The River of Doubt: Theodore Roosevelt's Darkest Journey

  CHAPTER 28

  The Rubber Men

  IF THE DISCOVERY OF a knife-cut vine offered the men the first tangible sign that they might yet emerge from the rain forest alive, it did not provide any immediate relief. On the contrary, it raised the possibility of a new danger associated with the region that they were approaching—a no-man’s-land between unmapped jungle and the Amazon’s rough pioneer civilization.

  The penetration of outside pioneers into the Amazon had been far from organized or peaceful, centering on rough, impoverished rubber-tappers, or seringueiros. Those tappers who had reached this far up the River of Doubt were likely alone, afraid, and in dangerous straits themselves. In approaching their huts from upriver, moreover, the members of the expedition were crossing the frontier from the wrong direction. The only humans the settlers expected to see coming from the river’s headwaters were hostile Indians, and they would do whatever they felt was necessary to defend themselves.

  Seringueiros were, by default, the true settlers of Brazil’s interior. When Henry Ford had introduced the Model T in 1908, the Amazon had been the world’s sole source of rubber. The wild popularity of these automobiles, and the seemingly insatiable demand for rubber that accompanied them, had ignited a frenzy in South America that rivaled the California gold rush. In The Sea and the Jungle, H. M. Tomlinson complained that the only thing Brazilians saw in their rich rain forests in 1910 was rubber. “It is blasphemous that in such a potentially opulent land the juice of one of its wild trees should be dwelt upon . . . as though it were the sole act of Providence,” he wrote. “The passengers on the river boats are rubber men, and the cargoes are rubber. All the talk is of rubber.” Two years before Roosevelt had set sail for South America, his friend the great American naturalist John Muir had been similarly astonished by the rubber lust that he had witnessed as he traveled through the Amazon. “Into this rubbery wilderness thousands of men, young and old, rush for fortunes,” he marveled, “half crazy, half merry, daring fevers, debilitating heat, and dangers of every sort.”

  By the time Roosevelt reached the Amazon, the dangers were still there but the promise of riches had all but disappeared. The bottom had dropped out of the South American rubber boom in 1912, when the Amazon lost its lock on the market. Thirty-six years earlier, an Englishman named Henry Wickham had smuggled Hevea brasiliensis seeds, the most popular species of Amazonian rubber tree, out of Brazil. Those seeds had then been cultivated at Kew Gardens, and the British had eventually planted their predecessors in tropical Malaysia. There, far from their natural enemies, the trees could be planted in neat rows with no fear that a blight would destroy the entire crop, as it likely would have done in South America. Labor in Malaysia was also not only cheap but readily available, and much more easily controlled. So successful had been the transfer of rubber trees to the Far East that by 1913 Malaya and Ceylon were producing as much rubber as the Amazon.

  Because of the cost in time-consuming experimentation and the difficulty of finding reliable labor, very little effort had been made even to try to cultivate rubber trees in South America. Brazilian tappers, therefore, had to live where the trees did. In order to find untapped trees and claim a small slice of land as their own, they had to keep moving deeper into unexplored territory. By the time Roosevelt’s expedition descended the River of Doubt, the seringueiros had become the point of intersection between the Amazonian wilderness and the outside world.

  Settling the Amazon, however, was even more perilous than settling the American West. Not only was it a difficult, lonely life, but it was an almost impossible job. A man could do little more than clear a pocket of land just large enough to hold his own small hut and a subsistence garden. The death rate was dismally high. Many of the dangers that the members of the expedition had faced since setting off on their river journey were a part of the seringueiros’ daily existence. Not surprisingly, the life of the seringueiro appealed to only the most desperate of men. “Such a man,” Roosevelt wrote, “the real pioneer, must have no strong desire for social life and no need, probably no knowledge, of any luxury, or of any social comfort save of the most elementary kind.” He must also be willing to spend most of every day alone in the jungle.

