The River of Doubt: Theodore Roosevelt's Darkest Journey

  In spite of his privileged background, Roosevelt helped the other men however he could. Cherrie would call Roosevelt “the best camp companion I have ever had.” “There was no camp duty that the Colonel shirked,” Cherrie wrote. “He stood ready and willing to do his share.” So willing was Roosevelt to help that he even washed his naturalist’s clothes one day. Cherrie had just taken a small bundle of clothing down to the river’s edge to wash when Roosevelt appeared and told him that Kermit needed his help in getting the dugouts through some rapids. Cherrie began to roll up his clothes to tuck between some stones until his return, but Roosevelt stopped him. “Never mind those things,” he said, to Cherrie’s great astonishment. “I’ll take care of them.” “That evening when Kermit and I returned to camp we found the washing had been done and hung up to dry,” Cherrie later wrote. “It is the only time I have ever had my clothes washed by an ex-President of the United States!”

  Since they had begun their expedition, Cherrie’s admiration for Roosevelt had grown, as had his affection. The long journey had given the two men plenty of time for drawn-out conversations on everything from the Civil War to specimen collecting. Roosevelt had never lost his fascination with natural history and his admiration for the life of a field naturalist. While on the River of Doubt, he intended to learn as much as he could from Cherrie, a man who was as knowledgeable as any other living naturalist when it came to the wildlife, especially the bird life, of the Amazon. “Day after day the Colonel would ply me with questions regarding the birds and other animals that were being collected and preserved,” Cherrie would later recall. “And he wanted to know all about them; their technical relations to one another, their geographical distribution, their food, their voices, their songs and calls, and their habits—especially the last. In short he wanted to know their life histories from ‘a’ to ‘z.’”

  These long discussions between Roosevelt and Cherrie, which took place in their canoe and around the campfire, gave Cherrie an opportunity to know Theodore Roosevelt as few men ever had. And Roosevelt, in turn, came to know his taciturn naturalist. “We talked together often, and of many things, for our views of life, and of a man’s duty to his wife and children, to other men, and to women, and to the state in peace and war, were in all essentials the same,” Roosevelt wrote.

  These similarities were surprising given that the two men had come from such different backgrounds. Roosevelt’s father was a wealthy man, able to send his son to the best schools and ensure his comfort no matter what career he chose to pursue. Cherrie, on the other hand, had had no one to rely on but himself. He had gone to work at a wool mill in Iowa when he was just twelve years old, putting in fourteen-hour days and making three dollars for a six-day work week. Three years later, driven by his own ambition, he entered Iowa State College. While Roosevelt played the campus dandy at Harvard, Cherrie worked his way through college by running the campus’s steam pump at night. He tried to study while stoking the pump, but more than once he fell asleep and woke to find that the steam had fallen and the pump, which fed water to the entire campus, had come to a shuddering halt.

  After graduation, Roosevelt stepped into the rough-and-tumble but exciting world of New York politics. Cherrie took a bland but steady job as an engineer, but after just two years, he made his escape. Cherrie’s life as an ornithologist had led not only to quietly collecting specimens in the Amazon—a dangerous enough activity in its own right—but also to entanglements with various South American insurrections. He had spent the better part of two and a half years as a gunrunner for one revolutionary chief, and had languished in a South American prison for three months, each day expecting to be hauled outside and shot. In spite of all he had endured in South America, however, he had never managed to stay away for long.

  * * *

  ROOSEVELT COULD understand the continent’s appeal to his naturalist. He himself had begun to develop a deep-seated admiration for South Americans, especially the expedition’s own camaradas. The former president, who had himself once believed that the white race was superior to others, had been deeply impressed by the camaradas’ endurance and good cheer on this dangerous and dispiriting journey. “They say that the Brazilians are indolent!” he told Rondon one day. “Well, my dear Colonel, a country that has men like these has assured a great future for itself, and will certainly carry out the biggest undertakings in the world.”

