The River of Doubt: Theodore Roosevelt's Darkest Journey

  The controversy surrounding the Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine had become even more acute in the months preceding Roosevelt’s departure for South America, because the corollary was about to be tested. As Roosevelt prepared to set sail, Mexico was, as he had written to Kermit, “bubbling like a frying-pan,” and Woodrow Wilson faced the unwelcome possibility of being forced to put Roosevelt’s theory into action. The Mexican Revolution had been raging since 1910 and had already brought about the forced resignation and exile of one of the country’s presidents and the imprisonment and assassination of another. The United States government was concerned about the revolution not only because Mexico was its closest neighbor to the south, or even because thousands of American expatriates were living there at the time, but because Americans had invested millions of dollars in the country. If the revolution continued to spin out of control, Wilson could decide at any moment to intervene—a step that South Americans expected, and bitterly resented.

  * * *

  IF THE United States did go to war with Mexico, Roosevelt was confident that his two oldest sons would be among the first to enlist. Theodore Jr. and Kermit had been raised by a father who was almost obsessed by war. Their grandfather, whom Roosevelt had idolized, had paid another man to fight for him during the Civil War, and Roosevelt had never gotten over it. It was relatively common at that time for wealthy men to pay poor men to take their place on the battlefield, and Roosevelt’s father had taken this route not out of fear but out of respect for his wife, who was a Southerner and whose brothers were fighting in the Confederate Army. But Roosevelt could never understand what he saw as the one flaw in his father’s otherwise irreproachable character. He would never miss a war, and neither would his sons. “I should regard it as an unspeakable disgrace if either of them failed to work hard at any honest occupation for his livelihood, while at the same time keeping himself in such trim that he would be able to perform a freeman’s duty and fight as efficiently as anyone if the need arose,” Roosevelt had written to the British historian and statesman George Otto Trevelyan after a post-Africa tour of Europe with Kermit in 1910.

  The importance of a Latin American conflict loomed particularly large for Kermit, who had embraced the region and was quickly earning a reputation for himself in Brazil as a disciplined and high-minded young man. Thin and fair, with high cheekbones and deep-set eyes, Kermit did not look much like his heavy-featured father, nor did he have the elder Roosevelt’s big, boisterous personality, but it was often said that he was, in many ways, more like his father than any of Roosevelt’s other children. Not only did he love adventure, he loved to learn. He was a voracious reader, and he had an uncanny ability with languages. By the end of his life, Kermit spoke Arabic, Urdu, Hindustani, and Romany, not to mention French, German, and Spanish. He read Greek in the original, had earned his porters’ respect and gratitude in Africa by learning Swahili, and was now speaking Portuguese like a native Brazilian.

  Kermit also had, as his sister Ethel often said, “the soul of a poet.” Before going to South America, Kermit had made a quick tour of Europe, stopping in England to stay with Rudyard Kipling. “He is very interested in South America, and wants to go there, as I suppose he will someday,” Kermit wrote to a friend from Kipling’s house. Kipling talked to Kermit about his poetry, explaining when and with what inspiration he wrote such immortal lines as those that had hung over the platform the night that the Progressive Party had nominated Roosevelt and Hiram Johnson to run for president and vice-president:

  For there is neither East nor West,

  Border nor breed nor birth,

  When two strong men stand face to face,

  Though they come from the ends of the earth.

  No longer a boy—he would turn twenty-four in just six days—Kermit was showing every sign of growing into the man that his father had always hoped he would be. He had not only carved out a life for himself under tough circumstances in Brazil, but he was earning his own way and was steadily establishing his independence. Concerned that his son was getting “down to such a very simple diet as a result of having no money at the end of the month,” Roosevelt had resolved in April to send him two hundred dollars each quarter. By late July, however, Kermit was proudly tearing up his father’s checks. “Unless things go very badly I shan’t need money unless I happened to marry. I’m now getting something more than a living wage, and have about three hundred and fifty dollars in the bank,” Kermit told his father. “I wrote you that I had torn up the first check and I have now torn up the second.”

