The River of Doubt: Theodore Roosevelt's Darkest Journey

  While Roosevelt and Cherrie studied the rain forest, their paddlers kept their eyes on the river. Pulling the dugout through the water with their long wooden paddles, they searched for a telltale ripple, their only warning that a fallen tree lay just below the surface. The rainy-season downpours that had been such a source of misery to the men on their overland journey had caused the river to swell to such a height that most of the sunken trees and boulders were safely buried under several feet of water. Some, such as the water-loving boritana palms, continued to grow and thrive although they were fully submerged, the current shaking their broad crowns like a strong wind. Other fallen trees, however, still lay close to the surface, and, whenever they appeared, the current seemed invariably to drive the expedition’s canoes straight down on top of them. It was then, Roosevelt wrote, that “the muscles stood out on the backs and arms of the paddlers as stroke on stroke they urged us away from and past the obstacle.”

  The strength and skill of the camaradas was evident as they maneuvered their craft down the river. Rondon had hired rugged young men in Tapirapoan to be their paddlers and porters. They were a “strapping set,” Roosevelt wrote admiringly. “They were expert river-men and men of the forest, skilled veterans in wilderness work. They were lithe as panthers and brawny as bears. They swam like water-dogs. They were equally at home with pole and paddle, with axe and machete.”

  Roosevelt realized, however, that great difficulty often brought out the worst in a man. Deep in the Amazon, the expedition was utterly isolated and far from help of any kind. The camaradas—who outnumbered the officers nearly three to one—could mutiny as easily as sailors at sea. They were all capable men, and most of them were brave, but they had lived a hard life. They looked, Roosevelt wrote, “like pirates in the pictures of Howard Pyle and Maxfield Parrish.” One glance at threvealed the almost unbridgeable difference between their hardscrabble world and Roosevelt’s refined and privileged one. For clothing, they had brought along nothing more than the thin shirts and ragged pants that they wore, and most of them were barefoot. Their feet and hands were as hard and gnarled as their rough-hewn paddles. Their faces, some bright and cheerful, others dark and glowering, were usually obscured by their slouching and soiled hats. It would take time for the officers, especially the Americans, to get to know their paddlers and to learn those on whom they could rely, even trusting them with their own lives, and those on whom they should never turn their backs.

  Even Roosevelt’s own boatmen represented the extremes of good and bad among the camaradas. His steersman, a black man from Mato Grosso named Luiz Correia, and his paddler, Antonio Pareci, a member of the peaceful Pareci Indian tribe that the expedition had met in Utiarity, were two of the best men in the expedition. Over the course of the journey, both of them would earn Roosevelt’s respect by proving that they not only knew the rain forest but were willing to work hard for the success of the expedition. The third camarada in Roosevelt’s boat, however, was Julio de Lima, the broad-shouldered, hot-tempered Brazilian who had attacked another man with a knife during the overland journey. Apparently Amilcar had not shared his concerns about Julio with Rondon, because not only had the volatile camarada been chosen among the select group of men who were to descend the River of Doubt, but he was now Roosevelt’s own bowman.

  * * *

  FROM THE moment their boats were swept into the unknown, Rondon set his plan for the expedition into motion. The Brazilian colonel was interested not in adventure but in geographical precision, and he was determined to survey the river carefully and completely, from its headwaters to its mouth. Little more than a century earlier, Alexander von Humboldt, the world-renowned German naturalist and explorer, had conducted the first thorough cartographical survey of South America, producing hundreds of maps based on seven hundred observations. Filling in these maps with the detail necessary to make them truly useful was an ongoing project, one that had met with varying degrees of success over the ensuing century. By the early twentieth century, the existing maps of the Brazilian interior were largely, and notoriously, wrong, indicating mountains where none existed and rivers misplaced by hundreds of miles. A significant part of Rondon’s job over the past twenty-four years had been not only adding to the cartographic knowledge of his continent but correcting these mistakes.

