Roosevelt’s children never suffered from a lack of opportunity to master their buck fever. On one occasion, their father found a big hollow tree that had a wide opening twenty feet up—perfect, he thought, for dangling small children in. “With much labor, I got up the tree,” Roosevelt proudly wrote to his sister Bamie, “and let each child in turn down the hollow by a rope.” His method for teaching his children to swim was not much gentler. He took them to a dock and ordered them to leap into the deep water. His oldest child, Alice, was particularly frightened of diving, but her father was not about to let her off the hook. He would shout, “Dive, Alice! Now, dive!” until, finally, trembling with fear, she would launch her tiny body into the cold, dark water.
Kermit, although he was always a sober little boy and less demonstrative than his siblings, worked as hard as any of the children to please his father and prove himself. There was never any question that he had been paying attention during his childhood scrambles across Oyster Bay. The problem was that Roosevelt’s lessons in manliness may have struck too deep a chord in his second son. Kermit had become almost too fearless, and certainly too reckless for even his father’s comfort. Although Roosevelt was proud of his son’s physical strength and courage, he worried that Kermit’s thirst for adventure was ungoverned by the kind of wisdom that comes with age, and untempered by even a small measure of caution.
Roosevelt’s letters home from Africa had been filled with stories of Kermit’s utter disregard for danger and his own incessant fretting. To his sister Corinne, he had written, “Kermit is a great pleasure to me, and of course often a cause of much concern. Do you remember how timid he used to be? Well, my trouble with him now is that he is altogether too bold, pushing daring into recklessness.” Kermit had faced down charging lions, elephants, and rhinoceroses in Africa. He had disappeared into the bush for two months with one of their guides and returned, Roosevelt wrote, “a better hunter than I am.” But Roosevelt knew that all of his son’s courage and skill could not save him if he continued to act carelessly. “Since I have been out here twelve men have been killed or mauled by Lions,” he had written Corinne, “and, naturally, when Kermit shows a reckless indifference to consequences when hunting them, I feel like beating him.”
Now, on the River of Doubt, Roosevelt’s old fears for his son’s safety had returned with a vengeance, and he winced every time Kermit climbed into his dugout to set off ahead of the rest of the expedition. Roosevelt wrote that Kermit was a “great comfort and help” to him on this expedition, but he admitted that he could never completely relax while his son pushed along on the unknown river so far ahead of him. “The fear of some fatal accident befalling him,” he wrote, “was always a nightmare to me.”
Although Roosevelt had long lectured Kermit about his recklessness, his advice appeared to have had little effect on his son’s actions. It certainly did not that afternoon on the River of Doubt, as he ordered his paddlers to carry him to the island that rested in the center of the rapids. Feeling that they had no choice but to obey Kermit’s command, João and Simplicio braced their paddles against the bank and shoved off. The three men successfully rode the current downstream and halfway across the river to the island. As soon as they disembarked, however, they realized that Rondon was right: There was no safe channel on either side of the river.
Now they were not only stranded on the island, they were farther down the river than they had been—and closer to the thundering waterfall. Kermit ordered the camaradas to board the dugout and cross back to the left bank. Both João and Simplicio, Roosevelt wrote, were “exceptionally good men in every way,” but they balked at this command. Kermit had to repeat his order before they reluctantly dug their paddles into the rushing river.
The three men were on their journey back when their canoe was suddenly struck by one of the shifting whirlpools that they had seen the day before. The vortex spun them around and, as Kermit shouted to his steersman to turn the dugout so that it would take the inevitable blow head-on rather than broadside, forced them over the fall. Incredibly, when they reached the bottom, their small canoe, which Roosevelt complained was “the least seaworthy of all,” was still upright. However, it had taken in so much water it could hardly float. Realizing that their only chance for survival was to make it to the shore, João and Simplicio paddled as fast and as hard as they could. They had just pulled themselves to within grasping distance of the bank when another whirlpool sucked them in and spat them back out into the middle of the river.
