Now that their food supplies were so low and their chances for survival worsening, the ailing Roosevelt did more than give the camaradas chocolate. He began to give them his own share of rations. When Kermit and Cherrie realized what he was doing and protested, Roosevelt simply replied, “I can’t do anything to help and they need the food.” “We had to watch him constantly,” Cherrie wrote. It “reached the point where if he didn’t eat all of his share either Kermit or I would take what was left and guard it until a later meal. We had so very little that every mouthful counted.”
By this point in the expedition, many of the camaradas had become visibly depressed, and the officers worried about their sullen attitudes and deteriorating morale. “A sense of gloom pervaded the camp,” Cherrie wrote. On March 30, Kermit had written in his diary that the men were “very disheartened.” Rondon insisted that they were still in good spirits, but even he had to admit that the rapids were causing “considerable suffering to our men” and that, with very few exceptions, they had “broken down.”
The officers knew that frightened and unhappy men were not only hard to motivate but potentially dangerous. Outnumbering the officers by more than two to one, and with no possibility of outside interference, the camaradas could easily wrest control of the expedition from their commanders. Rondon had fought against mutiny and its precursors—fear and frustration—his entire career. He knew its signs, and he knew that this expedition had all the right ingredients for it.
Cherrie too had had enough experience with disgruntled camaradas to be wary of them. During an earlier expedition, a man he had dismissed from his team of guides had tried to kill him. In an exchange of gunfire, Cherrie had ended up killing the man instead, but not before being seriously wounded. He had nearly bled to death trying to get to help, and he would never again have complete use of one of his arms.
The officers on the River of Doubt were fortunate. With very few exceptions, their camaradas were good, decent, and trustworthy men. As the weeks had passed, however, and their situation had steadily worsened, they had grown increasingly desperate. “Under such conditions,” Roosevelt wrote, “whatever is evil in men’s natures comes to the front.”
* * *
THE MEN awoke on the morning of April 3 with little hope for an easy or successful day. Their plan for getting the dugouts through the second gorge consisted of three distinct, and progressively more grueling, stages. The first stage involved running the empty boats down the river as far as they could safely take them. When the river became too rough, they would lower the canoes over the rapids by ropes. Then, at the point at which the ground began to level, they would slash a trail through the forest, chop down trees for a corduroy road, and haul the dugouts along the bank to the mouth of the gorge.
Disaster struck almost immediately, during the first and easiest stage of the plan. While Antonio Correia and another camarada were steering one of the canoes down the river, they suddenly lost control and found themselves being swept toward the rapids. They desperately grasped at the branches and vines that looped over the bank, but the current was too strong, and the branches simply snapped in their hands. Realizing that they were about to be hurled into the rapids, the two men finally dived into the rushing river and watched as the dugout was, in Cherrie’s words, “whirled out of their hands to be crushed to splinters in the whirlpools and rapids below.” Their expedition was left once again with only four dugouts, two of which they had built themselves.
Adding to the men’s already overwhelming feeling of isolation and vulnerability, the work of pushing past the rapids obliged them to be scattered from one end of the canyon to the other. While Lyra and his men were at the river’s edge, cutting away undergrowth so that the canoes could be let down the falls, Rondon had assembled a team to carve a trail along the face of the cliff to the foot of the rapids. The rest of the camaradas, under Paishon’s direction, were carrying the baggage to an intermediate station above the falls, where Kermit and Cherrie were waiting to assemble the supplies.
Only one man, a trusted and valued camarada named Pedrinho, remained behind at the previous night’s camp in order to guard the cargo as it was slowly carted off. Early that morning, as the camaradas filed by in their dirty, tattered clothes, picking up boxes and hefting them onto their tired shoulders, Pedrinho noticed some suspicious activity. Stepping forward, he surprised Julio de Lima as the muscular camarada was once again slipping some food out of one of the ration tins. This time, he was taking dried meat, a particularly rare and treasured commodity, and Pedrinho immediately reported the theft to Paishon.