  There were no reference points in the vast jungle, so the men would have to rely on celestial navigation to tell them where they were. To determine latitude and longitude, they used the same instrument that Humboldt himself had used—a sextant, which measures the angle between the horizon and the sun, moon, or stars. To chart the river from point to point, Rondon instituted a fixed-station method of survey, one of the most accurate methods but also the most labor-intensive. Not only did it require repeated, detailed measurements, but it also demanded frequent stops, especially on a river that wound as tightly as the River of Doubt.

  For the sake of accuracy, Rondon was more than willing to endure the tedium, grueling work, and danger that the fixed-station survey demanded. However, as in many great undertakings, the expedition’s commander would not suffer alone. In the lead canoe, Kermit had accepted the unenviable job of placing the sighting rod that Lyra and Rondon would use to make their measurements. Kermit and his paddlers would find a spot that afforded the longest unimpeded view both upstream and downstream—usually at a bend in the river—land their boat, and, using a machete, cut away the thick branches and vines that covered the bank. Fighting off swarms of biting ants and angry wasps, Kermit would plant his sighting rod—a slim pole on which a red disk and a white disk had been positioned one meter apart—in the thin, black leaf litter under his feet. Lyra would then use a telemeter to establish the distance between his canoe and the sighting rod, and Rondon would consult his compass and record the river’s direction.

  The river twisted and turned so capriciously—curving “literally toward every point of the compass,” Roosevelt remarked—that Kermit had to land, cut away the vegetation, and set up the sighting rod 114 times that first day alone. Roosevelt was not pleased with the fixed-station survey. Not only did it slow the expedition to a glacial pace—the boats traveled only six miles in five hours—but it placed his son in a particularly dangerous position. If there were sunken trees, hidden whirlpools, sudden waterfalls, or hostile Indians, Kermit would encounter them first. In spite of his concerns, however, Roosevelt refrained from asking Rondon to adopt a faster method of survey. This was Rondon’s country and Rondon’s expedition, more than his own, and Roosevelt was determined to respect his co-commander’s wishes as long as he could. He planned, he wrote, simply to keep an eye on the expedition, maintaining a “close supervision over everything that was done but being more than courteous and polite and friendly with my Brazilian companions.”

  After only two hours on the river, Roosevelt, whose canoe had long since passed the two slow surveying boats, instructed his paddlers to pull over. Leaning over the sides of the dugout to grasp leafy branches that overhung the river, the camaradas pulled as close to the overgrown shore as they could and then used a rope to tether the boat to a tree. The six men then settled in to wait for their companions, their boat rocking in the current, the rain and sun alternately drenching and drying them. Finally, after two more hours had passed with no sign of the surveying canoes, Roosevelt ordered the camaradas to make camp. It was only 4:00 p.m., but they could not go forward without the rest of the expedition, and they had no idea when they would all be reunited.

  * * *

  THE EXPEDITION’S first camp on the River of Doubt was little more than a crude clearing on the river’s edge. After making their way through the dense bushes and trees that crowded every inch of the shoreline and leaned far out over the river itself, the men were able to find a dry, level patch of ground at the top of a steep, hundred-yard incline. But fighting back the jungle was no easy task. With axes and machetes, the camaradas slowly began to cut away small trees and heavy vines, all crawling with a wide array of stinging,
biting insects. Eventually they were able to form a little open island in the sea of trees, and they began hauling up bags from the dugouts, setting up the officers’ two tents, and tying their own simple hammocks to sturdy trunks.

  By the time Kermit, Rondon, Lyra, and their six paddlers appeared, filthy and exhausted, the sun was already setting, and Franca the cook had, as he had time and again for the past month, miraculously started a fire from sodden wood. As the men sat around the sputtering campfire, the rain tapered off, leaving a clear, star-scattered sky above them. Beyond their little circle of light, however, the jungle was so black that, had a sudden rain doused their fire, the men would not have been able to see their own hands, much less one another. Only six miles into their expedition, they could already feel their isolation. But as they sank into their hammocks that night, their first on the banks of the River of Doubt, little time was wasted on worry. Exhaustion descended, as heavy and inescapable as the tropical humidity, and the men quickly fell asleep.

