The River of Doubt: Theodore Roosevelt's Darkest Journey

by Candice Millard

  Like that of other rain forest organisms, the physical form of insects has evolved to accomplish a spectacular range of survival-related feats, from living upside down on canopy leaves to flying almost invisibly on transparent wings to biting with pincerlike mandibles so large that they are sometimes used by Indians to suture wounds. The Brazilian wasp Mischocyttarus drewensi secretes a chemical repellent from its abdomen that, when slathered onto the stem that holds its nest, forces marauding ants to turn back and abandon their plans of attack. Ants of the neotropical genus Basiceros have made themselves all but invisible on the forest floor both by camouflaging their bodies in fine particles of soil that collect in two layers of hair and by learning the value of slothlike immobility. When foraging, the ants move extremely slowly, and if disturbed, they stand perfectly still for minutes at a time, disappearing into the rotting litter around them.

  More than any other rain forest creatures, insects have extended and refined their individual capabilities through elaborate social structures. As Roosevelt and his men discovered from their first moments on the River of Doubt, the powerful influence of ants, termites, wasps, and other highly regimented insects comes not only from the particular traits of any single individual, but from the collective, coordinated activities of colonies and hives that can number as many as a million members. Acting in concert, but with highly specialized roles, columns of hundreds of thousands of army ants can fan out in raiding parties fifty feet across at their front lines, harvesting huge numbers of tarantulas, roaches, beetles, scorpions, snakes, lizards, birds, and nearly anything else in their path before returning at dusk with the bodies of their prey to their common bivouac.

  Insects have also developed highly refined, mutually beneficial relationships with other rain forest organisms. Many tropical trees and plants have special sheltering cavities or nectar-producing structures for the benefit of ants, which in return then patrol them vigilantly, defending them against herbivores, tending their leaves, and eating the eggs and larvae of other potentially damaging insects. As a result of such relationships, virtually every growing thing teems with insects; a single tree in the Amazon can serve as home to more than forty different species of ant, rendering even the most casual contact with it a nightmare of painful bites.

  At this early point in the Roosevelt-Rondon Expedition, the insects had already become the bane of the men’s existence. On the morning of March 4, Cherrie woke up to find that the poncho that he had spread underneath his hammock the night before was “literally alive with termites.” Unfortunately for the expedition, termites swarm during the rainy season. The mass swarming may be an effort to increase their chances for reproducing, or it may better their odds for surviving their countless predators. Whatever the reason for this invasion, every man suffered because of it. The termites ate Cherrie’s duffle bag, the red lining of Roosevelt’s helmet, and even one leg of the former president’s underwear. “When the Colonel held them up for our inspection there was a shout of laughter,” Cherrie recalled. “But I don’t believe he relished our mirth.”

  Roosevelt might have found more humor in the situation if he had had underwear to spare. As it was, he had precious few pairs left. Not only had he left some of these essential items behind in an effort to reduce his personal belongings during the overland journey, but he had also lost some to another, earlier attack. One night near Utiarity, while he and Kermit were sleeping, one of the expedition’s pack oxen had gotten into their tent and feasted on their underwear.

  The insects were more than destructive. Their bites were maddening and painful, forcing even strong men to seek shelter. “Our hands and faces were swollen from the bites and stings of the insect pests,” Roosevelt complained. Each night when he sat down at his little portable table to work on his Scribner’s articles, Roosevelt had to pull long, fringed gauntlets over his hands and arms and drape his sun helmet in mosquito netting that hung heavily over his face.

  To fight off the insects, the men had at least one useful weapon besides clothing and netting: fly dope. Developed in the late nineteenth century, fly dope was one of the first chemical insect repellents to be introduced in the United States. “I had never before been forced to use such an ointment, and had been reluctant to take it with me,” Roosevelt admitted. “But now I was glad enough to have it, and we all of us found it exceedingly useful. I would never again go into mosquito or sand-fly country without it.”

