken line of hunting and gathering savages, living fossils of our neolithic past.

This is, according to new Amazon thinking, incorrect. These Indians are the sad, socially degenerated remnants of nations and tribes that were productive, sophisticated and stable  just a few centuries ago.

The other event was an article in The New York Times that reported on the discovery in Acre, only a few hours travel from the Madre de Dios Indians, of extensive, deep straight, or sometimes circular, trenches, ridges and mounds dating back to pre-Columbian times, indicating a large, well-developed society.

This was just the latest evidence that the Amazon, or at least parts of it, was heavily populated by well-organized societies in much the same way as the high Andes were remodelled by the Tiahuanuco, the Chavin, the Chachapoyas, the Huari, and the Incas.

Over the past couple of decades the pre-history of the Americas has been revolutionized, setting off poison-tipped academic and ecological vendettas.

First of all, the Americas were populated much earlier, at least 33-35,000 years ago, double the time previously calculated.  That is back to Neanderthal epochs.

Second, there were many more people here when Columbus arrived than was earlier thought.  And, most important, the societies and nations of the Americas were much more sophisticated and structured than was previously understood.  They were agriculturalists, not the war-whoopers of the movies.  Their mode of life and agriculture had massive, long-term effects on the original pre-human forests.   Fire was a basic control mechanism.

Today the evidence of genetics, linguistics and archaeology is clear that the Amazon was not just an impenetrable green hell populated by primitive hunters and fishermen eking out an unchanging, culturally marginal existence.

The same applies to North America.  Here most of the descriptions of primitive Indians come from 18th and 19th century travelers who were seeing only the sorry leftovers of great nations that had been obliterated by smallpox, viral hepatitis, influenza and other European and African diseases.  The Conquest set off the Dark Ages in the Americas.

In the Amazon the same collapse, featuring malaria and yellow fever, was exacerbated by the rubber boom of the late-1800s and early-1900s.

You can check this out in three fine recent books.  Two of these are Charles C Mann’s easy-to-read, well-researched “1491” and a sequel, “1493“, just out; and in John Hemming’s “Tree of Rivers“, a masterly description of the Amazon.  Hemming, author of the classic “The Conquest of the Incas” has also written, earlier, three volumes on the peoples of the Amazon.

Charles Mann describes, for instance, how my old friend William Denevan, Professor Emeritus of Geography at the University of Wisconsin, discovered how the Beni, on the edge of the western Amazon in Bolivia, was a flourishing, well-organized center of islands and causeways on what is today a bleak, sparsely-inhabited combination of dense jungle and flood-plain, inhabited today by sad remnants of Siriono Indians.

Bill worked on the Peruvian Times just before me in the 1960s and his stories on the Beni and similar mounds and trenches around Lake Titicaca in the PT were the first indication of this revolution in South American prehistory.

“Beginning as much as three thousand years ago, this long-ago society,”  Mann writes, “created one of the largest, strangest, and most ecologically rich artificial environments on the planet.”

Great stuff.

Mann desribes the Amazon as one of the world’s half-dozen agricultural heartlands, where plants were domesticated, the epicenters of civilization.  Others were the tropical Andes, Central America, the Fertile Crescent, and China.

The Amazon, including the area where the savage Indians appeared the other day, just north and west of the Beni, was the source of yuca, known elsewhere as manioc or cassava, as well as tobacco, peanuts chili pepper, chocolate, Brazilian broad beans, the peach palm, and Brazil nuts.

It was also the homeland of Hevea Brasiliensis, the rubber tree, which was to be, along with steel and oil, one of the three creators of the 20th century version of civilization.

For the Amazon, including the Indians on the banks the other day of the Madre de Dios, rubber became a disaster, just as gold and silver had been for Peru and Mexico.  The malaria and yellow fever, imports from Africa, that it helped to spread turned the Amazon and its western tributaries into what Charles Mann calls “de-populated fever valleys.”  Slavery did the rest.

The Amazon as a center of civilization has become the subject of a bitter dispute between two magnificent lady academics, the archaeologists Betty Meggers of the Smithsonian Institution and Anna Roosevelt of the University of Illinois. 

Hemming mentions the two warring camps on the issue of whether or not there were tribes with sophisticated, stable, large populations: Dr Meggers says that the Amazon basically had only hunters+gatherers; Dr. Roosevelt says that there were big lively societies all over the place.

Here is a message to me the other day from John Hemming and you will find nowhere else a more precise and appropriately colorful description of the state of play today in Amazon studies.

“Broadly, I think that Anna (and her acolytes like Michael Heckenberger) are right to say that there were large chiefdoms on some riverbanks of the main Amazon and its tributaries (although there were also very long stretches of uninhabited river).  Those chiefdoms were based on the river and its fish and turtle resources. 

“But I think that the Roosevelt school exaggerates the size and sophistication of their beloved chiefdoms, which they compare to the great civilizations of Peru.

