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

  Six days out of New York, the Vandyck picked up the young naturalist Leo Miller in Barbados. It was too early to tell what kind of camp companion he would be, but Roosevelt liked what he saw in Miller, and in all of his men. “I am pleased with the entire personnel of the trip,” he wrote to Chapman. “Evidently Cherrie and Miller will more than justify your choice of them.” Roosevelt’s men were equally pleased with their commander. Most of them had known Roosevelt only as a remote and exalted president of the United States, but he soon put them at ease with his tales of hunting grizzlies and stalking lions and his sincere interest in their own lives. “The Colonel’s friendly interest in each member of the party and his almost boyish enthusiasm for the project in hand won our confidence and loyalty at the outset,” Cherrie wrote.

  During the voyage to sun-soaked Bahia, the day-to-day routine of eating, reading, and sleeping gave way to more unusual activities. One particularly rowdy event was a pillow fight between two men straddling a spar laid across a tank of water. The match was a great spectator sport, but it rarely ended in a decisive victory. The combatants were not allowed to lock their feet beneath the pole, so both men usually ended up pitching headfirst into the tank. There was also a tug-of-war contest, in which, Cherrie reported, Roosevelt’s “two hundred and twenty pounds of avoir-dupois were the deciding factors,” and then, at night, there was dancing. One evening, after dinner, even the former president made his way onto the floor. Arms crossed and legs flying, he danced a rousing hornpipe “in true sailor fashion,” Cherrie recalled, and brought down the house.

  * * *

  WHILE ROOSEVELT set his cares aside and enjoyed himself for the first time in a long time on the Vandyck, his son Kermit sat alone, brooding in his cabin aboard the SS Voltaire, which was carrying him northward to Bahia. He was looking forward to seeing his parents again, but his mind was somewhere else entirely. The longer he had remained in Brazil, and the more lonely and isolated he had become, the more perfect Belle Willard had seemed. Finally, Kermit had come to the conclusion that he simply could not live without her. His heart bursting, he picked up a piece of the ship’s stationery and sat down to write the most important letter of his life.

  Dear Belle,

  I’ve been thinking about this letter for a very long time and have thought that I had no right to send it, but fools rush in where angels fear to tread, and I suppose that’s what I’m doing; for I don’t think that I have any right to write, but Belle I love you very much and want you to marry me. . .. Belle, I couldn’t go on writing to you and not tell you for I do love you so very much, and tho’ I know how very unworthy I am of you, I can’t help writing you this. Oh I would give anything to be able to go over and see you and tell you this, but I’ve got my way to make in the world, and I couldn’t ask you unless I had work which looked as if I could make it; and I couldn’t keep my position here if I just went away with no explanation. I would do anything in the world for you Belle, leave anything, or go anywhere if I felt you wanted me to, but you wouldn’t have wanted me to do that; for I must try to prove myself in some way worthy of you, no matter in how small a way. But oh Belle if we were we could go anywhere and succeed, I know that. Please, please forgive me if this is all wrong to you, and I should never have spoken, but it was more than I could do not to write for I love you so, that all the time that you were so far away just seems so much time when I’m not living but perhaps might be. It’s so very hard to put this in writing and you must read a lot that I have not written and would never know how to write. I’ve wished and prayed so much that you might love me, and perhaps you might tho’ I can’t seem to believe that you could.

  Good night Belle and please forgive me if I’m doing wrongly.

  Kermit

  CHAPTER 5

  A Change of Plans

  IT TOOK EIGHT DAYS for the Vandyck, trailing a white ribbon of foam, to steam from Barbados to Bahia, Brazil, roughly a third of the way down South America’s Atlantic seaboard. It would have been a much shorter trip but for the continent’s enormous northeastern coastline, which juts into the ocean like a broad shoulder, forcing ships to travel hundreds of miles east before resuming their southward journey. Three days before reaching Bahia, the steamer crossed the equator, an event that the crew and passengers celebrated with practical jokes and deck games, in keeping with nautical tradition. But for Roosevelt and his men, crossing from the Northern to the Southern Hemisphere was especially significant, because it meant that they were passing the natural wonder that was to be the ultimate object of their journey: the Amazon River.