  The seringueiro’s day started before the sun rose, when he stumbled through the black forest carrying a curved knife and wearing the kind of headlamp that miners rely on as they descend into the bowels of the earth. As the tapper pushed through the dense vegetation, he could see only a few feet in front of him. Everything beyond, beside, or behind the arc of his headlamp was cloaked in absolute darkness. Even in the full light of day, the trails that he had blazed to his rubber trees were difficult to discern. In the predawn hours, with nothing but the thin, trembling light of his headlamp to illuminate the forest, they were all but invisible—as were the dangers that waited on branches, under fallen logs, and in the very air.

  By 10:00 a.m., a typical tapper had visited between 150 and 180 trees, attaching small zinc bowls to the trees to capture the latex as it oozed out of the incision. He then had to retrace his steps in the afternoon, making his way through the steaming jungle to each tree so that he could collect the latex. When he returned home in the evening, more hot, miserable work awaited him. Hunched over a heavy, oily smoke that rolled from a palm-nut fire, he poured the latex onto a rough wooden spit that he turned over and over until it slowly coagulated in thin, even layers. It could take weeks of this relentless work to produce a single ball of rubber that was heavy enough—between 60 and 150 pounds—to be sold.

  As difficult for the seringueiros as their hardscrabble existence was the knowledge that what little they had managed to build could be taken away from them at a moment’s notice. They did not have anything other than squatter’s rights to the land on which they lived and worked, and so were constantly vulnerable to the threat of a wealthier, savvier man sweeping into their territory brandishing a title to all that they had thought they owned. The seringueiros themselves, of course, thought nothing of taking land from the Indians who had lived on it for millennia. Besides Rondon, few Brazilians at that time believed that the Amazonian Indians had any rights at all, certainly not to something as valuable as land.

  * * *

  THE MEN’s jubilation at discovering the cut vine on April 11 turned into tense anticipation as days passed with no other signs of the seringueiros, and the expedition encountered one series of rapids after another—the kind of rapids that they had dared to hope were behind them. Then, on April 15, good fortune returned in what was, in Roosevelt’s words, a “red-letter day.” After launching their boats that morning and traveling for two and a half hours, the men spotted a rough plank affixed to a stake on the left bank of the river. Dizzy with excitement, they quickly pulled their dugouts over to investigate. They soon discovered that there were actually two markers, one on each side of the river, and burned into them both were the initials “J.A.”

  An hour later, they saw a house. It was a very simple house, made of palm thatch with a smaller hut next to it for rubber smoking, but there was no confusing it with the Indian huts that they had seen up-river. It was, in the eyes of the men, a herald of the outside world. “Shouts of exaltation went up from our canoes as this frail outpost of civilization met our eyes,” Cherrie wrote.

  The house belonged to a seringueiro named Joaquim Antonio, the tapper whose markers they had seen on the riverbank, and the belongings inside indicated that he had a wife and child. Much to the dismay of the members of the expedition, however, the house was deserted. Not only were the men eager to meet a rubber-tapper, but the sight of food stored inside was excruciating, because, without Antonio’s permission, Rondon would not let them take even a single yam. “So none of the provisions were touched,” Cherrie wrote, “although we were sadly in need of some things for our camaradas.”

  Little more than a mile downstream, a single small canoe appeared in front of them, carried along by the swift current like a fallen tree branch. The sight sent a
rush of excitement through the four-dugout flotilla, but it was not excitement that burned in the chest of the seringueiro in the canoe. Looking up to find a line of dugout canoes coming toward him from the direction of the river’s mysterious headwaters, Raymundo José Marques, an old black man who lived alone on the banks of the River of Doubt, turned his boat and paddled quickly toward the shore.

  When Rondon saw Marques, he jumped out of his seat, snatched the cap off of his head, and began waving it like a flag, shouting to the seringueiro that there was nothing to fear—they were not Indians. Fortunately for the expedition, Marques did not disappear into the jungle as soon as he reached the bank. Instead, he stood at the river’s edge and listened to Rondon. After a few minutes, he climbed back into his canoe and slowly paddled over to the strange flotilla. Upon reaching it, he tried to explain to Rondon the terror that had driven him ashore. “It was quite impossible for him to expect the arrival of civilized people descending the river from its source,” Rondon later wrote.

