The River of Doubt: Theodore Roosevelt's Darkest Journey

by Candice Millard

  In the field, surrounded by hundreds of men, Rondon had found his job as commander to be a lonely and friendless one. But for a handful of close confidants, such as Lyra and Amilcar, Rondon’s only companionship had come from his dogs. At times he had as many as twenty dogs in his camp, and he always had a favored pack of three or four that were constantly by his side. They did not complain or mutiny, and they were cheerful, trustworthy, and devoted to their master. There was no question that Rondon cared more for these dogs than he did for his own men, or that he worried about their safety and comfort. He showered them with affection, shared his food with them, and, on one occasion, even halted a march so that they could rest. On another march, he had carried one of his dogs in his arms so that he “would not die of exhaustion.” Although he rarely devoted more than a single sentence in his journal to the death of one of his men, Rondon penned heartfelt eulogies to his dogs. After his dog Vulcão died, for instance, he wrote, “Travel companion who guarded my tent . . . Poor companion! How I feel your death. . .. You who served me so well, without my being able to pay you back for half of your dedication.”

  Now, contentedly walking through the forest with faithful Lobo at his side, Rondon turned north after cresting the hill behind the expedition’s camp and headed back in the direction of the River of Doubt. After following the river about a mile downstream, he came to a point at which a narrow canal split off from the main waterway. Making his way through the tangle of trees and vines along the canal, Rondon suddenly heard the unmistakable quavering whinny of the coatá, or spider monkey, the largest primate in the Amazon rain forest. Taking “a thousand precautions” so that he would not frighten the monkey, Rondon crouched down in the thick vegetation and slowly made his way toward the sound. As he scanned the trees’ highest branches, where he knew the coatá lived, he could imagine his men’s delight when he walked into camp holding a twenty-pound spider monkey by its long, dark tail.

  The forest was typically quiet, and Rondon did his best not to snap branches or rustle leaves as he crept through the underbrush. Excited by the hunt, Lobo sprinted ahead of his master and quickly disappeared from view. Moments later, the silence was rent by a high-pitched yelp.

  Certain that Lobo had been attacked by an animal, a jaguar or perhaps a peccary, Rondon braced himself for the worst. Then he heard something even more bone-chilling—the sound of human voices. “These were well known to me,” he would later recall. “They were short exclamations, energetic, and repeated in a kind of chorus with a certain cadence peculiar to Indians who when they are ready for the fight commence the attack on the enemy.” At that moment, Rondon was the enemy, and he had no protection beyond his rifle and the cover of the rain forest. His only hope was to remain as invisible to the Indians as they were to him.

  Suddenly Lobo reappeared, staggering toward his master and giving away Rondon’s hiding place. As the dog drew near, Rondon could see two long arrows protruding from his side. In desperation, with the Indians’ war cries ringing in his ears, Rondon raised his rifle and fired into the air. The blast shook the leaves around him and put startled animals to flight, but the Indians kept coming. Although Rondon still could not see Lobo’s attackers, he could hear them clearly, chattering excitedly to one another from the dense cover of the rain forest. He fired his other barrel, but the war whoops continued. Finally, realizing that he could not defend himself against certain attack, Colonel Rondon turned and fled.

  * * *

  HE FOUND the rest of the men at the foot of the rapids, where he had established the expedition’s next camp earlier that morning. Gathering his officers together, he told them what had happened. Their worst fear had been realized: The Indians that lived on the River of Doubt were no longer ghosts. They were real, and they were prepared to attack.

  The others had alarming news of their own. While Rondon was gone, they had lost another canoe. Luiz and Antonio Correia had successfully brought one of the dugouts down the channel, but as they were lowering the large canoe that they had built themselves just a few days earlier, the rope had broken and the canoe had been swept into a colony of boulders. Luiz had almost been swept away with it. The other camaradas had managed to save him, but they had not been able to save the canoe, or the ropes and pulleys that it had carried.