  From the deck of the Vandyck, out of sight of shore as they steamed along the Brazilian coast, Roosevelt and his men could not see the Amazon. But even at sea there was no escaping the sheer size and power of the giant river, a nonstop deluge that by itself accounts for approximately 15 percent of all fresh water carried to sea by all of the planet’s rivers put together. The river’s mouth is so vast that the island that rests in the middle of it, Marajó, is nearly the size of Switzerland, and the muddy plume that spills into the Atlantic reaches some hundred miles out into the open sea.

  For Roosevelt, the prospect of exploring such a magnificent, unfamiliar phenomenon of nature was irresistible. The ex-president was no doubt also thrilled that the mighty Amazon was intimately related to another region he had explored and come to love so well—Africa. As reflected by the very route that the Vandyck was following around the bulging coastline of South America, the continent had once been connected to Africa, fitting neatly under the chin of West Africa, just below what is today the string of small countries that reaches from Liberia to Nigeria.

  Floating upon the planet’s underlying core of molten rock, the plates that make up the earth’s outer shell have shifted slowly but continuously throughout the planet’s history—a process known as plate tectonics. Hundreds of millions of years ago, the South American continent was part of a single primal “protocontinent” known as Pangaea, which covered half the earth. During the Triassic period, Pangaea began to separate into two independent continents—a northern continent, known as Laurasia, and a southern continent, Gondwanaland.

  Approximately ninety million years ago, Gondwanaland, which encompassed Africa, Australia, Antarctica, peninsular India, and South America, also broke apart. The South American landmass drifted westward until it collided with the Nazca Plate, which underlies much of the Pacific Ocean. When the two enormous plates met, the momentum of the impact thrust the western edge of South America over the edge of the Nazca Plate. The result was a continent-long spine of rock and stone that formed what are known today as the Andes Mountains.

  The creation of the Andes dramatically altered South America’s rainfall patterns and river system. Prior to the rise of the Andes, the Amazon River had flowed in the opposite direction from its present course, descending northwestward and separated from the Atlantic Ocean to the east by a high stone ridge. The rise of the Andes blocked that westward route to the Pacific, leaving the continent’s rivers and streams no outlet to the sea on east or west. Cut off by the narrow cordon of mountains, rain that fell as little as a hundred miles from the Pacific Ocean could no longer reach it, and instead flowed back eastward, flooding the center of the landmass.

  Beyond merely redirecting the drainage of rain that fell upon the continent, the towering mountains also changed the location of the rainfall itself. By creating a barrier that reaches as high as twenty thousand feet, the Andes serve as a trap for moisture-laden winds from the interior, forcing clouds high into the atmosphere, where they condense and bathe the Andes’ eastern slopes and the basin’s lowland forests in nearly constant precipitation.

  For millions of years, the Amazon River was a vast inland sea that covered the central part of the continent. Finally, during the Pleistocene epoch, which began approximately 1.6 million years ago, the rising waters broke through the continent’s eastern escarpment and poured into the Atlantic Ocean. In their wake, they left behind the world’s
greatest river system and the former inland seabed—a vast basin of rich sediments and fertile lowlands perfectly suited to support an array of plant and animal life almost without parallel on the face of the earth.

  For all its exotic allure and potential riches, the great Amazon River Basin in 1913 remained a vast and remarkably mysterious place, untouched by modernity and repelling all but the most determined attempts to explore its hidden secrets. Although more than two-thirds of the Amazon Basin rests within Brazilian borders, the vast majority of Brazilians in the early twentieth century, crowded along the sun-soaked eastern coast, had little interest in knowing what lay within the basin and no way to find out even if they had.

  Communication between the coastal cities and the country’s largely unexplored interior was difficult, and travel was nearly impossible for the average person. The country’s sheer size was one impediment; its dense forests and rapids-choked rivers were another. The world’s fifth-largest nation, Brazil encompasses 3.3 million square miles, making it more than two hundred and fifty thousand square miles larger than the contiguous United States. The approximately four-thousand-mile-long Amazon River slices through the northern section of the country and is navigable for almost three-quarters of its length—roughly the distance from Bangor, Maine, to San Francisco, California—but its thousands of tributaries, which reach like tentacles into every corner of Brazil, are fast, twisting, and wild. Until very late in the nineteenth century, the only alternative for entering the interior was by mule, over rutted dirt roads and through heavy jungle and wide, barren highlands.

