The River of Doubt: Theodore Roosevelt's Darkest Journey

by Candice Millard

  In reaction to the attempts of freeloading vines and epiphytes to benefit from their hard-won position in the canopy—and to protect themselves from being shaded over by such parasites—trees have developed many protection methods of their own. Some have developed smooth bark that keeps tendrils from attaching, and still others have adapted to slough off bark, leaves, or indeed entire branches to send epiphytes and vines crashing to the forest floor. Throughout the jungle, moreover, trees have adapted to prevent multiple deaths from tree falls or blights by separating themselves at regular distances from trees of the same species.

  From his vantage point on the shaded forest floor, Roosevelt stood far below much of this unceasing evolutionary combat. Crowded with broad-leaved trees, crowning vines, and epiphytes, as well as the hundreds of insect and animal species that rely upon them, the upper canopy is difficult to see from the ground, except in the rooflike function that its name implies. By shading everything below it, the canopy helps to obscure much of the activity that takes place in the under-story, or middle level of the rain forest. Its shading action also contributes importantly to the relative absence of undergrowth on the forest floor, where the men of the expedition found that they could move about with surprising ease. While sunlight from the open river made the shoreline an almost impassable wall of trees, vines, and dense underbrush, once that barrier was breached the dark interior of the jungle, broken only by occasional gaps in the canopy and a scattered, speckled light, revealed a labyrinth of tree trunks and vines, but little else.

  As the men of the expedition arose and started their morning routine, Roosevelt was able to admire the complexity of the jungle before him, but could only guess at the mysteries that it held beyond his view. So complex and interdependent was the ecosystem he and his men had entered that the jungle itself could appear to take on the attributes of a living being. If Roosevelt had been able to see the rain forest from a distance, he could have watched it breathe. As the trees transpire, or, in a sense, sweat, they pump water into the atmosphere from their leaves. In the warm air, the water quickly evaporates and is recycled as rain. As the ex-president stood at the river’s edge, surveying the jungle he hoped to master and explore, the forest surrounding him met the dawn by exhaling thin white clouds of condensing moisture that rose over the canopy above him like the breath of a wolf on a winter morning.

  * * *

  AS HE had during his telegraph line expeditions, Rondon approached the camp routine on the River of Doubt with military formality. To the task he brought not only strict discipline but even pomp and ceremony. Every morning, the men would gather in front of their Brazilian commander, who was dressed in his army khakis, to hear his Orders of the Day, laid out as formally as if he were addressing a regiment at war. Then, after a search through the surrounding forest for a piece of hardwood that would make a suitable marker, they would smooth one side of the wood with an adze, paint the camp number and the date on it, and drive it into the forest floor. They knew that rain, sun, and insects would likely destroy the markers long before they would be discovered by anyone who could read them, but they felt compelled nonetheless to leave behind a historical record of their journey.

  This routine, which they planned to carry out every morning until they reached the mouth of the River of Doubt, was more than an empty ritual. It was a tangible connection to civilization and a constant reminder of who they were and why they were there. Rondon had learned through excruciating hardship how important routine, discipline, and military ritual were in maintaining morale during an expedition into the Amazon. Even on his 1909 journey, when he and all of his men nearly starved to death, Rondon had never deviated from his routine. “The ragged bugler had his bugle,” Roosevelt wrote, recording the last, traumatic days of the expedition as Rondon described them to him. “Lieutenant Pyrineus had lost every part of his clothing except a hat and a pair of drawers. The half-naked lieutenant drew up his eleven fever patients in line; the bugle sounded; every one came to attention; and the haggard colonel read out the orders of the day.”

  As important as Rondon’s routine had proved to be during a crisis, however, it could also appear inflexible and dogmatic to his men. Rondon expected the same rigorous discipline from his soldiers that he demanded from himself, and his was not an easy model to live up to. The colonel still woke at four o’clock every morning and swam in whatever pond or river was nearby. He shaved without a mirror and had a simple breakfast, never allowing himself any indulgences—even if he had access to them. He never drank alcohol, or allowed his men to do so, and he even abstained from coffee, drinking only water or herbal tea.

