The River of Doubt: Theodore Roosevelt's Darkest Journey Read online

  Critical Acclaim for

  The River of Doubt

  “The River of Doubt is not an ordinary biography. Its author, Candice Millard, is a credible historian as well as a former writer and editor for National Geographic. She pays keen attention to nature, human and otherwise, in this vigorous, critter-filled account of Roosevelt’s last epic journey … [and] juxtaposes Roosevelt’s larger-than-life persona with the rules of the jungle.”

  —New York Times

  “Millard has crafted an eye-popping mix of presidential history, white-water epic, and jungle-will thriller. Hell, Tom Clancy could only dream of a story this good.”

  —Men’s Journal

  “Extremely gripping … absorbing…. Her writing is brisk, and short chapters help move the story along, though it is so captivating it scarcely needs any help.”

  —Chicago Sun-Times

  “Millard writes with verve and precision as she vividly conveys the smothering jungle, the savage river and the flamboyant characters…. Unforgettable.”

  —Tampa Tribune

  “Anacondas … can weigh up to 500 pounds. That fact and many others embedded in this marvelously atmospheric travel narrative are here for the reader’s asking and edification in Millard’s important contribution to the complete biographical record of the great, dynamic Teddy Roosevelt … [R]eaders of both American history and travel narratives will take delight in living through these exciting pages.”

  —Booklist

  “This is history that reads like a thriller … beautifully written … riveting.”

  —Flint Journal

  “In an admirable debut, historian Millard records Theodore Roosevelt’s exploration of a hitherto uncharted river in the heart of the Mato Grosso…. Millard tells the story wonderfully, marshaling ecology, geography, human and natural history to tell the tale of the jungle primeval, of bravery and privation, determination and murder in the ranks as cowboy Roosevelt survived the Indians of the Amazon. Teddy Roosevelt’s tropical adventure, splendidly related.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  “Millard proves herself highly effective in telling a good story while including all the technical truths necessary to understand a part of the world that was then essentially unknown…. This is an amazing book—interesting to a fault—and it portrays a side of Roosevelt unknown to most readers.”

  —Deseret News

  “Americana buffs will be entranced by this account of Roosevelt’s journey down the Amazon in 1913. It reads like a thriller.”

  —Glamour

  “[A] gripping account … Millard nails the suspense element of this story perfectly, but equally important to her success is the marvelous amount of detail she provides on the wildlife that Roosevelt and his fellow explorers encountered on their journey.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “Harrowing.”

  —Winston-Salem Journal

  “The tale of Theodore Roosevelt’s near-death experiences exploring the Rio da Duvida in Brazil leaves little doubt about one thing: Candice Millard can write…. Remarkably, this well-written page turner is Millard’s first book…. She details the wildlife, insects, and the Amazon rain forest itself in intricate detail.”

  —Palm Beach Post

  “Millard understands Roosevelt as a man…. She offers a powerful depiction of the merciless rain forest, where the expedition met festering insects that rent their skins, wild rapids requiring long portages and native tribes hostile to intruders.”

  —Bookpage

  “With such wonderfully morbid details, this is a tale that requires no embellishment, and Millard is admirably restrained throughout. She writes with precision and perfect pacing, and she enriches her narrative by just the right amount of historical backstory and scientific context.”

  —San Francisco Chronicle

  “Excellent.”

  —National Geographic Adventure

  “Millard’s riveting tale reveals how Roosevelt’s frantic desire to make an impact in his final years by making his mark on the map of the Western Hemisphere almost cost him, his son, and his team their lives. Her prose is so alive that you will be reaching for your mosquito net.”

  —The Independent (Kansas City)

  “Superb … of Millard’s talent, much can be said. Roosevelt has attracted many fine biographers, but few if any have shown a greater gift for characterization, a finer sense of pacing or a surer grasp of her subject.”