  One camarada stood out above the rest, impressing everyone in the expedition with his hardy health, great discipline, and strength of character. His name was Paixão—Paishon—and he, like Lyra and Amilcar, was a veteran of Rondon’s telegraph line expeditions. He was a sergeant in Brazil’s Fifth Battalion of Engineers, and Rondon had made him the commander of a military post near the Juruena River. A few years earlier, Paishon had received a visit from a band of Nhambiquara Indians, and even they had been impressed with him. “He acquitted himself so well on this occasion,” Rondon proudly wrote, “that in a very short space of time, he succeeded in conquering the confidence of these Indians and acquiring great prestige among them.”

  When Paishon accepted Rondon’s invitation to join the expedition, Rondon had placed him in charge of the other camaradas, who came to admire the burly black man even though he was a stern disciplinarian. Like Rondon, Paishon expected his men to work as hard as he did. In fact, since the expedition had begun, he had worked so hard that he had torn his one pair of pants to shreds. He walked around with them literally hanging off of him in tatters until Roosevelt gave him one of his own pairs.

  The only man who had not earned Roosevelt’s admiration, or that of any other man in the expedition, was Julio. He shamelessly begged for special favors, lobbying to get extra food or, futilely, demanding that Kermit give him some of the tobacco that he willingly shared with the men who worked well and hard, something Julio had never done. “Nothing could make him do his share,” Roosevelt grumbled. The only incentive that seemed to work with the muscular Brazilian was when Lyra finally resorted to threatening to leave him in the jungle if he did not pull his own weight.

  One night, Paishon discovered Julio stealing from the expedition’s limited store of rations. Shocked and enraged, the senior camarada raised his powerful fist and struck Julio in the mouth. Julio immediately ran to Roosevelt and Rondon, unashamed of his own, much more serious crime. “Julio came crying to us, his face working with fear and malignant hatred,” Roosevelt wrote. Although it was immediately clear to both commanders who was at fault, they agreed to investigate the matter. It did not take long for them to conclude that Julio was thoroughly guilty and that, in Roosevelt’s words, he had “gotten off uncommonly lightly.”

  No one had trusted Julio before this incident, but the gravity of his crime and the depth of his betrayal were breathtaking. Had the expedition’s American commander had his way, Julio would likely have been shot on the spot. “On such an expedition the theft of food comes next to murder as a crime,” Roosevelt wrote bluntly, “and should by rights be punished as such.”

  CHAPTER 22

  “I Will Stop Here”

  OVER THE NEXT FOUR days, the expedition advanced less than four miles. All day on March 23, the men had been haunted by a distant roar that was as ominous as the sight of a still-smoldering fire in an empty Indian village. The sound disappeared on the 24th, and they were tempted to tell themselves that they had been hearing things, and that they were not really headed straight into a savage series of rapids. However, Antonio Correia, the expedition’s best paddler, warned them that not only were more rapids awaiting them downstream, but they would be worse than any they had encountered for many days. “I was brought up in the water,” he said, “and I know it like a fish, and all its sounds.”

  In fact, Antonio had underestimated the gravity of their situation. The rapids ahead of them were worse than any they had yet seen on the River of Doubt. On the 24th, the men reached the first set of rapids after less than thirty minutes on the river. After that, they rarely had more than f
ifteen minutes of smooth water between rapids for the next two days. They spent far more time carrying their cargo and canoes than the dugouts carried them. Every hour of the day, moreover, a low range of hills along the horizon cast its dark and foreboding shadow over them, threatening more heartbreak ahead. The range, Cherrie lamented in his diary, “probably means many more rapids before we will have passed it!”