  Roosevelt, in contrast, was much more flexible than his co-commander and, as a result, better liked. Roosevelt had endured some cold nights hunting down runaway cattle in the Dakota Badlands, and he had led a regiment to war, but he had never had to bring a band of starving, desperate men out of the jungle. Even on this expedition, he was more figurehead than commander, and when there were decisions to be made, he deferred to Rondon. Roosevelt’s job had, in a way, become that of expedition raconteur. He regaled the men every night with stories of his days in the Wild West or on the African savanna. He was, Rondon wrote, “the life of the party.” In contrast to the reserved, taciturn Brazilian colonel, Roosevelt must have seemed peculiarly fun and lighthearted. Rondon himself was stunned by his loquacious co-commander. “And talk!” he wrote. “I never saw a man who talked so much. He would talk all of the time he was in swimming, all of the time during meals, traveling in the canoe and at night around the camp fire. He talked endlessly and on all conceivable subjects.”

  * * *

  ALTHOUGH THEY had risen well before dawn, it was almost noon by the time Roosevelt, Cherrie, Dr. Cajazeira, and their three paddlers finally climbed into their dugout on the morning of February 28 and headed off down the river in pursuit of the rest of the expedition, which had left camp nearly four hours earlier. Sympathetic to how difficult it had been, and likely would continue to be, for his naturalist to collect specimens for the museum while they were on the River of Doubt, Roosevelt had ordered the other two dugouts and two balsas to go ahead without them when Cherrie heard some birdcalls near camp that morning. Cherrie had made it worth Roosevelt’s while, capturing six birds, including a red-headed woodpecker and a brilliant turquoise-blue cotinga.

  Once back on the twisting river, Roosevelt and Cherrie resumed their search for signs of life. Hour after hour passed, however, and their efforts were rewarded only by a few deserted game trails, an otter splashing across the river, and two tropical birds called guans. His face cast in shadow beneath his deep sun helmet, Roosevelt watched as the jungle glided past him, its towering trees and blue sky reflected, like a trembling, inverted world, in the water’s dark surface. He drank in the rich array of beauty, admiring the many-colored butterflies that “fluttered over the river,” and marveling at how a spark of sunlight could cloak the electric green jungle. “When the sun broke through rifts in the clouds,” he wrote, “his shafts turned the forest to gold.”

  Despite the beauty they were witnessing, nearly constant rain and an onslaught of insects made the men miserable. The Amazon Basin gets as much as a hundred inches of rain each year, three times as much as New York City. The rain forest itself generates 60 percent of the precipitation through the transpiration process, and most of it falls during the months of March and April. The temperature was consistently high, usually in the mid-to-high eighties, but the heat was powerless to counteract the effects of the relentless rain. “There would be a heavy downpour,” Kermit wrote. “Then out would come the sun and we would be steamed dry, only to be drenched once more a half-hour later.”

  The forest either steamed with thick humidity or sagged under a heavy downpour. Rain drummed on the river, ran off their hats, dripped down their backs, and pooled in their shoes. It soaked their tents and filled their canoes. Their clothes hung in heavy, clinging folds, and they never completely dried. “Our clothes were u
sually wet when we took them off at night, and just as wet when we put them on again in the morning,” Roosevelt wrote. Within a few days, they would all forget what it felt like to pull on a dry pair of socks.

  * * *

  COMPOUNDING THE misery wrought by the rain was an overarching sense of isolation and uncertainty, a feeling that was magnified by strange noises that shattered the forest’s silence and set the men’s nerves on edge. That afternoon, as Roosevelt and the men in his dugout paddled quietly down the river, a long, deep shriek suddenly ripped through the jungle. It was the roar of a howler monkey, one of the loudest cries of any animal on earth. The sound, which can be heard from three miles away, is formed when the monkey forces air through its large, hollow hyoid bone, which sits between its lower jaw and voice box and anchors its tongue. The result is a deep, resonating howl that vibrates through the forest with strange, inhuman intensity, and echoes so pervasively that its location can be nearly impossible to identify.