  The potential political consequences of such a vast, unknown territory in the heart of their country had been brought home to Brazilian leaders in 1865, when Paraguay invaded Brazil along its southern boundary and more than a month passed before the emperor, Pedro II, knew anything about it. Before he abdicated the throne twenty-five years later, Pedro II, who had reigned over Brazil since he was five years old, committed part of his military to the monumental task of linking Brazil’s coast with its interior by telegraph line. Stringing the line through the jungle had since cost the Strategic Telegraph Commission the lives of countless men, but the battalion had explored thousands of miles of wilderness and was slowly mapping large swaths of the northern and southern highlands and the wide Amazon Basin.

  Despite the progress the telegraph commission had made, however, vast stretches of Brazil remained unknown and unmapped, and its promise of adventure and discovery would soon prove too strong for Roosevelt to resist. The route that Father Zahm had drawn up entailed travel along five of the best-known rivers on the continent: the Paraná, the Paraguay, the Tapajos, the Negro, and the Orinoco, each of which appeared on even the most rudimentary maps of South America. Within days of his arrival in Brazil, however, Roosevelt would abandon Zahm’s tame itinerary and commit himself to an expedition that was much more interesting—and exponentially more dangerous.

  * * *

  ON OCTOBER 18, 1913, the Vandyck landed in Bahia, Brazil, where Kermit Roosevelt was waiting for his parents on a flag-draped launch that the city’s governor had sent into the harbor to welcome the former president of the United States to South America. It was a flawless day, and the passengers of the Vandyck were all gathered on the deck for their first glimpse of Bahia, one of the country’s oldest and most beautiful cities.

  Thousands of Brazilians waited on shore to greet Roosevelt, but he stayed in the city only long enough to take a tour, meet the governor, and pick up Kermit. He wanted to make sure that he was in Rio de Janeiro, then Brazil’s capital, by October 21, in time for a meeting he had arranged with Lauro Müller, Brazil’s minister of foreign affairs. A week earlier, aboard the Vandyck, Roosevelt had written to the minister gently reminding him that Ambassador Don Domicio da Gama had volunteered the Brazilian government’s help in transporting the expedition’s unwieldy boats and five tons of baggage overland from the Paraguay River to where they planned to begin their descent of the Tapajos.

  Da Gama had also offered to provide Roosevelt with a guide, but not just any guide. He had promised him Colonel Cândido Mariano da Silva Rondon, the heroic commander of the Strategic Telegraph Commission. The forty-eight-year-old Rondon had spent half his life exploring the Amazon and had traversed roughly fourteen thousand miles of wilderness that was not only unmapped but largely unknown to anyone but the indigenous peoples who lived there. On October 4, the day that Roosevelt had set sail for South America, Rondon had just completed an inspection trip to Barra dos Bugres, the farthest point south on his telegraph line. Upon returning to one of his less remote outposts, he had found a telegram from Müller, an old military-academy classmate of his, waiting for him. Rondon had not been surprised to receive a cable from Rio—he had instructed the Central Office to send him regular telegrams with news of the outside world, messages that the telegraph operators had nicknamed “the Rondon newspaper”—but he was surprised by its contents: an order to travel with Theodore Roosevelt into the Amazon.

  Rondon had accepted the assignment, but, like Cherrie, he had done so with reservations. He had made it clear to his superiors that he would join this expedition only if it was a serious scientific endeavor. He would not be a tour guide, nor would he join a hunting safari. “The fact is,” one of Rondon’s soldiers later wrote, “after Roosevelt made his expedition to Africa, the general assumption was that he was motivated exclusively by hunting concerns.”

  Unknown to Rondon, the type of trip that he demanded was increasingly what Roosevelt had in mind. The ex-president had come to the Amazon for neither tourism nor sport but for scientific exploration, and he held the deepest disdain for anyone who wanted anything less. “The ordinary traveller, who never goes off the beaten route and who on this beaten route is carried by others, without himself doing anything or risking anything, does not need to show much more initiative and intelligence than an express package,” Roosevelt sneered. “He does nothing; others do all the work, show all the forethought, take all the risk—and are entitled to all the credit. He and his valise are carried in practically the same fashion; and for each the achievement stands about on the same plane.”

