The River of Doubt: Theodore Roosevelt's Darkest Journey

  The weather only deepened Roosevelt’s concern about Kermit, whose malaria had continued to worsen, leaving him with a debilitating fever that now reached as high as 102 degrees. For Roosevelt, worry about his second son had become as familiar as the swelling pride he felt when he reflected on all that the young man had already accomplished.

  As proud as Roosevelt was of his son’s physical stamina and vigorous work ethic, he feared that Kermit might one day push himself too far. In Africa, Roosevelt had watched with growing alarm as Kermit threw himself into increasingly dangerous situations. “It is hard to realize that the rather timid boy of four years ago has turned out a perfectly cool and daring fellow,” Roosevelt had written his oldest son, Ted Jr. “Indeed he is a little too reckless and keeps my heart in my throat, for I worry about him all the time; he is not a good shot, not even as good as I am, and Heaven knows I am poor enough; but he is a bold rider, always cool and fearless, and eager to work all day long. He ran down and killed a Giraffe, alone, and a Hyena also, and the day before yesterday he stopped a charging Leopard within six yards of him, after it had mauled one of our porters.”

  Now, in a remote corner of the Brazilian interior, Roosevelt worried less about Kermit’s aim than about his ability to fight off the deadly diseases of the Amazon or survive the River of Doubt. He could not bear the thought of facing Belle and Edith if anything happened to Kermit. Kermit had joined the expedition so that he could protect his father, but it was Roosevelt who now feared for his son.

  * * *

  ON FEBRUARY 4, Roosevelt, perhaps shaken by the provisions the expedition had already lost, the lonely telegraph workers’ graves he had seen, Margaret’s death, and his son’s illness, decided that it was imperative to the success of the expedition that he cut another man from his team. Unfortunately, that man was the member of the expedition who, with the possible exception of Father Zahm, had hung the greatest hopes on this journey into the Amazon.

  After they made camp near the Burity—a swift, deep river that afforded them the luxury of a much-needed bath—Roosevelt called Anthony Fiala aside. With deep regret, he gave him the painful news that he would not be descending the River of Doubt with the rest of the expedition. Although Fiala had done his best to please Roosevelt, his knowledge of Arctic exploration, and the hard lessons he had learned there, had failed to translate to the Amazon.

  Miller dismissed Fiala out of hand, writing to Chapman that their quartermaster was “quite incompetent to do a single thing,” and Cherrie readily agreed. “I have not written anything about the organization of our expedition, but now I’m going to record my opinion that a greater lack of organization seems hardly possible!” he had written in his diary on November 25, while he and Miller were still in Corumbá. “There is no head no chief of the expedition. Fiala in a way is the temporary head but utterly incompetent for the work he has to do without previous experience in the tropics without any knowledge of the character of the people with whom he must treat and the almost insurmountable handicap of not having any knowledge of the language.”

  Of the trio of adventurous Americans whom Roosevelt had nicknamed the “three Buccaneers”—Cherrie, Miller, and Fiala—only Cherrie would actually go on the expedition that they had all planned to take together. But, as he had for Miller, Roosevelt made an effort to find another river journey for Fiala so that he would have some compensation for the months he had already devoted to the expedition. His plan was for the photographer to descend the Papagaio River, much of which had yet to be explored, even though its source and mouth were relatively well known. Fiala accepted the offer, but his heart clearly wasn’t in it.

  Although the men had had little sympathy for Father Zahm, they could not help pitying Fiala, whose cherished opportunity to redeem himself as an explorer was now lost. “Fiala left us and started back toward Utiarity at 10 p.m.,” Cherrie wrote in his diary that night. “I think his going had a saddening effect on all of us; and Fiala himself was almost in tears.”

  CHAPTER 9

  Warnings from the Dead

  “THE OXEN HAVE GIVEN out,” Kermit recorded in the cream-colored pages of his bound Letts of Lond on journal on February 6, 1914. As drastic as Roosevelt’s cutbacks in men and equipment had been, it had quickly become apparent that they were not enough. The expedition was faltering again. Not only were the oxen collapsing, the mules were dying at an alarming rate. Since Tapirapoan, the expedition had lost more than half of its ninety-eight mules and of those that remained, ten could barely walk. If the men hoped to reach the banks of the River of Doubt, their only option was to make more sacrifices—gambling that the provisions and equipment that they abandoned now would not be desperately needed later on.