“They also exaggerate the extent of human manipulation of forests. Remember that it was very laborious indeed for early man to fell trees (other than palms) with their stone axes.  And they had no need or desire to do so: they were very happy in pristine forests full of game. Planting the trees they liked near their villages was merely rearranging the deckchairs.  It did not alter the Amazon landscape.

“Meggers is right about the inability of Amazon terra-firma forest to support villages of more than a thousand people maximum – the surrounding game is exhausted otherwise, and the soils under mature forests are too weak to sustain large-scale farming. So, away from the rivers, early tribes were not much larger than their modern descendants at the time of first contact and before being hit by imported disease.”

For many years, John was Secretary of the Royal Geographical Society, London, and we can all understand what he means by “rearranging the deckchairs.”

But not everyone agrees. Charles Mann in his just-published “1493,” calls the Amazon “the world’s richest garden,” quoting archeobiologists and looking at parts of the Amazon today that are carefully-distributed and well-tended collections of trees, plants and fish and game reserves.

Today there are tourists but it can still be a tough place.  Near the Acre ruins noted in The New York Times, settlers are still gunned down by big-money ranchers.  I remember John telling me of the day in 1961 when he carried the arrow-filled body of his friend Richard Mason back to camp.   A decade later, in 1970, I myself was searching the jungles of the Pantiacolla in the Upper Madre de Dios for my friend Robert Nichols, chief reporter of the Peruvian Times of which I was then the editor, who had set out to find Paititi, a version of El Dorado.   It transpired that he, and two French companions, had been stoned to death by the Machiguengas.

Unlike John, I am not prejudiced by knowing what I am talking about and I unreservedly plump for the Roosevelt school’s bumptious Amazonian super-civilizations and I am supported by no less than Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie.  Their latest movie, due out this year, is The Lost City of Z, where Brad plays Colonel Percy Fawcett, the English explorer, searching in 1925 for El Dorado in the Amazon.   Let’s hope that Brad has better luck than Percy, who never returned. 

————–

Notes.
Colonel Percy Fawcett said: “The answer to the enigma of Ancient South America – and perhaps that of the entire prehistoric world – will be found when the old South American cities are located and opened up to scientific research. These cities exist, and I will prove that they exist.”
————-
Tony Morrison, the wildlife photographer and author, on a recent trip to the Beni:
“Setting out from Trinidad in the Beni we hopped on a 35b bus in the plaza and headed to the great mound at Eviata where the entire village is built above the floodplain. I went there to see the last of the Siriono tribe, as they have a base around the old mission church. What a bedraggled lot they were and the mound is now topped by a huge ENTEL satellite dish — not a bad place to site it as it should be above the annual flood.”
——
Vera Tulyneva charlie.quispe@yahoo.com . Ms Tulyneva is completing a thesis on “Paititi” at the Universidad Catolica, Lima.  Commenting on The New York Times story on ancient remains in the Acre:

“The earth constructions of Acre have been in the news for the past five years. The first one to speak of them was Martti Pärssinen, an historian from Finland who had been working in the region for many years. In fact, they are not “geoglyphs,” i.e. earth figurative drawings of apparent religious/ritual function, but rather utilitarian earthworks, like drainage trenches. Acre, Mojos, Beni, Xingu and many other Amazonic regions are full of them.”
————–
Michael Heckenberger website on Xingu: The Xingu Ethnoarchaeological Project
————–
An article on Acre: Pre-columbian geometric earthworks
and  Geometric Earthworks in the Upper Purus  

————–
The New York Times: The Nazca Lines of the Acre jungle – Land Carvings Attest to Lost World
______________________________________

 This article was published in Caretas magazine this week in Spanish. 

Nick Asheshov is a Director of The Machu Picchu Train Co., Urubamba. A veteran journalist, noted explorer and entrepreneur, he was editor of the Peruvian times from 1969 to 1990.

Open letter to President Ollanta Humala

Since Jan. 26, the inbox of Andean Air Mail & PERUVIAN TIMES has been inundated with an open letter addressed to President Ollanta Humala, signed by people from all corners of the globe.

As of today, the number of these appeals generated by the The Rainforest Portal and copied to our news blog’s email address surpassed 1,660.

Below is the content of their message:

“Please cancel plans for road through Alto Purus and save uncontacted tribes and their rainforest habitats” Read more…

Peru’s New Drug Chief: Country “Let Down Its Guard” in Eradication

Peru’s new anti-drug chief, Carmen Masias, said that the country “let down its guard” last year in the eradication of illegal coca crops, the raw material used to make cocaine.

In an interview published by daily El Comercio, Masias said that Peru’s five-year anti-drug strategy will be reviewed and approved by President Ollanta Humala’s cabinet on Wednesday.

Masias, who was appointed earlier this month to head the National Commission for Development and Life without Drugs, Devida, said that Peru eradicated about 10,000 hectares of coca last year and is expected to eradicate 14,000 hectares this year.

