The River of Doubt: Theodore Roosevelt's Darkest Journey

  More troubling than their own growing hunger was the visibly deteriorating condition of their mules and oxen. The open, sandy stretch of the Brazilian Highlands was extremely inhospitable for the pack animals. “It was rarely that we saw here a tree more than fifteen or twenty feet high,” Father Zahm recalled. “And certain areas were as treeless as the desert lands of New Mexico or Arizona. . .. During our first day in this arid land we did not find a drop of water for a stretch of twenty miles.” There was no way to carry heavy bags of grain, so the mules and oxen were simply set free at night to wander in an often fruitless search for grass and water. Then, as the rainy season downpours began in earnest, the dry dirt trail on which they were traveling turned to mud, forming a slick hazard for the animals.

  Worse trouble lay ahead. For the men in the mule train, the first warning signs appeared when they began to see the skeletons of oxen and mules that had starved to death or been eaten during previous expeditions, most likely Rondon’s. Although their startlingly white bones, bleached by the sun to a ghostly hue, indicated that they had died many months, if not years, earlier, that knowledge was of little comfort to Roosevelt and his men as they encountered unharnessed oxen from their own baggage train staggering slowly along the road. Having grown too weak from hunger and hard use to keep up with the rest of the train, the unfortunate beasts had simply been released and left to die.

  The men were stunned by the sight they encountered next: Strewn across their path, settling into the thick mud, were unopened supply crates, all clearly marked “Roosevelt South American Expedition.” The pack animals, who were still making their weary way across the plateau ahead of the mule train, had begun bucking off their heavy loads.

  As the officers in the mule train rode slowly past the boxes on their tired mounts, they wondered what they were leaving behind and how precious it might seem to them in the months to come. “What became of this food which we had so carefully selected in New York, and which we had looked after so solicitously for thousands of miles, it would be interesting to know,” Zahm wrote. “It was impossible for anyone to collect it and add it to our other stores which had been sent ahead, and impossible for our pack animals to carry it, for their burdens were already as great as they could bear.”

  The men also began to show signs of strain. Three Brazilians—a doctor, a lieutenant, and a botanist—had already resigned their posts, having lost all faith in what they now believed was a fatally unorganized and mismanaged expedition. Worse than the malcontent officers, however, was a volatile camarada who had been assigned to Amilcar’s baggage train in Tapirapoan. Julio de Lima, a full-blooded Portuguese from Bahia, had already given his captain good reason to worry. Just a few weeks into the overland journey, he viciously attacked another camarada with a knife and was prevented from injuring or even killing him only because Amilcar and one of his lieutenants, Vieria de Mello, stepped in and wrenched the weapon from his hand. Amilcar punished Julio—the only time he was forced to punish one of his men during the overland journey—but he was left with a foreboding about the violent camarada that he could not shake.

  * * *

  DRAWN TOGETHER by their ordeal, the men of the expedition quickly grew to know one another well. After riding together all day long, they shared tents at night and during pounding rainstorms—which were now all too frequent—and they ate every meal together. Each night, after erecting tents, organizing baggage, and peeling off their drenched clothes, the men would gather around two oxhides that had been spread over the damp ground and laid with rations of rice, beans, pork, and beef. The men, Rondon noted, “squatted in the Yedo and Tokyo fashion, some with a certain amount of elegance and others in a very clumsy posture; but they honoured our table with that joviality which can only be prepared by the exercise of long marches in the open, breathing the fresh and oxygenated air of the virgin forests and drinking from the running waters of the rivers.”

  It was during these dinners, and afterward, as they sat under the bright Southern stars, that the Brazilians and Americans began to forge the mutual respect and friendship that often develops between men who camp together for long periods of time in rough conditions—even men who do not share a common language. They relied on expressions, gestures, and an international amalgam of tongues that, in Roosevelt’s words, consisted of “English, Portuguese, bad French, and broken German.” Their conversation often centered on the river toward which they were riding—its length, its character, where it would take them, and when they would reach its end. But the River of Doubt still seemed impossibly far away, and their past lives were ever present in vivid, and often disturbing, memories.