  Worse even than the noises they could recognize were those that none of them could explain. These strange sounds, which disappeared as quickly as they came and were a mystery even to those who knew the rain forest best, had made a strong impression on the British naturalist Henry Walter Bates fifty years earlier. “Often, even in the still hours of midday, a sudden crash will be heard resounding afar through the wilderness, as some great bough or entire tree falls to the ground,” the naturalist wrote. “There are, besides, many sounds which it is impossible to account for. I found the natives generally as much at a loss in this respect as myself. Sometimes a sound is heard like the clang of an iron bar against a hard, hollow tree, or a piercing cry rends the air; these are not repeated, and the succeeding silence tends to heighten the unpleasant impression which they make on the mind.”

  There was activity all around the men, both human and animal, but they could not see it, and they could only guess at what it was. This blindness left them uniquely vulnerable as they fought their way through a tangled swath of submerged trees that evening—“hacking and hewing,” Roosevelt wrote—in search of dry ground for their second camp. This was a different kind of fear altogether, something that even their grueling, worry-plagued overland journey had not prepared them for, and no man seemed immune to the change in mood that occurred as the river carried them ever deeper into the jungle.

  The Amazon’s sudden, inexplicable sounds were especially terrifying at night, when they were all in the pitch-black forest, with no way to see a potential attacker and no sure means of escape. While the jungle in daylight could sometimes appear completely devoid of inhabitants, the nightly cacophony left no doubt that the men of the expedition were not alone. Even for veteran outdoorsmen like George Cherrie, the setting of the sun came to mark an unnerving threshold between the relative familiarity of a long day on the river, and sleepless nights in the jungle, spent trying to imagine the source of the spine-chilling noises that echoed in the darkness around him. “Frequently at night, with my camp at the edge of the jungle,” he wrote, “I have lain in my hammock listening, my ears yearning for some familiar sound—every sense alert, nerves taut. Strange things have happened in the night.”

  The screams, crashes, clangs, and cries of the long Amazon night were all the more disturbing because they often provoked apparent terror among the unseen inhabitants of the jungle themselves. In the fathomless canyons of tree trunks and the shrouds of black vines that surrounded the men at night, the hum and chatter of thousands of nocturnal creatures would snap into instant silence in response to a strange noise, leaving the men to wait in breathless apprehension of what might come next.

  “Let there be the least break in the harmony of sound,” Cherrie observed, “and instantly there succeeds a deathlike silence, while all living things wait in dread for the inevitable shriek that follows the night prowler’s stealthy spring.”

  CHAPTER 13

  On the Ink-Black River

  FROM THE MOMENT THEY launched their boats upon the River of Doubt, Roosevelt and his men knew that the river would be their only guide. Even when they were on land—hunting, portaging, or making camp for the night—they would never stray far from its shores. They needed it for drinking water, cooking, and bathing. They needed it to escape from the oppressive heat of the rain forest, which clung to them like a wet wool blanket. Most of all, they needed it to carry them home.

  As important as the river was to the expedition, however, it was a capricious and unreliable ally. Like many South American rivers, the River of Doubt could change character quickly and dramatically over a very short distance, and with profound consequences for an expedition. Swollen and swift during the rainy season, it was cluttered with dangerous debris and pocked with shifting whirlpools that could flip a canoe and trap a man under the surface of the water in a matter of seconds.

  Even more complex and dangerous than the river itself were the fishes, mammals, and reptiles that inhabited it. Like the rain forest that surrounds and depends upon it, the Amazon river system is a prodigy of speciation and diversity, serving as home to more than three thousand species of freshwater fishes—more than any other river system on earth. Its waters are crowded with creatures of nearly every size, shape, and evolutionary adaptation, from tiny neon tetras to thousand-pound manatees to pink freshwater boto dolphins to stingrays to armor-plated catfishes to bullsharks. By comparison, the entire Missouri and Mississippi river system that drains much of North America has only about 375 fish species.

