The River of Doubt: Theodore Roosevelt's Darkest Journey

  Kermit was acutely aware of his father’s serious condition, writing in his diary the day before the murder that he “worried a lot about F’s [Father’s] heart.” His concern was rivaled by Cherrie’s. The respect that the American naturalist had long held for Roosevelt had deepened over the past few months into a brotherly affection, and he was as determined to bring him out of the Amazon alive as he was to get himself out. With each passing day, however, that goal seemed increasingly unreachable. “There were a good many days, a good many mornings when I looked at Colonel Roosevelt and said to myself, he won’t be with us tonight,” Cherrie wrote. “And I would say the same thing in the evening, he can’t possibly live until morning.”

  It was Roosevelt’s earlier, although aborted, decision to take his own life as much as his rapidly deteriorating health that kept Cherrie awake at night. Cherrie had already lived through a friend’s suicide, and he would never forget it, or his role in it. While on an earlier expedition, one of his campmates had approached him looking pale and drawn but, the naturalist recalled, “with the fire of decision burning in his eyes.” “Cherrie, lend me your revolver,” the man had said. “What are you going to do with it?” Cherrie had asked. The answer had been quick and blunt: “Shoot myself.” “I thought: is he desperate?” Cherrie later wrote. “Hysterical? Ill? Temporarily demented? I talked with him for a few moments; not going into details, but probing the soundness of his state of mind. Then I took the gun from its holster and handed it over. He killed himself that day.”

  Kermit and Cherrie were not the only members of the expedition to worry about Roosevelt. Dr. Cajazeira, although he had his hands full administering prophylactics and treating all of the expedition’s nineteen men (including himself) for a wide variety of ailments, had begun to spend most of his days and nights hovering over his American commander. So closely did he watch Roosevelt that, in his official report, he dedicated an entire chapter to “Colonel Roosevelt’s Health Status.” On the afternoon of April 4, as the rest of the men tried to finish bringing down the last two canoes and the remainder of the provisions, Cajazeira and Roosevelt stayed behind at the camp. At about 2:30 p.m., while the two men were talking quietly, the doctor suddenly noticed that all of the color had drained from his patient’s face and that he had begun to shiver uncontrollably. Cajazeira took Roosevelt’s temperature and found that it was rising rapidly. Covering him as well as he could, he gave him another half-gram of quinine to swallow, “since by that time we were already deprived of almost everything including medications,” he wrote in frustration.

  Cajazeira wanted to move Roosevelt to a better camp than the makeshift one that they had set up amid the boulders the night before. He waited impatiently until the men finally finished the portage and, at 5:00 p.m., reloaded the canoes—with Roosevelt, Rondon, and Cajazeira riding in the largest—and were ready to set off downriver in search of a new campsite for the night.

  As an added precaution, in case Julio was still lurking about, the men decided to cross the river to the right bank. They had no sooner launched their four dugouts, however, than it began to rain. The downpour was the hardest they had had in several days, and it flooded forest and river, “drenching most of us to the skin,” Cherrie wrote in his diary that night. Cajazeira wrapped Roosevelt in his waterproof poncho, but the men had no way to fit their rough canoes with awnings. By the time they crossed the river and found another campsite, half an hour later, Roosevelt’s temperature had skyrocketed to 103 degrees, and he was, in Cajazeira’s words, “restless and delirious.”

  Roosevelt’s condition continued to deteriorate at such a fast rate that Cajazeira began to inject quinine directly into his abdomen. Every six hours, the doctor would open his wooden medical box, which was covered with a spotted animal skin and swung on a heavy hinge, pull out his silver syringe, and give his patient another half-gram injection. Despite all his efforts, however, Roosevelt’s fever stubbornly refused to abate, his temperature falling by “only a few fractions of a degree,” Cajazeira noted with dismay.

  That night, while the camaradas lay wound up in their cocoonlike hammocks under dripping palm leaves and a black sky, the officers took turns watching over Roosevelt in their tiny, thin-walled tent. As his temperature once again began to rise sharply, Roosevelt fell into a trancelike state, and he began to recite over and over the opening lines to Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s rhythmic poem “Kubla Khan”: “In Xanadu did Kubla Khan a stately pleasure-dome decree. In Xanadu did Kubla Khan a stately pleasure-dome decree. In Xanadu . . .”