  Before the overland journey had even begun, Roosevelt had insisted that they leave behind half of the tents that the Brazilian government had given them as gifts in Tapirapoan, and which, he later confided to the Royal Geographical Society’s John Scott Keltie, were “enormously heavy” and “utterly unsuited for the work.” He now urged Rondon to get rid of half of the tents that remained. “I had to exercise real tact,” he wrote Keltie, “because it almost broke the heart of good Colonel Rondon. . .. Our companions cared immensely for what they regarded as splendor.” Two oxcarts, groaning with the weight of their cargo, were abandoned, as were two trunks of specimens that Miller and Cherrie had collected and preserved for the museum. The naturalists were even forced to part with most of their collecting equipment.

  Each man then cut his personal baggage in half, keeping, Roosevelt wrote, only “the sheer necessities.” Kermit faithfully did his part to throw out what he did not absolutely need. He counted as necessities, however, his packet of letters from Belle—including a small picture of her that he always carried in his shirt pocket, and which he feared she would not recognize, “what with [it] being wet through so many times”—and his books, which were heavy, but essential. “Through all the lightening of the baggage I have kept my books,” he wrote Belle. “It means a lot to go to a quiet place to read the poems that we both like, and those that I always associate with you.” The poems were from The Oxford Book of French Verse. Besides this volume and The Oxford Book of English Verse, the rest of Kermit’s books were written in Portuguese—with the notable exception of his copies of The Iliad and The Odyssey, which were in the original Greek.

  As crucial as it was for the expedition to lighten the pack animals’ loads, however, much of what they were carrying was not expendable. Before they began jettisoning crates of food and other critical supplies, Roosevelt, using all of his diplomatic skills so as not to offend his co-commander, questioned Rondon about the expedition’s preparedness for the River of Doubt. If there was any possibility that they might not have all that they needed to make a safe descent, he told Rondon, they should walk, reserving every able-bodied animal for carrying provisions rather than passengers. Rondon “would not have minded the walk at all from the physical standpoint,” Roosevelt wrote, “but he simply could not bear to have us take action which he regarded as an admission that we were not doing the thing in splendid style.” He assured Roosevelt that there was no need to take such a drastic step. Everyone in the expedition would be well provided for on the River of Doubt.

  On February 8, the American and Brazilian officers finally reached the Juruena River, the site of another of Rondon’s remote and isolated telegraph stations. Pausing on a hilltop, the men looked back over the miles of rolling landscape that they had crossed, shrouded in low, thick forest. Farther north, the six-hundred-mile-long Juruena widens significantly, but even here, in its relatively narrow southern reaches, it was broad and deep enough to force the mules to cross it on a rickety raft composed of a wooden platform lashed onto three dugout canoes. When they reached the other side, pulling themselves across the rushing current with a wire trolley, the men were, as always, relieved to stop at a telegraph station. Their accommodations would again be a simple wattle-and-daub hut with a thatched roof and plenty o
f cracks and chinks for the sand flies to find their way inside and torment them throughout the night, but it was better than spending another miserable night in rain-soaked tents.

  As it had in Utiarity, however, bad news awaited the expedition in Juruena. This time, it was about Fiala. From a telegram that was handed to Roosevelt, the men learned that the first day of their friend’s descent of the Papagaio River had nearly been his last. Fiala’s expedition, which had begun just the day before without any of the provisions he had packed for Roosevelt’s journey, had met with immediate and almost complete disaster. Not long after they had launched their three dugout canoes, two of them, including the one in which Fiala was riding, were sucked into a churning pocket of the river known as the Rapids of the Devil. Most of the nine men had managed to fight their way back to the bank, but Fiala, along with half of the expedition’s food and most of its equipment, was swept helplessly down the river.