  Although Kermit’s pay had improved since he had first arrived in Brazil, the conditions under which he was working had not. Not only did he suffer from recurring bouts of malaria—a disease that he had endured since childhood, having first succumbed to it in Washington, D.C., in the days before the swamps on which the capital was built had been drained—but he worked in remote, sparsely populated locations near Indians who had had little interaction with white men beyond occasional, violent clashes. Kermit took the dangers in stride. In a letter he wrote home the previous fall, while he was working for the Brazil Railway Company, he had mentioned offhandedly that they had had three derailments in a single week. “Twice it was a big box car that went off, and once it was the engine,” he wrote. “Only one of them amounted to anything, and there we very nearly killed our cook.” A few weeks later, he mentioned that he did not think he would be able to do much hunting for a while, “for the Indians are up, and have killed several engineers with their long arrows.”

  Kermit was now building bridges in the Xingu Valley, a job that, if possible, was even more dangerous than the work he had done for the railroad. The Xingu Valley, which covers 195,000 square miles of northeastern Brazil, had not been explored until 1884, and there were still far more native inhabitants in that stretch of the country than settlers. The job paid well, and it had the added benefit of pleasing and impressing Roosevelt, but it came at a cost. That summer, Kermit had nearly been killed when a bridge had collapsed while he was working on it and he had fallen thirty-five feet into a dry, rocky ravine. It wasn’t anyone’s fault, he had written to his parents, just “the chances of the game,” but even he had to admit that it had been an incredibly close call. “I was bounced about like a ball,” he wrote. “I didn’t think I had a chance in a million nor did anyone else.” From the bottom of the ravine, injured and stunned, Kermit had watched as the massive bridge, trailing steel guy wires, plummeted toward him, but he could not move fast enough to get out of its way. He lived to tell the story only because the bridge miraculously fell just short of him. He walked away from the accident with two broken ribs, two missing teeth, and a partially dislocated knee, and was, he told his father, “somewhat scarred on head and hands which looks bad and means nothing.”

  Kermit was tough, fearless, and independent, but, as his parents well knew, he was not invulnerable to setbacks or disappointment. Of all of Roosevelt’s children, Kermit was the most sensitive. Even in childhood he had had a quiet, brooding disposition that gave him a gravitas that was startling for his age. “Kermit was a very solemn little boy,” his older brother, Theodore Jr., recalled. “He was not talkative. As a result when he said anything it gave the impression of a carefully weighed accurate statement.” Although he did not mind the difficult and dangerous conditions under which he worked in Brazil, the isolation from everything and everyone he knew had begun to wear on him. He even admitted to his father that just the sight of his parents’ proposed itinerary for South America had made him “tremendously homesick.”

  Perhaps it was this loneliness, as much as anything else, that had led Kermit to fall in love with a girl he hardly knew—and had not laid eyes on for more than a year. Her name was Belle Willard, and she was, as one admiring newspaper account put it, “fortunate in having been able to live up to her name.” Petite and blonde, with what the New York Times referred to as “clear-cut features,” Belle was an heiress to a family fortune and the olde
st daughter of Joseph Willard, the newly appointed American ambassador to Spain.

  Kermit had met Belle when his sister Ethel invited her to Sagamore Hill one summer. Belle seemed to share all of Kermit’s interests—from reading to traveling to even hunting—and they struck up a flirtatious friendship that survived in spite of Kermit’s quick departure for Brazil. For the past year and a half, their relationship had grown by small, tentative steps through letters that followed Belle from her home state of Virginia, to New York, and then to Europe, and Kermit to Europe and South America. With each letter, the two young aristocrats grew warmer toward each other, more familiar, and more willing to show interest and even affection.

  Kermit enjoyed his “gypsy life” in Brazil, but he never forgot Belle. On the contrary, he often worried that she would forget him. “No letter from you for ever so long. I’m afraid you’ve got engaged or married,” he had written only half jokingly from Piracicaba, Brazil, in March. “I suppose I shall have the formal announcement the next time I get mail.” Although he was looking forward to seeing his father, Kermit was saving his vacation time for Belle. “I don’t want to ask for any holiday,” he had written to her, “so that when you come I can have a good right to ask for one.”

