The River of Doubt: Theodore Roosevelt's Darkest Journey

  The Honoratos invited the men to spend the night at their home. It seemed, as Antonio Correia said to Kermit, “like a dream to be in a house again, and hear the voices of men and women, instead of being among those mountains and rapids.” The reminder of all that they had missed over the past two months, and were missing still, was painful. Even the sight of a brood of chicks, hopping around the Honoratos’ simple hut and pecking at the forest floor, stirred Cherrie to the core. “How nice it was to see them!” he wrote in his diary. “How it made me think of home.”

  Sitting outside after the first real meal that they had had in weeks, Cherrie and Kermit shared the scotch they had been saving to celebrate the first signs of deliverance from their river journey. As the alcohol slipped down their throats and filled their chests with a warm flush, they looked up into the dark Southern sky and saw the familiar outline of the Big Dipper suspended among the other stars. “Upside down to be sure, but how good it looks,” Cherrie wrote.

  * * *

  WHILE THE men celebrated their warm reception by the rubber men, and savored the prospect of returning to their loved ones in the outside world, they understood only part of the good fortune that had brought them down the River of Doubt alive. As significant as their own efforts had been in triumphing over the churning river, and the unforgiving rain forest that surrounded it, the men remained unaware of the single most important factor in their survival: the decision of the Cinta Larga to let them go.

  From the moment they had begun their river journey, their presence had been the subject of ongoing discussion and debate within the clannish communities of Cinta Larga that lined the River of Doubt, provoking a range of reactions from curiosity to fear to covetous fascination with their strange tools and clothing. The ability of Cinta Larga tribesmen to destroy the expedition and all its members was never in doubt. Despite their simplicity, the Indians’ weapons were marvels of efficient lethality, refined over thousands of years of experience to kill silently and swiftly. If their poisoned arrows were not enough to dispense with Roosevelt and his men, every Cinta Larga warrior had a lifetime of practice with the war clubs that were carefully designed to dispatch any survivors with a single, savage blow.

  The men of the expedition were armed with modern firearms, to be sure, but in the dark jungle at night, when the Cinta Larga preferred to surprise their enemies, there was little chance that Roosevelt or his men would ever have seen their attackers. From the moment they launched their boats on the River of Doubt, the expedition had repeatedly encountered signs of the Indians’ presence—passing through their villages, discovering their trail markings, examining their arrows, even hearing their voices. But not once had they so much as glimpsed a single tribesman.

  Like the other inhabitants of their rain forest, the Cinta Larga had worked for countless generations to perfect the art of disappearing in the riot of nature that surrounded them. For each member of the tribe, just like every other creature in the jungle, the advantage of concealment was a critical tool of survival that was painstakingly conserved and surrendered only when the payoff was large and certain. In a world of unpredictable, resourceful enemies, invisibility was not merely advantageous, but a matter of life and death. A single unguarded moment could be fatal, and the only look that an enemy was likely to get of a Cinta Larga warrior was a colorful flash of feathers and war paint before a swift and violent death.

  The same preoccupation with concealment that made the Cinta Larga so terrifyingly invisible to the expedition, however, also reflected the underlying conservatism that all rain forest inhabitants must exhibit when confronted by new or unfamiliar events. The survival instincts of virtually all jungle creatures favor flight or concealment over attack, and the Cinta Larga were no exception. Weighed against the uncertain benefits of any confrontation with the expedition, the risks of undertaking such an action and exposing themselves and their villages to potential danger were great. This was especially true because the expedition appeared to be moving steadily through their territory, without posing any specific threat. It seems likely that the benign character of the expedition was also reinforced by Rondon’s repeated attempts to reassure the Indians of his friendly intentions by leaving gifts for them at every opportunity.

  From the start of the expedition’s journey down the River of Doubt, these conflicting factors had produced a deep division of opinion between those Indian elders who wanted to kill the members of the expedition, and those who favored waiting to see if they would pass peacefully out of the Cinta Larga’s territory without provoking a confrontation. Given the tribe’s tradition that all decisions of war be made by consensus, the very existence of this debate became the thin thread on which the lives of Roosevelt and his men would ultimately hang.

  As the men of the expedition looked up at the clear black sky above the River of Doubt, and marveled at the brilliant stars which pointed their way home, they neither knew nor likely even suspected who was actually responsible for their safe passage out of the jungle. In the dark, liana-draped trees that towered on all sides around the tiny wooden shack in which the men fell off to sleep, the warriors of the Cinta Larga—with painted bodies, hard bark belts, and poison-tipped arrows—slipped away as silently and invisibly as they had come. Obeying the timeless calculus of survival in the rain forest, they disappeared on swift bare feet into endless dark halls of leaf and vine. For their own reasons, and on their own terms, they would let these enemies live.

  CHAPTER 29

  A Pair of Flags

  ACCORDING TO THE EXPEDITION’S seringuero hosts, it would take another fifteen days for the men to reach the confluence of the River of Doubt and the Aripuanã, where the men hoped that Lieutenant Pyrineus would be waiting. After they had spent a month and a half alone on the most treacherous and least known stretch of the river, another two weeks traveling through seringueiro territory might have seemed like a frustrating but relatively easy journey. If they could not catch food, they would be able to buy it, and if they lost another canoe, they could purchase one from a rubber-tapper. What they would not find, however, was a hospital, and fifteen days was a long time to keep alive a man as sick as Theodore Roosevelt.