  It was not long before the men began to tell stories from their former expeditions into the wilderness—whether South American, North American, African, or Arctic. Although Roosevelt was widely considered the best raconteur, the competition from this group of well-traveled, adventurous, and courageous men was impressive. Rondon enthralled his audience with memories of long expeditions through uncharted land. Roosevelt and his son shared stories from their year-long hunting safari in Africa, during which they had earned the nicknames Bwana Makubwa, or “Great Master,” and Bwana Mardadi, “Dandy Master.” And Miller, Roosevelt recalled, “told of the stone gods and altars and temples he had seen in the great Colombian forests, monuments of strange civilizations which flourished and died out ages ago, and of which all memory has vanished.”

  Cherrie, who had had perhaps a wider range of experiences than any man present, remained relatively silent until one night, when the conversation turned to cavalry battles. Despite himself, the taciturn naturalist nodded somberly when someone mentioned the powerful psychological effect of a shining, razor-sharp lance. Their curiosity aroused by Cherrie’s obvious firsthand knowledge of the subject, the men would not leave him alone until he told his story.

  “It was while he was fighting with the Venezuelan insurgents in an unsuccessful uprising against the tyranny of Castro,” Roosevelt wrote of Cherrie’s involvement in the effort to topple Venezuelan tyrant Cipriano Castro. “He was on foot, with five Venezuelans, all cool men and good shots. In an open plain they were charged by twenty of Castro’s lancers, who galloped out from behind cover two or three hundred yards off. It was a war in which neither side gave quarter and in which the wounded and the prisoners were butchered. . .. Cherrie knew that it meant death for him and his companions if the charge came home; and the sight of the horsemen running in at full speed, with their long lances in rest and the blades glittering, left an indelible impression on his mind. But he and his companions shot deliberately and accurately; ten of the lancers were killed, the nearest falling within fifty yards; and the others rode off in headlong haste. A cool man with a rifle, if he has mastered his weapon, need fear no foe.”

  Few tales of exploration or even warfare, however, could compete with Anthony Fiala’s memories of spending two years trapped in the frozen north. The supply ship that was supposed to relieve the expedition never appeared, and if it had not been for seal blubber, an unlucky polarbear, and the frozen caches of food left behind by earlier expeditions, he and his men would have starved.

  As they listened to Fiala’s stories of disaster and near-death in the polar north, Roosevelt and the other officers could not have helped but reflect on the fact that the commander of that expedition was the quartermaster of theirs. Fiala was not leading them into the Amazon, but he had chosen and packed everything that they would rely on to keep themselves alive during the months to come.

  * * *

  ONJANUARY 25, some good news arrived for Roosevelt and his men in the almost surreal form of three huge all-terrain trucks. The “auto vans,” as Zahm called them, rattled into camp that night on their way to the Utiarity telegraph station, the expedition’s next stop, and the point at which it would turn west and head directly toward the River of Doubt. The trucks, which belonged to the Rondon Commission, each carried two tons of freight and had been outfitted with wide, slatted belts t
hat wrapped around the wheels on each side like tank treads, forming what Miller referred to as an “endless trail” through the thick mud. This invention, which anticipated the use of the first military tank two years later, during World War I, amazed and elated the explorers. “It was a strange sight to see them racing across the uninhabited chapadão at a speed of thirty miles an hour,” Miller wrote. “Surely this was exploring de luxe.”

  No member of the expedition appreciated de luxe travel more than Father Zahm. The next morning, he secured two seats on one of the trucks for himself and the Swiss handyman Jacob Sigg, whom he had long since appropriated as his personal assistant. Cherrie and Miller also decided to ride in one of the trucks so that they would have a chance to do some collecting before the rest of the expedition caught up with them.