Fighting to save not just his companions but their crude canoe, João leapt into the water and desperately grabbed a hawser that had been tied to the bow. Straining against the rope, he tried to drag the dugout back to the bank as he slipped and stumbled over the riverbed. The current, however, was too strong for him. It quickly ripped the hawser out of his hands, flipped the canoe over, and hurled it downstream. The last thing that João saw as the dugout swirled out of sight was Simplicio and Kermit clinging to its splintered, capsized hull.
* * *
FROM THEIR canoe above the rapids, Roosevelt and Cherrie had watched in horror as Kermit, João, and Simplicio struggled to maintain control of their dugout and then disappeared over the waterfall. Shouting to their paddlers to pull over, they had scrambled out of their canoe and raced along the uneven bank until they reached the bottom of a second waterfall. What they saw there would have stopped any father’s heart. Kermit’s dugout lay among the rocks, as Cherrie would later write, “crushed to splinters.”
CHAPTER 18
Attack
AS HIS FATHER STRAINED desperately to catch a glimpse of him in the roiling river, Kermit fought for his life downstream. When his dugout was swept over the second waterfall, the impact had crushed the boat and hurled Kermit, Simplicio, and Kermit’s dog into the water. Kermit was still alive and conscious, but his battle with the river was only beginning. His favorite rifle, the .405 Winchester he had carried in Africa, was knocked from his hands, and the rushing water blinded, choked, and pummeled him. Like a relentless hammer, the torrent drove his broad, hard sun helmet over his face and forced his body down to the jagged riverbed. His waterlogged jacket became an anchor, dragging him to the bottom of the river.
Somewhere in the middle of the raging rapids, Simplicio was also being propelled through layers of white foam and black water. The powerful, rushing water and deadly whirlpools created by the rocky riverbed swept him violently downstream, threatening at any moment to pull him under long enough for his life, in Roosevelt’s words, to be “beaten out on the bowlders beneath the racing torrent.”
While Kermit and Simplicio struggled in the river, Rondon was walking back along its left bank, unaware of their plight, having found the portage route that he was looking for. As he approached his canoe, preoccupied with his orders for the camaradas, he was suddenly startled by what he saw—or, rather, did not see—in front of him. He had expected to find Kermit’s dugout tied to a tree alongside his own. Turning to his pilot, a well-respected camarada named Antonio Correia, Rondon demanded to know what had happened after he left. He listened in astonishment as Antonio told him that Kermit had blatantly disobeyed his command.
Furious, and worried that Kermit had put his boat and its precious provisions at risk, Rondon turned and hurried with Lyra toward the falls. In the distance, the two men caught sight of Kermit’s dog, Trigueiro, running toward them. The closer the dog approached, the greater Rondon’s concern became and the faster he began to walk, until he and Lyra were practically running along the river’s edge. By the time they reached Trigueiro, it was obvious to both men that the dog had been thrown into the river. Trigueiro was soaking wet. More ominously, he was alone.
Rushing past the dog, Rondon and Lyra raced to the bottom of the first waterfall. As they approached the crest of a small hill, they saw a lone figure climbing toward them on the other side. It was Kermit—drenched, battered, and weak with exhaustion, but alive. Rondon’s first reaction was overwhelming relief
. His relief, however, quickly gave way to anger. Rondon was not accustomed to being disobeyed, even by the son of a former president of the United States. By refusing to listen to him, Kermit had endangered the entire expedition. When Kermit was finally standing before him, Rondon’s rage boiled over into sarcasm. “Well,” he said caustically, “you have had a splendid bath, eh?”