  Rondon was deeply concerned about the loss of the new dugout, but the Indians worried him more. Turning to Lyra and Kermit, he asked them to return with him to the scene of the attack. They agreed and, taking Dr. Cajazeira and Antonio Pareci with them, immediately set out to retrace Rondon’s steps.

  By the time the five men reached the canal, the Indians had vanished. The men discovered a few items that they had left behind, however, including a small basket filled with animal entrails and tied to a long rod. Rondon guessed that the basket had been used for fishing. The Indians, he thought, must have lowered it into the river, waited for fish to swim over to the bait, and then speared them with their arrows. Kneeling down, he placed some gifts—a couple of axes and a few beads—next to the basket, a gesture he hoped would send the message that, not only did he and his men not want to be the Indians’ enemies, but they hoped to be their friends.

  Scanning the forest, the men found a rough trail that led across the canal and had clearly been the Indians’ path of retreat. Then Rondon found another, more grizzly trail: drops of blood smeared on leaves and dripped on branches. He followed the bloody trail for about three hundred yards, until, at its end, he found Lobo. The dog had tried to make his way back to camp but had finally collapsed. The arrows that had killed him still protruded from his small body. One had struck his left leg and torn away the muscle. The other had entered his stomach, just below his heart. That arrow had been launched with such force that it had been driven completely through his body, and its bloodstained tip emerged from the other side. Looking down at Lobo, no one could have any doubt that the Indians’ intent had been to kill—and that, had Rondon walked into the ambush first, it would have been his body rather than Lobo’s that lay in a pool of blood on the forest floor.

  Despite his sorrow and fear, Rondon refused to abandon his principles. “These melancholic reflections,” he wrote, “did not divert me away from my habitual norm of conduct regarding the Indians.” He had faced hostile Indians before and would likely do so again, and he was more worried about alienating them than dying at their hands.

  Rondon had long argued that Indians attacked only when forced to do so. In fact, he claimed that 90 percent of the Indian attacks that took place in Brazil were nothing more than acts of self-defense and retaliation. The idea that Indians might attack the expedition for reasons of fear or self-defense offered little comfort to Roosevelt, who noted wryly, “If you are shot by a man because he is afraid of you it is almost as unpleasant as if he shot you because he disliked you.”

  Even Rondon was shaken by what he found when he knelt down to get a closer look at the arrows that had impaled Lobo. Since the expedition had passed the abandoned village more than two weeks earlier, Rondon had assumed that the Indians that surrounded them in the rain forest were Nhambiquara, members of the tribe with whom he had made first contact seven years earlier. But as he examined these arrows, he realized that he was wrong. The arrow that had impaled Lobo had a point that was shaped like a barbed lance and was made from bamboo. This, Rondon knew, was not the work of the Nhambiquara. “The river Duvida,” he concluded, “was inhabited by a new tribe of Indians with regard to which we possessed no information.”

  Rondon did not know these Indians, and they did not know him. There was not even the pretense of peace between them and the outside world. Rondon, moreover, could only assume that, whoever these Indians were, they would defend their land as fiercely as the Nhambiquara had defended theirs. The critical difference was that he had been able to retreat after being attacked by the Nhambiquara. Now retreat was impossible. In fact, in order to survive, they would have to go deeper into the territory of this unknown tribe—a land where, they now
knew with certainty, they were not welcome.

  CHAPTER 19

  The Wide Belts

  BY ROUGHLY TWO MILLION years ago, humans had spread out of Africa and into Europe and Asia. Hundreds of thousands of years later, they migrated to Australia and New Guinea, which were then connected as a single continent. Because they did not yet have boats and could not endure the cruel cold of Siberia, tens of thousands of years more passed before they crossed the Bering Land Bridge and made their way into the Americas. When they finally began to populate North America, however, human beings quickly dispersed throughout the continent and, by crossing the Panamanian Land Bridge, soon reached South America. Some twelve thousand years ago, they entered the Amazon.