  * * *

  AS THE night wore on, Roosevelt slipped in and out of consciousness. One moment he was looking directly at Kermit and asking him if he thought that Cherrie had eaten enough to keep going, and the next he had forgotten his son’s presence entirely and was feverishly murmuring to himself, “I can’t work now, so I don’t need much food, but he and Cherrie have worked all day with the canoes, they must have part of mine.” While Kermit tried to calm and reassure his father, he felt a soft tap on his shoulder and turned to find Cajazeira, who had pulled himself out of a deep sleep to relieve the young man.

  At about 2:00 a.m., Rondon, in turn, relieved Cajazeira, taking his place next to Roosevelt’s sagging cot. Although still determined to fight to the last for Kermit’s sake, Roosevelt, in his few lucid moments that night, realized that he was so sick he might not be able to keep the promise he had made to himself and his son. He wanted one thing from Rondon now: reassurance that, if he fell into a coma, his co-commander would do the right thing and keep going. Glassy-eyed and bathed in sweat, Roosevelt turned to Rondon and said, “The expedition must not stop. . .. Go, and leave me here.”

  It wasn’t until the sun had begun to wash over the treetops, turning them from black to gold to green, that Roosevelt’s fever finally broke. The men’s relief was heavy and universal, but not complete. Roosevelt had come so close to death that night that no one was willing to take any chances with his health. Rondon immediately ordered the camaradas to prepare to find yet another new campsite. They had run into more rapids at the end of the previous day and would probably spend most of this day trying to get around them, but Rondon pronounced last night’s camp too wet and muddy for Roosevelt and insisted that they move.

  As it turned out, the best spot they found for a new campsite required a walk of half a mile. Although he was much improved from the night before, Roosevelt was still very weak, and his fever hovered around 101 degrees. Cajazeira planned to have some of the camaradas carry him to the next camp on his cot, but Roosevelt refused to be carted through the forest like a king—or an invalid. “As soon as Colonel Roosevelt learned of our decision, he opposed it strongly, finally stating that he did not want to become a heavy burden on the expedition,” Cajazeira wrote. Helped along on quivering legs, Roosevelt slowly made his way to the next camp—Kermit, Cherrie, Cajazeira, and Rondon at his side with his cot and collapsible chair. “From time to time, when he became very tired, he would rest either on his bed or chair,” Cajazeira would later recall. “And so he bravely made the journey.”

  While Kermit obsessed over his father’s health, his emotions rising and falling with each rally and relapse, the younger Roosevelt steadfastly ignored his own. He was suffering from a renewed attack of malaria, but he refused to admit how sick he was, continuing to work as though his hands weren’t trembling, his body wasn’t smoldering, and his head wasn’t reeling. “I have fever,” he admitted in his diary, “but not very bad.”

  So determined was Kermit to soldier on that he did not allow himself a moment of rest. He spent the morning helping the camaradas get the dugouts through the rapids. Later, when Antonio Pareci rushed into camp shouting excitedly that there were monkeys nearby, Kermit and Cherrie were the first to grab their rifles and race after him. They quickly spotted the animals—large woolly monkeys that were swinging through the treetops “with surprising speed,” Cherrie wrote. Notwithstanding the monkeys’ distance and agility, however, together C
herrie and Kermit were able to bring down three of them. Kermit also caught a side-neck turtle, which has an unusually long neck that folds sideways under its shell rather than pulling straight back, and he brought it back to the camp for Franca to boil into soup.

  Despite his fever, Kermit even joined Rondon and Lyra as they hiked downstream to try to find out what awaited the expedition. What they saw was worth the difficult trip. “I found,” Kermit reported, “that after these rapids we’re out of the hills.” The men had allowed themselves to believe that prediction in the past, only to be bitterly disappointed when new mountains, and new rapids, had risen up behind a sharp bend in the river, but whether Kermit was right or not, the hopeful news was welcome. “The fresh meat we all craved gave us renewed strength and energy,” Cherrie would later write, “and the fact that the mountains that had for so long hemmed us in seemed at last to be falling away from the river brought us new courage.”