Standing on the narrow, muddy trail, water running in rivulets down his pants and pooling at his feet, Kermit tried to explain what had happened to him and, he believed, João and Simplicio. After he was driven to the bottom of the river by the rapids, a back current had carried him to a stretch of swift but calm water. “Almost drowned, his breath and strength almost spent,” he had spotted an overhanging branch and recognized it as his best and probably last chance for survival. Grabbing the branch, he had hauled himself out of the river. Trigueiro, who had been by Kermit’s side throughout the ordeal, scrambled up the bank next to his master as he collapsed on the shore. João and Simplicio, Kermit now told Rondon, must have swum to safety on the other side of the river, but he did not know what had happened to his canoe or its contents.
Accepting Kermit’s assumption that everyone was probably safe, Rondon and Lyra focused their attention on the problem of portaging around the second waterfall, which they had not even known existed until they heard Kermit’s story, and searching for his canoe and any provisions that might have survived the rapids. As valuable as the canoe itself was the cargo that it had been carrying: essential boatbuilding tools as well as ten days’ worth of rations, the loss of which would be devastating. No sooner had Kermit walked away, however, than João appeared before Rondon and Lyra. As Kermit had guessed, João had emerged from the river on the other side and had somehow managed to make his way back across. But he had not seen Simplicio since the camarada had disappeared over the second waterfall with Kermit.
Rondon ordered an immediate manhunt. It was, he wrote, their “one hope left.” After a frantic search, which extended about a mile downstream, however, the men were able to recover nothing more than a battered paddle and a single box of rations. It was clear to them all what had happened. “Unfortunately the moment arrived when it was impossible to deceive ourselves,” Rondon wrote. “Simplicio was drowned.”
* * *
THAT NIGHT, after the men, now numbering only twenty-one, had finished their portage around the last waterfall, they retired to their tents and hammocks. Hunched over his small table, Roosevelt acknowledged in the article he was writing that his son had had a “very narrow escape.” Had they lost Kermit rather than Simplicio that day, he wrote, he did not think he could have borne the pain of bringing “bad tidings to his betrothed and to his mother.” Kermit’s near-drowning had been a result of the young man’s own recklessness, but Roosevelt felt a heavy weight of responsibility for having chosen to descend this dangerous river, and for having brought his son along with him. Although Kermit had joined the expedition in order to protect his father, Roosevelt’s mission from this point onward would be to protect Kermit, and to ensure that he made it out of the rain forest alive.
Having faced his own mortality and having caused, albeit indirectly, another man’s death, Kermit showed no signs of remorse or even any sense of responsibility when he scribbled a brief account of the day’s events in his journal that night. He recorded the fact of Simplicio’s death as tersely and unemotionally as he did his own near-drowning. “Simplicio was drowned,” he wrote. If he felt sorrow for Simplicio’s death, or regret for his own rash decision to cross to the other side of the river when Rondon had warned him not to, he did not admit it in his diary. Nor did he appear to have any desire to change his ways. If Roosevelt had hoped that this tragedy had driven some degree of fear or even caution into his son, he was to be disappointed.
The man who seemed to be most shaken by what had happened that day was Cherrie. Having spent half his life traveling through South American jungles, he understood the gravity of their situation better than did Kermit or Roosevelt, and he was more concerned about surviving the journey than was Rondon. Although he regretted Simplicio’s death, he was much more disturbed that they had lost Kermit’s dugout and most of its cargo. “The loss of a human life is always a tragedy,” he wrote. “But the loss of the canoe and its contents was an even greater tragedy to the remaining members of our party.” In his last letter home, which he had written the day before they launched their boats on the river, Cherrie had told his wife, Stella, that he hoped to be back in Vermont in time to help sow the spring crops at Rocky Dell. “We may reach New York by the end of May,” he had written. “I hope we shall for I would like very much to be able to help get in the potatoes and other crops.” He realized now, however, that if he was ever going to see his family or Rocky Dell again, the expedition could not afford any more losses like those they had suffered that day.
Rondon, although angry that Kermit’s disobedience had cost him the life of one of his men, was neither shocked by Simplicio’s death nor deterred by it. “Certainly no one commences an enterprise of the kind in which we were engaged, without having previously become acquainted with the idea of the danger which same may offer, and of the innumerable occasions in which one has to face death,” he wrote. For Rondon, death was merely one of the many costs of achieving a much larger goal that had already cost the lives of countless of his men: opening the country’s interior and integrating the Amazon’s native peoples into Brazilian society.
