The River of Doubt: Theodore Roosevelt's Darkest Journey

  What the officers discovered when they took stock of these provisions now, however, alarmed even Cherrie. “There were sufficient rations for the men to last about thirty-five days,” he wrote. “While the rations that had been arranged for the officials of the party would perhaps last fifty days.” With grim certainty, the officers calculated that, if the expedition continued to advance at this slow rate, they would be without food of any kind, beyond what they could catch or forage, for the last month of their journey.

  As well as worrying about their quickly dwindling rations, the men were reluctant to stay in one spot for too long for another reason: They were not alone. The jungle was, they now knew, inhabited by a group of Indians that had had no contact with the outside world. Rondon believed that the expedition was probably still traveling through Nhambiquara territory, but that was just a hunch. He could not be any more sure of what tribe of Indians they might face than he was of where the river was taking them. No other nonnative had ever been down the River of Doubt, and even the Nhambiquara who lived near its headwaters had not been able to tell Rondon what he might expect from the Indians who lived on its banks.

  Although the members of the expedition had yet to see a single human being since they had launched their boats nearly two weeks earlier, they had seen several signs of human life. Not only had they passed an abandoned village and the remains of a broken bridge, but, while crossing an Indian trail, Kermit had stumbled upon a pateran, an arrangement of branches and leaves designed to convey a message. What concerned the men about this pateran was that, unlike the rotting huts and overgrown fields, it was not a remnant of a deserted village. It had clearly been constructed very recently, and, as Roosevelt wrote, “it had some special significance.” It might have been simply an Indian path marker, giving directions to a camp or a prime fishing spot, but it just as easily might have been a warning to the members of the expedition. Either way, they were not willing to take any chances. “No one of us ever went ten yards from camp without his rifle,” Roosevelt wrote.

  * * *

  HAVING SPENT the past week fighting their way through a relentless series of rapids, the men would have little opportunity to rest during their forced delay. Construction of the new dugout had to begin immediately. As the rain fell, soaking everything and everyone, the camaradas trudged through the jungle, fanning out in different directions in an intensive search for trees that would be suitable for a canoe. They finally found three that they thought might work, chopped them down, and dragged them back to camp. Roosevelt judged them all to be “splendid looking trees,” but Rondon decided to use only one of them. It was a species of Euphorbiacaea, a Para rubber tree, which can grow to be 120 feet tall in its natural habitat. This one was five feet in diameter, and its timber, which the Brazilians called Tatajuba, was yellowish in color.

  Under Rondon’s direction, the camaradas fell to work. They only had time to build one canoe to replace the two that had been lost, so, if it had any hope of carrying the expedition’s cargo, it had to be big. The men measured off twenty-six feet from the tree’s base and then began the backbreaking work of hewing it out. Typically in building a dugout canoe, an ax is used to cut a flat plank from the bark and hollow out the trunk until the interior space is a couple of feet deep. The canoe is then filled with leaves and turned upside down, so that a small fire can be lit inside to help waterproof it and smooth out its rough edges. Next, the builders flip the canoe back over and, while the wood is still warm, scrape the interior walls and floor with the curved blade of an adze. Finally, they place crosspieces from wall to wall in the interior to help stretch the canoe.

  The members of the expedition allowed themselves only four days to complete the canoe. They worked in shifts, and Rondon never left their side, tirelessly directing the construction and ensuring that every man pulled his weight. The toll on the camaradas was heavy. Their backs ached, their arms quivered with fatigue, and, under constant attack from insects, their hands, faces, and feet became raw and inflamed. Under Rondon’s unwavering gaze, however, they never let up or even slowed down. Even after the sun set, Roosevelt watched the camaradas toil by candlelight, stripped to the waist in the hot, still air, some standing inside the canoe, others bent over its thick hull. “The flicker of the lights showed the tropic forest rising in the darkness round about,” he wrote. “Olive and copper and ebony, their skins glistened as if oiled, and rippled with the ceaseless play of the thews beneath.”

