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

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  BEYOND THE money, the recognition, and the opportunity to advise a fledgling democracy, Roosevelt also had a very personal reason for wanting to take this trip: It would give him a chance to see his twenty-three-year-old son, Kermit, who had been living and working in South America for more than a year. Kermit was a quiet middle child, the third of Roosevelt’s six children. He was smart, disciplined, and a skilled athlete, and he had inherited his father’s passion for far-flung places and physically challenging adventures.

  Kermit’s first great adventure had been a gift from his father: a chance to join him on his post-presidency African safari in 1909. Kermit was only eighteen years old at the time and had just begun Harvard as a freshman. Roosevelt had hesitated to take his son on a trip that he himself had waited a lifetime for, but in the end he put his faith in Kermit’s serious demeanor and rigorous discipline, concluding that he would not risk spoiling the young man. “You blessed fellow, I do not think you will have to wait until your ship comes in before making that African trip,” Roosevelt wrote Kermit from the White House that spring. “The only question that gives me concern in connection with it is whether letting you take it will tend to unsettle you for your work afterwards. I should want you to make up your mind fully and deliberately that you would treat it just as you would a college course; enjoy it to the full; count it as so much to the good, and then when it was over turn in and buckle down to hard work; for without the hard work you certainly can not make a success of life.”

  Kermit justified his father’s trust in him by returning to his studies as soon as the expedition ended and completing his four years at Harvard in two and a half. As soon as he graduated in the summer of 1912, however, he dived headlong into another adventure—in a new country, on a new continent, and entirely on his own. His first job in South America had been with the Brazil Railway Company, but after some shakeups in the management he had taken a job building bridges for the Anglo Brazilian Iron Company. Although he suffered from what Roosevelt referred to as “intermittent fever,” he was thriving in this rough, unfamiliar environment and was making his father proud. “I am greatly pleased at the way that Kermit has gone on,” Roosevelt had written to his sister-in-law, Emily. “He appears to be making good down in Brazil.”

  Kermit’s decision to go to Brazil could hardly have been better calculated to impress his father. Not only had the young man struck out on his own, but he had chosen South America, a continent that, in the early part of the twentieth century, was still considered remote, mysterious, and dangerous. In fact, at that time less was known about the interior of South America than about any other inhabited continent.

  If the idea of traveling to a South American city was unusual for most Americans in 1913, venturing into the dense jungles of the Amazon was simply out of the question. With the exception of a few large and widely spaced rivers, each more than eight hundred miles long, there was a blank, unexplored spot on the map of South America the size of Germany, and within it lay the vast, tangled expanse of the Amazon rain forest.

  So remote and unknown was the Amazon that the first substantial effort to penetrate it had ended in failure only the year before, when the final wooden ties were laid on the Madeira–Mamoré railroad. The railroad, which ran little more than two hundred miles along the Madeira and Mamoré rivers in western Brazil, had been designed to carry the highly prized sap of the rubber tree from the depths of the Amazon to the coast, where it could be shipped to overseas markets. Any promise that the railroad held, however, was eclipsed by the horrors of building it. In The Sea and the Jungle, his classic 1912 book on the Amazon, British author H. M. Tomlinson described meeting some of the men who worked on the railroad. “They were bearded like Crusoe, pallid as anaemic women, and speckled with insect bites,” he wrote. “These men said that where they had been working the sun never shone, for his light was stopped on the unbroken green which, except where the big rivers flowed, roofed the whole land.” Nicknamed “Mad Maria” by the engineers who designed it, the railroad took five years to finish, and by the time it was ready in 1912, the South American rubber trade had gone bust, and the estimated six thousand men who had died of disease and starvation trying to build it had lost their lives for nothing.

  For Roosevelt, South America’s vast, largely unknown, and unexplored interior was perhaps the most important factor of all in shaping his decision to accept the Museo Social’s invitation. With its primordial jungles and broad savannas, its soaring mountains and harsh extremes of climate and terrain, the continent offered the kind of unbounded, unfamiliar frontier and harsh physical adventure that had attracted Roosevelt throughout his life. There were few places on earth that were of greater interest to the former president than the Amazon—not just because it promised adventure but because it was a naturalist’s Shangri-La.

