Death on the River of Doubt

by Samantha Seiple

  Roosevelt wasn’t just a good talker with a sharp memory. He was also a good listener with a genuine curiosity about others.

  “His interest was so whole-hearted and obvious that the shyest, most tongue-tied adventurer found himself speaking with entire freedom,” Kermit wrote. “Every one with whom we came in contact fell under the charm. Father invariably thought the best of a person, and for that very reason every one was at his best with him—and felt bound to justify his confidence and judgment.”

  But there was always the exception. And, as Roosevelt would soon witness, when a situation becomes so desperate and dangerous that death seems inevitable, fear can bring out the worst in people.

  It was only a matter of time.

  CHAPTER 7

  The Roar

  March 2, 1914

  Day 4

  March 2 started out as a delightful day. There had hardly been a drop of rain, and the river was calm. The canoes traveled steadily, zigzagging along the bends in the river. The men knew the direction they were heading—due north—but the river and the surrounding rain forest could still hold plenty of surprises.

  “As usual, it was very beautiful,” Roosevelt wrote. “And we never could tell what might appear around any curve.”

  Sometimes the river took them through the swampy forest, where the water gently flowed for miles through the trees. Yesterday, they had suddenly stumbled upon an Indian village, passing palm-leaf shelters along the shore and some sticks poking out of the water, which was all that was left of the Indians’ fishing trap. The river then whisked the canoes under some braided vines that reached across the banks. The vines were remnants of a handrail from a footbridge that the rising waters had washed away.

  These were the first signs the expedition had found that indicated humans lived along the River of Doubt. Fortunately, this Indian village was abandoned. Otherwise, their arrival may have resulted in a surprise attack.

  Rondon wasn’t sure, but he thought it might be the Navaitê Indians, who had once lived there. They were a subtribe of the Nhambiquara Indians.

  Why they had abandoned the primitive village was anyone’s guess. The rising river could have forced them inland, or disease may have wiped them out, or another Indian tribe could have attacked and killed them all. And there was also the possibility that the Indians were still nearby, hiding and watching every move the men made.

  The expedition didn’t linger near the village long. With the aid of the camaradas’ poles and paddles, they continued down the river.

  During the long hours in the canoe, Roosevelt and Cherrie kept a lookout for wildlife. So far their collecting had been a success. From the moment Cherrie first set foot in Brazil, he had already added one thousand birds to the museum collection. They had also collected 250 mammals, which included the prized jaguar. Those specimens had been sent back to the American Museum of Natural History in New York before they started their river journey.

  Animals of the rain forest: left: The slow-moving sloth hangs out in the canopy; right: Is it a branch or a bug? The walking stick insect is great at camouflage.

  Although Cherrie usually went hunting each morning and had added about a dozen more birds to the collection, he and Roosevelt didn’t see much wildlife as they canoed down the river. While the rain forest had more kinds of animals than any other habitat—with many species still undiscovered—they were often difficult to see.

  Some, such as jaguars and tapirs, had migrated to higher ground during the rainy season, but there were still many animals all around them. Roosevelt and the others couldn’t see them because the animals were hiding and blending in among the densely packed leaves that make up the upper level of the towering trees, known as the canopy. Some animals, like the sloth, rarely come down from the canopy to the ground. Others, like monkeys, alternate between the ground and the trees.

  But even when the animals are in plain view, many have protective coloration, which acts as camouflage. This prevents predators from seeing and eating them. Sometimes what appears to be a leaf or stick in the rain forest is really an insect, fooling a would-be predator by blending in with its surroundings.

  Nevertheless, there were times when Roosevelt and Cherrie were lucky. Yesterday, for instance, after passing the abandoned Indian village, they had heard a noise coming from the trees above. It sounded like “eeolk, eeolk.”

  Cherrie looked up and caught sight of a dark gray monkey with a potbelly and prehensile tail. It was a woolly monkey, also known as a barrigudo. He aimed his gun at it and fired. The bullet met its target.

  Afterward, Cherrie skinned the monkey and handed it over to Franca, the cook, who prepared it for dinner that night. It was the first time Roosevelt had tasted monkey meat, and he wrote that it was “very good eating.”

  The monkey stew was particularly tasty to Roosevelt because he knew he was lucky to be alive. Before he had sat down to dinner last night, he was almost killed.

  It happened when the camaradas hurriedly set out to clear the area for their campsite, cutting away the thick vegetation and brushing aside the dead leaves. No one noticed the poisonous coral snake—until a camarada’s bare foot almost stepped on it.

  Frightened, the camarada swung at it with his ax, trying to kill it. But he missed, and the three-foot snake shot forward, heading toward Roosevelt.

  Roosevelt quickly lifted his foot and stomped down on it. Then he lifted his other foot and stomped again, trying to crush the snake’s head. But Roosevelt missed, and the snake opened its mouth, bared its venomous fangs, and bit down hard on his boot.

  The poisonous coral snake is bright yellow and red.

  Roosevelt knew that this was bad—very bad. A bite from a coral snake can lead to paralysis and death.

  “But I had on stout shoes,” Roosevelt noted. “And the fangs of these serpents—unlike those of the pit-vipers—are too short to penetrate good leather.”