  In fact, none of the men—with the notable exception of the seemingly invincible Rondon—was healthy. Cherrie and Lyra had battled nearly constant dysentery. Kermit had fought repeated attacks of malaria. Half of the camaradas were so sick with fever that they could no longer work. Even those who were still on their feet, Kermit noted in his diary, were “working poorly and lifelessly.”

  Only a few of the men had “retained their original physical and moral strength,” Roosevelt wrote. Fear, disease, and hunger had driven them to do things that they never would have done under any other circumstances. They had agreed to abandon one of their own to almost certain death in the jungle. They had stolen food from their fellow camaradas. They had scoured the forest in search of anything that might be even remotely edible. Just two days earlier, several of the camaradas had devoured some unidentified nuts that they had found while they were hunting and had become dangerously ill.

  As sick as his men were, even Roosevelt himself had to admit that he was “in worse shape” than anyone else in the expedition. He continued to fight for his life for his son’s sake, but he had no illusions about the gravity of his condition, and he had never faltered in his resolve that not a single life in the expedition be risked in an effort to save his own. “If I am to go, it’s all right,” he told Cajazeira. “You see that the others don’t stop for me. . .. I’ve the shortest span of life ahead of any in the party. If anyone is to die here, I must be the one.”

  Roosevelt’s condition had become so alarming and his pain had become so unbearable that, on April 16, he finally agreed to allow Cajazeira, the man he trusted most on this expedition after Cherrie and his own son, to operate on his leg. The operating-room floor was nothing more than the muddy soil of the riverbank. Using only the simplest of surgical tools and no anesthetic, Caja
zeira sliced deep into his patient’s leg, releasing a mottled mixture of blood and foul-smelling pus that had collected in the abscess. As the doctor worked to insert a drainage tube, swatting away the legions of piums and borrachudo flies that had been attracted to the stench, Roosevelt did not cry out in pain or utter a word of complaint. “Father’s courage was an inspiration never to be forgotten by any of us,” Kermit would later write.

  * * *

  WITH EACH passing day, the expedition’s situation improved just enough to keep the men’s spirits buoyed and their determination strong. They also had the good fortune of meeting a seringueiro named Barboso, a simple man with a “dusky cigar-smoking wife and his many children,” who awed the men of the expedition with his generosity. Refusing any payment, despite his own conspicuous poverty, Barboso gave the men a duck, a chicken, manioc, and six pounds of rice. He also lent them a boat—doubtless one of his most valuable possessions—and accepted in return one of the poorly constructed dugouts they had made themselves. Two days later, the expedition was able to gain another boat by trading two more of its dugouts to seringueiros it met along the river.

  With a local rubber-tapper to guide them, new canoes to carry them, and plenty of food to sustain them, what the men needed most now was speed. Although the operation to lance Roosevelt’s abscess had been successful, easing some of his pain as well as Cajazeira’s concern, the former president was still dangerously ill. The bacterial infection had continued to spread, and he had developed another abscess, this one on his right buttock. “We did what was reasonable in such an emergency to prevent another abscess,” Cajazeira wrote, “but to no avail.”

  Roosevelt’s familiar fat-cheeked face and barrel-chested physique looked deflated, as if the journey had stripped not just strength from his body but years from his life. After months of deprivation and starvation, when the men had finally reached a place where they could eat all that they wanted, Roosevelt had little interest in eating anything at all. “He eats very little,” Cherrie fretted in his diary. “He is so thin that his clothes hang like bags on him.” In just three months, Roosevelt had lost fifty-five pounds—one-quarter of his original body weight.

  In stark contrast to their American commander, the men of the expedition had difficulty restraining themselves when offered food of any size, shape, or origin. They rejoiced when they found a broken-down river store, even though its shelves were nearly empty and what little was there had been carted in nearly a year before. At exorbitant cost, the men bought and feasted on such luxuries as sugar and condensed milk. Several of the camaradas drank entire cans of condensed milk in long, sticky swallows. “In this land of plenty the camaradas over-ate,” Roosevelt wrote, “and sickness was as rife among them as ever.”

  The only food that interested Roosevelt was some eggs that he found and ate raw in a dingy little shack where the men stopped for the night on April 23. “Our stopping place filth[y], wet, and dark,” Cherrie wrote in disgust. “Pigs, chickens, and dogs contend for a place.” But spending the night with the animals was better than sleeping in another downpour, and it was worth any price to see Roosevelt eat something, anything. After months of worrying about his father, Kermit was now obsessed with the thought that, after all they had been through, he might not be able to bring him home alive.

  Concern over Roosevelt’s condition increased the next day, when the expedition had to halt because of a long and treacherous series of waterfalls. These falls, known to the seringueiros as Carupanan, began with half a dozen rapids. Their guide could not help them here, and the men knew that if they were forced to stumble slowly and blindly through these rapids, as they had done dozens of times before, it would take them at least two weeks to push past Carupanan.

