Colonel Roosevelt

by Edmund Morris

  In Xanadu did Kubla Khan

  A stately pleasure-dome decree:

  Where Alph, the sacred river, ran

  Through caverns measureless to man

  Down to a sunless sea.

  Kermit, Cajazeira, and Cherrie took turns watching over him. The doctor laced him with quinine, at first orally, and when that had no effect, by injection straight into the abdomen.

  In terror, Kermit registered the details of that night. “The black rushing river with the great trees towering high above along the bank; the sodden earth underfoot; for a few moments the stars would be shining, and then the sky would cloud over and the rain would fall in torrents, shutting out sky and trees and river.” If his father was the epic hero Kermit believed him to be, then nature seemed to be in a state of hysteria at the prospect of losing him.

  Toward dawn the quinine brought Roosevelt’s temperature down, and he summoned Cherrie and Rondon. The Brazilian was taken aback at his grim expression as he said, “The expedition cannot stop. On the other hand, I cannot proceed. You go on and leave me.”

  He grew agitated when he saw they would not obey him. Rondon countered with a gentle appeal to his sense of responsibility.

  “Let me point out that this is called the ‘Roosevelt-Rondon’ expedition, so we cannot possibly split up.”

  A reconnaissance after breakfast brought semi-encouraging news. There were two more rapids in the offing, but beyond them was a large affluent which gave promise of smooth water further on. If Roosevelt could stand another forty-eight hot, humid hours in the sunless gorge, he would see why Rondon had named the confluence “Bôa Esperança,” place of good hope. There, the expedition might at last become waterborne again.

  That day’s portage proved to be a long one. Roosevelt’s temperature resurged. His leg showed signs of erysipelas, a hot, shiny, streptococcal inflammation of the skin. He labored past the first rapid with ineffective help from Cherrie and Lyra, both of whom had dysentery. Kermit floated him down to the next one in a canoe, but he was more dead than alive when he got to a halfway camp Rondon had pitched. Dr. Cajazeira noted with concern that although his pulse had accelerated, his blood pressure had dropped. At least he did not become delirious again overnight.

  Kermit developed a fever of his own the following morning. It was 6 April, the thirty-ninth day of the expedition—or the eighty-fourth, counting back to its ascent of the Sepotuba—and almost every member was weak from malnutrition. Julio’s mysterious disappearance, after the deaths of Simplício and Paixão, had depressed the camaradas, while the principals dreaded that Roosevelt might die too.

  “Am in a blue funk, as I have been for some time, to get out of the country,” Kermit wrote in his diary.

  Roosevelt staggered through a second portage before the explorers reassembled at Bôa Esperança. They divided themselves between the two pontoons, with Rondon’s leading, and pushed out into the broadening river. The current took them, and for the first time in weeks, they felt a momentum that they did not have to slow.

  Rondon and Lyra dared not make any more survey stops for fear of enraging Roosevelt. But they hit on a way of correlating canoe speed and compass swings within imaginary rectilinear tracts superimposed on the river. They were in the midst of this absorbing geometry when a voice from the bank shouted, “Tenente!”*

  The sound of Portuguese coming out of a wilderness untrodden by white men bewildered them until they realized it was Julio’s voice. Desperate, apparently, for his own life, he had seen them coming downstream and crawled along a bough overhanging the water.

  Rondon was too shocked to respond. He did not want to ruin his calibrations by stopping. Roosevelt’s pontoon was still some way behind. Julio would certainly hail that too. If ignored, he would try to catch up with the expedition at its next camp. Or a search party could be sent back.

  After a record run of 36 kilometers, Rondon discovered another tributary of the Dúvida at almost eleven degrees of latitude. It poured in from the east over a bar of sparkling quartzite and swelled the main stream to a width of 120 meters. An abundance of uauássú palms soared above dense stands of rubber trees, signaling that Amazonas at last was near. Rondon named the new river the Capitão Cardoso, after a colleague who had died in the telegraph service, and pitched camp near the bar.