  The skies had been clear for the past five days, and, without the rain, the river had begun to fall, exposing debris that had previously been covered by the high water and sharpening the boulder-strewn rapids. The men spent the entire day on March 26 circumventing a single set of rapids. Lyra directed Antonio and Luiz Correia and one other paddler as they guided the dugouts down one side of the river. The rest of the men carried the cargo and set up camp at the foot of the rapids, surrounded by vines that, in Roosevelt’s words, were “as big as cables [and] bore clusters of fragrant flowers.”

  In spite of the hope that Lyra’s pacu had brought the members of the expedition a week earlier, their food situation had become increasingly desperate. Any food they captured or found now was cause for celebration. In their writings, Roosevelt, Rondon, Kermit, and Cherrie all made special note of the meal that they had on March 26, which seemed to them to be a veritable feast. On that day, the men found palmito, honey, wild fruit, and even some small knobby-shelled coconuts in the jungle near their camp. One of the camaradas also caught two big piranha, and, best of all, they discovered about a bushel’s worth of Brazil nuts. “This is a very important find,” Cherrie wrote in his diary that night. “For we may need them very much if our provisions give out.”

  Increasingly, it appeared to all of the officers that their provisions would indeed run out. They had already eaten half their rations, and they had traveled little more than a hundred miles. Rondon’s meticulous charting—including the measurements Lyra had taken while Rondon purposely slowed the boat building—told them that they probably had three or four times that distance yet to go. They were traveling so slowly, and consuming their rations so quickly, that Cherrie estimated they did not have enough food left to last them more than twenty-five days.

  * * *

  ON THE day after the men’s wilderness “feast,” they had paddled less than two miles when they reached the steep hills that they had seen from afar several days earlier. The hills were “beautiful to look upon, clad as they were in dense, tall, tropical forest,” Roosevelt wrote, “but ominous of new rapids.” Those new rapids appeared just minutes later, and the men were forced once again to pull over in preparation for a long portage. They decided to carry their baggage and risk running the empty dugouts through the rapids, in an attempt to save time and avoid the onerous work of hauling the boats through the forest.

  All of the cargo had been transferred to the foot of the rapids, and most of the dugouts had been successfully run through, when their tightly choreographed portage suddenly unraveled. Cherrie had wandered away from the rest of the men and was watching from the foot of the rapids as the three paddlers struggled with Roosevelt’s balsa, the expedition’s largest. They were trying to guide it through the same channel that they had used for the other dugouts, but the channel was too narrow for the large balsa, and it made a treacherously sharp turn right near the rocky shore. “In trying to make the turn,” Cherrie would later write in his diary, “the inside boat caught on the rocks and also against some bejucas [vines] and tree trunks. In the twinkling of an eye the current had wrenched the outer boat loose, driven it under the prow of the inside boat that was thrown on its side, both filled with water and sank.”

  The two boats were pinned against a grouping of boulders, the racing current, and each other, and the three camaradas alone could never have moved them. The power of the current was such that it might eventually dislodge the canoes, but if that happened, they would be catapulted downstream, where they would be smashed to pieces on the jutting rocks. Cherrie heard the camaradas yelling for help and rushed to their side to lend his strength. He quickly realized, however, that they would need every member of the expedition if they ever hoped to free the dugouts. Pulling himself out of the water, he ran to where the rest of the men were waiting, and sounded the alarm.

  Terrified of losing two more canoes, the men all ran to help. Roosevelt was the first man in. “His rushing into the water to assist was entirely characteristic of him,” Cherrie would later write. “And he did this after many days of suffering from fever which had weakened his vitality. He could not stand idly watching others at a time when action was required.” Yet even Cherrie did not understand how great a risk Roosevelt was taking each time he dived into the roiling river.

  For the past twelve years, Roosevelt had had only one strong leg—his right. After a trolley-car accident in 1902 had nearly crushed his left leg, he had been told that even the slightest injury to that leg could be dangerous, costing him part of the leg or, if left untreated, possibly even his life. Six years later, while he was riding his horse around Oyster Bay, a branch had hit him on the shin. Even that slight rap had caused an inflammation that, Roosevelt wrote, “had grown so serious . . . that Doctor Rixey had to hastily take it in hand.” For a while, the White House doctor had thought that he might have to operate on Roosevelt’s leg, but he had been able to check the inflammation before it advanced that far.