  Father Zahm, however, was unhappy with his ride in the auto van. According to Rondon, the priest was deeply offended that he had had to ride “beside the driver, a black man—which [he] never forgave.” While in Bahia, Father Zahm had been impressed with the successful mingling of the races. “Truth to tell,” he wrote, “there is not a little to say in favor of the fusion of the European and African races in Brazil. For some of the most distinguished men the country has produced have had a strain of Negro blood in their veins.” However, whatever his intellectual and theoretical opinions about racial integration, he clearly believed that the United States was not ready to take such a drastic step—and neither was he.

  In Brazil, Zahm wrote, “Whites, Indians, and Negroes associate together in a way which would be quite impossible with us, and which an old Virginian planter would condemn as an abomination unutterable.” Father Zahm, on the other hand, had no problem voicing his complaints about the “ignorant and careless negro” who, as a favor to Rondon, had driven him to Utiarity. And he thereafter, Rondon wrote, referred to that truck ride as a “measure of how much he had suffered during the expedition.”

  It would have been difficult for Father Zahm to find a better or faster way to alienate Rondon than to make a racist comment about one of his men. Not only was Rondon proud of his soldiers, but he was a humanist and a champion of minority rights. He had also been a victim of racism himself, and would continue to be for most of his life, in spite of all that he had achieved. “The colonel possesses the temperament of the savage,” a Brazilian journalist would write four years later. “In the centers of civilization he feels out of place. . .. [He] is a lost cause . . . because he has a high percentage of Indian blood mixed with the worst habits the centers of civilization have to offer.”

  Father Zahm was also openly scornful of Rondon’s philosophical beliefs and the deferential treatment he accorded Brazil’s indigenous peoples. In the introduction to his book Evolution and Dogma, Zahm had made it clear that he considered Positivism to be dangerous and subversive. “Our great, or more truthfully our greatest enemy, in the intellectual world to-day,” he wrote, “is Naturalism—variously known as Agnosticism, Positivism, Empiricism—which, as [the British statesman] Mr. [Arthur J.] Balfour well observes, ‘is in reality the only system which ultimately profits by any defeats which theology may sustain, or which may be counted on to flood the spaces from which the tide of religion has receded.”

  The priest made a point of baptizing both Brazilian settlers and Indians at several stops along the way on both their river journey up the Paraguay and Sepotuba Rivers and their mule ride through the highlands. While he bristled at the implication that Zahm was saving savage souls, Rondon never tried to stop him. “Although the Indian Service would not catechize, respecting the spiritual freedom and the way of life of the Indians under its protection,” he wrote, “it would not prevent others from trying to convert them to their beliefs, provided that they didn’t force them.”

  * * *

  COMPOUNDING THE growing frictions caused by harsh terrain, meager rations, and personality clashes was the ever-present risk of accident and illness. In early January, when the men had reached Saõ Luis de Cáceres, a small town on the Paraguay River, Rondon had learned that four of the soldiers that he had posted there were now dead. Three had drowned while trying to ascend the Gy-Paraná, a five-hundred-mile-long river in western Mato Grosso, and another man, Captain Cardoso, had succumbed to beriberi—a disease brought on by a thiamine deficiency—along the same route that Roosevelt’s expedition was traveling.

  A few weeks later, in Tapirapoan, illness had cost Roosevelt the assistance of his right-hand man, Frank Harper. As Roosevelt’s personal representative during the planning and equipping of the expedition, Harper had worked to protect the ex-president’s interests and was the only member of the expedition other than Zahm and Fiala with knowledge about the specific content of the crates and boxes that the baggage train was now laboring to deliver to the River of Doubt. Harper had contracted malaria early in the journey, and had been miserable ever since. He was not the only man on the expedition to suffer from the mosquito-borne infection, but he had gotten a vivid preview of the miseries that awaited him on the River of Doubt, and he wanted out. On January 18, three days before the other men left on their overland journey, Harper announced that he had had enough and had decided to return home.