  Here he waited for the rest of the expedition to arrive. When it did, Roosevelt’s fever appeared to be on the wane, but Kermit’s was worse. Julio, they said, had hailed them, but they too had not stopped. Rondon asked what they thought he should do.

  Roosevelt had no doubt whatsoever. “The expedition is in a state of peril,” he said. “We must devote all our resources to safeguarding the lives of present members.” Julio had forfeited that membership. Nineteen half-starved men, many of them sick, were in urgent need of a return to civilization. The camaradas were exhausted. Some were practically naked, their clothes and underwear devoured by termites. Nobody yet knew where the Dúvida was headed. If Julio gave himself up, he would have to be fed, accommodated, and guarded night and day. It was out of the question to go back for him. “I absolutely do not consent!”

  Kermit ventured to disagree. His father turned on him in rage.

  “Shut up!”

  Lyra murmured in Portuguese, “He thinks he is still President.”

  Rondon, who seemed to have forgotten about letting Julio escape three days before, said that it was “the duty of a Brazilian officer, and of a man” to bring a murderer to justice.

  Roosevelt’s anger ebbed as quickly as it had surged. He said he would defer to Rondon’s opinion. “Let the law of your country take its course.”

  Julio did not show up that night, despite the inviting plume of smoke sent up by the camp fire. After breakfast the next morning, two soldiers were dispatched to where he was last seen. They returned late in the day to say that they had searched a radius of many kilometers, but failed to find him.

  THE EXPEDIÇÀO CÍENTIFICA Roosevelt-Rondon made good use of its forty-eight-hour halt. Everybody needed a break from paddling and portaging. It was pleasant to relax in an open space, reasonably insect-free, in limpid light, after so many weeks in dark forests and valleys. For once there was no rain, just abundant sun to dry out blankets, and clear pools to bathe in. Two of the camaradas went out with a net, and brought back a gigantic catfish, more than enough for a communal feast under the stars (among them an inverted Dipper, pointing north). A bright moon made the joining of waters gleam like tossing silver.

  Roosevelt ate little. The malaria had killed his appetite. In addition, dysentery was eroding his body, leading to a gauntness that renewed Kermit’s fears for him. His leg was so angry with what Cherrie called “oriental ulcers” that he was unable to get any exercise, except when forced to portage—which in turn placed a strain on his heart.

  Rondon doubted there would be many more barriers to the progress of the expedition. According to his aneroid barometer, the Dúvida had fallen 202 meters since its passage under the wooden bridge near José Bonifácio. This suggested to him that the Amazon basin was bottoming out. Yet over the course of the next five days, the river continued to be as resentful of burdens on its back as Captain Amílcar’s pack team had been. “We are still surrounded by hills, and the roar of rapids is in our ears!” Cherrie wrote in his diary for 8 April. Every virgin promontory, right or left, disclosed another steaming set ahead. Roosevelt had to be carried past each. Soon he was not even able to sit upright in his dugout. A platform was improvised for him to lie on—tarpaulin spread across a bed of food tins—but then the sun beat down on him intolerably, and he sweated away further body salts. His men rigged an awning that gave him some relief from the heat, if not from the humidity that steamed off the river.

  He remained fully conscious, able to admire the lush beauty of palm and banana trees glistening in the forest after showers, or emerging wraithlike from the mist that hung over them every morning. Along with Kermit, obsessed with the notion of marrying Belle i
n May or early June, and Cherrie, longing for Vermont, he became daily more homesick for the temperate north. Maple buds would be red now around Sagamore Hill, and windflowers and bloodroot blooming. For perhaps the fortieth time, Roosevelt watched the pontoons thumping their way over wet boulders and regretted the Canadian canoes he had left behind. “How I longed,” he wrote in his manuscript, “for a big Maine birchbark, 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.”

  On 14 April the river at last allowed an advance of 32 kilometers. The explorers were so used to disappointment, they did not dare to exult. But there were no rapids the next morning, and after a smooth run of two and a half hours, somebody noticed a signpost on the left bank of the river. It read simply, “J. A.”

