The River of Doubt: Theodore Roosevelt's Darkest Journey

by Candice Millard

  The Cinta Larga were also fast and invisible in the jungle because they had blazed trails that an outsider could not possibly discern or follow. Even if Rondon, in his ardor to make contact with this unknown tribe, had started down the Cinta Larga trail that he had found near Lobo’s body, it would have been useless to him. The Cinta Larga’s trails zigzagged through the forest, cutting in and out of thickets, crisscrossing the river, and going over rather than around any obstacle they encountered.

  The tribe’s trails were marked, but ingeniously so. Markers appeared only once every twelve or eighteen feet and were simply small branches that the blazer had half broken and then bent backward. To anyone but a Cinta Larga, these markers were indistinguishable from any of a million other broken and bent branches in the rain forest. A change of direction was indicated by nothing more than a slightly larger broken branch whose bent end vaguely pointed the way. Only the Cinta Larga knew, moreover, that the markers also showed the direction to and from their camp: In a system like that used in modern maritime navigation, markers were placed so that when approaching the tribe’s camp they appeared on the left side of the trail, and leading away from camp they appeared on the right.

  The Cinta Larga were as skilled at hunting as they were at trailblazing. While the men of the expedition slowly starved, wandering through what seemed to them to be a lush but empty rain forest, the Indians saw, heard, and smelled game everywhere they turned. Their ability to move soundlessly through the forest also helped them to sneak up on their prey as the members of the expedition never could, and their skill with a bow and arrow was uncanny. These Indians were such expert hunters that they were even able to trick their game into coming to them. As Rondon had learned when they lured him with the whinny of the spider monkey, the Cinta Larga were talented mimics and could re-create nearly any animal call. In fact, so familiar were they with these calls that they used them not only to draw game within striking distance but even to express time. When referring to a time before sunrise, for example, they used the cry of the howler monkey.

  One of the greatest frustrations that the men of the expedition faced on the River of Doubt was that they were descending a river crowded with fish that they could not catch. Those same fish, however, were easy prey for the Cinta Larga. The Indians made up for their lack of poles, lines, or hooks with the type of fishing basket that Rondon had found. More important, they had timbó. This milky liquid, which the Cinta Larga extracted from a vine by pounding it with a rock, stuns—or, depending on the quantity, kills—fish by paralyzing their gills. Used in slow-moving inlets and pools, timbó allowed the Indians to spear or scoop up the fish as they floated to the river’s surface.

  As well as being expert hunters and fishermen, the Cinta Larga had access to crops that Roosevelt and his men did not, and they were willing to consume a larger variety of protein sources. The Indians grew vegetables such as manioc, yams, and sweet potatoes, but even they struggled to do so. Clearing the land in the jungle was grueling work. It often took a man with a stone ax an entire day just to fell a single large tree. Then, while sowing his crops, he had to contend with the long tree roots that lay frustratingly near the surface of the soil. After only three or four years had passed, the cleared land—scorched by the sun, robbed of its nutrients by the growing crops, and deprived of the cyclical nutrient exchange that had sustained it when it supported a forest—would become depleted, and the Indians would be forced to find another patch of land to till.

  Each Cinta Larga village, which had one or two large houses that each held three to five families, was almost completely autonomous from the larger tribe, and every one had its own chief. The chief had to exhibit strong leadership qualities, such as taking the initiative in building a house or clearing a garden, but he was not their commander in the traditional sense. The Cinta Larga would not allow their village chief to tell them how to live their lives. Instead, the chief’s job was to oversee the tribal ceremonies—an important role, because the Cinta Larga did not have a written language. Their only ceremonial guides were their own memories and the stories that they had heard their parents and grandparents tell.

  Not only did the chief not command the village as a whole, he did not have power over any family within it but his own. Each man was the chief of his own family, which consisted of as many wives as he could convince to marry him and as many children as his wives could bear. A Cinta Larga man usually chose a new wife as soon as his first wife began to age. Girls were considered to be ready for marriage when they were between eight and ten years old, and they often married their mother’s brother. In such small communities, a young man ready to take his first wife often found that there were no eligible girls left in his village. He was then allowed to take a wife from a man who had three or more, or, failing that, he had to look for a wife in a neighboring village. It was not unusual for villages to trade women. The women, however, usually consented to the switch.

  Like women in most early cultures, the Cinta Larga women did not have a voice in tribal or even family decisions. However, the Indian women did have a surprising amount of control over their own lives. For instance, if a Cinta Larga woman was unsatisfied in her marriage, she was free to do something about it. She could dissolve the marriage. She could marry another man. Or she could even stay with her husband and take a lover. In such circumstances, a husband would usually look the other way, unless he became the object of derision within his village.

  As important as children were to the future of a village, they were far from coddled, and they were expected to take on the role of an adult by the time they turned twelve years old. Also, although the Indians lived together in one or two large huts, they did not appear to feel any particular responsibility for anyone outside their own immediate family. Each family had its own corner of the hut and its own fire, and when a man had been out hunting and returned with game, his neighbors rarely benefited from his good fortune. The hunter ate first, then his wives, children, and other relatives—in that order.