  Marques’s description of the members of the expedition as “civilized people” only underscored how far the men still were from a settled area. To anyone who had not spent years in the wilderness, the men would have looked almost inhuman. After weeks of surviving on little more than a few bites of fish and a single biscuit each night, they were gaunt and hollow-cheeked. The clothes on their backs—the only clothing they had left—were in tatters, and wherever their skin appeared, it was bruised, cut, sunburned, and peppered with insect bites. They were filthy and wild-eyed from disease and fear, and their American commander was barely clinging to life.

  * * *

  BY THIS point, Roosevelt was so sick that he could no longer even sit up in his canoe. Neither, however, could he lie down. Each of the four dugouts was packed with men and supplies, and there was not an empty space in any of them. The former president had been reduced to painfully balancing on a row of hard-edged metal food canisters that had been covered with a mud-encrusted canvas sheet. The canvas would have been put to better use as a tent to shield Roosevelt from the tropical sun, but the camaradas had no way to rig it up in the tiny dugout. The best they could do was to place his heavy but crumbling pith helmet over his face, trading the glaring sun for suffocating black heat.

  Not only was Roosevelt’s pain intense, but he and the doctor both knew that if they did not reach help soon he would die. In the weeks since Roosevelt had injured his leg while trying to help free the trapped canoes, he had developed a potentially deadly bacterial infection, which thrives in a wet, warm environment. There was no more perfectly engineered growth medium for this infection than the rain forest.

  When Roosevelt had sliced his leg open on the river boulder, the defensive barrier that the skin forms against outside bacteria had been broken, and there was little that Cajazeira could do to shore it up. The infection had spread rapidly, and by early April, Roosevelt was in grave danger. The skin around his wound had become red, swollen, hot, and hard, and a deep, pus-filled abscess had formed on the soft inner portion of his lower thigh. His blood pressure had dropped, and his heart rate had risen. As his temperature soared and he lay on his cot sweating and shaking, it was at times difficult to tell if he was suffering from another attack of malaria or enduring the agonies of his infection.

  Cajazeira hovered over Roosevelt as though he were his mother, taking his temperature, cleaning and bandaging his wound, and injecting him with quinine. But the doctor had almost nothing with which to fight the growing infection. “We administered the palliative medication employed in these cases,” he wrote. “Nevertheless, day by day his condition worsened and we started to become seriously concerned.” If left untreated or treated inadequately, the infection could lead to blood poisoning and, ultimately, death. The best defense would have been an antibiotic, but even penicillin, one of the first antibiotics, would not be discovered for another fourteen years, and would not be widely prescribed until World War II.

  Cajazeira wanted to operate on Roosevelt’s leg, but Roosevelt was reluctant to undergo surgery. The Rough Rider was less concerned that the doctor would not be able to give him anesthesia of any kind (he had refused anesthetic during the operation on his left leg twelve years earlier) than that the operation would be performed in an environment teeming with bacteria and disease-carrying insects. “As was only natural, Colonel Roosevelt asked us to postpone surgery, hoping he would be cured without the need for such intervention,” Cajazeira wrote. “We agreed, clearly explaining, however, that we did not believe in such an outcome.”

  * * *

  SO SICK was the former president that, when Raymundo José Marques paddled over to the expedition, Roosevelt could not lift himself out of his canoe to meet him. His condition, however, did not diminish the old seringueiro’s awe when he learned that the ragged and stricken man he saw lying in the roughest sort of dugout canoe had once been the president of the United States. Astonished, Marques said to Rondon, “But is he really a President?” Rondon explained that Roosevelt was not president any longer but had once been. “Ah,” Marques replied. “He who has once been a king has always the right of majesty.”

  Marques, who was among the poorest of the river’s rubber-tappers, had no food that he could share with the starving men, but he did give them some valuable advice: Upon approaching a settler, he instructed them, they should signal their peaceful intent by firing one of their guns three times in a row and then blowing on a bamboo horn that he would give them as a gift.