Masias, a psychologist and former deputy head of the non-government drug prevention institution CEDRO, said that during the first five months of Humala’s administration, the message about eradication was unclear. “I think there could have been a more precise message. It was worked on internally, but you have to be explicit and say that the fight against drugs will be firm, that eradication – while not the only [measure] – is absolutely indispensible,” Masias said.

Masias was referring to her predecessor, Ricardo Soberon, and his plans to move away from attacking the coca growers and instead focus on attacking the structures of drug trafficking organizations, including money laundering.

Masías’ statements indicate a return to the tried and not-too-effective strategies of at least the past 10 years —despite eradication programs, coca hectares have increased from 40,000 to 60,000 in that time— and Valdes has also removed much of Devida’s autonomy, according to Soberon, by blocking its direct access to Dirandro, the drug police agency and instead placing it under the Ministry of Interior’s general administration office.

A lawyer and expert in the illegal drug trade, the outspoken Soberon was head of Devida for about five months and was in favor of a stronger intervention in drug policies by his institution, changing the focus from interdiction and forced crop eradication to a more comprehensive program to incorporate active participation of coca growers in the changes.

His appointment was strongly criticized by some local media, including El Comercio, the political opposition and some analysts of Peru’s drug trade, for his past ties with coca growers.

Soberon fights back

In an interview with Ideeleradio on Monday, Soberon said he had disagreements with cabinet chief Oscar Valdes, who was previously Humala’s Interior minister, about the role of Devida.

His proposals clashed with U.S. and U.N. drug policies, which concentrate on forced eradication, and shortly after his appointment to Devida he was not included in a fact-finding trip to Pucallpa with Valdes and military and police hosted by the U.S. Embassy.

Soberon criticized recent statements made by Masias and Valdes on the greater emphasis to be made on user prevention.

“I would have liked to believe that the idea of  drug policy reform would continue,” Soberon said. “But the first statements and the facts surrounding my leaving the post lead me to believe that Devida is enroute to becoming a State-funded NGO for drug prevention.”

Soberon said he believed that President Humala was being maliciously misinformed about his 2012 Coca Reduction Plan so that drug policies will continue to be a failure.  He also questioned the fact that police general Juan Zárate, head of Corah, the Upper Huallaga eradication program, has remained in Corah for 25 years and “that apparently no cabinet chief or even President has been able” to terminate his services.

Soberon also rejected accusations by congressman Luis Iberico, by Masias herself, and insinuations by cabinet chief Valdes that he had padded the Devida payroll and was earning a “golden” salary. “The salary I had of 15,600 soles was the same that the others before me received, including Romulo Pizarro and Nils Ericsson and every other drug czar in [Devida's] history,” he said, adding that the additional staff was hired to strengthen the seven Devida zone offices.

CADE Innovations: Stay tuned for ‘El Nuevo Peru de Antes!’

By Nicholas Asheshov

~ Special to Peruvian Times ~

As business leaders meet in Cusco this weekend to focus on “Innovation” at the Annual Executive Conference, CADE, from the countryside of the Urubamba valley the author proposes looking back for truly radical and practical, high-tech innovation.

Ancient Peru was one of the half-dozen centers of the technological and political innovation that ushered in today’s complex world of great, interdependent cultures.

Unlike the other centers — China, the Fertile Crescent and Egypt, India, and finally the Mediterranean and Western Europe — most of Peru’s innovations, above all in social organization, were lost in the disaster of the Conquest.

Proud, sad bits and pieces of the ancient Andean and coastal cultures remain.  The potato and a half-dozen varieties of maize have been essential parts of the food chain that is feeding 7,000 million people.  China is today the world’s biggest producer of the potato, first domesticated around Lake Titicaca, and of the sweet potato, camote.

Peruvians can reflect, perhaps with mixed feelings, that it was the US$200,000,000,000, at today’s values —the figure comes from Prof. Niall Ferguson’s Civilization: The West and The Rest, published in London earlier this year— that the conquistadors sent back to Europe between 1532 and 1780, which provided the liquidity for the creation of the global economy of the 21st century.

But the precious metals, like the guano, tomato, quinoa, cherimoya and cocaine, are secondary and are in any case not really what we mean by innovation.  The khipu, the cutting-edge strings-and-knots combination of iPad and Registros Publicos — production cost 35 cents— was lost, destroyed maliciously by the priests, the Taliban of the day.  Only 620 remain. According to Prof. Gary Urton, of Harvard, it was much more sophisticated than anything in Europe at the time but they still haven’t cracked its complex code.

Like Machu Picchu, the thousands of miles of all-weather roads, irrigation systems on the coast, tens of thousands of stone terraces and water systems in the valleys and highlands, and the networks of warehouses, these were by-products of the real value of life in Ancient Peru.  This was the lively, aggressive social and political stability that allowed the Incas and a dozen great cultures that preceded them — Chavin, Moche, Tiahuanacu, Huari — to produce societies that were in the front rank of their contemporaries worldwide.

