The River of Doubt: Theodore Roosevelt's Darkest Journey

by Candice Millard

  Although the pirarara was a powerful fish, it is more likely that it had taken advantage of a rare opportunity and devoured an already dead monkey that had fallen into the river than that it had caught the animal alive. The idea of a fish catching its lunch on the banks of the river rather than inside it, however, was not beyond the realm of possibility in the Amazon, as the high-jumping arawana, or water monkey, proved.

  For the Brazilians, such fish were fairly common and of little interest compared with another, even larger fish, the piraíba, which, they told their American companions, preys on men. The piraíba, which has been known to grow to nine feet in length and weigh more than three hundred pounds, is a bottom dweller, rising up from the murky depths to surprise its prey. Cajazeira himself had examined a piraíba that had been killed by two machete-wielding fishermen after, they claimed, the fish had lunged at them with open mouth and attempted to attack them. He told the men of the expedition that, because of its ability to wage a sneak attack, swimmers feared the catfish even more than caimans, which they could usually see and so had a better chance of avoiding. Rondon agreed with the doctor, adding that, in many of the villages he had visited along the banks of the lower Madeira River, the people had gone so far as to build stockades in the water just so they could have a place to bathe and swim without fear of an attack from piraíba.

  Night had fallen by the time Antonio Pareci and Luiz Correia returned from their search for Julio. As they stumbled into camp, it was immediately apparent to every man in the expedition that they were not only exhausted and hungry, but alone. Although they had spent all day looking for the fallen camarada—calling his name, firing their rifles, and building fires in the hope that the smoke would help him find his way to their little makeshift camp—they never even caught sight of him.

  * * *

  THE MEN concluded that Julio must have decided to try his luck with the Indians who had attacked Rondon and Lobo. “It was questionable whether or not he would live to reach the Indian villages,” Roosevelt wrote, “which were probably his goal.” Julio may have been better off trying to survive another night in the jungle alone than turning to the Cinta Larga for help. Like any inhabitant of the rain forest, the Cinta Larga did not coddle the weak or the vulnerable. Physical strength and self-sufficiency were prerequisites to surviving in their world. Julio’s presence, moreover, would have posed an unacceptable risk to the Indians. The simple fact that he would have had to walk into one of their villages or hunting camps as an unannounced stranger would have placed him in grave danger.

  According to one account, many years later, one of the first outsiders known to seek help from the Cinta Larga was an English engineer who had become lost in the jungle and had stumbled upon a Cinta Larga village when he was on the verge of starvation. Having nothing else to offer as a gift, he gave the Indians his only possession: his knife. The Cinta Larga took the knife and, in return, gave the man food. After watching him eat his fill, one of the Indians walked up behind him and slit his throat, killing him with the very knife he had given them.

  CHAPTER 27

  The Cauldron

  EVEN AS THEY SPECULATED about Julio’s fate, the nineteen remaining members of the expedition knew that they were not much better off than he was. They had a handful of advantages—ranging from weapons to supplies to sheer numbers—over the man that they had just abandoned to the jungle. Each of those resources, however, had proved to be far less valuable than they might have imagined before reaching the rain forest.

  Their rifles, which they had assumed they could rely on to supplement their rations, had never fulfilled their promise. In a rare moment of foresight during the pre-journey planning in New York, Fiala had hired a company to pack the expedition’s ammunition in zinc cases, a hundred rounds to a case, to protect it from the corrosive effects of the jungle’s heavy humidity. Even an endless supply of bullets, however, would have done them little good, since they could find no game to hunt. The best shot that any of them had taken on the banks of the River of Doubt had been Julio’s deadly accurate bead on Paishon.