  On the River of Doubt, Dr. Cajazeira did not have anything close to the medical resources that Dr. Rixey had had access to in the White House. If Roosevelt reinjured his left leg, Cajazeira might be forced to attempt an operation in the rain forest that Rixey had been loath to perform in one of the best hospitals in the United States. If Roosevelt hurt his right leg, he would find himself all but paralyzed on an expedition that demanded long hikes over difficult terrain and through dense forest. Both of his legs would be uniquely vulnerable to injury and infection in the steaming jungle.

  Although the water level had fallen over the past few days, it was still deep enough to reach up to the men’s armpits as they strove to reach the swamped canoes, slipping over moss-wrapped rocks and stumbling on the river’s sharply uneven bed. When they reached the balsa, they used axes to cut away the ropes that had bound it. Kermit and six other men stripped down to the skin and swam to an island in the small series of falls just above the trapped canoes, from where they lowered a rope. Roosevelt and the rest of the men used all the strength they had left to wrench the canoes free and secure them to the rope, so that Kermit and his team could drag them up to the island.

  As the river roared darkly around him, making it almost impossible to keep his balance, Roosevelt suddenly slipped, striking his right shin against the sharp edge of a rock. Blood spun out of the wound like an unraveling spool of thread, mixing with the muddy water and disappearing downstream. Roosevelt immediately realized the gravity of this seemingly minor injury as he pulled himself out of the river and quietly limped back to camp, blood beginning to mat the hairs on his leg under his one remaining pair of pants.

  For Roosevelt, in a dripping rain forest where every muddy step throbbed with bacteria, parasites, and disease-carrying insects, this injury was potentially fatal. “From that time on,” Cherrie wrote, “he was a very sick man.”

  * * *

  WHEN THE men had finally rescued the sunken dugouts and were ready to start back down the river, they were buffeted by a rainstorm. For the next three or four hours, the rain fell in such heavy sheets that the men could not even see across the river. It was 4:00 p.m. before it slowed enough for them to resume their journey. Just ten minutes later, however, they reached another sinister-looking series of rapids, and were left with no choice but to make camp in the rain. Trying to help a limping, quickly weakening Roosevelt, while fumbling with their waterlogged dugouts, rain-drenched bags, and the officers’ two slick tents, the men moved as fast as they could, but they could not protect themselves, or their injured commander, from the deluge. “Practically everything we had was soaked,” Cherrie wrote. “And our camp
was a dreary one.”

  On the morning of the 28th, the men left camp early, but they were on the river for less than a mile when they were stopped by the rapids that they had seen the day before. While Rondon, Lyra, Kermit, and Antonio Correia hiked ahead to find out just what awaited them downstream, Cherrie and Dr. Cajazeira watched over Roosevelt. But even their careful attention could not halt the consequences of his injury. Although only one night had passed since he had crushed his leg, an infection had already begun to bubble in the wound, and his temperature had spiked in a sudden attack of malaria. The result was a transformation as startling as it was ominous. After only a few hours away from camp, Kermit returned to find that his father’s condition had worsened dramatically, changing the ex-president from an injured but able man to an invalid scarcely able to rise from his cot.

  As Roosevelt’s conditioned swiftly deteriorated, so did the expedition’s. After fighting their way along the river’s edge for about a mile of what Kermit termed “miserable going,” the men who were scouting ahead of the expedition came to a gorge that was so tall and steep that the sheer cliffs that bordered the river seemed to lunge toward each other, squeezing the water through a narrow passage. Within this gorge, which was more than a mile long, the men found a series of six waterfalls, each larger and more treacherous than the last. The final fall was more than thirty feet high.