The River of Doubt: Theodore Roosevelt's Darkest Journey

by Candice Millard

  The Roosevelt men were rough around the edges, but they were also vulnerable to what Roosevelt’s older daughter, Alice, characterized as a “melancholic streak” that, she believed, ran in the family. Of all Roosevelt’s sons, Kermit was perhaps at greatest risk of falling prey to this family melancholy. Although he was smart and strong, he did not have his father’s ability to forge his own happiness.

  Even Edith, Kermit’s greatest admirer, acknowledged that there was a dark side to her blond son. In a letter that she had written to Roosevelt’s sister Bamie just months earlier, she had referred to Kermit as the “one with the white head and the black heart.” Her second son, she had once explained, had always been “odd and independent” and had seemed to prefer his own company to any other, with the occasional exception of his mother’s. “He never need retire to a cloister for a life of abstraction from outside interests,” Edith had once written to her sister, Emily. “I believe I am the only person he really cares for.” While at Groton, Kermit had also begun to drink—heavily enough at times for even the rector, Endicott Peabody, to notice. When Peabody confronted Kermit, the young man had become so angry that he had thought that he and the rector were “going to come to blows.”

  * * *

  KERMIT’S BROODING temperament and early taste for alcohol were character traits that Roosevelt had seen in his only brother, Elliott, who had died at the age of thirty-four from complications related to alcoholism and morphine addiction. In childhood, Elliott had been as charming and lighthearted as his older brother had been awkward and serious. He had been the stronger, taller, more athletic of the two Roosevelt boys, but as he had approached adolescence, Elliott had begun to lose his footing, developing, as one biographer put it, “an inclination toward poetic introspection” and a desire for solitude that was hauntingly similar to that of his future nephew.

  When their father died in 1878, Theodore, who had been at Harvard and had not witnessed the horrible ravages brought on by the final stages of cancer, was devastated. Elliott, who had been at their father’s side throughout his illness, nearly lost his mind. “Elliott gave unstintedly a devotion which was so tender that it was more like that of a woman,” their sister Corinne recalled, “and his young strength was poured out to help his father’s condition.” Theodore Sr.’s final days stayed with Elliott for the rest of his short life. “He was so mad with pain,” he would later remember with horror, “that beyond groans and horrible writhes and twists he could do nothing. Oh my God my Father what agonies you suffered.”

  Four years later, Elliott fell in love with a young society beauty named Anna Hall, who, like Belle Willard, came from a wealthy, well-connected family. Just as Belle now seemed to Kermit almost untouchable in her perfection, so did Elliott romanticize and idealize Anna “She seems to me so pure and so high and ideal that in my roughness and unworthiness I do not see how I can make her happy,” he wrote.

  In December 1883, Elliott and Anna married. Two months later, Theodore lost his young wife, Alice, to Bright’s disease. Theodore survived the tragedy but Elliott, who seemingly had everything he could hope for, slowly unraveled. He and Anna had three children—among them Eleanor, who grew up to marry her distant cousin Franklin Delano Roosevelt—but their marriage was a travesty. As the years passed, Elliott sank progressively deeper into alcoholism, morphine addiction, and a series of scandalous affairs that humiliated his proud wife and alienated his puritanical brother.

  In the end, Theodore simply gave up on Elliott. He finally had his brother admitted to an asylum in Paris and declared incompetent and insane. The next year, Anna died of diphtheria at the age of twenty-nine, refusing to see her husband even on her deathbed. Had Elliott been a stronger man, the sorrow and shame surrounding his wife’s early death might have turned his life around. But he was not, and it did not. Two years later, Theodore wrote to Bamie that he wished their sister, Corinne, “could get a little of my hard heart about Elliott. . .. He can’t be helped, and he must simply be let go his own gait. He is now laid up from a serious fall; while drunk he drove into a lamp post and went out on his head. Poor fellow! If only he could have died instead of Anna!” Elliott did die less than a month later, leaving nine-year-old Eleanor and her two siblings orphans.

  For Roosevelt, Elliott’s death transported him back in time, to twenty years earlier, when his brother was still a handsome, charming boy with a bright smile and a promising future. “I only need have pleasant thoughts of Elliott now,” he wrote his sister Corinne. “He is just the gallant, generous, manly, loyal young man whom everyone loved.” When Roosevelt saw his brother’s body, he was “more overcome than I have ever seen him,” Corinne later recalled. He “cried like a little boy for a long time.”

  * * *

  THROUGHOUT KERMIT’S adolescence and young adult life, Roosevelt had gone to great lengths to keep his son focused and industriously occupied. When Kermit was at Groton, his father, who was then president, always found time to monitor his schoolwork closely. In an attempt to encourage his son in any interest that he himself viewed as positive and worthwhile, Roosevelt had even rescued Edwin Arlington Robinson, the down-and-out American poet to whom Kermit had become devoted while at Groton. After leaving Harvard, Robinson had fallen into obscurity, misery, and alcoholism. Kermit had sent one of Robinson’s works to the White House and asked his father if he could help the poet. Although Roosevelt admitted that he did not think he truly understood Robinson’s poetry, he not only gave him a position as a special agent in the New York Treasury, but he reviewed The Children of the Night for Outlook magazine, thus bringing his writing to a much wider audience than it had ever had. “I do not like to think of where I should be now if it had not been for your astonishing father,” Robinson later wrote to Kermit. “He fished me out of hell by the hair of the head.”