  It was a surprising stroke of good luck.

  The fact that Roosevelt had lived another day, and was now sitting in a canoe with his fang-bitten boot looking for wildlife, proved it. But, as his canoe glided along another curve in the river, Roosevelt wasn’t feeling so lucky.

  It was midafternoon when he and the men noticed that the current was starting to pick up its pace. The water flowed faster and faster, and soon it was running at a furious speed.

  Suddenly, the canoes were flying down the river, bouncing and bumping over very rough water, and in the distance the sound of a roar grew louder and more thunderous.

  The roar was a warning, and the men hurriedly paddled their canoes toward the shore for safety. The expedition knew that they were facing one of their most dangerous and deadly foes of all: rapids.

  With one glance, they knew it would be impossible to paddle the canoes down the river. Foaming white water rushed violently over smashed rocks that were thrown on top of one another.

  If they were reckless and tried to run the rapids, their wooden canoes would most likely capsize and get ripped to pieces. If the men didn’t drown in the rapids, those who survived would be left stranded in the jungle without food, weapons, tools, and shelter.

  With no choice but to stop, the camaradas began setting up camp. Meanwhile, Rondon and the rest of the men cut through the undergrowth along the river’s edge to determine how far the rapids went.

  For nearly a mile, the rapids swept on, interspersed along the way with a number of waterfalls.

  “But the extraordinary thing,” Cherrie wrote in his diary, “is that just at the foot of the rapids proper the stream rushes into a narrow gorge with almost perpendicular walls of rock. In one place it is barely five feet across!”

  How deep the water at the narrowest point went could only be guessed at, but Cherrie was able to stand on one side of the river’s bank and touch the other side with the muzzle of his rifle.

  Their progress down the river was at a standstill. In the four days since starting their journey into the unknown, the expedition had t
raveled only twenty miles down the river. They knew that their sole choice now was to build a portage, or overland route, so they could drag their canoes to the point where the rapids ended. This was not an easy undertaking, and it would take days to build the trail.

  Using machetes and axes, they cut through the jungle’s dense foliage. They also chopped down trees and lined them up, side by side, along the newly cut path. The tree trunks acted as rollers, allowing a man to harness the canoe to his body with a rope and pull—like a horse pulling a wagon—while another man stood behind it with a pole and pushed and prodded the canoe as it moved sluggishly over the makeshift “road.”

  The precious time and hard physical labor needed to carry all their supplies and transport the canoes over dry land wasn’t their only problem. When Rondon scouted the area across the river, he found what was left of another abandoned Indian village.

  Even more troubling was something Kermit found while walking near the campsite—two freshly cut branches, laid carefully side by side, in plain view. Each small branch had eight leaves.

  The men recognized it as a message from the Indians. This type of signal was a common form of communication in the wild. What it meant, they didn’t know. But it was clear that they weren’t alone. After that, no one left the camp without his rifle.

  CHAPTER 8

  Welcome to the Jungle

  March 4, 1914

  Day 6

  Two days later, Roosevelt and Cherrie woke up not a second too soon to find their tent crawling with thousands of termites. The insects were eating everything in their path, including Cherrie’s rain poncho, mosquito netting, and duffel bag.

  “My poncho that I had spread on the ground beneath my hammock was literally alive with them,” Cherrie wrote in his diary.

  When Roosevelt leaned over the side of his cot and looked at the floor, he saw moving patches of red and green. Recognizing that the termites were eating his wide-brimmed sun helmet, he reached down and grabbed it. Brushing and shaking off the termites, he held up and inspected what remained of a spare pair of underwear. Cherrie and Kermit burst into laughter. This time, Roosevelt didn’t find it very funny.

  “My socks had totally disappeared and so had most of my underclothing,” Roosevelt said. “And I badly needed that change that very day.”

  From the time they set up camp to stop and build the portage, the bugs were worse than ever. Everyone was suffering from insect bites.

  “The little bees were in such swarms as to be a nuisance. Many small stinging bees were with them, which stung badly,” Roosevelt wrote. “We were bitten by huge horse-flies the size of bumblebees … The boroshudas were the worst pests; they brought the blood at once, and left marks that lasted for weeks.”

  Despite wearing head nets and using the newly invented “fly dope,” now known as insect repellent, there was no way to truly get rid of the bugs. The effectiveness of the fly dope ointment wore off after about a half hour—partly because they were sweating profusely from the intense heat. Even so, they were glad to have the repellent, especially at night, when they were trying to sleep.

  “We have suffered more … than any previous day with insects,” Cherrie wrote in his diary. “My hands, and ears especially, itch and burn almost intolerably.”

  The shoeless camaradas were dealing with painfully swollen bare feet. And Julio, the biggest and strongest camarada, was quickly losing his initial enthusiasm for his job. However, even amid the nearly constant biting and stinging insects, the men made headway with the portage, finishing it in two days.

  After cutting and clearing a path by hand, the men dragged the canoes over the portage, made up of the log rollers that they had chopped down in the rain forest.

