Robert Carneiro, one of the world’s pre-eminent anthropologists and the American Museum of Natural History’s specialist on South America’s indigenous peoples, not only patiently explained man’s earliest migrations into and throughout South America but made inquiries on my behalf, introduced me to people connected to Cândido Rondon, and, later, carefully read my manuscript and offered valuable insights and suggestions. Marcelo de Carvalho, a Brazilian ichthyologist also on the staff of the American Museum of Natural History, helped me peer into the fascinating depths of the South American rivers he knows so well. Douglas Daly, the respected curator of Amazonian botany at the New York Botanical Garden, graciously answered my many questions about the Amazon’s most influential inhabitants—its trees and other plant life. Flávio Lima of the Museu de Zoologia da USP provided me with critical information that I could not have found anywhere else, and was my best source on a river whose remoteness has deterred many other scientists. Douglas Stotz, an ornithologist at Chicago’s Field Museum who has often worked along the banks of the Aripuanã, described to me the joys and challenges of collecting birds in the Amazon. He is, in many ways, a modern-day George Cherrie. Doctors Paul Uhlig and Stephen Calderwood, with Massachusetts General Hospital, generously gave their time and considerable expertise to help me better understand tropical illnesses and bacterial infections.
The children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren of the men of the Roosevelt-Rondon Scientific Expedition were also, without exception, kind, generous, and immensely helpful. Of Roosevelt’s descendants, I owe the greatest thanks to Tweed Roosevelt, who in 1992, with a team of twenty men and women, successfully retraced his great-grandfather’s expedition from the River of Doubt’s deadly serpentine headwaters to its juncture with the Aripuanã. Sincere thanks also go to Willard Roosevelt, Kermit’s only surviving child; Kermit Roosevelt III, Kermit’s grandson and namesake; Edith Williams; Sarah Chapman; and Elizabeth Aldred. Many thanks too to Deb Cherrie, George Cherrie’s great-granddaughter-in-law, and Hubert Cherrie, the ornithologist’s grandson, who has inherited his grandfather’s wit and courage.
While in Rio de Janeiro, I also had the good fortune to meet several of Marshal Cândido Rondon’s grandchildren. Maria Beatriz Rondon Amarante generously invited me to her home, where she and her cousins, Maria Ignez Rondon Amarante, Angelo Christiano Rondon Amarante, and Pedro Henrique Bernardes Rondon, answered my questions and shared with me illuminating and little-known details about their grandfather and his beloved Chiquita.
For introducing me to Marshal Rondon’s grandchildren and explaining the design of Rondon’s telegraph stations, I thank Patricia and Mario Civelli. I am grateful to Lucrecia Franco for being my knowledgeable and cheerful guide through the libraries and museums of Rio de Janeiro, and to the intrepid Pedro Varela for traveling with me to remote and inhospitable stretches of the Amazon and helping me find and interview a group of Cinta Larga who remember well their tribal history. For helping me find translators and experts and track down last-minute letters and elusive facts, I am grateful to Kathryn Bard, Karen Courtnage, Mery Galanternick, Lisa Grossman, Pamela Muraski, Rani Shanker, Anna Uhlig, and Sandra Wellington. For his generous help, and for keeping me, as well as the rest of the world, informed about everything that is happening in South America—from politics to culture to conservation—I thank Larry Rohter, the New York Times bureau chief in Rio de Janeiro.
I am indebted to Marilia Rebello and Erin Schneider for French and Portuguese translations that are as lyrical as they are precise. Heartfelt thanks to David Uhlig for volunteering his talent as a photographer and graphic designer, to Myron Pitts for being unfailingly helpful, and to Richard Oller, Darren Sextro, Kevin Childress, and Lora Uhlig for offering advice as early readers.
For introducing me to the manuscripts and archival objects that breathed life into this book—from published books and articles to private journals and letters to equipment invoices, medical reports, splintered arrows, and rusted surgical knives—I am grateful to Elizabeth Bré, Denise Portugal Lamar, and the entire staff of the Museu do Índio; Jacqueline Dougherty and Reverend William B. Simmons, Indiana Province Archives Center of the Congregation of Holy Cross; Karla Estelita Godoy, Museu da República; Angela Kindig, Peter Lysy, and Sharon Sumpter, Notre Dame University Archives; Mary LeCroy, Ornithology Department of the American Museum of Natural History; Antonio Carlos de Souza Lima and Fátima Nascimento, Museu Nacional; Eileen Morales, Museum of the City of New York; and Liisa Morton, executive director of the Museum of Surveying. In the tradition of saving the best for last, I would like to offer a special thanks to Wallace Finley Dailey, the curator of the Theodore Roosevelt Collection at Harvard, whose work has helped define modern scholarship in this area.