  Kermit planned to meet his father in Bahia, a beautiful coastal town in central Brazil, but he did not plan to join him on his trek into the Amazon, nor did Roosevelt expect him to. Kermit had been the perfect companion in Africa, hardworking, uncomplaining, and independent, but he was a man now, and he had responsibilities that precluded such lighthearted excursions as this. Besides, Roosevelt did not think his son would be missing much. “It won’t be anything like our Africa trip,” he had assured Kermit in June. “There will be no hunting and no adventures so that I shall not have the pang I otherwise would about taking it and not taking you along—which of course would never do.”

  * * *

  THE PROSPECT of seeing Kermit had helped persuade his father to make a visit to South America, but it was even more important in convincing Roosevelt’s wife, Edith, to join him on the trip. After Kermit’s fall, Ted Jr. had written his brother that their father had taken “a sort of grim pride in the fact that you are doing dangerous work in which you could be injured.” Their mother, on the other hand, had felt Kermit’s absence from her life even more deeply. Kermit and his mother had always had a close relationship, at times the envy of her other children, and since his move to Brazil, Edith had mourned not only his physical distance but his growing emotional independence. “I have not been able to help Father,” she would confess to her daughter, Ethel, “and Kermit does not need me now.” Edith, however, had decided to span those thousands of miles that separated her from her second son by accompanying her husband to South America. Although she would only stay for the first few months of Roosevelt’s trip, she would be on the continent long enough to get a good, long look at Kermit and judge for herself whether or not he was indeed “all right again,” as he had assured her from his hospital bed in São Paulo.

  The real driving force behind Edith’s decision to go to South America, however, was concern not for her son but for her husband. For Roosevelt, this journey was an opportunity to escape the doomed Progressive Party, his own humiliating defeat, and the self-doubt that had haunted him for the past year. For his wife, it was just another long, lonely separation—as painful as it was familiar. Edith had spent half her life waiting for Theodore to come home—from the battlefield, the campaign trail, hunting trips, and grand adventures. After the election, she had been hurt when he had decided to set sail once again, but she had not been surprised. “Father needs more scope,” she had written to Ethel, “and since he can’t be President must go away from home to have it.”

  Edith was also worried about Roosevelt’s safety. He was no longer a young man, and he had driven his body too hard for too long. Worse, he had become secretive. She complained that Theodore had maintained a “sphinx-like silence” about his expedition into the Amazon. If he thought that his reticence might spare her worry, he was wrong. “I can but hope that the wild part of his trip is being more systematically arranged than is apparent,” she had written Kermit just a few weeks before they sailed.

  * * *

  ON BOARD the Vandyck, while Roosevelt fielded reporters’ questions and attempted to calm the South American ambassadors’ fears, Father Zahm and Fiala desperately tried to tie up loose ends. It was only with much frantic telephoning and telegraphing that they got the last of the equipment and provisions on board and safely stored in the ship’s hold. Roosevelt was getting nervous, because it was nearly 1:00 p.m., the time the Vandyck was scheduled to set sail, and no one had seen George Cherrie, the naturalist whom Frank Chapman had hand-picked for the expedition.

  To add to the chaos, Father Zahm had decided at the eleventh hour to hire another man, a Swiss handyman named Jacob Sigg. Although Zahm had first met Sigg only a short time earlier, he envisioned the handyman as a perfect jack-of-all-trades—and, perhaps more important, as a capable personal assistant for the priest himself. These qualities, real or imagined, persuaded Zahm to overlook what even he himself acknowledged to be the handyman’s “checkered career.” In offering his services, Sigg had told Zahm, who had no real ability to check out his story, that he had been the chief engineer of an electrical power plant, had operated steam engines, served as a courier in Europe, mined for gold in the Andes, helped build a railroad in Bolivia, and, incredibly, been the interpreter for an Indian princess. He could also drive a motorboat and an automobile (still a relatively rare skill at that time), speak Spanish and Portuguese, and shoot a gun. “And with all these qualifications,” Zahm wrote enthusiastically, “he was brave and trustworthy, devoted and ready for any emergency, from extracting an ulcerated tooth and amputating a crushed finger to making an anchor for a disabled launch.”