  —The Plain Dealer

  For Mark

  CONTENTS

  Prologue

  PART ONE

  Breaking Away

  1. Defeat

  2. Opportunity

  3. Preparation

  4. On the Open Sea

  5. A Change of Plans

  PART TWO

  Into the Wilderness

  6. Beyond the Frontier

  7. Disarray and Tragedy

  8. Hard Choices

  9. Warnings from the Dead

  PART THREE

  The Descent

  10. The Unknown

  11. Pole and Paddle, Axe and Machete

  12. The Living Jungle

  13. On the Ink-Black River

  14. Twitching Through the Woods

  15. The Wild Water

  16. Danger Afloat, Danger Ashore

  17. Death in the Rapids

  PART FOUR

  Iron Cruelty

  18. Attack

  19. The Wide Belts

  20. Hunger

  21. The Myth of “Beneficent Nature”

  22. “I Will Stop Here”

  PART FIVE

  Despair

  23. Missing

  24. The Worst in a Man

  25. “He Who Kills Must Die”

  26. Judgment

  27. The Cauldron

  PART SIX

  Deliverance

  28. The Rubber Men

  29. A Pair of Flags

  Epilogue

  Notes

  Select Bibliography

  Acknowledgments

  Photo Credits

  Prologue

  “I DON’T BELIEVE HE CAN live through the night,” George Cherrie wrote in his diary in the spring of 1914. A tough and highly respected naturalist who had spent twenty-five years exploring the Amazon, Cherrie too often had watched helplessly as his companions succumbed to the lethal dangers of the jungle. Deep in the Brazilian rain forest, he recognized the approach of death when he saw it, and it now hung unmistakably over Theodore Roosevelt.

  Less than eighteen months after Roosevelt’s dramatic, failed campaign for an unprecedented third term in the White House, the sweat-soaked figure before Cherrie in the jungle darkness could not have been further removed from the power and privilege of his former office. Hundreds of miles from help or even any outside awareness of his ordeal, Roosevelt hovered agonizingly on the brink of death. Suffering from disease and near-starvation, and shuddering uncontrollably from fever, the man who had been the youngest and most energetic president in his nation’s history drifted in and out of delirium, too weak to sit up or even to lift his head.

  Throughout his life, Roosevelt had turned to intense physical exertion as a means of overcoming setbacks and sorrow, and he had come to the Amazon in search of that same hard absolution. Deeply frustrated by the bitterness and betrayals of the election contest, he had sought to purge his disappointment by throwing himself headlong against the cruelest trials that nature could offer him. With only a handful of men, he had set out on a self-imposed journey to explore the River of Doubt, a churning, ink-black tributary of the Amazon that winds nearly a thousan
d miles through the dense Brazilian rain forest.

  In a lifetime of remarkable achievement, Roosevelt had shaped his own character—and that of his country—through sheer force of will, relentlessly choosing action over inaction, and championing what he famously termed “the strenuous life.” From his earliest childhood, that energetic credo had served as his compass and salvation, propelling him to the forefront of public life, and lifting him above a succession of personal tragedies and disappointments. Each time he encountered an obstacle, he responded with more vigor, more energy, more raw determination. Each time he faced personal tragedy or weakness, he found his strength not in the sympathy of others, but in the harsh ordeal of unfamiliar new challenges and lonely adventure.

  On the banks of the River of Doubt, the same unyielding will and thirst for achievement brought him face to face with the absolute limits of his strength. The exotic splendor of the unexplored jungle had captivated Roosevelt and his men as the journey began. “No civilized man, no white man, had ever gone down or up this river, or seen the country through which we were passing,” he wrote. “The lofty and matted forest rose like a green wall on either hand. The trees were stately and beautiful, the looped and twisted vines hung from them like great ropes.”

  After months in the wilderness, however, harsh jungle conditions and the river’s punishing rapids had left the expedition on the verge of disaster. Roosevelt and his men had already lost five of their seven canoes and most of their provisions, and one man had perished. What lay around the next bend was anyone’s guess. Even Colonel Cândido Rondon, the expedition’s Brazilian co-commander, who had explored more of the Amazon than any other man alive, had no idea where the uncharted river would take them.