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  BEFORE HE was a president, before he was a Rough Rider, a cowboy, or even a Harvard man, Roosevelt was a naturalist. From his earliest childhood, the sickly, privileged young man from New York City had been fascinated to the point of obsession with plants, animals, and insects, thrilling to the stories of famous adventurers and longing for the day when he could join the ranks of the pioneering natural scientists he read about so intently. As a boy, he filled his house and pockets with spiders, mice, and snakes, studying and sketching them with discipline and talent that far exceeded his age. As a young politician, he broke free from his official duties at every opportunity to pursue his passion, plunging into the nearest wilderness in search of new or uncatalogued species. By the time he was in the White House, Roosevelt was not merely the most powerful elected official in the country, but one of its most knowledgeable and experienced naturalists.

  Looking back, Roosevelt could name the exact day on which, as he put it, “I started on my career as zoölogist.” He was just a boy walking up Broadway in New York City, headed to the market to buy some strawberries, when he spied a dead seal that had been killed in the harbor and stretched out on a wooden plank. “That seal filled me with every possible feeling of romance and adventure,” he later recalled. As long as the seal lay there, rotting, Roosevelt visited it every day, measuring it—with a folding pocket ruler because he did not have a tape measure—and carefully writing his first natural history, with the dead seal as the star.

  Captivated by the thrill of discovery, the young Theodore, along with two cousins, founded the Roosevelt Museum of Natural History. “The collections were at first kept in my room,” he remembered, “until a rebellion on the part of the chambermaid received the approval of the higher authorities of the household and the collection was moved up to a kind of bookcase in the back hall upstairs.” When Roosevelt was only fourteen years old, he began contributing specimens to New York’s American Museum of Natural History, the museum that his father had helped found in 1869. After a family vacation in the Adirondacks, he proudly donated a bat, a turtle, four birds’ eggs, twelve mice, and a red-squirrel skull to the two-year-old museum, which was then modestly housed in the Arsenal on the east side of Central Park.

  Roosevelt’s dream of becoming a naturalist burned brightly until he began his studies at Harvard. He entered college “devoted to out-of-doors natural history,” dreaming of following in the footsteps of men like the world-renowned ornithologist John James Audubon, but he quickly became disgusted with the university’s curriculum for aspiring naturalists, which focused on laboratory experiments to the exclusion of, and disregard for, fieldwork. “In the entirely proper desire to be thorough and to avoid slipshod methods, the tendency was to treat as not serious, as unscientific, any kind of work that was not carried on with laborious minuteness in the laboratory,” he wrote. “My taste was specialized in a totally different direction, and I had no more desire or ability to be a microscopist and section-cutter than to be a mathematician. Accordingly, I abandoned all thought of becoming a scientist.”

  Although Roosevelt chose politics over science, he never lost
his passion for natural history, and his ascent to high office afforded him ever-expanding opportunities to follow his obsession. During his last term in the White House, he had invited the naturalist John Burroughs to Pine Knot, his presidential retreat in rural Virginia, to help him name the local birds. It was a day that Burroughs would never forget. “Together we identified more than seventy-five species of birds and wild fowl. He knew them all but two, and I knew them all but two,” Burroughs later recalled. “A few days before he had seen Lincoln’s sparrow in an old weedy field. On Sunday after church, he took me there and we loitered around for an hour, but the sparrow did not appear. Had he found this bird again, he would have been one ahead of me. The one subject I do know, and ought to know, is the birds. It has been one of the main studies of a long life. He knew the subject as well as I did, while he knew with the same thoroughness scores of other subjects of which I am entirely ignorant.”

  Roosevelt’s collecting trip through East Africa in 1909 had been a great boon to the American Museum of Natural History and the Smithsonian Institution—indeed, the entire scientific world. In fact, according to the then-president of the American Museum of Natural History, Henry Fairfield Osborn, it had been “by far the most successful expedition that has ever penetrated Africa.”

