PERU: Anybody Here Seen . . .?

A man with a taste for monuments, General Miguel Molina, prefect of Cuzco, decided one day a century ago to dress up the city's main plaza. He thereupon put up a bronze fountain, embellished by four Tritons and topped by a 5-ft. bronze statue identified as Atahuallpa, last of the Inca emperors, who was executed by the Spanish in 1533. But over the years the suspicion has grown in Cuzco that the lofty figure is not Atahuallpa at all. It seems, instead, to be the North American redskin Powhatan, chief of the Algonquins and father of Pocahontas.

The un-Incan Indian appears to have been delivered because of a slovenly mix-up of orders at the Philadelphia foundry that made it. When the wrong Indian arrived in Cuzco, with three feathers in the hair and a bow in the hand, Cuzco happened to be preoccupied by graver matters: a typhoid epidemic that reduced the population from 60,000 to 11,000. All records of the transaction with the foundry were lost around 1880 when a government building caved in, and Cuzco preferred not to listen to the skeptics. Says Cuzco Historian Enrique Gamarra Hernández: "Atahuallpa was never very popular among Cuzqueños. His father divided the overextended empire between his sons, Atahuallpa and Huascar. Atahuallpa defeated Huascar, took Cuzco, and eliminated the old Cuzco nobility. The Cuzqueños have never quite forgiven him."

Pan American-Grace Airways, which transports most of the tourists who visit Cuzco, has started a search to find the missing statue. Panagra reasons that if the foundry sent Powhatan to Peru, it may have sent Atahuallpa to some U.S. town square. He should be easy to spot. He is robust, with short-cropped hair, grave manner, handsome face, fierce eyes. He wears an elaborate band around his forehead, and a collar of large emeralds.