  For Roosevelt’s men, fears for their own survival were eclipsed only by despair about the fate of their leader. As Roosevelt’s fever soared to 105 degrees, Cherrie and Kermit, Roosevelt’s second son, were certain that they were witnessing his final hours. “The scene is vivid before me,” Kermit would later recall. “The black rushing river with the great trees towering high above along the bank; the sodden earth under foot; 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 the sky and trees and river.”

  As the fever-wracked former president drifted in and out of consciousness, he slipped into a trancelike delirium, reciting over and over again the opening lines to Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan”: “In Xanadu did Kubla Khan a stately pleasure-dome decree. In Xanadu did Kubla Khan a stately pleasure-dome decree. In Xanadu …”

  CHAPTER 1

  Defeat

  THE LINE OUTSIDE MADISON Square Garden started to form at 5:30 p.m., just as an orange autumn sun was setting in New York City on Halloween Eve, 1912. The doors were not scheduled to open for another hour and a half, but the excitement surrounding the Progressive Party’s last major rally of the presidential campaign promised a packed house. The party was still in its infancy, fighting for a foothold in its first national election, but it had something that the Democrats had never had and the Republicans had lately lost, the star attraction that drew tens of thousands of people to the Garden that night: Theodore Roosevelt.

  Roosevelt, one of the most popular presidents in his nation’s history, had vowed never to run again after winning his second term in the White House in 1904. But now, just eight years later, he was not only running for a third term, he was, to the horror and outrage of his old Republican backers, running as a third-party candidate against Democrats and Republicans alike.

  Roosevelt’s decision to abandon the Republican Party and run as a Progressive had been bitterly criticized, not just because he was muddying the political waters but because he still had a large and almost fanatically loyal following. Roosevelt was five feet eight inches tall, about average height for an American man in the early twentieth century, weighed more than two hundred pounds, and had a voice that sounded as if he had just taken a sip of helium, but his outsized personality made him unforgettable—and utterly irresistible. He delighted in leaning over the podium as though he were about to snatch his audience up by its collective collar; he talked fast, pounded his fists, waved his arms, and sent a current of electricity through the crowd. “Such unbounded energy and vitality impressed one like the perennial forces of nature,” the naturalist John Burroughs once wrote of Roosevelt. “When he came into the room it was as if a strong wind had blown the door open.”

  Not surprisingly, Roosevelt was proving to be dangerous competition for the Democratic candidate, Woodrow Wilson, to say nothing of President William Howard Taft, the lackluster Republican incumbent whom Roosevelt had hand-picked to be his successor in the White House four years earlier. It was a bitterly contested race, and Roosevelt hoped that this rally, strategically scheduled just a week before election day, could help swing the vote in his favor.

  Before the doors even opened, more than a hundred thousand people were swarming the sidewalks and choking the surrounding cobblestone streets. Men and boys nimbly wove their way through the crowd, boldly hawking tickets in plain sight of a hundred uniformed policemen. The scalpers had their work cut out for them selling tickets in the churning throng. Days earlier the Progressive Party, nicknamed the Bull Moose Party in honor of its tenacious leader, had posted a no more tickets sign, but brokers and street-corner salesmen had continued to do a brisk business. Dollar seats went for as much as seven dollars—roughly $130 in today’s money—and the priciest tickets in the house could set the buyer back as much as a hundred dollars. On the chaotic black market, however, even experienced con men could not be sure what they had actually bought. When Vincent Astor, son of financier John Jacob Astor, arrived at his box, he found it already occupied by George Graham Rice, lately of Blackswell’s Island—then one of New York’s grimmest penitentiaries. When the police escorted him out, Rice complained bitterly that he had paid ten dollars for the two choice seats.

  More than two thousand people tried to make it into the arena by bypassing the line and driving to the gate in a hired carriage or one of Henry Ford’s open-air Model T’s. But this tactic did not work for everyone. Even Roosevelt’s own sister Corinne was turned away at the gate.