  As welcome a relief as it had been, however, the small quantity of fly dope that Roosevelt had brought with him was hardly sufficient compared to the sheer scale of the insect life that the expedition encountered as it made its way down the River of Doubt.

  * * *

  FOR EVERY plant and creature that surrounded Roosevelt and his men as they toiled to build their first portage road, the qualifications for survival in the rain forest were essentially the same: the ability to find food, the ability to find their way through the labyrinth of nature around them, and the ability to protect themselves and their offspring from predators.

  In every part of the jungle, those requirements had produced miracles of adaptation and efficiency. In their hunt for food, the birds overhead enjoyed eyesight roughly eight times as acute as the best human vision. Some of the hawk moths that fluttered across their campsite at night could unfurl six-inch-long tongues to drink from the deep-throated flowers that sustained them. The leaf-cutting ants that paraded by in long lines, carrying proportionally huge bits of foliage, could not eat that leaf matter outright, but painstakingly transported it back home to cultivate the underground fungus on which their colony survived.

  Although the men of the expedition couldn’t discern them, the apparent chaos around them was actually organized into sophisticated paths that led throughout the jungle. Pink-faced capuchin monkeys swung along rapidly on carefully defined arboreal pathways at heights where the smallest miscalculation could mean a fatal fall. Millions of bats, following intricate sounds shaped by the strange fleshy protrusions, or nose leaves, on their faces, swooped confidently through the crowded, pitch-black forest on the basis of sound alone, alighting blindly but precisely on their nectar-filled blossoms, fruit, or insect prey, and even taking delicate sips of water from the river in mid-flight. Snakes, spiders, millipedes, mice, and lizards—to say nothing of their amazing ant neighbors—followed chemical pathways of taste and smell across the thin forest floor, ranging far each night before returning with flawless navigation to their carefully hidden sanctuaries.

  At every step, any resources that did not go to finding sustenance were devoted to securing protection from predators. Everything in the rain forest, even the trees, had adapted to protect itself and its progeny from predation. The rubber tree, which had made the Amazon Basin a center of frenzied commercial attention, produced its sticky resin not for the purpose of building automobile tires, but to choke its insect predators. The army ants that flooded out of the trees and plants that the expedition disturbed were genetically programmed to give their own lives to save the one to three hundred thousand offspring carried by their one queen.

  Within such an intricate world of resourcefulness, skill, and ruthless self-interest, refined over hundreds of millions of years, Roosevelt and his men were, for all their own experience and knowledge, vulnerable outsiders. Most of the men were veteran outdoorsmen, and many of them considered themselves masters of nature. They were stealthy hunters, crack shots, and experienced survivalists, and, given the right tools, they believed that they would never find themselves in a situation in the wild that they could not control. But as they struggled to make their way along the shores of the River of Doubt, any basis for such confidence was quickly slipping away. Compared with the creatures of the Amazon, including the Indians whose territory they were invading, they were all—from the lowliest camarada to the former president of the United States—clumsy, conspicuous prey.

  CHAPTER 15

  The Wild Water

  THE LONG DIFFICULT PORTAGE around th
e first set of rapids, which Rondon had named Navaité Rapids in honor of the Indians who he believed lived at their foot, finally ended on the morning of March 5. By early afternoon, the men had relaunched their canoes and were back on the river. Riding on the smooth current, they noticed that the forest on either side of them grew denser and denser—“and therefore more picturesque,” Rondon wrote—as they pushed deeper and deeper into the Amazon. The rain forest that flanked the River of Doubt was the definition of a primordial jungle. It was lush, vivid green, and absolutely pristine.