  Müller, a sophisticated, cosmopolitan man who reminded Roosevelt of his own secretary of state, John Hay, quickly understood that what his distinguished guest really wanted was an expedition that had much more potential for scientific discovery and historical resonance than the journey that Father Zahm had laid out for him. With a single question—startling for its simplicity in light of the series of events that it set in motion—Müller made Roosevelt an offer. “Colonel Roosevelt,” he asked, “why don’t you go down an unknown river?”

  * * *

  THE RIVER that Müller had in mind was one of the great remaining mysteries of the Brazilian wilderness. Absent from even the most accurate and detailed maps of South America, it was all but unknown to the outside world. In fact, the river was so remote and mysterious that its very name was a warning to would-be explorers: Rio da Dúvida, the River of Doubt.

  Even Rondon, who had discovered and named the river, had been able to tell Müller very little about its course or its character. Rondon had stumbled upon its source five years earlier while on a telegraph line expedition in the Brazilian Highlands, the ancient plateau region south of the Amazon Basin, and he and his men had followed it just long enough to realize that they would need a separate expedition, one solely devoted to mapping its entire length, to know anything of substance about it. When he was told that Roosevelt’s objective was to “unravel the unknown aspects of our wilds,” Rondon himself had proposed the descent of the River of Doubt as one of five possible alternatives to Zahm’s more conventional route. No one who knew Roosevelt would have been surprised to learn that, of the five alternatives, he quickly chose the one that, in Rondon’s words, “offered the greatest unforeseen difficulties.”

  Even in a time when great feats of discovery were almost commonplace, a descent of the River of Doubt would be audacious.
Not only was the river unmapped—its length and direction unknown and each whirlpool, rapid, and waterfall a sudden and potentially deadly surprise—but it coursed through a dense, tangled jungle that had a dark history of destroying the men who hoped to map it.

  One of the Amazon’s earliest explorers, the first nonnative to descend the Amazon River, Francisco de Orellana, suffered more than most. Orellana, who had lost one of his eyes during the conquest of the Incas in Peru, plunged into the Amazon rain forest in 1541, in the hope of discovering the legendary kingdom of El Dorado, whose ruler was said to coat his body in gold dust and then wash it off in a sacred lake. Orellana’s expedition, however, soon changed from a search for gold to a battle for survival. According to a friar who traveled with the expedition and chronicled its journey, before the men even reached the Amazon River, they were reduced to “eating nothing but leather, belts and soles of shoes, cooked with certain herbs.” Once on the river, they fought nearly every Indian tribe they encountered, eventually losing roughly a dozen men to starvation and three others to poisonous arrows. Incredibly, Orellana survived to repeat the ordeal just three years later, this time losing 172 men to starvation and Indian attacks before himself succumbing to disease and, some said, heartbreak at the disastrous collapse of his ambitions.

  Thirteen years later, another ill-fated Spanish expedition, this one led by thirty-four-year-old Pedro de Ursúa, set out to find El Dorado, which was rumored to lie at the headwaters of the Amazon River. Although Ursúa had had many successes in his young life, on this expedition he made the fatal mistake of hiring Lope de Aguirre, a man whose name would later become practically synonymous in South America with deceit and brutality. As soon as the expedition reached the Amazon’s headwaters, Aguirre led a mutiny, murdering Ursúa in his hammock and installing another man, Fernando de Guzmán, as the expedition’s commander. Guzmán then met his own end one morning when Aguirre and a band of men awakened him at dawn and, after reassuring him—“Do not be alarmed, Your Excellency”—shot him at point-blank range with their heavy matchlock guns, known as arquebuses. Aguirre then took command of the expedition and tore through what is now Venezuela, ransacking towns, killing inhabitants, and burning homes. Spanish royalists finally caught up with him in Peru in late October 1561. In a bloody standoff, Aguirre was shot to death by two of his own men. He was then beheaded and his body quartered, gutted, and tossed into the road.