The River of Doubt: Theodore Roosevelt's Darkest Journey Page 4

  CHAPTER 3

  Preparation

  ALTHOUGH ROOSEVELT REMAINED MILDLY interested in his pending South American journey during the months before his departure, he viewed the expedition as little more than a “delightful holiday” that would provide “just the right amount of adventure.” In fact, he was so certain that the trip would be uneventful that he left the planning almost entirely to Father Zahm, whom he affectionately though condescendingly referred to as “a funny little Catholic priest.” In July, Roosevelt left New York for five weeks to go cougar hunting in Arizona with his two youngest sons, Archie and Quentin. The only instruction he offered Zahm before leaving was to say that, in regard to the expedition’s proposed route, he refused to be the “thousandth American to visit Cuzco.”

  Having at last realized his long-standing ambition to return to South America, Father Zahm was now faced with the job of turning his dream into reality. Looking for assistance, he headed to the sporting-goods section of Rogers Peet & Company, the New York City department store, and fell into conversation with the head sporting-goods clerk, a man named Anthony Fiala. On the strength of Fiala’s evident interest in exploration, Father Zahm wasted no time in inviting him to join the Roosevelt party, quickly delegating the logistical burdens of the trip by placing his new friend in charge of selecting and ordering the expedition’s provisions and equipment.

  As convenient as it may have seemed to Zahm, however, the selection of Fiala as the expedition’s quartermaster was less than auspicious for the expedition as a whole. For while the forty-four-year-old clerk did indeed have a background in exploration, the details of that experience arguably made him the last person on earth to be entrusted with the planning or provisioning of a scientific expedition. Despite his current job as a department-store clerk, nearly every explorer at the turn of the twentieth century knew who Anthony Fiala was. Indeed, his story was a cautionary tale of what can happen when an expedition goes terribly wrong and its commander survives to face derision from his peers and exclusion from his profession.

  Ten years earlier, Fiala—tall and thin, with a prominent nose and a small, angular face—had been in a high-stakes race with an elite group of men for one of history’s greatest geographical prizes: the North Pole. Fiala’s first trip to the Arctic had been as the photographer for the Baldwin-Ziegler Expedition in 1901. When that mission failed to reach the pole, its leader, Evelyn Baldwin, was fired, and Fiala was promoted from photographer to commander of a second expedition in 1903. The renamed Fiala-Ziegler Expedition never made it farther north than 82 degrees. Its ship, crushed in the Arctic ice, sank, and Fiala and his men, out of the reach of rescue ships, were stranded in the icy north for two excruciating years. On Fiala’s orders, the expedition’s provisions were bundled together for safekeeping on the ice, which gave way one night as Fiala and his thirty-eight men slept. They awakened in horror to find half of their food supply and all of their coal lost; only the discovery of supplies from another expedition kept the entire party from perishing. Back in New York, Fiala had had to face his fellow explorers’ brutal assessment of his leadership skills. They wasted no time on sympathy. On hearing details about the expedition, the renowned British naturalist and explorer Henry Feilden excoriated it as “an ill conceived, badly managed, undisciplined venture,” and its commander as “utterly incompetent.” Fiala, Feilden wrote, “may be a fairly good cook but not a leader of men.” It was clear that no one would be sending Anthony Fiala on another expedition anytime soon.

  When Father Zahm happened into Rogers Peet a decade later looking for supplies for his trip with Roosevelt, his story of an impending journey into the Amazonian jungle tapped a wellspring of hope in Fiala. “I would give anything in the world to go with you,” he told Zahm. Had Roosevelt been concerned about the trip he was about to take, he certainly would have hesitated to hire a man whose sole exploring experience had been in the Arctic—a region that had almost nothing in common with the Amazon—and who, while there, had led his men to a disaster of legendary proportions. But, given Zahm’s enthusiasm about Fiala, Roosevelt, almost in passing, agreed to hire him—not merely as an extra hand, but as the man in charge of equipping the entire expedition.

