The River of Doubt: Theodore Roosevelt's Darkest Journey

  Rondon’s injunction against violence directed toward an Indian—any Indian, for any reason—was categorical. In fact, he valued the lives of the Amazonian Indians above his own life—or the lives of his men. Surely there was not a soldier in the Rondon Commission who could not recite by heart his colonel’s now famous command: “Die if you must, but never kill.” Rondon’s success in the Amazon had depended on this dictum. It was the only reason the Indians had ever dared to trust him.

  As they had in the United States, Native Americans in Brazil had been exploited, enslaved, and slaughtered for centuries—since 1500, the year the Portuguese explorer Pedro Álvares Cabral is said to have discovered the region. In 1908, Hermann von Ihering, the German-born director of the São Paulo Museum, argued that it was a shame, but the Indians would surely not survive Brazilian ambitions, and they should not be allowed to stand in their way. “I feel for them as a man,” he wrote, “but as a citizen in keeping with my political belief, I cannot stand by and watch the march of our culture halted by Indian arrows. And certainly the life of the backwoodsman and colonist is worth more to us than the life of the savage. The fate of the Indians is certain. Many of them will accept our culture, the remainder will continue to be our enemies and, as such, will gradually disappear.”

  Unwittingly, however, von Ihering had ignited the greatest advancement in the cause of Indian rights that Brazil had ever witnessed. Outraged by the museum director’s blatant disregard for Indian lives—von Ihering had even gone so far as to note in an article that it was “worth registering here what the American General Custer said: ‘the only good Indian is a dead Indian’”—Rondon engaged him in a public debate. In 1910, the momentum generated by this debate resulted in the formation of Brazil’s Indian Protection Service—SPI—the country’s first agency devoted to the protection of its native inhabitants, and Rondon was named its first director.

  Rondon’s brave and unyielding advocacy of the Amazonian Indian was to become his most important legacy—outshining even his achievements as an explorer. Whatever the merits of his philosophy, however, his approach was cold comfort to the soldiers he forced to practice it. In fact, so infamous were Rondon’s expeditions into the interior that he had to pay his men seven times what they made anywhere else. Even the cook aboard the Nyoac had known Rondon’s reputation for losing his men’s lives as he forged a path through Indian territory. When the Brazilian colonel invited him to join the descent of the River of Doubt, the cook had replied in horror, “Sir! I have done nothing to deserve such punishment!”

  Rondon refused even to let his men retaliate when they had been attacked. It was not unusual for his soldiers to have to watch helplessly while their friends died brutal deaths at the hands of Indians, and then have no ability to avenge their loss, no recourse but tears. “Let us weep,” Rondon would tell them, “for I loved this man who has perished for my sake. But I command you to do as he did. Never shoot.” Rondon believed that his mission in protecting and pacifying the Indians was larger than his own life, larger than any of their lives. He would rather die than surrender his ideals, and he obliged his men to follow suit.

  * * *

  ROOSEVELT FOR his part, was not planning on sacrificing his expedition or the lives of any of his men on the altar of Rondon’s ideals. As a young rancher in the Dakota Territories, Roosevelt had barked, “I don’t go so far as to think that the only good Indians are dead Indians, but I believe nine out of every ten are, and I shouldn’t like to inquire too closely into the case of the tenth.” By the time he became president, his views had tempered, and he, like Rondon, believed that the country’s “aim should be [the Indians’] ultimate absorption into the body of our people.” However, the man he appointed as commissioner of Indian Affairs, Francis Leupp, made no effort to hide his belief that Indians would never be seamlessly integrated into the world of the white man. In fact, he argued that Indians should not be made United States citizens. “They are not fitted for [citizenship’s] duties,” he declared, “or able to take advantage of its benefits.”

  Roosevelt would never completely shake off the model of the American Western frontier with which he had grown up. When he was in Dakota, the battles between the Indians and the pioneers were only just ending. “There were still sporadic outbreaks here and there, and occasionally bands of marauding young braves were a menace to outlying and lonely settlements,” he recalled, but “many of the white men were themselves lawless and brutal, and prone to commit outrages on the Indians.” Though Roosevelt had sympathy for the Indians and understood the injustices and cruelties that they had endured, in South America as well as in North America, Rondon’s passive, pacifist approach was alien to his entire way of thinking. He was much more inclined to conquer than to be slaughtered.