  The trip to South America that Roosevelt began to consider on the strength of the Argentine museum’s invitation would not cover uncharted territory. But it would, he hoped, offer the chance to do something of scientific importance. To expand his itinerary beyond a mere speaking tour, he again turned to the American Museum of Natural History to discover where and how he might find the opportunity to indulge his passion for natural science during the trip. Although he did not contemplate anything too difficult or dangerous, the sheer scale of the continent’s natural wonders promised a rich and absorbing adventure, crowned by the chance to have a firsthand look—however casual—at the wonders of the Amazon.

  In looking to the museum for advice, Roosevelt was turning to the epicenter of American natural science. The museum, encompassing four city blocks between Seventy-seventh and Eighty-first Streets, had grown during Roosevelt’s lifetime to become not only one of the world’s leading natural-history museums, but also a renowned sponsor of expeditions to all corners of the earth, from the North Pole to the Gobi Desert to the lush jungle of the Congo.

  Foremost among Roosevelt’s friends at the museum was Henry Fairfield Osborn, the articulate young paleontologist who, five years earlier, had become the first scientist to be named president of the museum, a position he would hold for twenty-five years. Roosevelt had known “Fair” Osborn most of his life. “I can hardly express to you how much your offer to cooperate with the American Museum of Natural History pleases me,” Osborn wrote Roosevelt when he heard about his plans for a trip to the Amazon, “both for your own sake and because of the historical association of your Father in the foundation of the Museum.” Osborn, who would earn a place in history for naming the Tyrannosaurus Rex, did not have the specialized regional knowledge necessary to help the former president with his plan, but he pledged the full support of the museum staff, and offered the assistance of Frank Chapman, head of the museum’s ornithology department, whom Roosevelt knew and respected from his own detailed study of birds. A veteran scientist and experienced traveler who knew South America well, Chapman quickly arranged a luncheon with Roosevelt at the museum to discuss the details of the expedition.

  Though the Museo Social’s letter—as well as subsequent invitations from Brazil and Chile—served to catalyze many different motives that Roosevelt had for embarking on a trip to South America, it was not the first time that the former president had entertained the idea of such an adventure. Roosevelt’s decision to make the journey was likely due in large part to the fact that just such a trip had been urged on him for many years by an old acquaintance from the University of Notre Dame named Father John Augustine Zahm.

  A slight, balding man with heavily lidded blue eyes and cup-handle ears, Father Zahm was a strange pastiche of seemingly incongruent interests and passions, which had placed him at the crossroads of religion, science, and politics. A priest since the age of twenty-three, Zahm had begun training for the position when he was only sixteen and had developed, as his friend Father John Cavanaugh put it, “an intense zeal for the glory of God and the triumph of the Church.” But, paradoxically, Father Zahm, who had taught chemistry and physics at Notre Dame, was also a proponent of evolution, a theory that—although Charles Darwin had published On the Origin of Species more than half a century earlier—was still shunned by many Americans as sacrilege and derided by most Catholics as, in the words of one journalist, “the ‘philosophy of mud’ and the ‘gospel of dirt.’” In 1896, while still at Notre Dame, Zahm had even taken the extraordinary step of publishing a book defending evolution. The book, titled Evolution and Dogma, bravely argued that evolution “explains countless facts and phenomena which are explicable on no other theory,” and that, rather than being religion’s enemy, was its ally.

  Father Zahm’s contradictions, however, went beyond science and religion. While he was a devoted priest and a serious scholar, he was hardly an ascetic, and had a deep appreciation and affinity for the good things in life. Now that he was at Holy Cross Academy in Washington, D.C., he had become a member of the exclusive Cosmos Club, a luxurious club that the American writer Wallace Stegner would call “the closest thing to a social headquarters for Washington’s intellectual elite.” Zahm was also a skilled self-promoter—“keep yourself before the public always,” he advised his brother, Albert, “if you wish the public to remember you or do anything for you”—and he reveled in his friendship with Roosevelt, crowing to Albert that he and the former president were “the chummiest of chums.”