  Roosevelt’s team was becoming larger and more eclectic with each passing hour, but he knew that it would be seriously, and dangerously, incomplete without George Cherrie. At 1:00 p.m., the final gong sounded, warning anyone who was not a passenger to head quickly to shore or find himself steaming toward Barbados. Just as Roosevelt was beginning to think that his ornithologist was not going to make it, Cherrie raced up the pier and bounded on board. Although he had had his colleagues’ hearts in their throats, Cherrie was casually but completely prepared for his twenty-sixth expedition to South America when the Vandyck slipped its moorings and plowed through the muddy East River en route to the sea.

  * * *

  THE MOMENT Manhattan melted into the horizon, Roosevelt was reborn. “I think he feels like Christian in Pilgrims Progress when the bundle fell from his back,” Edith wrote her sister-in-law Bamie from her stateroom. “In this case it was not made of sins but of the Progressive Party.” Although the real expedition had yet to begin, the Rooseveltian therapy of adventure and danger in a strange land was already working. Roosevelt had put the Progressive Party and his failed campaign behind him, and his thoughts and energy were focused on achieving something significant, something important in the Amazon. “If we have reasonably good luck we shall accomplish something worth accomplishing,” he wrote to his daughter Ethel. “But of course there is enough chance in it to make me reluctant to prophesy.”

  Zahm, on the other hand, not only confidently predicted the expedition’s success, he was already busy trying to negotiate a potentially lucrative little deal with one of the country’s best-respected and best-funded institutions: The National Geographic Society. “Ask [Gilbert] Grosvenor [the editor-in-chief of National Geographic magazine] if he would like a series of first-class photographs—with a suitable description—of the heart of South America,” he instructed his brother, Albert. “They will be the best and rarest ever taken and will possess a special value for his magazine. Try, diplomatically, to learn what he would give for a good, illustrated article with absolutely new and unique photographs. But do not let him know that I have written you about the matter. Act as if y
ou were doing it spontaneously and in his interest.”

  In her suite on the Vandyck’s B deck, which had been reserved for the Roosevelts’ private use, Edith pursued rest and relaxation. Most days she did not even get dressed until the afternoon, when she would pull on long white gloves and a veil and sit on the ship’s deck to listen to her cousin Margaret Roosevelt, who had volunteered to accompany her to South America, read aloud. Margaret, the daughter of Theodore’s cousin Emlen, was a vibrant young woman who radiated health and enthusiasm. Twenty-five years old, she was an athlete—equally skilled at golf, tennis, and riding—and she loved adventure. Lately, she had become one of Edith’s favorite companions.

  Theodore also approved of Margaret and was prepared to let his young cousin and his wife have an adventure of their own. “Margaret has proved a delightful companion,” he wrote to Ethel. “I am now quite at ease about having Mother and her go up the West Coast from Chile together.” Margaret and Edith had planned to make a trip to Panama after Roosevelt set off for the Brazilian interior. Margaret was looking forward to it, but there were plenty of distractions on board the Vandyck to keep her amused until they reached South America, including the flattering attentions of a fellow passenger, a man named Henry Hunt.

  The men of the Roosevelt South American Scientific Expedition—newly christened during a last-minute meeting at the Harvard Club in New York City—spent most of their time thinking about and planning for the Amazon. Fiala could usually be found hunched over his sextant and theodolite, examining the surveying tools he had used ten years earlier in the Arctic. Cherrie busied himself with his collecting equipment, and Frank Harper studied his new Kodak camera—an invention that was fast becoming a national craze—which he had bought for the trip.