  The stakes were rising, moreover, because, with each passing day, the expedition was intruding deeper into Nhambiquara territory, and the Indians were becoming increasingly bold with Roosevelt and his men. Their gestures were friendly, as they clearly knew and liked Rondon, but the expedition members understood that the slightest insult or injury, whether real or simply perceived, could turn the Indians against them before they even realized what had happened.

  The Nhambiquara lived by the laws of the wilderness, which demanded that, as Roosevelt explained, “friends proclaim their presence; a silent advance marks a foe.” During war, the Nhambiquara had perfected the art of the surprise attack. “When preparing for a war the chief of the band takes the men into the woods and tells them that there are bad people to the north which they must kill,” observed Kalvero Oberg, a Smithsonian anthropologist who studied the tribe in the mid-1940s.

  Then after singing a war song they set about making many arrows and war clubs. The night before the attack they camp near the village of the enemy. The men paint their bodies with the sap of some latex tree and their faces with urucú and charcoal. They then take leaves and stuff them into any holes in the ground or in trees around their camp. After all the holes are stopped up, they take the skin of an anteater, the skin of a toad, and the leaves of a tree, which are used in preventing rain, and burn them. The stopping of the holes is believed to prevent the enemy from hearing them. . .. The Chief remains at his spot and sings all night with the shamans. At dawn the young men approach the huts of the enemy, stand in the doorway and shout, and when the occupants awaken they are shot down or clubbed. No one is spared.

  Conversely, to show their good intentions when they visited the expedition, the Indians would leave their weapons behind and call out to Roosevelt and his men from hiding places in the forest that surrounded the telegraph road. The members of the expedition would answer, inviting the Indians to visit their camp. The Indians would then shout again. The expedition would answer. Shout. Answer. Shout. Answer. Until, finally, the Indians were certain that they were welcome, and the expedition was certain that they were coming as friends and not as attackers.

  Once in the camp, the Nhambiquara would get as close as physically possible to the white men, whom they found curiously pale, tall, and hairy. While Roosevelt was trying to write, they would gather around him so tightly that he would have to gently push them away so that he could move his arms. The Nhambiquara were taller and darker than the Pareci, with longer heads and hair cut into distinctive bowl-like bangs. Around Rondon, they were smiling and relaxed. Kermit liked them. They are “a very pleasant set,” he wrote Belle, “and didn’t look at all as if they had given Rondon all the trouble they have. . .. They have small hands and feet, and really nice faces. It’s melancholy to think how they will change when civilization comes here.” Leo Miller, however, who, perhaps of all the members of the expedition, had the lowest opinion of Indians, was repelled by the quills and thin pieces of bamboo that the Nhambiquara men threaded through holes pierced into their upper lips and the septum of their noses—especially since the Indians clearly had no appreciation for the American concept of personal space. “They had the unpleasant habit of coming close up to on
e and jabbering at a furious rate of speed,” Miller wrote. “This caused the labrets to move uncomfortably near one’s eyes, and it was necessary at times to retreat a short distance in order to get out of range of the menacing ornaments.” Roosevelt marveled that these sticks, which were roughly six inches long, did not bother the Indians, even when they ate. “They laughed at the suggestion of removing them,” he wrote. “Evidently to have done so would have been rather bad manners—like using a knife as an aid in eating ice cream.”

  The Nhambiquara intrigued Roosevelt, and he enjoyed their company, but he would not let his guard down around them. He had heard vivid tales of their brutality toward the Pareci in Utiarity, and he had spent a night watching them dance in Juruena, only to wake up and find that they had left in the wee hours, taking with them two of the expedition’s dogs. These Indians were, he wrote, “light-hearted robbers and murderers.”