On Lake Titicaca, in the Sacred Valley, and in 50 other valleys like the Colca and the Rimac, the stability and genius for working together of the ancient Peruvians literally remodeled one of the world’s toughest environments.  They consistently created an idealized, civilized world of good order and stability.

No one can look at the massive millimeter-fine, delicately imaginative granite blocks at Sacsayhuaman, Pisac, Rac’chi, Huanuco Viejo, Rosaspata, Sillustani and, naturally, Machu Picchu itself without understanding instantly that for two or three thousand years ancient Peruvians created a purposeful permanence.

The same applies, with obvious local variations, to the great adobe pyramids on the coast.  Perhaps in the same way that today’s costeños are more outgoing than the peoples of the highlands, the costeños produced the flamboyant artistry of the gold- and silver-working of Sipan.

These were productive, often competitive societies whose vision was not just day-to-day or year-to-year, but in some clear way, eternal.  You and your children do not spend a lifetime producing a granite masterpiece just to fill in the time between meals.

Peruvian schoolchildren are not taught about the power and range of their ancestors.

The Incas — schoolchildren in Urubamba, Huancane, Bambamarca and Ayabaca are taught today — were ‘indigenas’.   There is a puzzling political agenda here.  The teachers do not know, do not seem to want to know, about Peru’s long distinguished past.

So my proposal for a first innovation that Peru today might want to consider is to produce DVD and computer programs that will be in every school in the land, every classroom in the country, which will tell the real story of the pre-Conquista past.  They will learn, for instance, of the complex, innovative technology that went into the layered construction of the terraces and hydrological systems they see around them.  They will learn about the networks of warehouses and storage facilities.  When the Spaniards arrived, they found that there was two or three years of food and clothing stored everywhere.

The project includes the creation of computer games called “Build An Andean Empire” and “Run Your Own Coastal Civilization” and, of course, war games like “Incas vs Spaniards.”

Secondary-level kids will move on to “How to Run a Municipality/Region/Country.”

And so on.

The interactive computer programs and movies, modeled perhaps on the science and history programs produced for the NGS, the Discovery Channel, the History Channel and the BBC, will be financed and distributed by the banks and commercial and industrial companies, all of them members of CADE, which will also be in charge of distributing them.  Teachers, including members of SUTEP, will be instructed on teaching the children how to switch them on and off.

Within a few years young Peruvian voters will have a new vision of their country and its possibilities.  Unlike most other countries, including some of the neighbors, they have a history, not to mention a geography, which they can see and touch, second to none.

Population: from 1mn to 3mn to 30mn — and now on to 40mn

It is hard to blame today’s governments for not telling the young about the first-class public administrations of Peru half a millennium ago.

The most crushing blow of the Conquest was in the loss of people.  Between smallpox and piratical savagery, nine out of every 10 Peruvians died between 1530 and 1601 when a census registered only one million people, most of them in the highlands.  The coastal peoples had been exterminated.

These population losses were calculated by Noble David Cook in Demographic Collapse: Indian Peru 1520-1620 and Born to Die; Disease and New World Conquest published by the Cambridge University Press.

Peru’s population was to rise painfully slowly to three million by 1911.  All the Peruvians of a century ago would all fit easily into Lima’s Cono Norte today.   As everyone knows, today Peru’s population is 30mn, 10 times greater, in less than four generations.

Inca Peru had 10 million inhabitants, according to Prof. Cook’s best guess.   All of them lived out in what is today the countryside.  Cuzco had perhaps 40,000 inhabitants, less than Huacho today.

The next innovation will be to prepare for a Peru that within another generation will have 40 million people.  Peruvians will be much younger in a decade or two than the Chinese and other Asian tigers and, of course, the already-geriatric Europeans.

The local politicians in Cajamarca, Puno and elsewhere today who are protesting against gold and copper mines are being unusually far-sighted.   They are trying to keep the gold, silver and copper out of the hands both of international bankers and of Lima bureaucrats.  “Water for us, not gold for them,” they shout, and of course we all agree.   The government should instead borrow from the bankers and, noblesse oblige, repay them in worthless paper in 2041 et seq.

A decade or two from now the minerals will be worth ten times their present value and a generation of history-savvy, computer-literate Peruvians will be able to take full advantage of their elders’ foresight.

______________________

This article was published in Caretas magazine this week in Spanish.

Nick Asheshov is a director of The Machu Picchu Train Co., Urubamba. A veteran journalist, noted explorer and entrepreneur, he was editor of the Peruvian Times from 1969 to 1990.

HISTORY OF PERU SERIES – Part 10: The Big Picture —3500 BC – 500 AD

By Paul Goulder – Special to Peruvian Times —

During the past year the Peruvian Times (see links below) has published a series of articles on the History of Peru spanning the years, very approximately, 3500 BC to 500 AD. At the beginning of this period humans were starting to live in towns, to build monumental religious sites, to specialize in trade and to form hierarchical societies. 