  In the eyes of the rest of the world, the humans who reached the Amazon Basin virtually disappeared. For thousands of years, there was no further contact with the Amazonians. Whereas most regions of the world continued to change and interact, to form new peoples and nations by fusing races and cultures, the inhabitants of the Amazon remained insular and isolated. Even in 1500, when European explorers began to land on the shores of South America, claiming the land for themselves and their kings and enslaving its aboriginal inhabitants, the continent’s vast interior remained untouched and its people unknown and unreachable.

  After the Spanish explorer Orellana finally penetrated the Amazon Basin in 1542, he returned with startling tales of dense jungles, deadly poisons, and, most astonishing of all, a tribe of vicious women warriors. The expedition’s chronicler, the Dominican friar Gaspar de Carvajal, described the women as going “about naked but with their privy parts covered, with their bows and arrows in their hands, doing as much fighting as ten Indian men.” Orellana named these women the Amazons, after the famed women warriors of Greek mythology, who were said to have removed their right breast so that they could more effectively shoot a bow and arrow. It is from the Greek word a-mazos, or “no breast,” that the word “Amazon” is derived.

  After Orellana, few outsiders disturbed the Amazon’s native peoples for the next two hundred years. In the mid-eighteenth century, however, things changed dramatically and, for the Amazon’s human inhabitants, disastrously. While traveling down the Amazon River from Ecuador, the French naturalist and mathematician Charles-Marie de La Condamine saw natives extracting a milky substance from a tall tree. After the strange liquid, which the Indians called caoutchouc, had coagulated, it was used to make everything from boots to bottles. La Condamine saw potential in caoutchouc and brought a sample with him back to France. When the strange, pliable substance made its way across the channel, the British soon discovered that it worked extremely well as an eraser, and so began referring to it as “rubber.” By the end of the eighteenth century, rubber was well known and widely used throughout Europe and the New World. By the middle of the nineteenth century, the Amazon was exporting more than 150 metric tons of it each year.

  La Condamine’s discovery meant great wealth for a few South Americans and Europeans, but nothing but sorrow and terror for Amazonian Indians. Settlers who had made their way to the Amazon in the hope of making their fortunes in rubber, quickly became frustrated by the dearth of willing cheap labor and began to organize slaving expeditions. Already laid low by European diseases, many Indian tribes were nearly decimated by these expeditions. Those Indians who survived were perhaps even less fortunate than those who lost their lives. Rubber barons were notorious for treating their slave laborers with exceptional cruelty. Julio César Arana, the son of a Peruvian hatmaker who made millions of dollars harvesting and selling Amazonian rubber in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, ordered his men to go into the rain forest with rifles to “recruit” Indians. The tens of thousands of men, women, and children whom they rounded up were shackled into chain gangs. If they did not make their quotas, Arana’s men would burn them alive, hang and quarter them, or shoot off their genitals. During the twelve years that Arana held his reign of terror along the banks of the Rio Putumayo, the native population plummeted from more than fifty thousand to less than eight thousand. Those who survived did so with horribly disabling and disfiguring wounds that became known as “la marca arana,” the mark of Arana.

  The Indians’ only advocates were the missionaries who had already established themselves in the Amazon by the early seventeenth century, searching for souls to save. They made an effort to protect their charges, but they were powerless against wealthy and merciless settlers such as Arana. Their best hope came in offering the Indians as wage laborers instead of slaves. The settlers, however, reverted back to slavery when they found that they could not get as many laborers as they needed and did not have as much control over them as they had had over their slaves. Even the missionaries themselves wanted to force the Indians into reductions, or missions, in which they were made to wear clothing and worship the Christian God.

  Before Rondon’s Indian Protection Service was established in 1910, and even after, the Indians’ best protector was the Amazon itself. So dense and dangerous was the rain forest that few white men were able to venture very far into it, even for the promise of rubber. Despite the intense search for Indians by the men who wanted their labor or their souls, several tribes had not yet had any contact with the outside world by the time Roosevelt reached South America in 1913. Even those who had had some limited contact with outsiders were so isolated by the jungle in which they lived that they did not have even the vaguest understanding of what the rest of the world looked like. “Such isolation makes it well nigh impossible for them to grasp the significance of large communities,” George Cherrie observed. “The distant villager is incapable of picturing a much larger group of human beings living together than that in his own tiny settlement. . .. They picture the rest of the world as one of jungles, great rivers, and vast seas; with here and there tiny pools of humanity no larger than their own. Thus it is that they look upon the stranger from afar as a traveller between villages.”