  CHAPTER 12

  The Living Jungle

  WHEN ROOSEVELT EMERGED FROM his thin balloon-silk tent on the morning of February 28, 1914, he stepped into the narrow clearing that his men had carved between water and forest. Before him rushed the River of Doubt, dark, swollen, and littered with debris from fallen trees. Having overflowed its banks, it coursed through the forest on either side in wayward streams and rivulets, picking up clots of leaves and displaced birds’ nests, and filling the jungle with a glasslike floor of water that mirrored the canopy above. The expedition’s dugouts rocked uneasily at their moorings, looking as unreliable at dawn as they had the afternoon before.

  Although Roosevelt had hunted and camped in forests throughout the United States, marveling at California’s enormous redwoods, he had never seen anything like the prodigy of nature that surrounded him now. The massive trees rose so high that their crowns disappeared in the tangle of branches and flicker of sunlight above his head. Branches of neighboring trees wound around one another like interlaced fingers, and heavy epiphytes unfurled from the treetops like a ship’s rigging.

  In the early-morning light, the scene that Roosevelt beheld was a breathtaking tableau of timeless nature—tranquil and apparently unchanging. That impression, however, could hardly have been more dangerous or deceiving. For, even as the men of the expedition gazed in awe at the natural beauty surrounding them, the creatures of the rain forest were watching back, identifying them as intruders, assaying their potential value, surveying their weaknesses, and preparing to take whatever they might have to give.

  Far from its outward appearance, the rain forest was not a garden of easy abundance, but precisely the opposite. Its quiet, shaded halls of leafy opulence were not a sanctuary but, rather, the greatest natural battlefield anywhere on the planet, hosting an unremitting and remorseless fight for survival that occupied every single one of its inhabitants, every minute of every day. Though frequently impossible for a casual observer to discern, every inch of space was alive—from the black, teeming soil under Roosevelt’s boots to the top of the canopy far above his head—and everything was connected. A long, linked mat of fungi under the soil consumed the dead and fed the living, completing an ever-changing cycle of remarkable life and commonplace death which had throbbed without pause for millions of years—and of which Roosevelt and his men, knowingly or not, had now become a part.

  * * *

  UNLIKE THE woods of New England, where Roosevelt had spent years exploring and learning about nature, the rain forest floor was not covered with thick leaf litter or plant life, but appeared largely empty, characterized only by a shallow layer of soil shot through with thin white threadlike fibers. Just as unusual, each tree in the Amazon rain forest appeared to be nearly unique. Many trees had commonly shaped leaves, but stands or groupings of a single tree species were very rare, and after identifying one tree the men could search for hours before finding another of the same kind. The trees themselves were often strange and complex, characterized by huge buttresses, flowering trunks, or apparent branches that plunged back into the earth or were wrapped in enormous looped or curled vines. Most important, other than insects, which teemed everywhere, the forest seemed virtually empty, with little or no sign or sound of any inhabitants.

  These odd characteristics were not mere natural curiosities or local quirks, but direct reflections of the deadly, exquisitely efficient competition for survival that was taking place all around Roosevelt and his men. They also reflected the profound impact of that evolutionary competition on all forms of life in the Amazon, where it has produced some of the most phenomenally diverse and specialized plants and creatures anywhere on earth.

  While the process of evolution has continuously altered and selected the features of life everywhere on the planet, in few places have its workings been as conspicuous or its results as refined as in the Amazon. The extraordinary range of forms that characterizes the Amazon rain forest has been attributed to many causes, all of which are likely to have played some role in creating the immense cornucopia of living things that surrounded the expedition.

  Perhaps the most frequently cited factor in the species richness of the Amazon is the region’s latitude, which has for millions of years produced generally stable temperatures and moist environmental conditions that have favored the uninterrupted development of the jungle and its inhabitants. Another prominent explanation is the repeated isolation and reconnection of the jungle to other continents and habitats over the broad sweep of time. Whereas some regions, such as Africa, have undergone fewer changes, and reflect a comparatively lower number of unique plant and animal species, the South American continent has at different points been cut off from, or rejoined to, other landmasses. The separation of South America from the rest of Gondwanaland, for example, created opportunities for the development of new indigenous species. That isolation was then interrupted by the rise of the Panamanian Land Bridge, which permitted the arrival of new species from North America, and started new rounds of selection.