Paishon was enraged to hear that the camarada had been caught stealing food once again. As serious as the theft was, however, there were few available options for punishment beyond a harsh rebuke. They had too much work to do to sacrifice one of the expedition’s healthiest men to any sort of imprisonment. Soon after the theft, both Paishon and Julio returned to their places in the line of baggage carriers, and Pedrinho resumed his duties as camp guard.
It was not long before Julio raised Paishon’s ire again. As the other men hauled their heavy loads up the steep hillside, Paishon reprimanded Julio for not pulling his weight. At the intermediate station, Kermit and Cherrie were waiting with the ailing Roosevelt, and all three men were attempting to distract themselves by reading, when Julio appeared, groaning under the weight of his load and muttering to himself as he shuffled forward. When he heard Julio approach, Cherrie looked up and joked to Roosevelt and Kermit, “One would know who that was by the groans.” The two Roosevelts both gave a short laugh of acknowledgment and returned to their books.
After Julio had set down his cargo, Cherrie happened to look up and see the camarada walk over to a group of rifles, which were leaning against a tree, and pick up a carbine. The camaradas often carried rifles with them in case they saw game, so Cherrie did not give much thought to Julio’s action, other than to remark to Kermit and Roosevelt that Julio must have seen a monkey or bird near the trail.
Only a few minutes after Julio had disappeared, the three Americans heard the unmistakable crack of the carbine going off. “I wonder what he has shot at?” Roosevelt said, rousing himself from his illness. He, Kermit, and Cherrie began to speculate, hoping that, if Julio’s shot had found its mark, whatever he hit would be fit for dinner. No sooner had they started savoring the prospect of a good meal, however, than they saw three camaradas running toward them up the trail.
The men’s voices reached them in a breathless panic. “Julio mato Paishon!” they shouted in Portuguese. “Julio has killed Paishon!”
CHAPTER 25
“He Who Kills Must Die”
AS NEWS OF THE MURDER spread across the stone canyon, the members of the expedition froze in fearful expectation, their ears primed to hear another rifle shot ring through the trees. No one believed that Paishon was Julio’s only target. They were certain that the volatile camarada had snapped under the pressures and hardships of the expedition and gone on a killing spree. “We all felt that Julio had run amuck and had probably determined to kill as many of us as he could,” Cherrie wrote. Several minutes passed, however, and the men heard nothing more. The forest’s heavy silence in the wake of the single shot was more sinister than a fusillade, threatening to break at any moment, and from any direction.
At the intermediate station, the Americans realized that the silence might mean that Julio was making his way back to the last camp, and his next victim: Pedrinho. The guard who had caught Julio stealing food earlier in the day was not only unaware of the murder, but also alone and unarmed. Roosevelt’s health had continued to deteriorate since his accident a week earlier, but, despite his physical frailty, the murder of one innocent man and the imminent threat to another triggered in him a lifelong instinct for action. To Kermit and Cherrie’s dismay, Roosevelt suddenly pulled himself to his feet and lunged for the same group of rifles from which Julio had taken his murder weapon just minutes earlier. Ordering his son and the naturalist t
o guard the canoes and supplies, he set off to warn Pedrinho, a rifle clenched in his hand. “Before we could stop him he had started down the path where Julio had disappeared,” Cherrie wrote. “Without hesitation he himself chose to go back over a trail on which the murderer might be concealed.”
Roosevelt—followed closely by Dr. Cajazeira, who had raced after him with a revolver at his side—did not get very far before he found Paishon. The young man lay facedown near an abandoned pile of baggage, his lifeless body crumpled and still, a pool of blood slowly spreading beneath him. Julio had shot Paishon straight through the heart, and he had dropped dead on the spot, pitching forward until he slammed into the soft forest floor like a felled tree. “The murderer,” Roosevelt determined, “had stood to one side of the path and killed his victim, when a dozen paces off, with deliberate and malignant purpose.”