  “I just saved myself by snatching hold of a tree-bough that overhung the stream about thirty feet from the bank, and then pulling myself in,” Fiala told a reporter for the New York Times after returning home. The Brazilians whom Rondon had assigned to accompany Fiala, however, told their colonel a very different story. It was true that the boats had capsized, they said, but Fiala did not save himself—in fact, he very nearly caused the drowning death of the man who ultimately rescued him from the rapids.

  Even if Fiala had once again led his men into a disaster, with new doubts about his own actions, the ill-starred explorer had at least been proved right on one count: his insistence that North American canoes were the proper means for descending the Amazon’s dangerous tributaries. Fiala blamed his near-death in the Papagaio rapids on the heavy, clumsy South American dugouts. After his first disastrous day on the Papagaio, Fiala refused to trust the dugouts a second time. He returned to Utiarity and retrieved the Canadian canoes that he himself had handpicked, and which Roosevelt’s expedition had left behind because they could not afford the additional weight.

  The Brazilians on his team thought that their commander had lost his mind and balked at the idea of boarding such an insubstantial-looking canoe, especially since Rondon held them responsible for Fiala’s safety. However, when they saw “how buoyantly the canoe rode the rapids,” Fiala later proudly recalled, “how a twist of the paddle would deflect it around a rock on which a dugout would crash and smash, they gave cries of delight.” Fiala’s selection of his Canadian canoes had been vindicated.

  Miles away, on his journey to the River of Doubt, however, Roosevelt had no way to know that and could do nothing about it even if he had.

  * * *

  OUTSIDE of Juruena, moreover, the men’s concern about accidental mishaps, dying mules, and low supplies were compounded by a new fear: calculated attack. The hum of the telegraph wires, as familiar now as the weary clop-clop-clop of their mules’ hooves on the wet clay and sand soil, was the only sign of civilization in the broad scrub forest before them. They felt as isolated as if they were traveling across an uninhabited planet. They were not alone, however, and they knew that there was rarely a moment of the day or night when they were not being watched.

  They were now, Roosevelt wrote, “in a still wilder region, the land of the naked Nhambiquaras.” Rondon had made first contact with this tribe, one of the most isolated and primitive of the Amazon, only six years earlier. They had welcomed him with a fusillade of poison-tipped arrows. Hoping to make a clear gesture of friendship, Rondon and just three of his men, including Lyra, had ridden single-file toward a Nhambiquara camp, their mules heaped high with gifts. But before they had even reached the camp, Rondon had felt something fly past his face that was so light and fast that for a moment he thought it was a bird. In the millisecond it took him to realize that it was an arrow, a second one slammed into his helmet. The third arrow struck his chest and lodged in his thick leather bandolier. Ordering his men not to return fire, Rondon calmly turned his mule around and rode back to his own camp, sitting straight in his saddle with the arrow—five feet long with a ten-inch macaw feather, split in two, on one end and a serrated, curare-coated tip on the other—still sticking out of his chest.

  For weeks, the Nhambiquara had terrorized Rondon’s men, disappearing during the day and attacking at night, when the soldiers were most vulnerable. The men were so frightened that they refused even to build a campfire after the sun went down, in the hope that the Nhambiquara would not be able to find them on the black plateau. Gradually, however, Rondon had won the Indians over, by first wooing them with gifts and then luring them to his campsite by playing a phonograph at night, sending the strains of a Wagnerian opera into the forest like a beautiful, incorporeal siren. Through persistent kindness, compassion, and patience in the face of relentless and often deadly attacks, he had forged a simple peace, but it was tentative at best and had met with varying degrees of success within the tribes’ scattered and independent bands.