  While he was on this expedition, Roosevelt felt obliged to follow Rondon’s lead. This was his country and his territory, and Roosevelt respected Rondon’s authority as a colonel in the Brazilian military. However, nothing he saw suggested that Rondon’s approach would produce anything but tragedy. His concerns were dramatically illustrated on February 11, when the men made camp near the remains of an abandoned Indian village. After dinner, a few of the men wandered over to see what was left. Not far from the sagging and crumbling palm-thatch huts, the men stumbled upon the graves of two Brazilian soldiers and an army officer who had been murdered by Nhambiquara and then buried vertically, with their heads and shoulders sticking out of the ground.

  The most frightening aspect of these lonely graves was that the Indians who had killed these men were much further along the road of pacification, civilization, and friendship with the outside world than were the unknown Indians who lived on the banks of the River of Doubt. The Nhambiquara were violent and unpredictable, but at least they had forged a semblance of peace with Rondon. The Indians of the River of Doubt, in contrast, were utterly unknown even to Rondon, and there was no reason to think that they would welcome the expedition into their territory with any more tolerance or self-restraint than the Nhambiquara had shown when they had rained arrows down on Rondon at his first approach. Roosevelt and his men may have regarded themselves as explorers, but the Indians would know them only as invaders.

  * * *

  WITH ALL of these worries weighing on his mind, Roosevelt was struck one last heavy blow just as he reached the River of Doubt. Throughout the overland journey, Rondon had assured the ex-president that the expedition would have enough provisions for every man who was to descend the river. When they took stock of their supplies, however, Rondon and Roosevelt together learned that the haphazard preparations for the journey, and the grueling month since leaving Tapirapoan, had taken a far greater toll than anyone had fully realized.

  Even in the best of circumstances, the remaining rations would not come close to feeding the sixteen camaradas who were to do the hardest work of paddling the expedition’s boats and portaging its equipment. At the very outset of their descent of an unmapped river, Roosevelt was forced to cut his own and the other officers’ rations in half so that the camaradas on whom they depended could have any chance of surviving the journey. The expedition had now turned into a race against time. The survival of every man would depend on their collective ability to master the churning river, evade its ever-present dangers, and discover a route out of the deepest rain forest before their supplies ran out.

  CHAPTER 10

  The Unknown

  IF ROOSEVELT AND HIS men could have soared over the rain forest like the hawks that wheeled above them, the River of Doubt would have looked like a black piece of ribbon candy nestled in an endless expanse of green. Here, at the start of its tortuous journey northward, the river was so tightly coiled that at times it doubled back on itself, and in every direction the jungle stretched—dense, impenetrable, and untouched—to the horizon. The expedition was finally preparing to descend into the Amazon Basin from the highland plateau that it had just crossed. Even from the air, however, the river’s path into the jungle lowlands was so capricious, and the terrain so uneven, that it frequently disappeared entirely beneath the dense green canopy, making it nearly impossible to follow.

  Rondon believed that the River of Doubt ultimately poured into the Madeira, the principal tributary of the Amazon River. On the basis of that educated guess, he had, before departing, sent a detachment of men to travel up the Madeira to the point where he calculated that he and Roosevelt would eventually emerge. The detachment, led by Lieutenant Antonio Pyrineus—the man who had nearly lost his tongue and his life to a piranha during Rondon’s harrowing 1909 telegraph expedition—was ordered to set up camp at the confluence of the two southern branches of a tributary of the Madeira called the Aripuanã. The Madeira, which is so large that its basin is more than twice the size of France, winds for more than two thousand miles through western Brazil and has more than a dozen tributaries. As the Madeira’s largest tributary, the Aripuanã was well known in its final, lower reaches, but rapids and Indians had prevented even the most intrepid and ambitious rubber-tappers from traveling more than a few hundred miles up its course. Rondon had instructed Pyrineus to take a steamer up the Aripuanã as far as he could, and then to go by canoe to the point at which the river was known to split into two long arms. He was to wait at this fork in the river in the hope that, two or even three months after starting down the River of Doubt, the Roosevelt-Rondon Scientific Expedition would appear on the horizon.