Now that he had seen with his own eyes what Julio was capable of, Roosevelt’s concern for Pedrinho and sense of urgency redoubled. Struggling on with his infected leg, he pushed past Paishon’s body and continued to make his way to the last camp, searching for any signs of Julio. When they finally reached the camp, Cajazeira swiftly and silently stepped in front of Roosevelt. “My eyes are better than yours, colonel,” he said. “If he is in sight I’ll point him out to you, as you have the rifle.” Julio, however, was nowhere to be seen. Pedrinho was unharmed, but the murderer had disappeared. They realized that he must be hiding somewhere in the forest, probably not far from where he had shot Paishon.
By that time, the other officers had reached the scene of the murder. After Roosevelt left, Kermit and Cherrie had waited at the intermediate station until they found two camaradas who could be trusted to guard the canoes and supplies. It had taken Lyra and Rondon nearly half an hour just to get word of Paishon’s death and to make their way back to the muddy stretch of trail between the station and the last camp. Lyra, who was still struggling to lower the canoes over the falls, had heard about the tragedy first and had sent a camarada to tell Rondon. After instructing his men to continue their work cutting a path along the cliff face, the Brazilian commander had left immediately. The four men finally met on the forest trail, gathering around Paishon’s body.
Rondon had seen many dead men during the quarter-century that he had spent in the Amazon. He had watched them in their death throes, unable to help as they writhed in agony with a poisoned arrow in their chest, burned with fever until they fell into a disease-induced coma, or withered away from starvation. But he had never before seen one of his own men kill another out of pure hatred. When he looked down at Paishon, he saw senseless death, a wasted life, a sacrifice that had gained nothing for the telegraph commission’s greater mission, or even for this single expedition. The murder sparked a deep-seated outrage in Rondon. Despite his great discipline, the Brazilian colonel was, Kermit would later write in his diary, “in a blind rage to kill” Julio.
As Rondon would later describe the strange events of that day, however, it was his hot-blooded American co-commander, not he, who demanded an eye for an eye. After finding Paishon, the four officers walked back to camp looking for Roosevelt. “When I met him,” Rondon later recalled, “he was very pent up.” “Julio has to be tracked, arrested and killed,” Roosevelt barked when he saw Rondon. “In Brazil, that is impossible,” Rondon answered. “When someone commits a crime, he is tried, not murdered.” Roosevelt was not convinced. “He who kills must die,” he said. “That’s the way it is in my country.”
If they found Julio, Rondon argued, they should apply the laws of the Brazilian government, not wilderness justice. Rondon believed, his faithful friend and soldier Amilcar would later explain, “that the evil doer should be taken in and fed, demanding that he would work in return for the food he was entitled to, although he would still be a prisoner awaiting contact with the civilized world in order to eventually be duly tried.” Ever the pragmatist, however, Roosevelt thought that it would be folly to subject themselves to a dangerous man and to ask their camaradas to share their scarce rations with a thief and murderer.
As they argued, Roosevelt and Rondon were literally handed a quick if temporary resolution to their situation—in the form of the .44-caliber Winchester rifle that Julio had used to kill Paishon. Although Rondon had doubted that Julio could be found in the tangle of trees and vines that flanked the trail, he had sent two men, Antonio Correia and Antonio Pareci, to search for him. The two camaradas found the spot at which Julio had fled into the jungle, and quickly disappeared from sight. Moments later, the officers heard a cry of surprise, and Antonio Correia stepped back onto the trail holding the murder weapon in his dirt-streaked hands.
Julio, they realized with great relief, had lost his rifle as he fought his way through the thick vegetation. “Perhaps hearing someone coming along the path, he fled in panic terror into the wilderness,” Roosevelt speculated. “A tree had knocked the carbine from his hand.” Broken branches and matted leaves told them that Julio had doubled back to retrieve the rifle but then must have been frightened away by the voices of the other men as they discovered Paishon’s body. “His murderous hatred had once again given way to his innate cowardice,” Roosevelt wrote with contempt.