  As a boy sailing on the Nile, Roosevelt had seen the fundamentals of civilization proclaim themselves thus: the column, the tablet, the cipher. As a statesman, he had passed through the gates of many palaces. But now, having nearly died, and being threatened yet with death from blood poisoning (he had a violent abscess on his inner right thigh, and another forming on his buttock), he could look on this wooden marker as something more thrilling than Karnak or Schönbrunn.

  “J. A.” TURNED OUT to be Joaquim Antônio, one of the rubber-tappers who were staking claims all over Amazonas in response to the worldwide automobile boom. Had he been at home, in his clean, cool palm-thatched house, he would have been able to tell the explorers what he called the Dúvida, and whether he had any inkling that it originated in Mato Grosso. But he was engaged elsewhere.

  They had to keep paddling for another hour until they came upon an old black fisherman, the first new human being they had seen in forty-eight days. When he got over his shock at their appearance, he said that the river they were on was known locally as the “Castanho.”

  Rondon did not try to make him understand that it now bore the name of the emaciated senhor in the big canoe. The fisherman did learn, however, that Roosevelt had once been President of the United States. It took a while for this information to register.

  “But is he truly a president?”

  Rondon explained that Roosevelt was now retired.

  “Ah, but he who has been a king, is still majestic.”

  When Roosevelt heard this in translation, he thanked the fisherman, and said that no ordinary person in his own country would be capable of such eloquence.

  Later in the day, the expedition reached another rubber-tapping outpost, where Rondon learned that some rough stretches of river swirled downstream. Dr. Cajazeira was afraid they might fatally delay the hospital treatment his patient needed. So far, Roosevelt had declined camp surgery, but it had become imperative to lance and drain the abscess on his thigh. No anesthetic was available. On the morning of 16 April, he submitted without complaint to the agonizing operation, in which pium and boroshuda flies greedily participated. His condition at once improved, although he continued to shed weight until his clothes drooped around him.

  It took another ten days, and several more portages, before an affluent that looked even broader than the Dúvida opened out on the right bank, and a neat tent hove into view, flying the combined colors of the United States and Brazil.

  Rondon knew at once who had pitched it, and what the affluent was. Early in the year he had ordered one of his junior officers in Amazonas, Lieutenant Antonio Pirineus de Sousa, to sail up the navigable river known as the baixo, or “lower” Aripuaná to the point that it received a river of mysterious origin, flowing north. Rondon had not been able to guarantee that the unknown river was the Dúvida, nor had he been able to predict when—if ever—he and Roosevelt might come down it. But assuming his guess was correct, he wanted Pirineus to be ready with a range of emergency supplies.

  The lieutenant had been waiting for more than a month. He was consequently as relieved as Rondon was when their respective rifle salutes cracked across the water. After the joy of a champagne-sluiced reunion, Pirineus added further cheer by reporting that the Lauriodó-Fiala and Amílcar-Miller expeditions had been successful. Fiala had left for New York. Miller was in Manáos, indefatigably collecting local specimens.

  It was agreed in a hydrological conference that the so-called Dúvida, Castanho, and baixo Aripuaná were all the same river. Broad as the inflowing alto Aripuaná might be, its volume was less than that of the main stream—which could now be formally “baptized” as the Rio Roosevelt.

  ROOSEVELT HAD TO brace himself to stand through the long ceremony, which took place the following day, Monday, 27 April 1914. He could not sit, because of the unlanced abscess in his buttock. But at least he could look forward to immediate transportation out of the worst hell he had ever been in. There was a steamboat terminal not far away, at the little rubber town of São João, with daily departures to Manáos. Rondon had sent ahead to reserve tickets on the next service for the three norte-americanos. The rest of the expedition would follow after Lyra had surveyed the Aripuaná confluence for the information of Brazilian cartographers.

  Helmet in hand, looking thin and spent, Roosevelt listened patiently as Rondon read an extensive summary of what they had achieved together. The subsequent ritual was anticlimactic, being a repetition of the one already conducted more than a month before. The dedicatee seemed less moved by it than by having to say goodbye to Rondon and Lyra.