  Since witnessing their heroic struggle to bring the expedition’s dugout canoes through the rapids, Roosevelt had developed a deep admiration for his team of camaradas. “Looking at the way the work was done, at the good-will, the endurance, and the bull-like strength of the camaradas, and at the intelligence and the unwearied efforts of their commanders,” he wrote, “one could not but wonder at the ignorance of those who do not realize the energy and the power that are so often possessed by, and that may be so readily developed in, the men of the tropics.”

  Only one camarada had turned out to be, in Roosevelt’s words, “utterly worthless.” Julio de Lima had proved himself to be so lazy and untrustworthy that if Rondon could have sent him back he would have. “When we were able to discover his bad qualities, his cowardice and complete incapacity to follow up the continuous efforts of his fellow companions, we were so far advanced in the river that it was impossible for us to rid ourselves of his presence,” Rondon wrote. When they were hiring camaradas in Tapirapoan, Julio had caught their eye because of his strapping physique, good health, and professed enthusiasm for the work. That enthusiasm, however, had evaporated as soon as they reached their first set of rapids, and his strength was useless to them because he would never use it for the good of the expedition unless threatened with punishment or even abandonment. “In the Expedition no one relied upon the assistance of his strength, and least of all, of his will,” Rondon wrote. Roosevelt had absolutely no use for Julio, calling him an “inborn, lazy shirk with the heart of a ferocious cur in the body of a bullock.” But Rondon was determined to make him work.

  Rondon did not tolerate laziness or disobedience from anyone in his regiment. When it came to his soldiers, he had earned a reputation for being implacable. In the wilderness, where his men had to fight daily just to survive, he had no alternative but to guide his regiment with a firm hand. He had, however, learned through painful personal experience the importance of tempering the anger that flared inside of him at the first sign of rebellion.

  Twenty years earlier, Rondon had ordered a group of men who had rebelled against his officers to be flogged with bamboo sticks for more than an hour. Such punishment was against the law in Brazil at that time, but it was widely known to be common practice in Mato Grosso. This time, however, it had disastrous results. Under the force of a blow, a bamboo stick had snapped and punctured the lung of one of the soldiers. Horrified, Rondon had quickly ordered an end to the flogging, but there had been nothing that he could do for the wounded man, who eventually died from peritonitis.

  Although Rondon deeply regretted the man’s death and vowed never again to resort to violence, he did not, and could not, dispense with all forms of punishment. Nor did he rely on the weight of the Brazilian military to enforce his rules or keep his men in check. Even with his thin, five-foot-three-inch frame, he could intimidate the most unruly mob of young men. Six years earlier, while at work extending the telegraph line, Rondon’s soldiers had wreaked havoc on a small town, reeling drunkenly in the streets, breaking windows, and starting fights. After receiving only a lackluster response to his order to leave the saloons and assemble before him in the street, Rondon had turned toward the largest tavern in town, dug his spurs into his horse’s sides, and charged at full speed through the front doors. As men scrambled to get out of his way, he vaulted a table and bounded out the back door. One of his officers then solemnly announced that Rondon would smash every bottle in town if the saloons did not close. Moments later, the soldiers staggered into the street, swept a
long by anxious barkeepers.

  * * *

  WHILE RONDON and his camaradas built a new canoe for the expedition, Roosevelt and his son did their best to find food in the eerily quiet forest. Kermit shot an eight-foot-long water snake and a curassow, a large-crested game bird, and he just missed several red howler monkeys, which were frightened away by Rondon’s favorite dog, Lobo. Roosevelt, on the other hand, unfailingly returned to camp empty-handed. “I spent the day hunting in the woods, for the most part by the river,” he wrote of one such solo hunting trip, “but saw nothing.” Few among them would have been surprised by this revelation. Not only were the animals of the rain forest masters of disguise, but Roosevelt, the mighty hunter, was famously myopic. “He was always alone on these excursions,” Rondon would later recall, “and most frequently he returned without any game whatever, as being short sighted he did not always succeed in seeing the game from afar, and the latter, in its turn, was scared and fled when it heard his footsteps as he approached it.”