Now that they knew Julio was unarmed, Roosevelt and Rondon’s desperation to find him—whether to kill him or to imprison him—was defused, at least for the moment, and they could finally turn their thoughts to Paishon. Someone had laid a handkerchief over the dead camarada’s face, but it was still hard for them to believe that, as Roosevelt wrote, “the poor body which but half an hour before had been so full of vigorous life” would never move again. When they had lost Simplicio more than two weeks earlier, the men had been deeply saddened, but Paishon’s death was an even greater blow. They had never found Simplicio’s body, and somehow that had made his death seem less real, less immediate. The sight of Paishon’s broken body, however, would stay with them, a painful reminder of the violence and tragedy that they had witnessed that day.
All that the men could do for Paishon now was give him as dignified a burial as they could manage. Rondon announced that he would name the falls and the mountains that surrounded them Paishon, as they had had “the bad destiny of being [the] indirect cause and theater” of the young man’s murder. He decided to bury his camarada where he had died, “with his head towards the mountain and his feet towards the river.”
The principal obstacle to Rondon’s plan was that, having already abandoned most of their tools, the men did not have any shovels with which to dig a grave. While the officers stood watching, their hats removed, the camaradas used knives, axes, and their own hands to claw back the wet earth. When they finished, Roosevelt and Rondon “reverently and carefully” picked up Paishon’s shoulders while Lyra, Kermit, Cherrie, and Dr. Cajazeira supported his back and legs. Together they laid the blood-soaked body in its shallow grave, heaped a low mound over it, placed a rude cross at the head, and fired a volley in Paishon’s honor. “Then we left him forever,” Roosevelt wrote, “under the great trees beside the lonely river.”
* * *
ALTHOUGH FINDING Julio’s gun had eased their minds, it did not ensure their safety. With nowhere to go and nothing to lose, Julio would likely try to steal another gun or, at the very least, provisions from the expedition. If he was still feeling angry and vindictive, he could damage their dugout canoes or even try to kill them by pushing boulders over the cliff’s edge while they were working on or near the river. Until they passed these rapids, moreover, the men would still be scattered across the gorge. In an effort to protect themselves and their cargo and canoes, they posted guards wherever they could. One man was stationed at each of the two camps, and another was assigned to follow the camaradas as they completed the baggage carry. Cherrie himself guarded Lyra, Kermit, and their men as they lowered the rest of the canoes over the falls.
Despite a determined struggle, the men were able to move only part of their baggage and two of their four canoes to the bottom of the falls
before darkness fell. Since they could not risk losing any of their dugouts or even the smallest box of provisions, they would have to divide the party overnight, the first time they had had to do so since their expedition had begun. Some of the men slept at the head of the rapids that night, while the rest swung their hammocks between a clutch of trees that had somehow grown up among the boulders that littered a narrow strip of land at the bottom of the cliff.
That night, as they helped Roosevelt struggle to reach the new camp, the men were struck anew by how sick he was. With the excitement and outrage of the murder circulating in his veins, the former president’s urgent determination to take action had temporarily prevailed over the effects of his illness. As his chest heaved with each step up the steep side of the gorge to the new camp, however, it was painfully apparent to them all that he had lost the vitality that had awed them at the outset of their overland journey not even three months earlier. “At 5:30 p.m. Mr. Roosevelt arrived breathless with the great effort which he had made to climb up the slopes of the rocky mountain,” Rondon noted. “That violent exercise was too excessive for his state of health and made him suffer very much.”
Roosevelt’s heart worried them now as much as his infected leg. For the past few days, the man who had torn through every backwoods he could find, from Oyster Bay to Maine to Washington, D.C.’s wild Rock Creek Park, could hobble only a few steps before becoming utterly exhausted. A few days earlier, on a downhill walk with Roosevelt from one camp to the next, Cherrie had been shocked by his friend’s rapid and severe decline. “As he and I went down the trail to our camp at the foot of the rapids, his heart was so affected that frequently he had to sit down and rest,” Cherrie wrote. “He was evidently in great pain because three or four times he threw himself on the ground and begged me to go on.”
The River of Doubt: Theodore Roosevelt's Darkest Journey Page 29