I thank Sydney Possuelo, the world’s greatest living sertanista, and João Dal Poz, the Cinta Larga’s devoted and accomplished anthropologist, for giving me invaluable insight into the lives of indigenous Amazonians in general and the Cinta Larga in particular, and I am grateful to Oitamina Cinta Larga and Tatataré Cinta Larga, two of the tribe’s former chiefs, for a firsthand introduction to the Cinta Larga, its way of life as well as its tribal history.
For giving me my first opportunities as a writer and editor, and for making this book possible by teaching me their craft through example and patient instruction, I would like to thank Donald Belt, Dean Bevan, Robert Booth, Judith Brown, Preston and Virginia Fambrough, Steven Gerson, Jon Goodman, David Jeffrey, Jude Nixon, Bernard Ohanian, Robert Poole, Lucy Price, Mary Singh, Rhonda Wickham, and Scott Wyerman. For their encouragement and support on this project, I thank Molly Crosby, Jennifer Fox, David and Martha Ives, Davida Kales, Jodi Lewis, Keith Moore, and Don Wilson. Thanks also to Adam Bellow for his generous advice and guidance, and to the staff of the National Geographic Society, who inspired and encouraged my interest in exploration and natural history.
Every writer hopes to have in her corner an agent and editor upon whose talent and wisdom she can depend. I have been fortunate to find two of the industry’s best in Suzanne Gluck and Bill Thomas. Suzanne not only agreed to take on an unknown writer but came through for me at every turn with power and grace. Bill is the consummate editor, and I am extremely grateful that my book landed in his experienced hands.
For being a model of patience and a source of inspiration over the past three years—the span of her lifetime—I am indebted to my daughter, Emery Millard Uhlig, and for enduring research trips and long hours at the office, I thank her new little sister, Petra Tihen Uhlig, who has timed her arrival to coincide with the publication of this book. For the invaluable knowledge that, while I researched and wrote, Emery was in the very best of hands, I thank our dear friend and beloved family member, Betty Jacobs. I also owe a lifetime of gratitude to my mother-in-law, Doris Uhlig, for welcoming me wholeheartedly into her family. For their flawless example, I thank George Emery Millard, Mable Mitchel, Lora Tihen, and Ethel Wright, and for making me proud beyond measure to be their sister, I thank Kelly Sandvig, Anna Shaffer, and Nichole Millard. Finally, for giving me a lifetime of unconditional love and for making whatever I have achieved in my life possible, I am deeply grateful to my parents, Lawrence and Constance Millard.
CREDITS
The author and publisher gratefully acknowledge the American Museum of Natural History Library, the Theodore Roosevelt Collection, Harvard College Library, and The Explorer’s Club for permission to print the following photos, which appear in inserts:
Specific credits:
Theodore Roosevelt Collection, Harvard College Library.
American Museum of Natural History Library.
The Explorer’s Club.
Reprinted by permission of the publisher from The Letters of Theodore Roosevelt, Volumes I–XIII, selected and edited by Elting E. Morison. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Copyright © 1951, 1952, 1954 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. Copyright © renewed 1980 by Elting E. Morison.
ABOUT THE AUTH
OR
Candice Millard is a former writer and editor for National Geographic magazine. She lives in Kansas City.
“Such unbounded energy and vitality impressed one like the perennial forces of nature,” the naturalist John Burroughs wrote of Roosevelt, who, in an unsuccessful bid for a third term as a third-party candidate, used his legendary magnetism to persuade millions of voters to abandon the Democratic and Republican parties in 1912.
The folded manuscript and steel spectacle case that Roosevelt carried in his right breast pocket saved his life when he was shot by a would-be assassin before giving a campaign speech in 1912. Roaring that it “takes more than that to kill a Bull Moose!” Roosevelt insisted on giving his speech—still wearing his bloody shirt and with the bullet lodged five inches deep in his chest.
Even as a child, “Kermit was … very solemn,” his older brother, Theodore Jr., would recall. Quiet and brooding by nature, Kermit was both the most introverted of Roosevelt’s six children and the most fearless. During a year-long African hunting trip in 1909, Roosevelt worried about his second son’s recklessness, complaining that Kermit, shown below standing over a lion he had killed, “keeps my heart in my throat.”
