Hiram Bingham III was born in Honolulu in 1875, the son and grandson of Protestant missionaries to the Kingdom of Hawaii and a descendant of Mayflower passenger William Brewster. He studied at Phillips Academy, Yale and Berkeley, where he took one of the first Latin American history courses offered in the United States, and earned a Harvard PhD that required an outside examiner from Yale, Edward Gaylord Bourne. A historian with no archaeological training, he married Alfreda Mitchell, granddaughter of the founder of Tiffany and Company, and organized the 1911 Yale Peruvian Expedition to find the last Inca capital. He identified Vitcos and passed through Espíritu Pampa without realizing it was Vilcabamba, the capital he sought.
On July 24, 1911, farmer Melchor Arteaga led him to Machu Picchu, where the name of Agustín Lizárraga and the year 1902 were written in charcoal on the Temple of the Three Windows. Bingham credited Lizárraga privately, then wrote him out of later accounts and called the site a shrine for virgins of the sun, though it was a royal estate. He became a wartime aviator, lieutenant governor and governor of Connecticut, then went to the U.S. Senate, where he was censured 54 to 22 in 1929 and lost his seat in 1932.
- Explorer Vince Lee later mapped Espíritu Pampa in detail and confirmed it was Vilcabamba.
- His Peruvian expeditions took an estimated 40,000 artifacts to Yale; an agreement came in 2007 and returns began in 2012.
- His story shaped Charlton Heston’s Harry Steele in Secret of the Incas (1954), a blueprint for Indiana Jones.
- He was governor of Connecticut from January 7 to January 8, 1925, then resigned to take the Senate seat left by Frank Brandegee’s suicide.
- He was censured for putting an industry lobbyist on his Senate payroll to sit in closed Finance Committee tariff meetings, then calling the inquiry a witch hunt.
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