  Roosevelt’s myopia had hampered his hunting and bird-watching ever since he was a small child. “Quite unknown to myself, I was, while a boy, under a hopeless disadvantage in studying nature,” he explained in his autobiography. “I was very near-sighted, so that the only things that I could study were those I ran against or stumbled over.” Roosevelt got his first gun and his first pair of glasses at about the same time. Unfortunately, the gun came first. Roosevelt could not understand why his friends were consistently spotting and shooting game that he could not even see. It was not until he confessed his difficulties to his father that his myopia was finally diagnosed and he was fitted with a strong pair of lenses. Those glasses, he wrote, “literally opened an entirely new world to me. I had no idea how beautiful the world was until I got those spectacles.”

  Roosevelt prized his spectacles; he carried eight or ten pairs with him, carefully distributed throughout his luggage, whenever he traveled. In the tropics, however, his nearsightedness proved to be a greater disadvantage than it had been elsewhere. Not only did his glasses constantly fog over in the heavy humidity, it was almost impossible for him to see when it rained, which it did several times a day. While this frustrating and potentially dangerous disability would have kept most men out of the rain forest, Roosevelt refused even to acknowledge that it was a problem. “It was a continual source of amazement to see how skillfully father had discounted this handicap in advance and appeared to be unhampered by it,” Kermit wrote.

  On March 13, the camaradas worked until nearly midnight, and the next morning, in the middle of a torrential downpour, they finally completed the canoe. It took all twenty-two men to drag the twenty-six-foot-long dugout down the mud-slick bank, but by early afternoon it had begun its maiden voyage on the River of Doubt. The men were proud of their new, although hastily built, dugout, and they were thrilled to be moving again. But the river gave them little opportunity to celebrate. The farther the canoes traveled downstream, the faster the current became, steadily picking up speed as it cut its way down the northern face of the highlands. Worse, large, shifting whirlpools trailed their dugouts like sharks circling a lifeboat.

  * * *

  IT WAS a measure of how desperate the men had become that, on their first day back on the river, they decided to run every set of rapids they encountered. They could not predict how their new canoe would hold up in the writhing river, and all of their dugouts were piled so high with heavy equipment and men that, in spite of the burity branches lashed to their sides, they sank to within three inches of the water’s surface. But the river’s myriad dangers paled in comparison with the threat of starving to death in the rain forest. “Of the two hazards,” Roosevelt wrote, “we felt it necessary to risk running the rapids.”

  So strong was their sense of urgency that Rondon was persuaded to abandon the fixed-station survey and resort to a faster, although less accurate method of mapping the river. Instead of waiting for Kermit to land, cut away the vines on the bank, and plant the sighting rod, Rondon and Lyra had to make their measurements based on sightings of the lead canoe as it raced down the river. Not only was this method less dependable, it placed Kermit and his paddlers in even greater danger. They were now obliged to keep Rondon and Lyra in their sights, as well as keep a sharp eye out for rapids and whirlpools.

  Within the course of just four hours that day, the men would run six sets of rapids. But while Kermit, in his small canoe, safely skimmed past every whirlpool he encountered, his father’s large, lumbering dugout was not as agile, or as fortunate. While running “one set of big ripples,” as Roosevelt described it, his canoe was suddenly caught in the powerful, suctioning grip of a vortex. The dugout began to fill with water so fast that Cherrie and Dr. Cajazeira were forced to leap overboard to lighten the load. With strong, swift strokes, the camaradas fought their way out of the whirlpool, but the canoe had come perilously close to being swamped, and all of its cargo, and perhaps even its men, lost.

  That night, as they made camp in the darkened forest, the men felt a deep sense of satisfaction and even relief. In just half a day on the river, they had managed to make nearly ten miles of crucial progress. But while their daring had paid off that day, they knew the odds of repeating that success were slim. The more chances they took, the more likely they were to lose everything.