  At night, gathered close to their campfire after a simple dinner, the men unfailingly talked about the river’s undecipherable course, wondering aloud where it would lead them and what the next day would hold. “We held endless discussions and hazarded all kinds of guesses on both subjects,” Roosevelt would later recall. Regarding the river’s final destination, they had whittled the multitude of possibilities down to only four: It could swing westward and feed into the Gy-Paraná, the same river that Miller and Amilcar were now descending. It could curve to the east and enter the Tapajos, the river that Roosevelt had originally planned to descend with Father Zahm. It could straighten out and head directly north to pour into the Madeira, the principal tributary of the Amazon River, as Rondon had gambled. Or it could turn out to be a direct tributary of the Amazon.

  “We did not know whether we had one hundred or eight hundred kilometers to go,” Roosevelt wrote, “whether the stream would be fairly smooth or whether we would encounter waterfalls, or rapids, or even some big marsh or lake.” Roosevelt did not have long to wait for the answer to his second question. Around three o’clock the next afternoon, the men again felt the current quicken and heard the ominous roar of rapids ahead. They stopped, tied their canoes to some trees, and made their way down the bank by using a narrow trail blazed by a tapir. What they saw just a quarter-mile downstream—two waterfalls carved out of red porphyritic rock followed by a series of treacherous rapids—left no doubt in anyone’s mind that they would again have to haul their heavy dugouts from the water and drag them through the jungle.

  * * *

  THE EXPEDITION’S second portage took three full days. The men were nervous not only about the time and rations that they were losing by carrying the equipment and hauling the canoes over the rough terrain, but about the damage that they were doing to their dugouts in the process. During the first portage, Roosevelt’s canoe, battered by the crude corduroy road, had cracked. They had managed to patch it, but they did not know how long it would last or what yet another long portage would do to it or the other canoes. The dugouts—heavy, clumsy, and sagging though they were—were as precious to the men as the provisions that they carried.

  The men had no hope that this series of rapids might be the last that they would encounter. On the first full day of the portage, the expedition got more bad news. Kermit had gone about four miles downstream that day to hunt with his dog, Trigueiro, and Antonio Pareci, one of Roosevelt’s paddlers. As a hunt, the outing had been a success. Kermit returned with a jacu—a turkeylike bird—for Franca’s pot, and Antonio brought back a big monkey. Roosevelt himself had even developed a taste for monkey meat, pronouncing his first mouthful “very good eating.” But, as excited as the men had been to see Antonio Pareci holding a monkey in his hands when he walked back into camp, the news that Kermit carried deflated their spirits. If they made it through this series of treacherous rapids, he reported, another one awaited them not far downriver.

  The men were defeated before they had even finished their first day of muscle-wrenching, bone-jarring work portaging around this second series of rapids. Lyra and Kermit divided the camaradas into two divisions. While Lyra and his men cut and laid the corduroy road, Kermit’s team began dragging the dugouts up from the river. Together they then strained to pull the boats through the jungle and down the steep bank at the foot of the rapids.

  On March 10, the men finally completed their three-day, 750-yard portage and relaunched their boats. Only a mile later, however, they reached the rapids that Kermit had warned them about. This time the prospect of another overland struggle was too much for them to bear. On the theory that the risk to their canoes from another haul through the jungle was even greater than the threat of smashing them to matchsticks in the roiling river, they decided to plunge ahead and take their chances on the water. One group of camaradas was assigned to carry the provisions to the foot of the falls by means of a hastily cut forest trail, while the rest of the men worked to get the empty dugouts through the rapids. The three individual canoes were then run straight through the boulder-strewn water by a couple of naked and intrepid paddlers, who managed to bring them through undamaged. The smaller of the two balsas, however, did not make it. It was swamped, and before they could do anything to save it, it sank.

  Desperate not to lose the canoes, the camaradas tore into the river and wrenched them free from the rapids. In the process, one camarada was momentarily carried away by the rushing water. He fought his way to the bank, but not before slashing his face open on the unforgiving rocks that lined the riverbed. Shaken by the near-catastrophe, the men were not willing to risk the second, larger balsa. They secured it to ropes and slowly lowered it down the river.