  * * *

  ZAHM WAS thrilled. With Fiala now in the picture, the priest could simply delegate and pontificate, both of which he happily did. “A better man . . . could hardly have been found for our purposes,” he wrote. “Thenceforward I had little more to do with the outfitting of the expedition than to tell Fiala what my experiences in the tropics had taught me was necessary for our undertaking, and everything was attended to with rare intelligence and dispatch.”

  The expedition’s tentative plan was to start in Buenos Aires, Argentina, and then travel by boat northward up the length of the continent along well-known navigable rivers to the Amazon, giving Roosevelt a chance to observe a wide range of landscapes and animal life in relative comfort. After reaching the Amazon River, Roosevelt was considering traveling up the Rio Negro, whose black waters famously mix with the café-au-lait–colored Amazon at the junction of the two great rivers in north-central Brazil, then down the broad Orinoco River, crossing Venezuela to the Atlantic Ocean. While such an itinerary would take the expedition into sparsely populated areas, and promised a fascinating tour of the continent’s wilderness and wildlife, it would not be particularly taxing or dangerous, and was limited to well-charted rivers that could be expected to offer adventure without risk.

  One of the earliest disagreements of the fledgling expedition was a dispute over the selection of boats to carry Roosevelt and his men along the rivers of South America. Despite the central role of river travel in the planned route, the specific requirements of that travel were largely a matter of mystery to those charged with outfitting the expedition. Apart from Father Zahm, whose time in South America had been primarily limited to sightseeing, none of the men involved in planning the trip had ever been to South America, or had any knowledge whatsoever of its rivers. Despite, or perhaps because of, that inexperience, each man developed a different idea about the type and characteristics of boat the expedition would need to complete its journey.

  Fiala was looking forward to using the expedition to test a pet theory he had developed about canoes, and took the initiative to order two craft similar to those traditionally built by the native peoples of North America. He was convinced that the lightweight Northern canoes were much better suited for the Amazonian tributaries than the inflexible, heavy dugouts that they would find in South America. The canoes he ordered were nineteen feet long, built with a cedar frame, and covered in canvas. Where the rivers were navigable, each one could carry a ton of cargo and three to four men. Even better, they weighed only 160 pounds each, so four men—two if necessary—could pick them up and easily haul them for miles if the rivers became impassable.

  Frank Harper, Roosevelt’s British-born private secretary, concerned about Roosevelt’s safety but otherwise lacking a clear professional basis for his opinion, favored instead a variety of stamped-steel boats manufactured by the W. H. Mullins Company of Salem, Ohio. Father Zahm, meanwhile, had sent a check to the Rift Climbing Boat Company in Athens, Pennsylvania, in payment for a matching pair of eight-hundred-pound steel-hulled motorboats. Characteristically, Zahm also managed to prevail upon the company to make some improvements to the boats at the company’s own expense, for the “glory” of it. He also ordered two custom pennants to announce the expedition with appropriate pomp and ceremony: one with an “R” for Roosevelt and the other with a “Z”—for Zahm.

  While the chaos and costs surrounding the expedition’s boats grew, Fiala set about providing for the rest of their needs, procuring the food and provisions the men would require, as he understood them. The quantity and variety were impressive, but the question of what items to include was something else entirely. Nearly as much thought seemed to have been put into the purchase of luxuries and incidentals as necessities. Fiala ordered pancake flour, sliced baco
n, boned chicken, dehydrated potatoes, safety matches, and soap, but he also stocked up on smoking pipes (three dozen), two kinds of tobacco, malted milk, and twenty-four rolls of Challenge toilet paper. One heavy zinc-lined case included nothing but spices and gourmet condiments: tins of ground mustard, celery salt, poultry seasoning, paprika, cinnamon, nutmeg, chutney, orange and grapefruit marmalade, Tabasco sauce, and olive zest. Ever mindful that the expedition would be led by a former president, Fiala even sent Roosevelt a variety of teas so that he could select his favorite kind. “I am sending you five samples of tea,” he wrote in early September, “and would appreciate it very much if you would test these and let me know which variety you prefer for your jungle trip.”