  So awkward and heavy were the expedition’s dugout canoes that they were only slightly preferable to having no boats at all. Any hope that the men had found in the leveling landscape and smooth waters they had encountered upon leaving Paishon Canyon on April 6 was lost when they launched their boats again on the 8th. They encountered so many rapids that day that they made only three miles. The following day was even worse, allowing the expedition only fifteen minutes of quiet water between sets of rapids. “On the 10th,” Roosevelt wrote wearily through the fog of his illness, “we repeated the proceedings: a short quick run; a few hundred meters’ portage, occupying, however, at least a couple of hours; again a few minutes’ run; again other rapids.”

  The rapids of the River of Doubt had destroyed six of their canoes in less than a month’s time. The problem, Roosevelt realized, was as much the boats that they were riding in as the river that they were descending. “How I longed for a big Maine birch-bark, such as that in which I once went down the Mattawamkeag at high water! It would have slipped down these rapids as a girl trips through a country dance,” he wrote. “But our loaded dugouts would have shoved their noses under every curl.”

  As for their provisions, the men were now eating barely enough to stay alive, much less to fuel the hard work that they had to do in order to get through and around the rapids. “My supper . . . consisted of one soda cracker and a small ‘portion’ of fish with a cup of coffee,” Cherrie wrote in his diary. “Not a very hearty meal for a full grown man!” The officers did their best to supplement the camaradas’ diet with food from their own ration tins, but they had too little to spare, and the delicacies that Fiala had packed simply stirred the appetites of the rugged paddlers and porters.

  Cherrie suspected that this near-starvation diet was at the root of many of their maladies. “The lack of sufficient food is one potent reason why we are all physically below normal,” he wrote. Cherrie and Lyra had been battling dysentery for weeks, and two of the camaradas were so ill that the others feared for their lives. “A long further delay, accompanied by wearing labor, would have almost certainly meant that the weakest among our party would have begun to die,” Roosevelt wrote.

  Roosevelt himself was at the top of that list, but his son was not far behind. Although Kermit rarely mentioned his malaria in his journal, Cherrie wrote that Kermit’s fever was so bad that he was “scarce able to stand.” Deeply concerned, Dr. Cajazeira began to inject quinine directly into Kermit’s arms, but his fever continued unabated.

  Kermit was so sick that he did not even notice when his dog, Trigueiro, leapt out of his dugout just as the paddlers pushed off from the bank. Trigueiro had been given to Kermit as a gift early in the expedition and had quickly become his closest companion. Kermit had even written about his dog in his letters to Belle, recounting their long solitary walks across the chapadão and how Trigueiro would wish him good night at the end of the day by thrusting his muzzle into his master’s hand as it hung over the side of his hammock.

  Despite Kermit’s affection for Trigueiro, nothing could be done to retrieve him until the expedition found a place to camp for the night.

  The men had traveled roughly two hundred miles by that point, but they still had at least two hundred more to go until they reached the fork in the river where, they hoped, Lieutenant Pyrineus would be waiting for them. Rondon’s early decision to send Pyrineus up the Aripuanã to meet their expedition with new provisions had proved prescient and, if all went according to plan, could save their lives. After all that had happened to them, however, they could not feel confident that, if they did make it to the agreed-upon rendezvous point, Pyrineus and his party would be there waiting for them. The Brazilian lieutenant faced a difficult voyage of his own, and there were no guarantees that he and his men had reached their destination.

  * * *

  THE POSSIBILITY that they might not return home alive, once a remote
and abstract idea, had become a corrosive, everyday burden for the members of the expedition. As the journey wore on, the Amazonian jungle, which had never seemed welcoming, had begun to feel not just dark and dangerous but inescapably oppressive. It was a sensation that most outsiders who plunged into that dense, inscrutable wilderness experienced, and it left behind an indelible, almost violent impression. The Polish explorer and writer Arkady Fiedler wrote that, after he and his companions had spent months in the Amazon rain forest, “something began to go wrong in us. Coming daily into such close contact with the virgin forest we found, as so many other white men had found before us, that its grotesque forms and brilliant colours got on our nerves like a nightmare. It was stifling us; the whole exotic jungle became one gigantic cauldron of hatred and brutality.”