  Determined to keep his son from descending into the blackness that had swallowed Elliott and had nearly destroyed Robinson, Roosevelt had taken Kermit along on his most challenging adventures and had always given him a mission, something to work toward, something to give him a sense of direction and accomplishment. Besides encouraging Kermit in his schoolwork and literary interests, Roosevelt had exposed him to the physical challenges that had toughened his own body and mind. While Kermit was at Groton, Roosevelt had sent him to South Dakota one summer to work in the Badlands that had been his own salvation after Alice’s death. Africa, too, had been a constant physical challenge, and Roosevelt had watched with soaring pride as his son thrived on the difficult work.

  “We worked hard; Kermit of course worked hardest, for he is really a first-class walker and runner,” Roosevelt had written proudly from the Sudan to Kermit’s brother Archie. “Kermit has really become not only an excellent hunter but also a responsible and trustworthy man, fit to lead.”

  * * *

  STANDING NEXT to Roosevelt’s prone, sweat-soaked figure in their dim tent beside the River of Doubt, Kermit met his father’s decision to take his own life with the same quiet strength and determination that the elder Roosevelt had so carefully cultivated and admired in him. This time, however, the result would be different. For the first time in his life, Kermit simply refused to honor his father’s wishes. Whatever it took, whatever the cost, he would not leave without Roosevelt.

  In the fraction of a second that passed between Roosevelt’s grim declaration and Kermit’s reaction, father and son reversed the roles that had defined their relationship, and which neither of them had ever questioned. Over nearly a quarter-century, through lectures, letters, camping trips, grand adventures, and strong example, Roosevelt had molded Kermit in his own image, creating a young man who, given a goal, would fight with everything he had to achieve it. But, although Roosevelt was proud of his son’s growing independence, he had always remained the patriarch, continuing to make the final decisions. On this night, Kermit not only refused to do what his father asked of him but demanded that Roosevelt step back and let his son determine his, and the entire exped
ition’s, course of action.

  Recognizing the resolve on his son’s face, Roosevelt realized that if he wanted to save Kermit’s life he would have to allow his son to save him. “It came to me, and I saw that if I did end it, that would only make it more sure that Kermit would not get out,” Roosevelt would later confide to a friend. “For I knew he would not abandon me, but would insist on bringing my body out, too. That, of course, would have been impossible. I knew his determination. So there was only one thing for me to do, and that was to come out myself.”

  CHAPTER 24

  The Worst in a Man

  THEODORE ROOSEVELT HAD DECIDED to live. In the past, that would have been enough. On the River of Doubt, however, his decision would save him only from himself. He was still perilously ill, and he and his men still faced a deep, rocky gorge, an impassable series of rapids, and a commander who believed that their only hope lay in abandoning their canoes and striking out into the pathless jungle. With the growing infection in his leg and his raging fever, Roosevelt knew that he would never be able to survive a forced march through the rain forest, no matter how determined he was to do so.

  Although his will was strong, his body was not. For the first time in his adult life, Roosevelt would have to rely on someone else’s physical strength to pull him through. He would have to rely on his son. Kermit had been battling malaria almost since the expedition began, but he was still strong, and he had the endless endurance of youth.

  Having inherited his father’s unshakable confidence, Kermit was certain that he could get the expedition’s dugouts through the canyon. The problem was convincing the other men. “Kermit,” Roosevelt would later write, “was the only man who believed we could get the canoes down at all.” The young man’s conviction, however, quickly swayed not just Cherrie but also, even more important, Lyra. The Brazilian navigator had been Rondon’s right-hand man for much of his life, but he had spent the past month working side by side with Kermit as they struggled to get past one series of rapids after another. Lyra had come to respect Kermit’s energy, courage, and, more to the point, considerable dexterity with ropes, a skill that he had gained while helping to build bridges in other corners of Brazil. Rondon still believed that the effort was a lost cause, but, when confronted by these three determined men, he agreed to do what he could to help.

  Kermit’s plan was to lower the empty dugouts down the falls with ropes while the camaradas carried the baggage over the steep canyon cliffs. In order to make the plan even feasible, the men first had to whittle down their cargo yet again. This purge—the fourth since their expedition had begun—was particularly difficult because there was little left that they could afford to lose. Nonetheless, the men examined their baggage with misers’ eyes, cutting down “everything except the food,” Kermit wrote in his diary.

  Roosevelt kept only two small bags. One was his cartridge bag, which, along with his cartridges, held the head net and gauntlets that he used to protect himself while he wrote. The other bag, a duffel, contained his cot, a blanket, and a mosquito net, as well as a meager set of personal items: a single pair of pajamas, one extra pair of underwear, a pair of socks, six handkerchiefs, his wash kit, his pocket medicine case, some gun grease, adhesive plaster, a bottle of fly dope, needles and thread, his spare eyeglasses, his wallet, and a letter of credit, which would be essential should the expedition reach Manáos. He gave the shoes that he had been wearing to Kermit, whose own shoes had finally disintegrated, and pulled on his only spare pair.