Towards the end of the period political states had formed to the extent that two of them, Read more…

Satellite images confirm true source of the Amazon

Satellite images taken by the Kompsat-2 confirm the findings of a scientific expedition made 15 years ago to the source of the Amazon River —a small spring in the Apacheta gulley on Mt. Quehisha, 5150 meters above sea level in the Andes of southern Arequipa.

Confirmation of Apacheta as the source also means that the Amazon is not only the largest but the longest river in the world,  around 400 kilometers (250 miles) longer than the Nile. Read more…

Atahualpa’s Ransom & Other Treasure Fables

By Daniel Buck
~ Special to Peruvian Times ~

How many argonauts have barreled headlong into the Andes and the Amazon, lusting for riches?  No one can say for sure.

Alluring tales of wondrous lost civilizations built by gold and gem bedizened Indians have sparked the imaginations of European and North American treasure hunters ever since Atahualpa filled a 15-by-25 foot room with ransom gold for Pizarro.

Atahualpa’s ransom didn’t do the emperor much good — his conquistador captors executed him anyway — but dreams of similar riches in the lands of the former Inca empire have inspired countless gullible explorers and investors, often manipulated by swindlers.  Here are some of their stories.

Entrepreneur Augusto R. Berns was not the first man to promise treasure in the Andes, but he might have been the most fanciful.  His 1881 prospectus – written while he was living in Detroit, Michigan – for the development of an alleged gold property in Peru’s Urubamba Valley, informed potential investors that the region was more like “the south of France more than any other” place on earth.

The property, “Torontoy or Cercada-de-San Antonio Estate in Southern Peru,” an 8-by-18 square-mile section of the valley, not only rivaled Provence, but also contained a stairway and paved road that ascended to certain ruins, which Berns extravagantly called “The Towns of the Gold and Silver Smiths of the Andes.”

Another auriferous trove on his land, “Llamajcansha,” Berns helpfully translated as “Gold Yard.”  In reality, it means “Llama Yard.”  Berns was selling his investors a load of llama dung.

All in all, Berns emphasized, “the WHOLE DISTRICT, generally, only requires to be known and opened up to be universally recognized as the greatest gold and silver producing centre in the world, and thus of immense value to any body of capitalists possessing really adequate means to profit by it in a MERCANTILE as well as mineral point of view.”

The enterprise would require the payment of a semi-annual $16 “mining License,” which would “entitle any proprietor to search for the precious metals or for hidden treasure (the last a common and sometimes lucrative occupation in Peru.)”

Berns was willing to sell the entire estate for $55,000 – more than a million dollars in today’s money – of which $30,000 was to pay off the mortgage, $15,000 to pay the claims of his former partners, and $10,000 to pay the expenses he had accrued.  In other words, he was offering to sell what he had described as the “greatest gold and silver producing centre in the world” for nothing more than the amount of his outstanding debts.

But he set a high bar.  His prospectus indicated that any buyer must be “a syndicate or company of bona fide capitalists,” willing to commit no less than $10 million – more than $200 million today – to the development of the property.  The buyer must be agreeable to paying Berns $5,000 a year and, “as traveling is extremely expensive in Peru,” an additional $5,000 or more in annual travel expenses.  In today’s money, that would be about $100,000 a year.

What became of the Torontoy scheme is not known.  Today, some argue that Berns was referring to Machu Picchu, but the Torontoy property – assuming he even owned it – illustrated on his map was on the opposite side of the Urubamba River from Machu Picchu.  In any event, there is no indication that any “bona fide capitalists” ever appeared at Berns’s door or that a single gold nugget was ever found.

Several years later, now back in Peru, Berns launched another scheme, the “Compañía Anónima Exploradora de las ‘Huacas del Inca’ Limitada,” and recruited eminent Peruvians and foreign residents, including the British vice consul in Mollendo, as board members or agents.  The company’s prospectus said that the government of Peru “has guaranteed the success of our enterprise.”  Hardly.  In 1888, one year after “Huacas del Inca” was organized, its vice-president resigned, charging that Berns had been using company funds for personal use and had failed to launch a single treasure-hunting expedition.

If there was ever a man who lived up to Mark Twain’s adage that “a gold mine is a hole in the ground alongside of which stands a liar,” it was Raymond McCune.  In 1912, he “floated a large corporation,” the Washington Post reported, “on the strength of having discovered the source of the gold of the ancient Incas.”  Specifically, he organized two corporations, the Peruvian Exploration Company and Marañon River Placers, Inc., and fleeced investors to the tune of several hundred thousand dollars.  Among the fleeced were prominent Delawareans, including members of the DuPont family.

McCune was an unlikely figure to get mixed up in such a fraud.  His father, multi-millionaire Utah industrialist A.W. McCune, was a partner in the Cerro de Pasco copper mine in Peru and had extensive mineral holdings in the American West.

Raymond McCune claimed that his gold deposits, somewhere near the headwaters of the Marañon, were worth half a billion dollars, about $10 billion today.  A prospectus went even further, saying that the enterprise’s directors “are of the opinion theirs are the most valuable gold-bearing placers yet discovered in the world’s history.”  McCune predicted that earnings from the endeavor “ought to amount to $600,000 a year.”