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  ALTHOUGH ROOSEVELT and Rondon did not realize it, the Cinta Larga’s strong independence was probably keeping the men of the expedition alive. Because the Indians did not have a traditional chief, they were forced to make all of their decisions by consensus. If it was time to move the village, for instance, they had to agree on the time and location of the move. When it came to dealing with the expedition, the Cinta Larga were divided. Some of them believed that they should remain invisible to the outsider. Others, however, argued that they should attack. These men had invaded their territory, and there was no reason to believe they did not mean the Indians harm. By attacking first, the Cinta Larga would have the upper hand. They would also be able to loot the expedition, which was carrying valuable provisions and tools—especially those made of metal.

  War was not a rare event for the Cinta Larga. The most common cause was the death of one of their own, from an earlier attack or even from natural causes. The Cinta Larga believed that death was brought about by witchcraft. If a man became ill and died, the others in his village never blamed their healer, a man who used plants and religion to cure the sick. Instead, they looked around their own village, and if they did not find anyone suspicious, they assumed that someone from another village must have performed the dark magic. The only response was to avenge the death by attacking the offending village.

  The Cinta Larga also occasionally went to war if the population of their own village had become so depleted by disease, murder, or both that they needed to steal women and children. Such attacks took place at night. The men would camp near their victims’ village, and then, after the sun had set, they would slip inside their communal hut. As the male members of the other village slept in their hammocks, the warriors would club them to death before rounding up as many women and children as they could find.

  Although the Cinta Larga rarely wore much adornment, when they went to war they dressed for the part. They would cut their hair very short
, place hawk-feather headdresses over their shorn heads, paint their bodies with animal and plant extracts, and hang bead necklaces from their necks. The most important item in the Cinta Larga’s war dress, however, was the wide belt for which the Portuguese would later name them. These belts were made from the couratari tree, which was difficult to find. The men were sometimes forced to walk for several days in order to harvest the smooth, mahogany-colored bark of this tree. They wrapped an eight-inch-wide strip around their waists one and a half times and then tied it tightly with a fine liana. The stiff bark, which was a tenth of an inch thick, was uncomfortable and often cut their stomachs and backs, thus exposing them to infection, but the belt was ubiquitous among the warlike Cinta Larga because it covered the abdomen and so was useful as body armor.

  Although skilled with both clubs and poison, the Cinta Larga’s most lethal weapons were bows and arrows. As Rondon learned when he examined the arrows that had killed Lobo, the Cinta Larga’s arrows were exquisitely made and deadly accurate. Made from bamboo, the shaft was adorned with braids of peccary hair and topped with a knife-shaped bamboo tip. The arrows were, on average, five feet long—nearly as tall as the Cinta Larga men, and taller than many of the women—and were adorned with hawk wings or curassow feathers, which stabilized them in flight. The tribesmen made several different types of arrows—for shooting fish, birds, monkeys, large animals, and men—but they used only one type of bow. About six feet long, the bows were made from the trunk of the peach-palm tree and were so stiff and difficult to pull that it is doubtful that any of the men in the expedition could have used a Cinta Larga bow had they found one.

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  THE MOST striking fact about the Cinta Larga—and one that would have alarmed the men of the expedition had they known it—was that these Indians were cannibals. Unlike the type of cannibalism much of the world had come to know—among desperate explorers, marooned sailors, and victims of famine—the Cinta Larga’s consumption of human flesh was born not out of necessity but out of vengeance and an adherence to tribal traditions and ceremony. The tribe had very strict rules for cannibalism. They could eat another man only in celebration of a war victory, and that celebration had to take place in the early evening. The man who had done the killing could not grill the meat or distribute it, and children and adults with small children would not eat it. If they did, the Cinta Larga believed, they would go mad.

  The most important rule of cannibalism within the tribe was that one Cinta Larga could not eat another. The tribe drew a clear distinction between its own members and the rest of mankind, which they considered to be “other”—and, thus, edible. An enemy killed during war, therefore, was ritually dismembered and eaten. While still on the battlefield, either in the enemy’s village or in the forest, the Cinta Larga would carve up the body just as they would a monkey that they had shot down from the canopy. First they would cut off and discard the man’s head and heart. Then they would section off the edible portions: the arms, legs, and a round of flesh over the stomach. They grilled this meat over an open fire and brought it home to their village for their wives to slice and cook with water in a ceramic pan.

  If Indians from other tribes were considered “other,” then the men of the expedition, who did not even look human to the Cinta Larga, certainly fell into that category. Moreover, should the Indians attack the expedition, Roosevelt would likely be one of their first targets. After watching the expedition for several weeks, the Cinta Larga had surely figured out by now that Roosevelt and Rondon were its commanders. Not only did they give orders and do less physical work than the other men, but the camaradas and even the other officers clearly treated them with deference. Even if the Indians had only recently stumbled upon the expedition, they probably would have aimed for Roosevelt first—simply because of his substantial girth. The Cinta Larga often tossed pieces of a slain enemy into the jungle if they thought that he was too lean. Although Roosevelt had already begun to lose much of his 220 pounds to illness and the intense physical work and meager diet of the past few months, he was still by far the heaviest man in the expedition. If the men were massacred, the former president would make the best ceremonial meal.