  “We had already met with misfortune,” Cherrie would later write, “but the following day was to be one of tragedy.”

  CHAPTER 17

  Death in the Rapids

  ON THE MORNING OF March 15, the men awoke with a renewed determination. They had survived a week-long series of raging rapids, one following hard on the heels of another, and they had weathered the loss of two canoes. They had built a new dugout, and they had driven it straight through six more sets of rapids. They were wet, hungry, and exhausted, but they were hopeful that they could survive just about anything the river had in store for them.

  Even the river itself seemed to cooperate. When they climbed aboard their canoes at 7:00 a.m., an unusually early start time for the expedition, the river was so smooth and unchallenging, though still swift, that they were free once again to admire the beauty and complexity of the jungle.

  This idyllic interlude was heartbreakingly brief. After the expedition had traveled only three miles, the land on either side of the river began to rise like an emerging mountain chain, and the men quickly found themselves surrounded by high, boulder-strewn hills. The river still twisted and turned too tightly for them to be able to see very far ahead, but they could hear a familiar distant roar.

  Like the first set of rapids that they had been forced to portage around two weeks earlier, this wide stretch of white water was split down the center by a small island. Pushing past the island, the river rushed heavily over a low waterfall. Beyond the waterfall, all they could see was, in Rondon’s words, “furious bubblings.” Although they had successfully passed through half a dozen rapids only the day before, Rondon drew the line here. Even with time slipping away and their rations in short supply, they could not risk running these rapids. They would have to make another portage.

  Rondon quickly ordered his three paddlers to pull over to the bank, and he gestured to João and Simplicio, the two camaradas who were in the lead canoe with Kermit and his dog, Trigueiro, to do the same. After their boat had been tethered to a tree, Rondon, Lyra, and their prowman, Joaquim, climbed up the muddy bank and set out to find a route for the expedition’s portage. With the easy self-assurance of an experienced commander, Rondon strode into the forest-cloaked hills, confident that his orders were being carried out in full.

  * * *

  AS RONDON disappeared from sight, Kermit decided to take a chance. Sitting in his cramped dugout as it bumped heavily against the bank, he ordered his paddlers to cross over to the small island that bisected the rapids so that he could see if the right side of the river was more passable than the left. Although the confidence of most of the men in the expedition had been shaken, Kermit?
??s determination to forge ahead was as strong as ever. He had postponed his own life to join this expedition, and he had been frustrated for months by its glacial pace. Young, strong, and skilled at working in the wilderness, he also appeared to be blithely certain of his own ability to survive this journey. It was his aging father’s health and safety that concerned him, not his own, and he believed that it was more important to move quickly through the rain forest than to fritter away their time and provisions by being overly cautious.

  For Kermit, feeling confident in the wilderness was second nature. His father had hammered it into him, as well as each of his children, from a very young age. So determined was Roosevelt that his children grow up to be strong, fearless adults that he had said that he would “rather one of them should die than have them grow up weaklings.” To ensure that none of them would ever be the kind of weakling he himself had been before he had resolved to “make” his body, Roosevelt had put his children through frequent and, for some of them, terrifying tests of physical endurance and courage. Most of these tests took place during what came to be known in the Roosevelt household as scrambles, long point-to-point walks led by Roosevelt himself. The only rule during these walks was that the participants could go through, over, or under an obstacle, but never around it. Roosevelt and his children, as well as a revolving crowd of cousins and friends, would not turn aside “for anything,” Ted Jr. would later write. “If a haystack was in the way we either climbed over it or burrowed through it. If we came to a pond we swam across.”

  Roosevelt used these scrambles, as well as other, separate excursions, to attack his children’s wilderness fears, which he referred to as buck fever—“a state of intense nervous excitement which may be entirely divorced from timidity.” Even the most courageous man, he believed, when confronted by real danger in the wilderness—whether it be an angry lion or a roaring river—could suffer from buck fever. “What such a man needs is not courage but nerve control, cool-headedness,” he explained. “This he can get only by actual practice.”