  Father Zahm had fallen under the spell of South America in 1907, when he had traveled, with a guide, through the northern reaches of the continent. At the end of his trip, as he had sailed east on the Amazon River, toward the Atlantic Ocean and home, Zahm had promised himself that he would return, but the next time he wanted company. The problem was finding a suitable companion. “Where was I to find the kind of a companion desired—one who was not only a lover of wild nature but one who was also prepared to endure all the privations and hardships incident to travel in the uninhabited jungle?” Zahm wrote. “I had not, however, pondered the matter long before I bethought me of a man who would be an ideal traveling companion, if he could find the necessary leisure, and could be induced to visit the southern continent. This man was Theodore Roosevelt.”

  With high hopes, Zahm had visited the Oval Office in 1908, during Roosevelt’s last year in the White House, to propose the trip to his friend. Roosevelt had been intrigued by the invitation, but since he had already planned his yearlong hunting trip to East Africa with his son Kermit, he had turned the priest down. Disappointed but not discouraged, Zahm had decided to wait for Roosevelt. He waited through Roosevelt’s trip to Africa, his controversial campaign, his electoral defeat, and his brooding isolation on Oyster Bay. He waited until, on the cusp of sixty-two and in failing health, he felt that he could not wait any longer.

  Finally, in the summer of 1913—the same summer that Roosevelt accepted the invitation to speak at the Museo Social—Father Zahm, in his own words, reluctantly began to “cast about” for someone else to accompany him to the Amazon. In an extraordinary stroke of luck, Zahm decided to seek advice not just from the same institution that Roosevelt had turned to for help, but from the exact same man—Frank Chapman, the bird curator at the American Museum of Natural History. In describing his long-dreamed-of trip to the Amazon, Zahm happened to mention to the curator that he was planning to visit Roosevelt at Oyster Bay. Zahm had “no hope,” he wrote, “that the Colonel would finally be able to go to South America,” but he felt certain that he would be interested in hearing about the journey that they had long discussed, and which would soon take place without him.

  “You may save yourself th
e trip to Oyster Bay, if you have anything else to do,” Chapman replied. “For Colonel Roosevelt is going to take luncheon with me here tomorrow and I shall be glad to have you join us.” Surprised and delighted, Zahm immediately accepted, and Chapman added him to the guest list—apparently without warning Roosevelt.

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  “BY GEORGE! You here!” Roosevelt cried when he blew into the museum’s dining room for his luncheon with Chapman and found Father Zahm in the midst of the scientists and staff who were to be his own expedition advisers. Zahm’s unexpected appearance caught Roosevelt off guard, but, with a veteran politician’s skill, he recovered nicely. “You are the very man I wish to see,” he boomed. “I was just about to write you to inform you that I think I shall, at last, be able to take that long-talked-of trip to South America.”

  The abrupt reappearance of the priest and his dreams of South American adventure both accelerated the preparations for the ex-president’s own trip and gave it an energetic, full-time advocate and organizer in the person of Zahm. The elderly priest quickly assumed responsibility for planning the journey, and placed himself in charge of choosing a route, organizing transportation, and ordering provisions and equipment—details that Roosevelt was content to leave in the hands of others.

  Zahm’s grasp of the actual requirements of such a journey, however, was far from certain. Zahm had billed himself as something of an expert on South America. In addition to his travels through the continent, he had also written several books on the subject. However, both Up the Orinoco and Down the Magdalena and Along the Andes and Down the Amazon—which Zahm had published under the pen name H. J. Mozans, Ph.D.—had generated skepticism within the country’s relatively small circle of South American travelers. “With a wide knowledge of the history of the regions traversed,” Frank Chapman would later write, “he seemed to have seen so little of the countries themselves that it was suggested he had never visited them.” If Roosevelt had concerns about his friend’s abilities, he did not express them, perhaps because he did not expect the trip—conceived initially as a simple speaking tour—to prove too taxing. Rather, in a rare reference to his own age and mortality, Roosevelt merely cautioned the priest to be mindful of the potential risks inherent in such travel, and avoid imprudent choices in his planning. “[I] would like to get a fairly good idea of . . . the amount of mischance to which we would be exposed,” he wrote Zahm. “I don’t in the least mind risk to my life, but I want to be sure that I am not doing something for which I will find my physical strength unequal.”