  No one worked harder than Kermit to get the expedition past these rapids and back onto the river. He was at his best when he had a mission. Left to his own devices, he had a tendency to brood, even to fall into a quiet depression, but, given a cause, he worked harder than anyone around him. He thrived on the challenge, and Roosevelt marveled at his son, who had grown a heavy beard and was “dressed substantially like the camaradas themselves,” as he worked tirelessly to defeat the rapids that stood between him and home.

  * * *

  AFTER TWELVE days on the river, the expedition had only managed to cover seventy-five miles—an average of less than seven miles a day. Exhausted and hungry, the men decided to make camp immediately, directly below the last rapid. As usual, they searched for a high, level stretch of ground and then moored their canoes to some trees at the river’s edge. Perhaps Fiala’s stories of losing his provisions to the icy waters of the Arctic had stayed with them, because that night, as beaten by the river and jungle as they were, they hauled their provisions out of the canoes and up the slippery, overgrown bank. At the time it seemed like nothing more than a mild precaution.

  As the men slept that night in their hammocks—the camaradas beneath twelve-foot-long wild banana-tree leaves that gave them some meager shelter from the rain—the river rose. Slowly, inch by inch, water began to seep into the old and leaky dugout that had been tied to the expedition’s largest canoe. At some point during the night, the leaky dugout took on so much water that it began to sink, dragging the big canoe down with it. Since the men had chosen a campsite close to the tail of the rapids, the river was not only high, it was rough, and the two boats rolled and twisted in the current until they finally snapped their moorings and were swept downriver.

  The members of the expedition had endured a week of painful portages because they could not imagine losing even one canoe. Now they had lost two. When they discovered their loss the next morning, the men, hoping against hope that they would recover at least one of the dugouts, immediately mounted a search party. However, the same sharp boulders that had torn open the face of one of their paddlers had made quick work of the old waterlogged dugouts. “Rolling over the bowlders [sic] on the rocky bottom, they had at once been riven asunder,” Roosevelt wrote. “And the big fragments that were soon found, floating in eddies, or along the shore, showed that it was useless to look farther.”

  The men had saved their provisions from the same fate by hauling them up to camp the night before, but with only five canoes left, they could no longer carry all of their food and equipment, not to mention their men, down the river. Now, not only could the members of the expedition not turn back, but they could not move forward. They were stranded on the tree-shrouded banks of the River of Doubt.
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br />   CHAPTER 16

  Danger Afloat, Danger Ashore

  STANDING AT the river’s edge, Roosevelt and his men realized that they had very few options left. They could either try to hack their way through the forest on foot—likely losing most if not all of their men in the process—or they could try to build a new canoe. The last option was nearly as dangerous as the first. “That means time and the eating into our limited supply of provisions!” Cherrie scrawled frustratedly in his diary. He knew as well as Roosevelt and Rondon that the expedition could ill afford a delay of even a few days.

  In an effort to find out just how dire their circumstances had become, the expedition’s officers gathered together to take stock of their rations. When splitting the provisions with Miller and Amilcar before they launched their boats, the River of Doubt party had taken fifty of the ninety food tins that Fiala had packed, as well as the seventy-five United States Army emergency rations he had purchased as a precaution. Each tin box was meant to hold enough food for five men for one day. Concerned that the former president have not just gourmet condiments but also a variety of foods during what was supposed to be an uneventful journey, Fiala had planned seven different meals—one for each day of the week—and had numbered each box, from one to seven, so that Roosevelt would never have to have the same meal twice in a row. The Friday meal, for example, consisted of rice, bread, gingersnaps, dehydrated potatoes and onions, Erbswurst (a type of sausage), condensed milk, bacon, curry and chicken, dates, sugar, coffee, tea, and salt. The Saturday meal was similar, but Fiala had made some strategic changes, such as replacing rice with oatmeal, and potatoes with baked beans. Each tin, which had been lacquered to protect it from rust, also held a yard of muslin, two boxes of matches, and a single cake of soap.