Kermit’s introspective character was hauntingly reminiscent of that of his father’s only brother, Elliott—First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt’s father. Although full of promise as a young man, Elliott (right, with Theodore in 1880) succumbed to alcoholism and morphine addiction later in life and died at the age of thirty-four.
When Roosevelt decided to undertake an expedition into the Amazon, the American Museum of Natural History hired two of its best naturalists to accompany him: George Cherrie (top) and Leo Miller (bottom).
Of the seven Americans who planned to descend the River of Doubt—from left to right, Anthony Fiala, George Cherrie, Father John Zahm, Theodore Roosevelt, Kermit Roosevelt, Frank Harper, and Leo Miller—only Roosevelt, Kermit, and Cherrie would make the journey.
Just before the expedition began, Kermit became engaged to Belle Willard, daughter of the American ambassador to Spain. After hearing that her quiet, serious son planned to marry the young socialite, Edith Roosevelt, who had nicknamed Belle “the Fair One with Golden Locks,” confessed that she felt “a trifle down.”
Signaling the commencement of their expedition, Roosevelt and his Brazilian co-commander, Colonel Cândido Rondon, met for the first time on December 12, 1913, on the Paraguay River. As head of the Strategic Telegraph Commission—commonly known as the Rondon Commission—Rondon had already spent nearly a quarter of a century, half his life, mapping the Amazon.
Renowned, and later criticized, as a big-game hunter, Roosevelt—posing here with Rondon and a bush deer he killed before reaching the River of Doubt—would find that, once on the river, he and his men were more often prey than predator.
For much of their month-long overland journey, Roosevelt (right), Rondon (left), and their men rode under the humming wires of the telegraph poles that the Rondon Commission had erected, at the cost of countless lives, across eight hundred miles of the Brazilian interior.
Overloaded and underfed, the expedition’s pack oxen died at an alarming rate during the trip to the River of Doubt. In a futile attempt to save themselves, many of the oxen bucked off their loads, abandoning crates of provisions that the men would desperately need on the river.
“Why they do not grind off their noses I cannot imagine,” Roosevelt marveled after watching a group of Pareci Indians at a telegraph station play a game that required them to butt a ball, a hollow sphere of rubber, by diving headfirst at the ground.
The Nhambiquara Indians, whom Roosevelt considered “light-hearted robbers and murderers,” had answered Rondon’s first attempt at contact in 1909 with a fusillade of curare-tipped arrows. Rondon had ordered his soldiers not to return fire, obliging them, as always, to live by his admirable if suicidal motto: “Die if need be, but kill never.”
During the overland journey, the members of the expedition—from left to right, Father Zahm, Rondon, Kermit, Cherrie, Miller, four members of the Brazilian contingent, Roosevelt, and Fiala—gathered for their evening meal around two ox hides spread over the damp ground. Refusing to sit in a chair unless Rondon also had one, Roosevelt told his co-commander that “he would accept nothing, and do nothing, that might have an appearance of special attention to his person. And consequently just as he saw me sit so would he sit himself.”
PUBLISHED BY BROADWAY BOOKS
Copyright © 2005 by Candice Millard
All Rights Reserved
A hardcover edition of this book was originally published in 2005 by Doubleday.
Published in the United States by Broadway Books, an imprint of The Doubleday Broadway Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
www.broadwaybooks.com
BROADWAY BOOKS and its logo, a letter B bisected on the diagonal, are trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Map of South America by Jeffrey L. Ward.
Sketch of the River of Doubt by Theodore Roosevelt, courtesy of the Theodore Roosevelt Collection, Harvard College Library.
Photo permissions appear.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Millard, Candice.
The river of doubt : Theodore Roosevelt’s darkest journey /
Candice Millard.—1st ed.
p. cm.
1. Roosevelt River (Brazil)—Description and travel. 2. Amazon River Valley—Description and travel. 3. Rain forests—Amazon River Valley. 4. Natural history—Amazon River Valley. 5. Roosevelt-Rondon Scientific Expedition (1913–1914) 6. Roosevelt, Theodore, 1858–1919—Travel—Brazil—Roosevelt River. 7. Presidents—United States—Biography. I. Title.
F2546.M587 2005
918.1′13045—dc22 2005046541
eISBN: 978-0-307-57508-1
v3.0
Candice Millard, The River of Doubt: Theodore Roosevelt's Darkest Journey
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