  CHAPTER 20

  Hunger

  AFTER A MISERABLE NIGHT OF WORRY and fear, the men of the Roosevelt-Rondon Scientific Expedition awoke on the morning of March 17 to the dire reality of their situation. They could not get back on the river, but neither could they stay where they were. The loss of the new dugout the day before had left them with only four canoes—three fewer than they had started out with, and far too few to carry twenty-one men and all of their food and equipment. There were no trees suitable for boatbuilding anywhere near their camp. They were quickly running out of rations, and they were surrounded by hostile Indians.

  Whatever the cost, they had to keep moving, and most of the men would have to walk. By this point in the expedition, none of them had any illusions about what it meant to walk along the banks of the River of Doubt. So dense was the vegetation along the river’s sun-washed shoreline that they would have to laboriously carve a path for each step with a machete. Although the dark interior of the rain forest offered a potentially easier route than the overgrown riverbank, that advantage was outweighed by the risks of dividing the expedition, and would have exposed those on foot to even greater risk of attack.

  Moving forward with only four canoes also meant that the men would have to leave behind almost anything that was not essential to their survival. “We left all the baggage we could,” Roosevelt wrote. “We were already down as far as comfort would permit; but we now struck off much of the comfort.” However, after months of similar cutbacks and the loss of much of their clothing to oxen, ants, and termites, they had so few personal items left that, as Roosevelt put it, “The only way to make a serious diminution was to restrict ourselves to the clothes on our backs.”

  Early that morning, the expedition set off down the river once again—eight men riding in the canoes and thirteen men walking. For better stability, the four dugouts had been tied together to form two balsas, and the expedition’s three best paddlers had been assigned to navigate them. Roosevelt, who had been battling fever, rode in one balsa, and Dr. Cajazeira rode in another, so that he could look after three camaradas whose feet were so swollen with bruises, gashes, and insect bites that they could no longer walk. The remaining nine camaradas, along with Rondon, Lyra, Cherrie, and Kermit, hacked their way with knives and machetes through the underbrush that crowded the banks. Their misery growing with every step, several camaradas wrapped their legs and feet in strips of canvas, but even this measure provided little protection from the sharp branches that sliced open their skin and ripped and unraveled their makeshift shoes.

  For the camaradas, the exhausting and painful trek along the river-bank had one benefit: It gave them an opportunity to search for food in the forest. Hunger, and the possibility of starvation, now tormented and frightened the men as much as any other danger they faced. They had already consumed more than a third of their provisions, and they had not traveled even ninety miles down the river. They feared that they had at least five times that distance still to go. Game was still nearly nonexistent, and they had been unable to catch even a single fish. Because it was the rainy season and the river had flooded its banks, the fish were dispersed over a larger area.

  Despite their constant hunger and the expedition’s relentless physical demands, the men had no choice but to eat less to conserve their provisions. They limited themselves to only two meals a day. The officers also spread one day’s rations out over two days, and felt compelled to share some of what was left with the camaradas, who were in even worse shape than they.

  The camaradas had begun to rely more and more heavily on whatever they could scavenge from the rain forest. As they walked along the riverbank, they scanned the jungle for beehives or even milk trees, a relative of the breadfruit tree that, when nicked with an ax, oozes a thick, milky latex that tastes somethin
g like cow’s milk. Roosevelt had tried the liquid but had complained that, while the “taste was not unpleasant . . . it left a sticky feeling in the mouth”—a fact that reflected the liquid’s evolutionary purpose as a chemical defense compound aimed at plant-eating insects. The camaradas eagerly lapped up as much of it as they could find, but the principal item in their diet had become palmito, or hearts of palm, the inner core of small palm trees. Although raw palmito was bland—Cherrie described it as tasting like celery—and had few nutrients, it filled their stomachs and eased their gnawing hunger.

  Even the officers had begun to take an interest in palmito, sending two men into the forest each day to search for the vegetable. What they really hoped to find, however, was Brazil nuts. For centuries, Amazon explorers had counted on these high-fat, high-protein nuts to get them through the rain forest. In fact, Brazil nuts had likely saved the lives of Rondon and his men during their 1909 expedition. The almondlike nuts grow in a hard, round, wood-walled shell that holds as many as twenty-four nuts and can reach seven inches in diameter and six pounds in weight. When ripe, these shells crash to the ground like small cannonballs from the branches of the 130-foot-tall Brazil nut tree, sometimes striking gatherers below with stunning force. So hard that they resist the blow of a hammer, Brazil nuts have been known to knock men out cold, even kill them. Roosevelt and his men, however, were in no danger from falling Brazil nuts. Mysteriously, they had found virtually none at all.

  As surprising as it was to Roosevelt and the other officers, the inability of the expedition to sustain itself on fruit or nuts from the lush forest around them was not merely a reflection of bad luck, or the time of year in which they made their journey. Like their inability to find game animals, the apparent lack of fruit was also a product of millions of years of evolutionary pressure, which had refined the reproductive methods of the jungle’s plants and trees to an extraordinary level of complexity and sophistication.