  The seringueiros who lived along the River of Doubt had had little more interaction with the local Indians than had the members of the expedition, but their fear was not theoretical. Most of the time the Cinta Larga remained invisible, revealing themselves to the settlers only in brief glimpses in scattered locations. They had, however, appeared to the tappers who lived along this stretch of the river on one occasion, and the result had been disastrous. A frightened seringueiro named Manoel Vieira who lived in a hut just below Marques’s had met some approaching Indians with a rain of gunfire. Soon after, the Indians had responded in kind, riddling Vieira with poisonous arrows. “After this fact no other of such gravity had occurred,” Rondon wrote, “but the rubber tappers did not deceive themselves with regard to the tranquility which they were enjoying. . .. The panic caused by our arrival clearly shows the degree of nervous tension in which those people live, constantly tormented by the expectation of seeing the warlike Indians springing forth from the wilderness.”

  As they continued down the river, the men were as agitated and high-strung as the settlers they expected to see at any moment. The rain began again, filling the bottoms of their dugouts with muddy water and drenching Roosevelt. Suddenly, out of the monotony of the river’s sounds—the water sloshing against the side of his canoe, the occasional grunts of his men as they dug their paddles into the black river—a roar of elation erupted all around him. The men had spotted another house along the riverbank, and this time someone was home.

  From their canoes, the men could see smoke billowing from the chimney and two small children playing outside. Before Rondon could snatch up his rifle and bamboo horn, the children had looked up from their games, noticed the expedition coming toward them, and disappeared into their house. A moment later, they reappeared with their mother at their side. Seeing his opportunity and hoping to reassure the woman before she panicked, Rondon fired three shots into the air and blew heavily into the old seringueiro’s horn. “Unfortunately,” he wrote, “this precaution did not have the desired effect.”

  So deep-seated was the seringueiros’ fear of the Cinta Larga that, when the mother of the two children looked at the expedition’s weak and exhausted men, she not only saw fierce Indians in their place in the canoes, but believed she heard their war whoops echoing through the forest. Terrified, she scooped her children up into her arms and fled downriver, desperately trying to reach her neighbor’s house, where she knew she would find her husband. Driven by fear and blinded by the rain, she s
tumbled along a rough dirt path that skirted the river’s edge until she tripped and fell into a stream that bisected it. The men watched helplessly from their canoes, their efforts to reassure her only heightening her distress. “She succeeded in getting up with her clothes drenched,” Rondon wrote, “and continued her wild race until she arrived at the house of a neighbour where she fainted.”

  As soon as she could talk, the woman told her husband, a rubber-tapper named Honorato, that their house was under attack by Indians. Believing that the confrontation that he had long feared had finally happened, Honorato wasted no time. He and three of his neighbors armed themselves, climbed into a canoe, and made their way upstream, prepared for a bloody battle. As they neared the house, the rain was still coming down and the sun had begun to set, but Honorato could see the fire that his wife had built in preparation for their evening meal, and he could see men standing just outside his door. He and the other men in his canoe silently pulled through the dark water until they reached the bank. Climbing through the soup of mud and half-decomposed leaves under their feet, they sought cover in the thick woods, where they could wait unseen until the moment was right to attack.

  As the light of the fire flickered over the faces of the men who had invaded his home, however, Honorato began to realize that something was not right—these men were not Indians. This realization, and Honorato’s willingness to step forward and investigate rather than take cover and shoot, very likely saved the lives of many of the men in the expedition that night. Stepping inside, Honorato found Theodore Roosevelt and Brazil’s greatest explorer resting in his home while a group of starving and exhausted men made dinner over his wife’s fire.

  Although their first meeting had nearly ended in tragedy, the Honoratos and their neighbors proved to be extremely valuable to the men of the expedition. They were, Roosevelt wrote, “most hospitable” to their unexpected guests, and, as Raymundo Marques had promised, they agreed to sell the expedition provisions and two large canoes, and they helped them hire a guide. Honorato also explained to the men exactly where they were. The River of Doubt, the western branch of the Aripuanã, was known to the seringueiros as the Castanha—ironically, the Portuguese word for Brazil nut, the nuts that the men had searched so desperately for upriver. Even at this point, however, the river was not known to anyone but the settlers and Indians who lived on it. “It was astonishing,” Roosevelt wrote, “when we were on a river of about the size of the upper Rhine or Elbe, to realize that no geographer had any idea of its existence. But, after all, no civilized man of any grade had ever been on it.”