  “For some unexplained reason the pass which had been given to me that night for my motor was not accepted by the policeman in charge, and I, my husband, my son Monroe, and our friend Mrs. Parsons were obliged to take our places in the cheering, laughing, singing crowd,” she later wrote. “How it swayed and swung! how it throbbed with life and elation! how imbued it was with an earnest party ambition, and yet, with a deep and genuine religious fervor. Had I lived my whole life only for those fifteen minutes during which I marched toward the Garden already full to overflowing with my brother’s adoring followers, I should have been content to do so.” Caught up in the moment, fifty-one-year-old Corinne finally made it into the arena by climbing a fire escape.

  Theodore Roosevelt, the object of all the furor, had nearly as much trouble trying to reach Madison Square Garden as his sister. The police had blocked off Twenty-seventh Street from Madison to Fourth Avenue for his car, but when his black limousine turned onto Madison Avenue at nine-fifteen, the excitement burning all night flamed into hysteria. A New York Sun reporter marveled at the chaos as swarms of people rushed Roosevelt’s car, “yelling their immortal souls out. They went through a battery of photographers, tried to sweep the cops off their feet, tangled, jammed and shoved into the throng.”

  Roosevelt, a little stiff in his black suit, stepped out of the car, raised his hat to the crowd, and walked through a narrow, bucking pathway that the policemen had opened through the suffocating press of bodies. As Roosevelt passed by, his admirers “had their brief and delirious howls, their cries of greeting,” one reporter wrote. When he opened a door that led directly onto the speaker’s platform, the arena seemed to expand with his very presence, and the people outside “had to step back and watch the walls of the big building rippl
e under the vocal pressure from within, like the accordion-pleated skirt of a dancer.”

  * * *

  INSIDE THE auditorium, Edith Roosevelt, every inch the aristocrat with her softly cleft chin and long, elegant neck, was seated in a box above the fray when a mighty roar rose up from the audience, heralding her husband’s entrance. Four colossal American flags greeted Roosevelt, waving grandly from the girdered ceiling, and an entire, massive bull moose stood mounted on a pedestal and bathed in a white spotlight, its head raised high, its ears erect, as if about to charge.

  Roosevelt, still famously energetic at fifty-four, greeted his admirers with characteristic vigor, pumping his left arm in the air like a windmill. His right arm, however, hung motionless at his side. The last time Roosevelt had given a speech—just two weeks earlier, in Milwaukee, Wisconsin—he had been shot in the chest by a thirty-six-year-old New York bartender named John Schrank, a Bavarian immigrant who feared that Roosevelt’s run for a third term was an effort to establish a monarchy in the United States. Incredibly, Roosevelt’s heavy army overcoat and the folded fifty-page manuscript and steel spectacle-case he carried in his right breast pocket had saved his life, but the bullet had plunged some five inches deep, lodging near his rib cage. That night, whether out of an earnest desire to deliver his message or merely an egotist’s love of drama, Roosevelt had insisted on delivering his speech to a terrified and transfixed audience. His coat unbuttoned to reveal a bloodstained shirt, and his speech held high so that all could see the two sinister-looking holes made by the assailant’s bullet, Roosevelt had shouted, “It takes more than that to kill a bull moose!”

  Now, in Madison Square Garden as the boisterous cheering went on for forty-one minutes, Roosevelt still had one of Schrank’s bullets in his chest. At 10:03 p.m., pounding on the flag-draped desk in front of him and nervously snapping his jaws, he finally convinced the crowd that he was in earnest, and the hall slowly quieted. Unaided by a loudspeaker, an invention that would revolutionize public speaking the following year, he began his speech. “Friends . . .” At the sound of his voice, the crowd erupted into a thunderous cheer that continued for two more minutes. When it tapered off, he began again. “My friends,” he said, “perhaps once in a generation . . .” Suddenly, from seats close to the platform, a clamor arose as policemen tried to push back several people who had forced their way into the hall. Bending forward, Roosevelt bellowed, “Keep those people quiet, please! Officers, be quiet!”