  For outsiders who are forced to spend lengthy periods in the rain forest, one of its most oppressive and frequently mentioned features is its relentless monotony. Although their boats were passing through a world of infinite variety, to the members of the expedition everything had begun to look simply green. The creatures of the Amazon had become such masters of disguise that all that the men could see on either side of the river was verdant leaves and heavy vines. H. M. Tomlinson, an Englishman who had traveled along two thousand miles of Amazonian rivers just a few years before Roosevelt’s expedition, tried to explain this overwhelming sense of sameness by comparing the rain forest to the soaring sky and the endless sea. “The forest of the Amazons is not merely trees and shrubs. It is not land. It is another element,” he wrote. “Its inhabitants are arborean; they have been fashioned for life in that medium as fishes to the sea and birds to the air. Its green apparition is persistent, as the sky is and the ocean. In months of travel it is the horizon which the traveler cannot reach.”

  The camaradas were deeply affected by the forest’s stifling monotony, the river’s myriad dangers, and their own dark fears, and the American officers charted their emotional decline with growing alarm. Cherrie discovered that a box of shells for his rifle had been stolen by some of the camaradas, who, he wrote in his diary, “doubtless thought the cans contained meat.” As the expedition already had little ammunition to spare, the theft was a serious one. “My gun is thus rendered of little value for obtaining meat for our party,” Cherrie wrote. Even more damaging than the loss of the shells was the blow to the trust between the officers and the camaradas. No one could blame Julio this time.

  Rondon was willing to admit that physically his men were worn thin, but he continued to insist that mentally and emotionally they were as strong as ever. “No sign of mental depression was manifested in them and nothing could make us foresee the possibility of their losing determination to face and conquer new obstacles and resist the shock of the greatest misadventures and sufferings,” he wrote forcefully. But Rondon was attributing to his men his own extraordinary fortitude, and expecting them to share his unshakable confidence that what they were doing was worth any sacrifice.

  The rain forest did not depress Rondon because it was the only home he knew—more familiar to him even than his own wife and children. For the fever-wracked Roosevelt, however, it was nothing of the kind. Rather, the expedition was becoming an ordeal of inhuman proportions, testing his strength and resolve as nothing he had encountered in a lifetime of self-imposed physical challenges. When he wasn’t too sick to sit up, Roosevelt sought comfort and distraction in the world that he knew best: his library. For his trip to Africa, he had spent months choosing the books that he would take with him, ordering special volumes that had been beautifully bound in pigskin, with type reduced to the smallest legible size, so that the books would be as light as possible. Roosevelt, Kermit wrote, “read so rapidly that he had to plan very carefully in order to have enough books to last him through a trip.”

  He had not had that luxury when preparing for his South American journey, however. “The plans for the Brazilian expedition came into being so unexpectedly that he could not choose his library with the usual care,” Kermit noted. Among the books that had made it onto the dugout canoes for their river journey were Thomas More’s Utopia, the plays of Sophocles, the last two volumes of Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, and Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus. “These and many others comforted me much,” Roosevelt wrote, “as I read them in head-net and gauntlets, sitting on a log.”

  By this point in the expedition, Roosevelt had already read and discarded every book in his small traveling library and was desperate for new reading material. He finally resorted to reading Kermit’s Oxford Book of English Verse, even though he was unimpressed by it. “The choice from Longfellow’s poems appealed to him as particularly poor,” Kermit recalled, “and I think that it was for this reason that he disapproved of the whole collection.” After tearing through the book of English verse as he lay burning with fever, Roosevelt turned, with great reluctance, to the book of French verse, which he considered to be better than nothing, but just barely. “For French verse father had never cared. He said it didn’t sing sufficiently. ‘The Song of Roland’ was the one exception he granted,” Kermit wrote. “It was, therefore, a still greater proof of distress when he borrowed the Oxford book of French verse.” Roosevelt read the book, but he complained so bitterly about it that his Francophile son finally threatened to take it away if he did not stop attacking his favorite works.