  The next day, April 6, had a promising start as well. The men were finally beginning to feel as if they could predict, if not control, the dangers they might face downriver. To their delight, the hills began to drop away, just as Kermit had said they would, and the river slowly widened into a spacious bay. “For the most part our course was over the scarcely rippling surface of a broad quiet stream,” Cherrie wrote in his diary.

  The expedition was finally leaving Paishon’s sorrowful canyon. As the land leveled and the waters smoothed, the men were able to step back into their canoes and ride for the first time in a long time. The low, heavily forested terrain on either side of them melted into an impressionistic wash of green and brown as Rondon and Lyra rode the racing current. Unencumbered by cataracts or whirlpools, they were finally free to turn their full attention to their survey, cleaning their instruments, taking measurements, and making notes on the river’s gently winding course. As they bent over their work, the two men were startled by a man’s voice calling to them from the left bank The cry—“Senhor Coronel!”—hung, heavy with desperation, in the thick, wet air. Rondon looked up to find a dark figure clinging to a broad tree branch that leaned far out over the river. After a moment of startled confusion, he finally recognized the powerful physique. It was Julio.

  CHAPTER 26

  Judgment

  EVEN RONDON WAS SHOCKED by how pathetic Julio looked, crouching in the gnarled tree like a frightened animal, “imploring for mercy and asking us to receive him on board.” Three nights alone in the jungle would have taken their toll on any of the men, but they had been especially excruciating for Julio. By now, the members of the expedition knew that, second only to wrath, fear was the muscular young Brazilian’s most powerful emotion. He was, Roosevelt wrote, “an arrant craven at heart, a strange mixture of ferocity and cowardice.”

  If Julio had expected Rondon to brim with compassion and mercy at the sight of him, he did not know his commander. “It is not possible for me to stop the canoe now, and to interrupt the survey,” he called coldly to the desperate man. “Besides, it is best to wait for Mr. Roosevelt.” Having said all that he had to say, Rondon returned his attention to his survey charts, and Julio watched in horror as the river swiftly carried his commander’s canoe downstream.

  The reaction Julio received from the men in the three dugouts that followed gave him less hope than even his encounter with Rondon They refused to look at the murderer, much less help him, passing by his tree in stony silence. Although they felt that Julio deserved a harsh punishment for the crime he had committed, they shuddered to imagine his fate. “Surely that murderer was in a living hell,” Roosevelt wrote, “as, with fever and famine leering at him from the shadows, he made his way through the empty desolation of the wilderness.”

  Seated in different dugouts and separated by several yards on a fast-moving river, Roosevelt and Rondon were unable to discuss Julio’s reappearance until they reached the next camp. Some seven miles after they passed Julio, the men came upon a large tributary that entered the River of Doubt from the right-hand side, and decided to camp in the protected corner of land formed by the two rivers.

  Roosevelt knew that his co-commander would want to survey the new river, and Rondon knew that Roosevelt would object to the delay that such a survey would necessitate. That night, after the camaradas had cleared a spot for the campsite and set up the officers’ single tent, Rondon sat down with the ailing ex-president and told him that he wanted the expedition to pause in order to send some men back to look for Julio. Both Roosevelt’s and Kermit’s temperatures had risen again during the day, and they were feeling feverish and weak. But they remembered how Rondon had slowed the boat building a few weeks earlier so that Lyra could determine the latitude, and neither of them believed his story now. “Rondon,” Kermit wrote in his diary that night, “vacillated about Julio with 100 lies. He wants to wait to take the latitude but F[ather] won’t let him.”

  The next morning, with Lyra by his side, Rondon took up his case again, never mentioning the survey, and focusing all of his arguments on the question of locating Julio. He argued that it was “the duty of a Brazilian officer and of a man” to do all that he could to find Julio and bring him back to civilization so that he could be tried for murder. Brazil did not have capital punishment, but even if it had, a government-orchestrated execution would be infinitely more merciful than the horrors Julio faced alone in the jungle. Even knowing all of this, the American officers did not want to take Julio back, and they were outraged by Rondon’s suggestion that they lose an entire day of travel to search for him. “What was our astonishment to hear Col. Rondon announce that he intended remaining in the camp for the day!” Cherrie railed in his diary. “And that he intended to send a couple of men back to look for the murderer Julio! . . . This resolution on Col. Rondon’s part is almost inexplicable in the face of facts regarding our own position. Our food supply is growing alarmingly less. . .. Furthermore our four canoes are already loaded to the limits. . .. From our point of view this delay and the trying to carry a prisoner places in jeporday [sic] the lives of every member of the party.”