  * * *

  BACK AT the American Museum of Natural History, Frank Chapman was looking for someone to accompany Roosevelt into the Amazon who actually had firsthand experience in that part of the world. Chapman and the museum’s president, Henry Fairfield Osborn, were concerned about Roosevelt’s safety, not only because he was an old friend but because they had the interests of their institution to consider. A former president of the United States was about to travel through the Amazon under the museum’s auspices. If the expedition did not go well, or if Roosevelt was injured or became ill—or if the unthinkable happened and he was killed—the museum’s reputation could be damaged beyond repair.

  Roosevelt expected the journey to be safe and uneventful, but he was not deterred by the possibility that he could be wrong. Osborn could not have been happy to hear Roosevelt say, as he often did, that he did not mind risking his life on this expedition. After being told that he might encounter hostile Indians, white-water rapids, and deadly, disease-carrying insects, Roosevelt had said, “I’ll reply to you as I did to the doctors who said they would not be responsible for the consequences if I delivered my address after being shot and wounded in Milwaukee: ‘I’m ahead of the game and can afford to take the chances.’”

  The museum, however, could not afford to take chances, so Chapman was determined to find a naturalist who not only was talented and experienced but could be counted on to ensure that Roosevelt returned from the Amazon—alive. In making his choice, Chapman knew that he could have his pick of the finest scientists and explorers in the country: Few scientists would pass up an opportunity to work for the American Museum of Natural History. As fate would have it, however, the man Chapman had picked for the job—a nearly forty-eight-year-old ornithologist and veteran explorer named George Cherrie—was also the only man who was likely to turn it down.

  George Cherrie had spent the past quarter-century, more than half his life, collecting birds in South America. Although he had the lean, carved muscles of a jaguar and skin that looked as if it had been soaked in tannin and left to dry in the sun, Cherrie also had the refined features of a venerated statesman. His hair was closely clipped and graying, and he had a handsome face, a modest mustache, and a calm, dignified expression that unfailingly inspired trust and respect. If you were about to go into the Amazonian jungle, George Cherrie was the man you wanted by your side. Chapman had known Cherrie for more than thirty years and had recently accompanied him on an “exceptionally trying” collecting trip in Colombia. “He speaks Spanish like a native, is accustomed to roughing it, and is, besides, a capital traveling companion,” Chapman told Father Zahm.

  Cherrie received Chapman’s letter on a scorching-hot day in July, while he was “lounging in comfortable fashion” in the speckled shade of an apple tree on his Vermont farm—Rocky Dell. Tearing open the envelope postmarked “New York” with his leathery hands, he found an invitation to join Roosevelt’s expedition—a journey that would begin in the fall and, he knew, last well into the spring. “Having just returned from my twenty-fifth trip to that country,” he later observed dryly, “my enthusiasm did not break bounds.” Besides his reluctance to leave his family and his farm, which had been obliged to struggle on without him far too long and too often, Cherrie had little interest in tagging along with an official entourage or spending time, as he put it, “camping with royalty.”

  Despite such misgivings, Cherrie agreed to make the trip to New York in ten days to learn more about the expedition. Once he was at the museum, Chapman was able to remind him of the excitement of their recent adventures and the possibility of collecting specimens that were new to science. Chapman also offered the naturalist a salary of $150 per month, guaranteeing that he would be making nearly three times the average American worker’s wage, and far more than he could have expected to receive from his own farm. By the end of the visit, Cherrie had agreed to repack the luggage he had so recently put down and to leave behind his family and farm for yet another long trip through the South American wilderness.

  As extra insurance, Chapman also recruited another museum scientist, Leo Miller, who at twenty-six was already highly regarded by his colleagues, to accompany Roosevelt. Miller, who was already in South America collecting both birds and mammals for the museum, would be the designated mammalogist on the Roosevelt expedition, leaving the birds to Cherrie. This division of labor, Chapman reported to Osborn, would have the effect of “practically doubling the efficiency of the collecting force.”