  Kermit too found in his few remaining books some measure of escape from the monotony of the rain forest, but not from its dangers. On April 11, he finished reading A Retirada da Laguna by the Brazilian novelist Visconde de Taunay. The book revolved around Taunay’s impressions of the War of the Triple Alliance, the five-year conflict that had devastated Paraguay and orphaned Rondon. Every time Kermit picked up the book, rather than being spirited away to some other world, he was reminded, in vivid, nightmarish detail, of the ravages of starvation and the consequences of stumbling into the unknown. The book was, he wrote in his diary that night, “a wonderful account but not cheering to read with our own provisions so low, and no knowledge of what’s ahead of us.”

  More effective than books for Kermit, although in even shorter supply, was a bottle of Scotch that he and Cherrie shared when, in Cherrie’s words, they “felt the need of spiritual help.” The two men had actually started out with three bottles, but since they had taken “quite generous drinks,” the first bottle had quickly disappeared. They were more conservative with the second bottle, but soon it too was gone. With only one bottle left and a seemingly endless river before them, Kermit and Cherrie treated the whiskey they had left with great care. “When we got the third bottle out on the first night,” Cherrie would later recall, “we held it up and took a pencil and marked off: this is the 10th, the 11th, the 12th, 13th, 14th, 15th,—marked off the amount we could take from that. . .. You can imagine the marks were close together on the bottle.”

  * * *

  LIKE KERMIT with his books, Cherrie enjoyed his whiskey but found little relaxation in it. With each passing day, the naturalist grew increasingly worried about the expedition, and he bristled at every decision that seemed to him to endanger it further. He continued to blame Rondon for most of the expedition’s woes, venting his fury in the pages of his journal at night. But even Cherrie’s friends were not exempt from his criticism. On April 11, the day after Trigueiro had leapt from Kermit’s canoe and disappeared into the jungle, Cherrie was appalled to learn that the expedition was stopping so that they could send two men back up the river to search for Kermit’s dog. “Personally I feel this was a great mistake on Col. Roosevelt’s and Kermit’s part, when we are so anxious to get ahead,” Cherrie wrote. His disapproval only deepened as the day wore on and the men did not return. Finally, at almost 5:00 p.m., the camaradas stepped into camp with Trigueiro at their side.

  An entire day had been lost to searching for Kermit’s pet. The camaradas must have wondered what kind of people go to such lengths to rescue a dog but intentionally abandon a man to certain death in the w
ilderness. Cherrie simply thought that it was a waste of precious time and, more important, that it sent the wrong message to Rondon about their willingness to linger in the rain forest. “A precedence is established of which our companions will doubtless avail themselves when again they may wish to stop for a day or part of a day!” he complained in his diary.

  By the end of the day, however, the delay had also yielded a piece of exceptionally good news. While waiting for the two searchers to return with Trigueiro, Luiz Correia had taken one of the dugout canoes and gone fishing along the opposite side of the river from the expedition’s campsite. “As he worked his way along the shore,” Cherrie wrote excitedly, “[he] found a place where a bejuca had been cut off with a knife or an ax!”

  Not only did the use of a metal tool indicate that a rubber-tapper rather than an Indian had cut the vine, but it was obvious to Correia that whoever had done the cutting had been sitting or standing in a canoe rather than on the riverbank. Having gone this long without seeing anyone else on the river, the members of the expedition knew that the Indians who lived along its banks were not, as Cherrie put it, “canoe Indians”—making it all but certain that rubber-tappers had reached this far up the river in boats.

  This was the first mark of the outside world that the men had seen since they had launched their dugouts on the River of Doubt a month and a half earlier. It was a sign of hope—a sign that salvation lay within reach.