Few Brazilians, including many of Rondon’s soldiers, shared his passion for contacting and befriending Indians, or even believed that such a thing was possible. Backed by a number of vocal civilians, his men resented the sacrifices that they were expected to make in the name of their commander’s ideals. At one point, a group of rubber plantation owners wrote to the Brazilian newspaper A Cruz that Rondon “lets his soldiers die of hunger while distributing food to the savages.” In the most remote reaches of the Amazon, however, Rondon was unreachable and unstoppable. He had never allowed his men’s suffering or even their deaths to affect his work in the wilderness, and he never would. “Death and dangers, in spite of how much suffering they bring,” he wrote, “should not interfere with the expedition’s mission.”
* * *
THE NEXT morning, March 16, the men awoke ready to face the river once again. While the rain fell heavily in the still-dark forest, they gathered around Rondon to listen to his Orders of the Day. As a representative of the Brazilian government, Rondon “perpetuated the name of the unfortunate Simplicio” by officially naming for him the waterfall that had ended his young life. Simplicio was unmarried, so Rondon and Roosevelt agreed that, if they survived this journey, they would send the money that he would have earned to his mother. Unable to do anything more for the young man who had lost his life for their ambition, they carved a short inscription on one side of their camp marker—“In these rapids died poor Simplicio”—and solemnly walked away.
There was no doubt in anyone’s mind that they had another hard and dangerous day ahead of them. The day before, during their desperate search for Simplicio, they had found another series of rapids downstream, even worse than the one that had drowned the camarada. Further complicating the situation was the fact that they now had twenty-one men and only five canoes, and none of the trees near their camp were suitable material for dugouts. Some of the men would have to walk.
At 7:00 a.m., in a blinding rain, Kermit climbed into the expedition’s large new canoe and set off ahead of the rest of the boats, just as he had for the past two and a half weeks. After only half an hour on the river, the men reached the rapids that they had known awaited them. As Kermit had already explored the left side of the river in his search for Simplicio, Rondon and Lyra paddled to the right side, where they found a channel that circumvented the worst part of the rapids. Luiz and Antonio Correia, the expedition’s two best watermen, were then charged with the job of lowering the empty dugouts by ropes from the right bank. At the same time, the rest of
the camaradas would begin cutting a half-mile-long portage road along the left bank for the baggage carry. Having satisfied himself that all of his men were suitably engaged in useful work, Rondon took his favorite dog, Lobo, and set off over a hill just behind their camp in the hope of finding game or, failing that, Brazil nuts.
Although the rest of the men rarely left camp alone, especially after they saw the abandoned Indian village and found the pateran, Rondon was most at ease when he was on his own. He was, and had always been, a loner. He had found his own way in the world, first as an orphan and then as an outsider at the military academy in Rio de Janeiro. Even after he had married, he had been separated for long periods of time and by hundreds of miles from his wife and children.
Francisca Rondon had suffered as much as any of her husband’s soldiers over the past twenty-two years. She had been raised as a sheltered city girl in Rio de Janeiro, the daughter of one of Rondon’s professors at the military school, but soon after she married, she had left that life behind, moving to remote Mato Grosso to be closer to Cândido. Since then, she had given birth to seven children, endured isolation and illness—including malaria and yaws, an infectious tropical disease that attacks the skin and bones—and been forced to carry on without her husband for months and even years at a time. She finally taught herself telegraphic code so that she could send brief messages to him while he was in the field. On their ninth wedding anniversary, in February 1901, Rondon had sent her a wistful telegram: “This day brings us sweet remembrances of the past. Let us accept our sad life. Miss you deeply. Embraces. Candido.”
The River of Doubt: Theodore Roosevelt's Darkest Journey Page 21