  With the addition of Cherrie and Miller to the expeditionary team, Osborn relaxed, secure in the knowledge that Roosevelt would come home safely. Although the museum president would later insist that his friend had “prepared with the utmost intelligence and thoroughness for what he knew would be a hazardous trip,” the truth was that at this point Roosevelt viewed the expedition as neither hazardous nor deserving of much time or thought. Osborn, however, had two reasons to feel confident. He had hired tough, experienced naturalists to accompany Roosevelt. Even more important, the expedition’s intended route, although strenuous, was relatively well known and not particularly dangerous.

  There was no cause for concern—so long as Roosevelt’s plans did not change.

  CHAPTER 4

  On the Open Sea

  ON THE MORNING OF October 4, 1913, the day he was to set sail for South America, Roosevelt arrived at Pier 8 in Brooklyn, New York. As he stepped from his car, he could see the Vandyck—a two-year-old, ten-thousand-ton steamship—towering, tall and majestic, above the farewell party that had gathered on the dock to wish him bon voyage. It was a bright, crisp, blue-sky morning, the perfect day for slipping away.

  As soon as Roosevelt boarded the Vandyck, joking as he scaled the steep gangplank that “this is where I commence my mountaineering,” he went straight to his suite of rooms to put away the belongings he had packed for the roughly two-and-a-half-week-long sea voyage ahead of him. Among those waiting patiently to shake hands with Roosevelt were three South American ambassadors who had come to Pier 8 to wish him a successful and, they dared to hope, uncontroversial journey. For the ambassadors—from the so-called ABC Powers of Argentina, Brazil, and Chile—Roosevelt’s visit to their countries was as much a subject of concern as of pride, and with good reason. As president, Roosevelt had provoked more controversy in South America than in any other region of the world, and although four years had passed since he had left the White House, South Americans had not forgotten his policies or his unapologetic imperialism.

  Roosevelt was an avid proponent of the Monroe Doctrine, and he had even attached his own imperialistic twist to it. Enunciated by President James Monroe in 1823, the doctrine sent a clear message to any European powers with colonial ambitions in South America that the United States would not stand idly by and allow the oppression, control, or colonization of any country in its hemisphere. On the contrary, such an act would, by definition, be considered hostile to the United States. The doctrine was put to the test in 1904, when Germany threatened to use military force against the Dominican Republic in an effort to collect unpaid debts. The small Latin American country turned to Roosevelt, who was then in the last year of his first term in the White House, for protection. In response, the president not only upheld the doctrine but added to it, creating wh
at became known as the Roosevelt Corollary.

  Whereas the Monroe Doctrine barred Europe from intervening in the affairs of any country in the Western Hemisphere, the Roosevelt Corollary asserted America’s right to intervene whenever it felt compelled. “If a nation shows that it knows how to act with reasonable efficiency and decency in social and political matters, if it keeps order and pays its obligations, it need fear no interference from the United States,” Roosevelt declared as he defined his corollary to Congress on December 6, 1904. “Chronic wrongdoing, or an impotence which results in a general loosening of the ties of civilized society . . . may force the United States, however reluctantly, in flagrant cases of such wrongdoing or impotence, to the exercise of an international police power.” Roosevelt went on to add that the colossus to the north would intervene “only in the last resort,” but that did little to reassure South Americans, or temper their outrage.

  Nearly a decade later, South America still bristled at the inherent condescension and implied threat of the doctrine and its corollary. A few weeks before his departure, Roosevelt had received a letter from former New York Congressman Lemuel Quigg—a longtime supporter of Roosevelt’s who had traveled through much of South America as a journalist—warning him that, if he planned to talk about the Monroe Doctrine on his trip, he could expect the political equivalent of being tarred, feathered, and ridden out of the continent on a rail.