One news account provided the back story: “The prospectus rehearsed some of the history of Pizarro and the Incas, and asserted the belief that the Incas’ ransom came from the Marañon River, for it explained:  ‘The purpose of the numerous guard towers, the ruins of which are located on precipitous and well-nigh impregnable cliffs overhanging the Marañon River, was that the defenders of the gold washings standing on the tops of the cliffs might shower rocks on an attacking force without danger of their enemies being able to scale the cliffs.’”

McCune had reportedly “encountered an Indian of great age, who might be described as the last of the Incas, and who had revealed where the really rich deposits lay.”

Who blew the whistle is unclear – perhaps one of the wealthy Delawareans – but in May 1915, McCune was arrested in New York City on charges of mail fraud.  “McCUNE GIVES BAIL; NOT IN INCAS’ GOLD,” the New York Times headline quipped.  A U.S. Postal Inspector spent six weeks in Peru “trying to locate the buried treasure of the Incas,” but “failed in his quest,” the Washington Post reported.  “The natives told him they had never known of any gold in the vicinity.”

A year later, McCune was convicted of mail fraud and sentenced to four years in a federal penitentiary; a convicted co-defendant dropped dead of a heart attack at his sentencing.

A similar but more plebeian hoax lured a couple of hundred American prospectors to Bolivia in early 1912, when a man using the pen name “Ferguson” released a bogus letter to the press boasting of “enormously rich gold discoveries” along the Tipuani River.  One news report said the letter writer was a German, but another said he was “an itinerant American miner, who previously had worked in Alaska.”  Some 250 Americans answered fortune’s call according to the U.S. minister in La Paz.  The German, a “fugitive from justice” known to local authorities, owned property on the Tipuani and he was eager to “boom the land.”  Although there was gold in the Tipuani, the minister said that the “difficulties are such that only large enterprises and capital can handle the propositions successfully.”  By July 1912, fewer than 25 American prospectors were still panning in Bolivia.

Macmillan’s, a popular magazine of the era, warned its readers that “South American treasures have, in fact, a thoroughly bad name, and investors should fight very shy indeed of shares in any of the numerous companies formed to empty sacred lakes or search the recesses of the Andes for Atahualpa’s hidden gold.”

Regardless, fortune hunters came and went, often with investors in tow.  In July 1897, Captain A.G. Hatfield was outfitting his vessel Lancing in San Francisco, en route to Peru to hunt for “the treasure houses of the Incas,” per the Chicago Tribune.

“Captain Hatfield said that the expedition would probably consist of 500 men, but he refused to give the names of the leaders in the scheme, as negotiations had not yet been completed.  He said: ‘All that I am at liberty to say in regard to this matter is that the men who have been negotiating with me are well known capitalists of San Francisco, who are responsible in every way.’”

The plan was to anchor the Lancing off the Peruvian coast:  “Using the vessel as headquarters and a supply depot, parties will be sent to mineral regions to locate good properties.”  The fate of Hatfield’s expedition is unknown.

Not all was gold in the Andes.  A “Greek tavern keeper named Kalafatovich” found a rich deposit of emeralds “of the highest quality,” according to the Los Angeles Times.  The deposit, found near near Acomayo, Peru, in 1912, was described, in the superlatives obligatory to such stories, as “one of the most important ever made in the world.”

On the shores of Lake Titicaca near the “City of Chililaya, . . . not far west of La Paz, once a great city of the Incas,” a group of American and European engineers uncovered “a portion” of the lost treasure of the Incas, again per the Los Angeles Times.  Uncovered in 1904, this vast trove, “gold, silver, and precious stones” worth $14 million had been buried in 1780 and hunted ever since by “adventurers from every civilized nation on the globe.”

The Times article detoured into a potted history of the Incas, quoting experts as suggesting that the rulers of the Andes were culturally linked to the “‘Egyptians and Syrians’”or to Homer’s Ilium, which is to say Troy, or that the “‘gigantic architecture of Peru points to the Cyclopian family, the founders of the Temple of Babel, and of the Egyptian Pyramids.’”

The 1780 burial date for the Inca treasure was explained as follows: “The [Spanish] conquerors ruled with a heavy hand, when an Indian uprising occurred, and numerous bands surrounded the City of La Paz.  The revolution spread, and the Indians avenged the wrongs which had been done to them from the beginning of the Spanish invasion.  They ransacked the City of La Paz, taking all the remaining splendor of the Incas as well as the treasure found in other parts of the country.  All of this was taken to the camp of the revolutionists.”

While the rebels marched on Cuzco, the treasure was buried between La Paz and Lake Titicaca.  After the rebels’ defeat, the exact location of the treasure was lost to memory.