  Within the Amazon itself, some scientists believe, localized changes of climate created shifting patterns of so-called refugia, or rain forest pockets, whose isolation offered unusual opportunities for the emergence of specialized plants, birds, insects, and other animals. New variants of life, particularly fish life, were also fostered by the long presence of an inland sea at the heart of the continent. Distinct new species are also thought to have emerged within enclaves set off by natural boundaries such as mountains and, of course, the channels and tributaries of the giant Amazon river system itself.

  As in the development of a modern economy, with its ever-increasing specialization of labor and markets, each increase in competition among the inhabitants of the rain forest has itself been a powerful source of further speciation, rewarding entrepreneurial variations of life that can exploit skills and opportunities that previously went unrecognized or did not exist.

  In the presence of such highly refined evolutionary pressures, every natural advantage and source of potential sustenance becomes an object of competition and is consequently used to its fullest. Despite the lush green vistas and overgrown shores that the expedition could see from the river, for example, the soil of many lowland rain forests is not rich or fecund but, rather, has adapted to recycle nutrients with extraordinary speed. The same abundant precipitation and steady temperatures that support life also leach minerals from the soil, and intense tree-and-plant growth exploits every available nutrient, leaving the floor of many tropical jungles, including the Amazon, permanently hovering at the margin of exhaustion.

  For plants and trees, competition for available soil nutrients is paired with competition for sunlight, which is essential for the photosynthesis that green plants use to create carbohydrates from carbon dioxide and water. Every kind of plant or tree therefore represents a unique trade-off between the quest for water and soil nutrients on one hand, and the quest for sunlight on the other.

  Soaring more than 150 f
eet above Roosevelt’s head and out of sight in the green canopy were giant emergent tree species that had secured their survival by putting all their resources into the effort to outrace their competitors to the sunshine. For fast-growing trees, the trade-off for speed is inadequate defenses against insects and vulnerability to storms that cannot reach the lower, more sheltered layers of the forest. Unable to sink deep roots in the thin forest floor, canopy trees are also generally obliged to develop elaborate support systems at their base, either with giant triangular buttresses that surround the bole, or tree-trunk, or so-called flying buttresses that look like inverted branches.

  On the forest floor, where the sky is all but obscured by such tall canopy trees, smaller plants or trees with limited resources must develop increasingly refined strategies to find a place in the sun. The most obvious of these strategies is to avoid the cost of building a structure capable of reaching the canopy by simply climbing a tree that has already done so. This opportunistic strategy, adopted by vines and lianas, can permit a newcomer to remain anchored in the forest floor while growing rapidly to the canopy. But since even vine construction requires substantial resources, it entails complex choices about which tree to climb—a requirement that has produced astonishingly sophisticated traits. Some Amazonian plants, for example, can shift as necessary between treelike form, when they receive sunlight, and a climbing vine, when they find themselves in shade. Others can transform themselves into trees once they reach the canopy, abandoning their host and winding their viny stems together into a trunk. While most plants naturally seek the sun, other Amazonian vines have adapted to seek out the dark bases of large canopy trees that might offer reliable support, and only then to turn upward toward the light.

  With an alacrity that can seem almost human, rain forest vines send out tendrils that reach out delicately to encounter a potential host, then curl to grasp it once it is found. A principal risk of the vine strategy is the danger that the host tree will sway and break the vine, so many vine species have adapted by developing slack in the form of elaborate loops, curls, and coils, lending the rain forest the distinctive draping character that Roosevelt could so easily see and admire. Another adaptation to this and other dangers is for the vine simply to abandon its connection to the ground and to derive its water and nutrients entirely in the canopy, becoming an air plant or epiphyte, a category of plant that has generated literally thousands of species, including bromeliads and orchids. After establishing themselves in the canopy, some epiphytes, in their turn, then reverse the entire process, sending aerial roots downward to establish a connection to the forest floor.