  With the expedition’s supplies cut down to the barest necessities, Lyra and Kermit climbed to the top of the gorge and prepared to lower the dugout canoes. Although they had used this method to hoist their boats over falls in the past, they had never before been forced to work in such extreme circumstances. The canyon walls were so steep—an almost vertical line from ridge to river—that at times the men had to cling to narrow, crumbling rock shelves while they struggled with the rough ropes and their massive cargo. “The work was not only difficult and laborious in the extreme, but hazardous,” Roosevelt later recalled. The chances that the dugouts would not survive the ordeal, moreover, were very high. The men understood that, even if the plan worked, they might still end up spending several days at the other end of the gorge building new canoes.

  The canyon walls were also far too steep for a cargo carry. Instead of walking along the river, as they had in the past, the camaradas would have to hike some distance away and then carve a trail more than 350 feet up the side and over the top of the densely forested mountain. While Kermit and Lyra struggled with the canoes, Rondon and a team of camaradas began to scout out a path. At the summit, Rondon stopped and ordered his men to cut down a few trees so that he could have an unimpeded view of the horizon. What he, and later Cherrie, saw from that mountaintop only made their situation seem even more hopeless than they already believed it to be. “In the valley below we could see the Rio Roosevelt rushing like an arrow of light straight away toward the distant hills, there to disappear into the somber forest,” Cherrie wrote. “It was a beautiful view but it filled everyone with dread. We had learned that wherever the river entered among the hills it meant rapids and cataracts and our strength and courage alike were almost exhausted. We again discussed the possibility of having to abandon our canoes but dreaded to think what our fate would be should we be forced to do so.”

  It took four days, but the expedition’s men, baggage, and canoes finally emerged from the northern end of the canyon on April 1. Although this extraordinary achievement had likely saved their lives, there were no celebrations in the camp that night. The men were too exhausted and sick, and they had not escaped from the canyon unscathed. On the third day of the portage, Kermit and Lyra, in spite of all that they had done to protect their precious cargo, had watched helplessly as one of their dugouts had slipped from its rope and was smashed among the rocks on the river’s bottom.

  To add to the men’s unhappiness on their first night beyond the gorge, the heavens opened, and they were swept up in a rainstorm that was so punishing that even Rondon referred to it as “tempestuous.” It rained so hard that the canvas awnings that the men had rigged up collapsed under the weight of the water, and they feared that their remaining five canoes would be swamped. The storm even drove rain under the officers’ tent, drenching Roosevelt as he lay on his cot, his fever raging.

  The men began the next day, April 2, more exhausted than they had ever been, following four days of a perilous portage and a terrible night’s sleep. Although they looked forward to their return to the river, it brought with it little opportunity for rest. With only five canoes, everyone but Roosevelt and the paddlers had to walk. After less than two miles, moreover, the expedition reached yet another steep-sided canyon. “Instead of getting out of the hills at once as we hoped to do,” Cherrie despaired, “we are deeper in among them!”

  By that point, the men had been fighting rapids for a month straight since they had heard the river’s first roar on March 2. During that month, they had made only sixty-eight miles and descended nearly five hundred feet. Worse than this portage, or even the last, was the probability that countless more awaited them downstream. “No one can tell how many times the task will have to be repeated, or when it will end, or whether the food will hold out,” Roosevelt wrote. “Every hour of work in the rapids is fraught with the possibility of the gravest disaster, and yet it is imperatively necessary to attempt it; . . . failure to get through means death by disease or starvation.”

  * * *

  THE BRUTAL job of getting through and around the rapids had begun to destroy what remained not only of the camaradas’ health but also of their hope. Each new series of rapids reminded them of their drowned companion, Simplicio, and each portage held the threat of snake or Indian attack and the promise of heartbreaking toil. So dejected were the camaradas that they began asking the officers if they really believed that they would ever get out of the jungle alive. The officers were as frightened and unsu
re as their men, but felt obliged to put on a brave face. “We had to cheer them up as best we could,” Roosevelt wrote.

  From the beginning of the expedition, Roosevelt had worried about the camaradas, and done what he could to bolster their spirits. “In the weeks of trying hardships when the fates seemed all against us, despite the fever and dysentery that were sapping his strength, he never failed, day after day, to make inquiry about his camp companions including the canoemen and camp helpers,” Cherrie wrote of Roosevelt. Early on, Roosevelt had begun giving the camaradas chocolate bars at noon from his meager supply. The men treasured this treat so much that, instead of immediately devouring it, they would hoard it until 3:00 p.m., when they would make it into a mid-afternoon meal. “It was a strange form of food for the Brazilian interior, and was especially enjoyed by the laborers,” Rondon wrote. “Those little daily acts of thoughtfulness were much appreciated and the men soon loved him.”