  If Rondon was right, and the expedition eventually reunited with Pyrineus on the Aripuanã, it would mean two things: First, it would mean that Roosevelt had placed on the map of South America a river that was nearly a thousand miles long—as long as the Ohio or the Rhine. There would then be no question but that the River of Doubt was, in Rondon’s words, a “river whose importance would justify the idea of giving it [Roosevelt’s] name.” The scale of that achievement, however, would be directly proportional to the sacrifices it would require. If the expedition emerged where Rondon predicted, it also would mean that Roosevelt, Rondon, and their men had survived a journey as perilous as any in the history of Amazon exploration.

  In contrast to the broad, sweeping grandeur of the Amazon River itself, the thousands of tributaries that stream into it are wild and capricious. They tear through the jungle like wounded animals, thrashing their banks and spitting white foam into the branches of overhanging trees. The rivers’ ferocity is caused not solely by the great volume of water they carry (taken by itself, the Madeira is equal in volume to the powerful Congo—the world’s second-largest river by volume after the Amazon itself), or even by their plunge from highland plateau to lowland basin. Instead, the principal reason these rivers are nearly impossible to navigate is that they are studded with rapids that are produced as water flows over rock formations of contrasting degrees of hardness. The softer the rock, the more easily it erodes, exposing bars of hard bedrock that form ever-steeper steps in the riverbed, making the water roil and churn as if a fire were blazing beneath it. The Madeira, which starts its journey near the Bolivia-Brazil border in the Brazilian Highlands, has at least thirty major waterfalls and rapids, with sixteen powerful cataracts in one 225-mile stretch alone.

  Everyone in the expedition understood that the River of Doubt, if it followed the path Rondon suspected, would be just as rapids-choked as the Madeira, if not more so. The difference between Roosevelt’s expedition and those of the countless rubber-tappers who had tried unsuccessfully to negotiate the Amazon’s wild tributaries was that Roosevelt was going to descend the River of Doubt, not attempt to fight his way up it. This strategy would allow him to harness the river’s great strength rather than oppose it. But it represented a gamble of life-or-death proportions, because, from the moment the men of the expedition launched their boats, they would no longer be able to turn around. The river would carry them ever deeper into the rain forest, with whatever dangers
that might entail. When they reached a series of rapids, they would have to portage around them—or mumble a prayer and plunge ahead. In either case, the option of returning the way they came was no longer available to them. They would find a way through, or they would perish in the attempt.

  * * *

  ON THE spot where Rondon had abandoned his exploration of the River of Doubt five years earlier, the Rondon Commission had built a simple wooden bridge to straddle the river’s roughly sixty-five-foot expanse. As Roosevelt at last stood on that bridge, listening to the swift, muddy water slap against the warped planks beneath his feet, he peered into the dark stretch of jungle ahead of him. This world, which he was about to enter for better or worse, was strange and utterly unfamiliar, and while his first glimpse into it was exciting, it was also deeply sobering. No one, not even the inscrutable Rondon, could predict what was around the next bend. Roosevelt was about to become an explorer in the truest, and most unforgiving, sense of the word. It was an opportunity he had dreamed of from his earliest childhood. Now, however, he realized that he would be called on to pay the full cost of his ambitions—and he found himself gravely unprepared for what might lie ahead.

  After months of inattention, Roosevelt had now come face to face with the acute logistical shortcomings and rapidly escalating risks that his own casual approach to the expedition and its route had produced. Roosevelt, Rondon, and their men were about to begin the most difficult leg of their journey, but they were already at the limits of their endurance. After spending more than a month slogging through the muddy highlands, with long days on muleback, nearly constant downpours, illness, worry, death, and sorrow, the men were exhausted, homesick, and wary—not just of the river they were about to descend but also of one another. To the Americans, the overland journey had appeared chaotic and shockingly disorganized. To the Brazilians, on the other hand, the Americans must have seemed selfish and demanding. Father Zahm had certainly been the worst offender, but the comfort of all the Americans had always come first—even before the Brazilians’ basic needs. Unknown to Roosevelt, Rondon had not only ordered his men to eat less so that the Americans could eat more, but had intentionally overloaded the pack oxen and abandoned entire crates of the camaradas’ provisions in the hope that he would not have to ask the Americans to leave behind any of their ponderous baggage.