  They then began the grueling task of lugging the seven empty canoes out of the river and up the steep riverbank to the portage. Kermit, who was not only suffering from insect bites but also from another outbreak of boils, still managed to help. Together, he and Rondon’s right-hand man, Lyra, pulled and pushed the biggest and heaviest canoe.

  By the following day, on March 5, at noon, the canoes were finally back in the river, loaded down with their cargo and ready to go. When Roosevelt climbed into his canoe, looking it over, he could see that all their hard work had come at a price.

  “It not only cost two and a half days of severe and incessant labor, but it cost something in the damage to the canoes,” Roosevelt stated. “One in particular, the one in which I had been journeying, was split in a manner which caused us serious uneasiness as to how long, even after being patched, it would last.”

  With swollen hands, faces, and feet, the men finally continued on down the river. They found some slight relief from the biting insects—as long as the canoes were in constant motion. But when they spotted a huge “bee-tree” along the bank, they didn’t hesitate to stop.

  The camaradas took their knives and axes and gouged holes in the tree. A thick milky liquid oozed out, which they eagerly drank. Roosevelt wasn’t sure he liked it.

  But when Luiz, the steersman in Roosevelt’s canoe, took his ax and chopped into the hollow of the tree, Roosevelt could see a waxy formation. Inside was the hive where the stingless bees stored their honey. Everyone greedily ate some.

  “The honey was delicious, sweet and yet with a tart flavor,” Roosevelt wrote.

  Before leaving, some greenish-black, white, and brown feathers caught Kermit’s attention. It was the turkey-like guan. He quickly grabbed his rifle and fired, expertly hitting his target. Tonight, the cook, Franca, would make canja—Roosevelt’s favorite stew. But it wouldn’t be nearly enough to curb the hunger pains of the twenty-two men.

  Back in their canoes, Rondon, Kermit, and Lyra continued to survey and map the winding river. Overall, it was slow going. Roosevelt still worried about the time involved in making a detailed map—not to mention the time lost in building the portage.

  Since the start of the journey, they had zigzagged down the curvy river, traveling about sixty miles, which averaged to seven and a half miles a day so far. But if they drew the distance as a straight line on the map, the number of miles they had traveled was much shorter—by about half. And no one knew how many more miles the river ran.

  “What is ahead is absolutely unknown … for we had no idea where we would come out, how we would get out, or when we would get out,” Roosevelt wrote.

  Roosevelt (left) and Rondon stand on a tall rock formation to get a better view of the rapids.

  At three o’clock that afternoon, the current suddenly picked up its pace, and the men again heard the ominous roar of rapids. The camaradas quickly paddled the canoes to the bank.

  They soon found a narrow path alongside the river. The path had been beaten down by the four- and three-toed feet of the piglike tapirs that usually live near the water because they love to swim. Following the trail, the men scouted the area.

  The rapids stretched on for a mile and included two waterfalls. Although the men didn’t want to, they knew that they had to stop and build another portage. Running the rapids was too risky, as Roosevelt noted:

  “It would be silly to make the attempt on an exploring expedition, where the loss of a canoe or of its contents means disaster … Our canoes would not have lived half a minute in the wild river.”

  * * *

  Four grueling days later, the canoes were back on the river. But the expedition traveled only one mile before reaching another set of impassable rapids. Disheartened, the men moored their canoes securely to some trees and set up camp.

  That night the rain fell hard, and while they slept, no one had any idea that the river was quickly and steadily rising.

  CHAPTER 9

  Misfortune

  March 11, 1914

  Day 13

  It was still raining the next morning when the men woke up and discovered that two canoes were missing. They hurriedly untied one of the remaining canoes and set off, frantically searching the river for their lost canoes. But all they found were pie
ces of wood, the last remaining fragments of their smashed canoes.

  Roosevelt figured that the rising river caused the leaky canoe to sink, pulling the canoe it was tied to under as well. Once the canoes were sunk, the water yanked and pulled them free from their moors. The canoes were then swept away, crashing into rocks that pulverized them to bits.

  It was a disastrous setback. There wasn’t enough room for all the men and cargo in the five remaining canoes. Their only option was to build another canoe, but it would take days.

  Cherrie expressed his worry in his diary:

  “This morning our first serious misfortune faces us! The two old big canoes … broke away last night and are smashed on the rocks! There is nothing for us to do but stop and build one or two new canoes. This means time and the eating into our limited supply of provisions!”

  The men immediately set out looking for a suitable tree to build a canoe. It continued to rain heavily, but they eventually found a huge tatajuba, a type of rubber tree, that was five feet in diameter around the base. Under Rondon’s watchful eye, the camaradas got busy and chopped it down. By evening, they began the time-consuming task of hollowing out and shaping the hard yellowish wood into a canoe.

  For the next few days, the camaradas worked all day in shifts, not stopping until near midnight. Rondon never left their side while they worked. He wanted to make sure that the camaradas never let up.

  Camarada Paixão Paishon, who had proved his mettle working in the wilderness for Rondon’s Telegraph Commission, labored so hard that his trousers were shredded. The rest of the camaradas worked tirelessly, too—except for one—the strongest one of all, Julio. Roosevelt described Julio as an “utterly worthless … lazy shirk.”