  “ROOSEVELT HAD TO BRACE HIMSELF TO STAND THROUGH THE LONG CEREMONY.”

  From right of the flag-draped marker: two camaradas, the two colonels, Lt. Lyra, Cherrie, Kermit, unidentified Brazilian officer. (photo credit i16.2)

  WHEN THE AMERICAN PARTY awoke on Wednesday morning (Roosevelt lying face downward because of the agony of his latest abscess) they found themselves cruising down the Rio Madeira aboard the SS Cidade de Manáos. “The throbbing of her engines seems good to us,” wrote Cherrie. “She is a fast boat and is carrying us rapidly toward the Amazon.”

  In their sleep, they had been delivered from a river no longer mysterious, but known, every kilometer of it recorded in ink, and some paid for in blood. Roosevelt’s estimate, subject to official verification, was that they had explored 1,500 kilometers, or nearly one thousand miles, of a watercourse longer than the Rhine—or in his preferred phrase, “the largest unknown river in the world.” That more than fulfilled the hope he had expressed to Ethel five months before, that his expedition would represent “some small achievement of worth.”

  At 2:30 P.M. the Amazon manifested itself, so sluggishly that it failed to impress. It looked like a muddy lake, flooded to immobility by the rainy season just ended. Roosevelt did not have the energy to include a description of it in his latest sheaf of manuscript, entitled “Down an Unknown River.” For weeks he had been unable to eat more than a few spoonfuls of solid food; now he was living on nothing but eggs and milk. Either because he was too weak to exercise his habitual circumspection about personal matters, or because his relief at having survived was so strong, he permitted himself an unusual degree of sentimentality in bringing the manuscript to an end:

  Each man to his home, and his true love! Each was longing for the homely things that were so dear to him, for the home people that were dearer still, and for the one who was dearest of all.

  Roosevelt did not know it, but Rondon had discreetly timed his arrival in Manáos for the small hours of Thursday, 30 April. This was to spare him the embarrassment of having many people see him carried down the gangway in a prone position. Even so, a reception committee was on hand, and he had to endure its welcome. A luxurious private “palacette” was provided him, courtesy of the governor of Amazonas. A sack of family mail awaited. Kermit, ecstatic, stayed up the rest of the night reading letters from Belle.

  “Father about the same, but much more cheerful,” he noted in his diary.

  Arrangements were made to ferry them the rest of the way down the Amazon on a cargo boat, along with Cherrie, Miller, and forty-eight tons of freshly harves
ted nuts. Such was the power of Roosevelt’s name that a British Booth Line steamship, the Aidan, was standing by at Belém do Para, ready to take him directly to New York.

  Before leaving Manáos on the first day of May, he had his rear abscess lanced. This procedure left him still unable to walk, and he was taken aboard the cargo boat on a stretcher. The subsequent river voyage took four days. He spent all of it in the captain’s cabin, writing letters to his family and friends. One note was addressed to Arthur Lee in London. It showed that Roosevelt’s spirit was still strong, leaping ahead to future activity:

  ON THE AMAZON, MAY 4, 1912

  Dear Arthur,

  I’ve had a bad fever bout and two abscesses, and am still in bed, so excuse pencil.

  On June 11th I shall be in Madrid at Kermit’s wedding. I shall be in London about June 15th. Will you be there then? Can I come to Chesterfield Street? If not, can you engage me rooms at Brown’s or some other old fogey hotel? And, will you see Leonard Darwin, or whoever the present head of the Royal Geographic Society is, and tell him that whereas I had to refuse to give the Society a lecture on Africa, now I can and will give them a lecture on a genuine bit of South American exploration. We have put on the map an absolutely unknown river, running through seven parallels of latitude, almost on the 60th degree of longitude, into the Madeira; no map has a hint of it, yet it is the biggest affluent of the biggest affluent of the mightiest river in the world.… Love to the Lady!

  Yours ever

  Theodore Roosevelt

  HE WAS PROFOUNDLY affected, on reaching Belém, to find that Rondon had somehow contrived to beat him there. The little Brazilian wanted to make sure he got off safely.