  For the telegraph-station workers, the men whom Rondon left behind to guard and repair the poles after the rest of the expedition had moved on, the Nhambiquara remained a constant threat. In general, long-term peace between the telegraph-station workers and the Indians was rare. Although the relationship usually started out on a friendly footing—Rondon having ordered the workers to be kind to the Indians, not meddle in their affairs, and give them plenty of gifts—it almost always devolved into resentment and distrust. The telegraph-station workers, moreover, were utterly alone, with no hope of help from any quarter, and with a store of coveted weapons and metal tools that made them enticing targets. In the late 1930s, the French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss traveled along Rondon’s telegraph line and heard many stories of telegraph workers who had died grisly deaths at the hands of the Nhambiquara. “Someone may recall,” Lévi-Strauss wrote in his seminal book Tristes Tropiques, “how a certain telegraph operator was found buried up to the waist, with his chest riddled with arrows and his morse-key on his head.”

  Even missionaries, who were ostensibly there to help the Indians, body and soul, had difficulty staying alive in Nhambiquara territory. The seemingly simplest of misunderstandings could lead to the slaughter of an entire missionary community. Lévi-Strauss told the story of one such massacre that happened in the very region through which Roosevelt and his men were now traveling:

  A Protestant mission came to settle not far from the post at Juruena. It would seem that relations soon became embittered, the natives having been dissatisfied with the gifts—inadequate, apparently—that the missionaries had given them in return for their help in building the house and planting the garden. A few months later, an Indian with a high temperature presented himself at the mission and was publicly given two aspirin tablets, which he swallowed; afterwards he bathed in the river, developed congestion of the lungs and died. As the Nambikwara are expert poisoners, they concluded that their fellow-tribesman had been murdered; they launched a retaliatory attack, during which six members of the mission were massacred, including a two-year-old child. Only one woman was found alive by a search party sent out from Cuiaba.

  * * *

  EVEN WHERE relationships appeared to be well established, there was still a good chance that things could go disastrously wrong. Rondon did his best to “civilize” the Indians who lived near his telegraph stations—a perhaps misguided effort for which he would be criticized in later years—but he did not control them, and he never would. In Utiarity, he taught the Pareci Indians, one of the region’s most sophisticated and peaceful tribes, how to build more substantial houses; he helped them grow potatoes, corn, and manioc; and he gave them clothing. He even hired some of them to work for the Rondon Commission, paying the average worker sixty-six cents a day, particularly valuable employees a dollar, and chiefs $1.66.

  The Nhambiquara, however, had proved impervious to Rondon’s efforts. They were still largely nomadic hunter-gatherers, settling down only during the rainy season. For most of the year, they slept under the most temporary an
d fragile of shelters—a half- or quarter-circle of palm branches that they had driven into holes dug into the sand. They would set up these shelters in the direction from which they expected to receive the most sun, wind, or rain, but they would disassemble them every morning and build new ones the next night. Unlike neighboring tribes, the Nhambiquara also slept on the ground rather than in a hammock—a practice for which the Pareci despised them.

  The Nhambiquara were also wholly uninterested in clothing. Some of the Pareci who worked for the telegraph stations had begun to wear shirts and even pants, but the Nhambiquara men still wore nothing more than a string around their waist with, at the most, a tuft of dried grass or a scrap of cloth that served no purpose beyond pure ornamentation. The Nhambiquara women did not even wear that much. This determined nakedness never ceased to worry Rondon, who did not trust his soldiers around the Indian girls, and who knew that, if his men succumbed to this particular temptation, they would likely pay for it with their lives.

  An even greater danger to the telegraph line soldiers—and to all the progress that Rondon had made in his relationship with the Indians—was tribal warfare. Rondon had strictly forbidden his men ever to take sides in a tribal battle, no matter how seemingly brutal or unjust. In Utiarity, however, one man had recently defied this order, with potentially disastrous results. Shortly before the expedition had arrived there, a group of Nhambiquara had descended on the Pareci’s village while their men were gone. Hearing the screams of their wives and mothers, the Pareci had rushed home, and a battle had broken out in full view of the telegraph station. The Nhambiquara were better, more experienced warriors than the Pareci, but the Pareci had a powerful ally: a telegraph line employee, the only man for nearly a hundred miles who had a gun. Having grown fond of the Pareci, and having watched the Nhambiquara prey on them time and again, the man had stepped into the melee, raised his gun, and fatally shot a Nhambiquara warrior, enraging Rondon and putting at risk the precarious peace he had worked so long to achieve.