Although La Paz was never an Inca city, great or otherwise – it wasn’t even founded until 1548, by the Spaniards – there was an uprising of Indians and mestizos in 1780, the Túpac Amaru rebellion, which convulsed the Bolivian and southern Peruvian highlands for more than a year.  The Chililaya treasure tale, however, has the chronology backwards.  Cuzco was put to siege during the initial phase, but the Spaniards rallied and Túpac Amaru was captured.  Though never ransacked, La Paz was under siege for several months in late 1781 before colonial troops from Buenos Aires came to the city’s rescue.

According to the Times, a European syndicate had hired a group of prospectors who began the search in Puno and worked their way around Titicaca until, near Chililaya, they struck gold.   There is no community named Chililaya in Bolivia, but west of La Paz, near the lake, are two Indian settlements, Chichilaya and Cachilaya either of which might be the site referred to.  One of the prospectors’ Indian guides reported the find to the authorities in La Paz and the treasure quest had been shut down by the government.  So ended this particular installment of the hunt for the lost treasure of the Incas, assuming it ever happened to begin with.

Incan troves were erupting in 1904.  According to a wire service report, a team of British and American engineers stumbled upon a treasure “of the purest gold” worth $16 million at Chayaltaya, Bolivia, and expected that $30 million more was “awaiting a discover.”  There is no place named Chayaltaya, but perhaps it was the mountain Chacaltaya, the site of Bolivia’s only ski run, the highest in the world.

The gold had been collected by the Indians, the story said, “to be paid over to the Spaniards as a ransom for the liberation of Emperor Atahualpa but the money was refused by the Spaniards, who killed the Peruvian emperor, and the treasure remained hidden.”  The engineers found the gold by accident while driving survey stakes.

Two years later, in 1906, came “Buried Treasures of the Incas,” a story in the New York Times, indicating that maybe the Incan treasure was not on the shores of Lake Titicaca, but in the lake itself: “The lake, it is believed, would, if dredged, yield up thousands of [gold and silver images] and similar precious gold articles thrown in [the lake], it is alleged, both as a sacrifice and to prevent them from falling into the hands of Pizarro’s band.”  The lake was not dredged.

Hiram Bingham, who came to Peru in the 1910s to hunt for lost cities, got snared by the treasure-of-the-Incas legend.  In 1915, during Bingham’s third and final expedition to Machu Picchu and nearby ruins, local officials came to believe he was smuggling Inca gold from his excavations out of the country.  “Bingham learned with amazement,” Alfred Bingham wrote in his biography of his father, Portrait of an Explorer, that a Cuzqueño newspaper editor had published an article “reporting rumors of the export of gold by way of Bolivia.  Controlling his anger, [Bingham] denied that he had exported anything, much less gold, and offered to open any of the boxes” for inspection.  A Peruvian delegation sent to La Paz to investigate the matter found nothing, and Bingham himself obtained an affidavit from the port authorities in Puno attesting that he had shipped nothing gilt.

The Jesuits stood in for the Incas in the Sacambaya legend, which has been attracting argonauts for more than a century.  As the well-worn tale goes, when the Jesuits were expelled from South America in the 1760s, the contingent at the Sacambaya mission, at the junction Apopaya and Khatu rivers in Bolivia, near the border between the La Paz and Cochabamba departments, ordered local Indians to construct an elaborate multi-alcoved cave in which was hidden a vast treasure, worth a billion dollars today.  The Indians, who numbered from half a dozen to several hundred in the various accounts, were then murdered by the Jesuits and buried in the cave, which was sealed.  Upon the Jesuits’ return to Rome, they were imprisoned and all but one executed.

As luck would have it, the surviving Jesuit returned to Bolivia, and had a daughter by his mistress.  The daughter later took up with an Englishman and spilled the Sacambaya secret to him.  A woman is a constant in stories of how the secret was divulged.

A succession of Europeans fell for the Sacambaya yarn.  The first was Cecil Herbert Prodgers, a six-foot tall, 265-pound Englishman who had fought in the Boer War, raced horses in Peru, and tapped rubber in Bolivia.   He claimed to have been given a document about the treasure by none other than the daughter of the president of Peru.  The treasure, his document said, consisted of $90,000 in silver, 67 “heaps of gold,” and gold ornaments adorned with diamonds and other precious stones hidden in a maze of rooms, compartments, and hollows booby-trapped with “enough strong poison to kill a regiment.”

In 1905, Prodgers gathered a troupe of laborers and set off for Sacambaya.  The rainy season halted work, but they returned the next year.  His workers punctured the treasure cave’s roof but were overcome by “a very powerful smell.”  A new crew came in and they were also struck down by toxic vapors, as was Prodgers, who said his fingernails turned blue.  He called off the hunt.  He tried to return in 1907, but neither could attract investors nor willing laborers.