  * * *

  THE MYSTERIOUS Indians who surrounded Roosevelt and his men on the banks of the River of Doubt were so isolated that they had never seen a white man. The intersection of their world and that of Roosevelt and Rondon was not simply a clash of different cultures; it was a collision of the Industrial Age and the Stone Age, the modern world and the ancient. Known by modern anthropologists as the Cinta Larga, which is Portuguese for “wide belt”—a reference to the strips of bark that they wrap around their waists—this tribe had remained shrouded from the rest of the world not just by the impenetrable rain forest but by the very thing that had exposed most Amazonian Indians to settlers and missionaries: a river.

  For European explorers, South America’s rivers had long been the only highways into the interior. It had been along the Amazon River and some of its thousands of tributaries that they had discovered the rain forest and its occupants, and the Indians had discovered another world beyond their own. Some Amazonian tributaries, however, were so rapids-choked that they were impossible to ascend and too dangerous to descend. The River of Doubt’s fierce rapids had dissuaded even the most determined settlers from exploring its course. The same rapids that had already cost the expedition the life of one man and had nearly robbed Roosevelt of his son had kept the Cinta Larga in a time capsule, which had been sealed for millennia.

  While the world in which Roosevelt lived had undergone dramatic recent changes, including skyscrapers, automobiles, and even airplanes (Orville and Wilbur Wright had made their first successful flight over Kill Devil Hill eleven years earlier), the Indians in this region were still using the simplest of tools. Their axes were ground and polished stone, and their cutting tools sharp slivers of bamboo. They made their fires by drilling a hard stick of wood into a softer one. The men all carried their hard “drills” with them while they were out hunting so that they could start a fire.

  So cut off from the outside world were the Cinta Larga that, when they first saw the expedition, they were not even certain that Roosevelt, Rondon, an
d their men were human. By this point in their journey, most of the men in the expedition had grown rough beards, which looked strange and animalistic to the Cinta Larga, who, like all native Amazonians, had little facial or body hair. After watching the men from the shadows of the forest, the Cinta Larga mothers warned their children to sleep close to the fire at night so that they would not grow a patchy layer of fur like these strange creatures.

  The Cinta Larga must also have been curious about the expedition’s canoes. As simple and crudely made as they were, the dugouts represented a level of technological sophistication that was unknown to the Cinta Larga. Although they lived on both sides of the River of Doubt, fishing from it, drinking from it, bathing in it, and traveling long distances along its banks, the Cinta Larga had not yet conceived of boats, even those as simple as the expedition’s dugout canoes. The only means they had developed for crossing the river were simple rope-and-plank bridges. Nor, despite their dependence on the river, had they yet developed the means of fishing with a hook and line, relying instead on spears or arrows to kill the fish that were so central to their diet.

  * * *

  DESPITE THESE limitations and, in part, because of their isolation, the Cinta Larga were masters at surviving in the jungle. During their portages, the men of the expedition crashed through the underbrush, scaring off game and announcing their presence to the Indians. Even when they did not have to wrestle with their dugouts, the men found it nearly impossible to fight their way through the jungle. Long vines crisscrossed the forest. Sharp branches caught their loose clothing, snagging and ripping it and holding them hostage while they struggled to set themselves free.

  In contrast to Roosevelt and his men, the Cinta Larga moved through the rain forest quickly and silently. They wore no clothing and so were able to slip through the tangle of vegetation unrestrained. The women, who wore their hair long and parted down the middle, had nothing on their bodies but necklaces of black vegetable beads, which they strung around their necks, wrists, waists, and ankles. But for a simple liana covering to protect their penises, the men were similarly naked.