  Beyond the additional logistical burdens it imposed on Roosevelt, Harper’s departure pointed up the acute vulnerability, in medical terms, that the expedition could expect to face for the duration of the journey. For, despite the gravity of his illness, Harper had nevertheless had the option of returning with relative speed and safety to well-equipped medical facilities and, ultimately, the comfort of his own home. Once embarked upon their overland journey, however, Roosevelt and his men no longer had that safety net, and even otherwise minor illnesses acquired in the wilderness or on the river itself could have fatal consequences.

  The expedition did have a doctor—a tough, serious, and highly competent man named José Cajazeira, whom Rondon had hired in Corumbá—but, as Roosevelt knew, Dr. Cajazeira was only a thin line of defense against the dangers of the Amazon. “A good doctor is an absolute necessity on an exploring expedition in such a country as that we were in, under penalty of a frightful mortality among the members,” Roosevelt wrote. “The necessary risks and hazards are so great, the chances of disaster so large, that there is no warrant for increasing them by the failure to take all feasible precautions.”

  Unbeknownst to anyone in the expedition but Kermit and Roosevelt himself, having a doctor on hand for the former president was more than an ordinary precaution. More than a decade earlier, while he was campaigning in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, Roosevelt’s carriage had been struck by a runaway trolley. One of his secret-service agents had been killed instantly, and he had been thrown thirty feet. The accident had left Roosevelt with loosened teeth, a swollen and bruised cheek, a black eye, and a severe injury to his left leg. The infection that followed had nearly led to blood poisoning, a disease that, in a time before antibiotics, often proved deadly. Even six years after the accident, when Roosevelt was in his second term in the White House, he wrote Kermit that he had “never gotten over the effects of the trolley-car accident . . . when, as you will remember, they had to cut down to the shin bone. The shock permanently damaged the bone, and if anything happens there is always a chance of trouble which would be serious.”

  Kermit, realizing that he had come close to losing his father that day, had been traumatized by the accident. Afterward, he had declared that, from then on, he “must be on hand to protect his Father.” In fact, that accident, and the threat that it would forever after pose to Roosevelt’s life, was one of the principal reasons Kermit had felt compelled to join this expedition into the Amazon. “You see he has never quite recovered from the accident he had when the wagon he was driving in got run over by a trolley,” he had explained to Belle. “One of his legs is still pretty bad and needs a lot of care.”

  Right now, however, it was Kermit rather than his father who needed a lot of care. To Roosevelt’s deep dismay, even before Harper prepared to
return home, Kermit also fell ill with malaria. As his father looked on, “utterly miserable with worry,” the younger Roosevelt became so ill with fever and chills that he could not manage to rise from his hammock. Arguing that he had long since become accustomed to the rigors of the tropics, Kermit refused to yield to his illness or to consider returning in Harper’s footsteps. But the specter of his son’s suffering made a powerful impression on the elder Roosevelt, who was left to ponder, amid the rapidly mounting difficulties the expedition was facing, how heavy a toll he might ultimately be forced to pay for his decision to descend the River of Doubt.

  * * *

  IN LATE January, upon reaching Utiarity, the remote telegraph station that constituted one of the last, tentative outposts of official exploration into Brazil’s dark interior, Roosevelt learned that his fears about the risk of illness had already been realized. Thousands of miles away, in New York City, the deadly diseases of the tropics had claimed their first victim from his expedition: his young cousin Margaret Roosevelt.

  Waiting for Roosevelt at the lonely telegraph office was a short, devastating message informing him that Margaret had died three weeks before, from typhoid fever contracted on her journey to South America. It was the same infectious disease that had killed his mother thirty years earlier. The young woman had first begun to show signs of illness in early December, a few days after she and her aunt left Panama. Edith was baffled. “Margaret drank only bottled water and ate no salad,” she had written despondently in her diary after Margaret’s death. “Can’t imagine how she got the typhoid.” Edith, shaken by the sudden loss of her cousin and young companion, had attended the funeral two days later. “Poor Henry Hunt there,” she had written that night. She felt pity for the man who had fallen in love with Margaret on the Vandyck and had lost her before he had even had a chance to win her.