English explorer Percy Harrison Fawcett heard about the treasure a few years later from William Tredinnick, a Cornishman who said that he had been in a partnership with descendants of the surviving Jesuit.  (Some years earlier Tredinnick had been jailed in Bolivia for a robbery some attribute to Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.)  Fawcett went to Sacambaya for a look-see.  “My opinion is,” Fawcett later wrote, “if a treasure really exists there, then attempts to find it have not been carried out very intelligently.”  He thought that if the clues were followed, it would be a “simple matter” the settled the question once and for all.  Simplicity notwithstanding, he didn’t bite.  “It didn’t ‘feel’ as though the treasure were buried there,” he wrote, “and I am inclined to give some weight to my impressions.”

Fawcett’s instincts failed him a few years later when he disappeared in the Mato Grosso while searching for “Z,” a lost city of “clothed natives of European appearance.”

But the hunt for Sacambaya’s fabled fortune was not over.  In the 1920s, Prodgers passed his documents to Edgar Sanders, a Russian-born Swiss citizen living in England.  After a couple exploratory visits to Bolivia, Sanders returned to England, announcing that he had excavated a “man-made cave,” inside of which he had found a crucifix and a parchment.  The ancient document, written in Spanish, warned: “You who reach this place withdraw!  This spot is dedicated to God Almighty and one who dares enter, a dolorous death in this world and eternal condemnation in the world he goes to.”

Eternal damnation did not deter Sanders from offering $125,000 in stock in the Sacambaya Exploration Company, promising a heavenly 48,000 percent return to investors. The stock sold quickly, and in 1928 Sanders found himself back in Bolivia with a crew of 20 and a caravan of trucks loaded with tons of gear – mining equipment, suction pumps, compressors, gas masks (for the fabled toxic vapors), food, and an array of weaponry.  After several months of fruitless digging, the rainy season shut down the project.

Sacambaya lay undisturbed until the 1960s, when two Englishmen, Mark Howell and Tony Morrison, came calling with “field distortion locating equipment,” essentially a metal detector capable of penetrating at least 20 feet of soil or rock.  Howell and Morrison hauled their metal detector to a number of locations at the Sacambaya junction, but the only metal they found was a trapezoidal copper plate, possibly a relic of the Sanders expedition.  The rains came, and Howell and Morrison went home.

Reached at his home in England several years ago, Morrison was still hopeful.  He said by email that “there are excellent but still unproven reasons for the existence of a treasure,” though he surmised that it “could be in any one of thirty places.”

Howell and Morrison’s guide, Juan Oroya, came as close as anyone to deciphering the Sacambaya mystery.  As Howell recounts it in Steps to Fortune, Morrison’s and his book about their adventures, he asked Oroya: “Juan . . . why has no one ever found the treasure?  You live here.  You must have heard stories, and have your own ideas.”

“It’s a gringo treasure,” Oroya said.

FURTHER READING:

Alfred Bingham, Portrait of an Explorer (1989); Daniel Buck, “Tales of Glitter or Dust,” Américas, May/June 2000; Col. P.H. Fawcett, Lost Trails, Lost Cities (1953); Mark Howell and Tony Morrison, Steps to a Fortune (1967); Stratford D. Jolly, The Treasure Tale (1934) and South American Adventures (n.d.); Alicia Overbeck, Living High (1935); C.H. Prodgers, Adventures in Bolivia (1922); and James Stead, Treasure Trek (1936).

Daniel Buck lives in Washington, DC.  He was a Peace Corps Volunteer in Puno, 1965-1967

Mayor of Gothenburg says city will return Paracas textiles to Peru

The mayor of the Swedish city of Gothenburg, Anneli Hulthen, has said the town will return some 100 items from the Paracas culture to Peru, daily La Republica reported.

The mayor sent an official letter to Peru recognizing the country as the owners of Paracas textiles that were smuggled out of Peru in 1931 and 1939, and which are being held at the World Culture Museum in Gothenburg.

In July, then Peruvian President Alan Garcia announced plans to begin legal action against Gothenburg. Garcia said the city was complicit in the removal of the textiles.

The announcement, made at a conference on international cooperation for the protection and repatriation of cultural heritage, came as a surprise to Gothenburg Read more…

Hidden Jewels of Lima: Parque de Bellas Artes, La Victoria

By Tony Darrington

This part of the Lima district of La Victoria is known for its car accessory traders. Any spare part, anything for or connected to the motor vehicle can be obtained on or near Avenida Mexico.

What you are not expecting to find are works of art. Read more…

COUNTRY NOTES: Machu Picchu, Maize and the Advantage of Backwardness

By Nicholas Asheshov

– Special for the Machu Picchu Centennial –

Machu Picchu and the Inca Empire were the creation of an import from Central America, maize, and a dramatic climate shift that turned the Andean highlands from inhospitable wet-and-cold to pleasant, as it is today, dry-and-warm.

For more than half a millenium before this shift the high Andes had been miserable.  With the new dry-and-warm, starting around 1000 AD, a backwoods tribe, the Incas, put together the new climate and technology breakthroughs and by 1500AD had produced the world’s most go-ahead empire, heavily populated and larger, richer, healthier and better organized than Ming Dynasty China and the Ottoman Empire, its nearest contemporaries. Read more…

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