  Able to swim freely through large swaths of the jungle during the rainy season, for example, certain Amazonian fish, such as the tam-baqui, have evolved teeth that look like sheep molars and are tough enough to crack open even the hard, cannonball-sized shell of the Brazil nut. The ancient, eellike South American lungfish has lungs as well as gills. Unless it surfaces every four to ten minutes for a gulp of air, it will drown. During the dry season, however, while other fishes around it die as the ponds and streams dry up, the lungfish survives by burrowing into the mud and taking oxygen from the air. Still another species, the so-called four-eyed-fish, has eyes that are divided in two at the waterline by a band of tissue. With two separate sets of corneas and retinas, the fish can search for predators in the sky above and at the same time look for danger in the water below.

  Many of these strange adaptations are geared toward self-defense. Others are designed to help the fish become better, faster, smarter predators. There are electric fishes that eat nothing but the tails of other electric fish, which can regenerate their appendages, thus ensuring the predator a limitless food supply. Other fish have evolved to eat prey that live outside of their own immediate ecosystem. The three-foot-long arawana, for example, has a huge mouth and a bony tongue and can leap twice its body length. Nicknamed the “water monkey,” it snatches large insects, reptiles, and even small birds from the low branches of overhanging trees.

  The riverine creatures that the members of the expedition were most interested in, however, were those that were dangerous to man. The most visible threats were the fifteen-foot-long black caimans, which lay low near their nests of rotting debris and vanished into the water as the expedition’s canoes passed by. Cherrie in particular had great respect for the South American alligator. He had nearly lost his life to one while on an expedition on the Orinoco. The river had been low, and the mud flat that bordered it studded with flat, exposed stones. He was stepping from stone to stone, his mind and eyes on the birds that lined the river, when he suddenly felt an impulse to look down. In mid-stride, with his foot still dangling in the air, he realized that he was just about to step not on a stone but on the back of a large caiman. “Had I done so,” he later wrote, “the creature would have instantly whirled about and had me in his jaws before I could possibly have escaped.”

  The river’s other inhabitants were largely invisible from the expedition’s dugouts, but the fact that they could not be seen only heightened the oppressive sense of danger they instilled in the men. Aboard their crude,
heavily loaded boats, they sat at most just six inches above the water, and courted danger whenever one of them dangled his foot overboard or trailed his fingers in the current. If one of their boats tipped over in a whirlpool or rapid, the men would find themselves dumped into the middle of the river with no option but a frightening swim to shore.

  Launching and landing the boats, often chest-deep in water amid the heavy underbrush that lined the riverbank, the men were constantly vulnerable to the predatory fish, waterborne snakes, and other creatures they were disturbing. Even the mundane necessity of bathing was a source of ongoing concern, although, in the mud and sweltering jungle heat, the men grew willing to take their chances. Roosevelt himself cooled off in the river at every opportunity. Floating in the shallow water near the bank, the 220-pound former president looked to Rondon “like some sort of a great, fat fish which had come to the surface,” defying the dangers that surrounded him.

  The fish that inspired the greatest fear among the men was the piranha. Attracted by blood and drawn to the kind of commotion that a bathing man might make, piranha have been known to swim in groups of more than a hundred, spreading out to scout for prey and then alerting the others, probably by sound, when they find it. Of the approximately twenty piranha species, most prefer to attack something their own size or smaller, and they are happy to scavenge, especially during the rainy season, when there is more to choose from. However, their muscular jaws and sawlike teeth, which look as if they have been filed to tiny spear points, can make quick work of a living creature of any size and strength, from a waterbird to a monkey to even an ox. During telegraph line expeditions, Rondon and his soldiers regularly offered up their weakest ox to a school of piranha so that the rest of their herd could safely cross a river.