  It was painfully apparent to his men that Roosevelt would not survive such a long and harrowing ordeal. Men much younger and stronger than he had died attempting to cross the Carupanan falls, and their buried remains still lay at the edge of the rapids, a sobering reminder that the expedition was not yet beyond the grasp of the River of Doubt. The men of the expedition, however, like the men who had come before them, had no choice but to take their chances in the falls. Ahead of them lay either death or deliverance.

  * * *

  AT THE top of the rapids, the men found a store that was owned by José Caripe, a man who, in Cherrie’s words, reigned as “the ‘king’ of the rubber gatherers” on the River of Doubt. Caripe had begun his career as a lowly seringueiro but was now, through hard work and, presumably, hard dealings, a patrão, or boss. Most of the tappers along this stretch of the river worked for him, giving him rubber in exchange for tools and provisions from his store.

  Caripe was exactly what the expedition needed. Roosevelt immediately recognized the Brazilian as his kind of man, describing him as “cool, fearless, and brawny as a bull.” Not only was he a self-made man—working his way up from extreme poverty to relative power and wealth—but he had faced down the dangers of the jungle with courage and even bravado, proving himself to be almost Rondon-like in his invincibility, if not in his interests or motivations.

  When he heard that the expedition was about to pass through Carupanan, and he saw the condition that Roosevelt was in, Caripe proposed that he himself should guide the men to the foot of the falls. They gratefully accepted his offer and were thrilled when he also gave them one of his own well-made boats in exchange for the last of their dugout canoes. With Caripe’s guidance and the use of their three new lightweight boats, it took the men only a day and a half to pass through the series of rapids. Along those stretches of the river that were at all navigable, Caripe effortlessly guided them to the safest channels. Where the rapids were impassable, he showed them trails that had already been cut through the heavy jungle.

  The Carupanan falls demanded several difficult portages, and it nearly claimed one of their new canoes, but in the end, the men lost only one member of their expedition: Kermit’s dog, Trigueiro, who wandered off into the jungle while his master was busy preparing to run the boats through a set of rapids. It was a loss that, for Kermit, was particularly painful so close to the end of the journey. But in what had become an all-out race against time, nothing mattered now but getting Roosevelt to Manáos, where, his son desperately hoped, the ex-president’s life might yet be saved.

  * * *

  ON THE afternoon of April 26, the expedition passed through a stretch of the forest that had been partially submerged. The dark, murky river, which was still swollen from the rainy season downpours, swirled around the thick tree trunks and swallowed whole the small islands that held them aloft.

  Looking into the distance, the men suddenly saw a row of neat tents lined up along one of the banks. Standing among those tents were Lieutenant Pyrineus and the six men of his relief party, who had established their tiny camp at the confluence of the two branches of the Aripuanã six weeks earlier. Since that time, their fears had risen like the waters of the swollen river as day after day, and then week after week, had passed with no sign of their colonel and his expedition.

  When the men on the river and the men on the shore finally spotted one another, shouts of joy rang through the forest, and rifle reports shook the leaves of the sunken trees. Lying under his makeshift tent, Roosevelt pulled himself up with quivering arms to witness his own rescue. What he saw before him were two flags outlined against a sharp blue sky. First, the green, gold, and blue of Rondon’s beloved Republic of Brazil. Then, fluttering beside them, the stars and stripes that had for so long driven and defined Roosevelt’s own life, and whose promise stirred him still.

  Epilogue

  ON THE AFTERNOON OF MAY 19, 1914, just three weeks after his expedition’s emotional reunion with Lieutenant Pyrineus on the banks of the River of Doubt, Roosevelt triumphantly entered New York Harbor on the steamship Aidan, all flags flying. As he leaned over the deck railing, smiling his toothy smile, waving his big Panama hat, and, in a gesture for which he had become famous, vigorously shaking hands with him
self, every watercraft in the harbor that had a whistle blew three long, joyful blasts.

  Although Roosevelt’s homecoming was an occasion of great joy for everyone from his wife to his children to the journalists who had followed him for decades, the sight of the former president, thin, drawn, and leaning on a cane—which he jokingly referred to as his “big stick”—came as a shock. He was, one reporter wrote, “brown as the saddle that formed part of his luggage,” but his dark, tropical tan covered a face that had lost its youthful fullness and gained a network of new, deeply etched lines.

  Physically at least, Theodore Roosevelt was not the same man he had been when he left New York nearly eight months earlier. Even Leo Miller, who had endured dangers and deprivations of his own during his descent of the Gy-Paraná, had been horrified when he saw Roosevelt in Manáos, writing that his commander had “wasted to a mere shadow of his former self.” For his trip from Manáos to Pará, Brazil, Roosevelt had been transported to his steamship in an ambulance and carried on board on a stretcher. He had stayed in his cabin for most of the journey, unable to talk above a whisper, and eating very little. It was not until the fourth day out that he was finally able to take a short walk on deck, but he had still needed help climbing down the ship’s ladder when it reached Pará.