  Laced with suspicions of ulterior motives, and fueled by the expedition’s desperate circumstances, the argument that ensued between the Brazilian and the American officers over Julio was so heated that it fractured the bond, born of a shared sorrow and renewed sense of common purpose, that had formed among all of the men after Paishon’s murder. When he and Roosevelt locked horns over the murderer’s fate, Rondon would later write, “the clash was tremendous.”

  Roosevelt regretted that they “could not legally put [Julio] to death” themselves, but, as Rondon had made it clear that that was not an option in his country and under his watch, Roosevelt insisted that the only thing left to do was to abandon the camarada to his fate. “If we brought the murderer in he would have to be guarded night and day on an expedition where there were always loaded firearms about, and where there would continually be opportunity and temptation for him to make an effort to seize food and a weapon and escape, perhaps murdering some other good man,” he argued. “Whether the murderer lived or died in the wilderness was of no moment compared with the duty of doing everything to secure the safety of the rest of the party.” The idea of wasting any more time, energy, or provisions searching for a murderer seemed almost criminal to Roosevelt. Finally, boiling with anger, frustration, and fever, he shouted at Rondon, “The expedition is endangered!”

  However, Roosevelt knew that this was not his decision to make. “He, Colonel Rondon, was the superior officer of both the murderer and of all the other enlisted men and army officers on the expedition, and in return was responsible for his actions to his own governmental superiors and to the laws of Brazil,” Roosevelt wrote. “In view of this responsibility he must act as his sense of duty bade him.” As soon as his co-commander stepped aside, Rondon ordered two camaradas, Antonio Pareci and Luiz Correia, to hike back up the river and look for Julio.

  As the Americans had bitterly predicted, Rondon and Lyra spent that day, Apri
l 7, surveying the new tributary and determining the latitude of the Rio Roosevelt. “To take the greatest advantage possible of the stoppage which had been imposed upon us,” Rondon would later write, “Lieut. Lyra and I occupied ourselves with the measurement of the rivers and the necessary astronomical observations for the calculation of the geographical coordinates of our position.” When Roosevelt suggested that they also use the time to hike ahead to see what the expedition would face downriver, Rondon dismissed the idea as an unnecessary effort. Cherrie, who had become deeply frustrated with his Brazilian commander, an emotion expressed almost nightly in his diary, was once again outraged. “Today Col. Rondon did not even think it necessary to ‘explore’ ahead the rapids whose roar we hear!” he wrote in the simple paper-and-cardboard notebook that he used as a journal. “And only after Kermit and Col. Roosevelt had protested was Antonio Correia sent ahead to make an examination.”

  When the camarada returned later in the day, it was with a grim report. Although they had had smooth water and level land the previous day—traveling twenty-two miles, the greatest distance the expedition had yet to make in a single day on the River of Doubt—they would face another difficult series of rapids and falls soon after they launched their boats again the next morning. “It may well be that we are ‘up against it’ again and good and hard,” Cherrie wrote in his diary.

  However, as well as bringing bad news back with him, Antonio Correia also returned with dinner: a particularly large Amazonian catfish called a pirarara. The men were thrilled, because the beautiful pirarara, which flashed a bright-orange tail and bore a massive, bony head, was not only huge, measuring three and a half feet long, but was, in Cherrie’s words, a “very good flavored fish.” When they began to clean the catfish, however, the men were in for a surprise: Slicing open its belly, they found the head and arm of a monkey. “We Americans were astounded at the idea of a catfish making prey of a monkey,” Roosevelt wrote, speculating that the monkey had probably been “seized while drinking from the end of a branch; and once engulfed in that yawning cavern there was no escape.”