Colonel Roosevelt (69 page)

During the debate that followed, Bethmann-Hollweg tried to forestall what was in effect a vote of no confidence by offering to withdraw the ninety-ninth Regiment from Zabern. But his conciliatory gesture was ignored, and on the evening of 4 December the Reichstag demanded his resignation by a vote of 293 to 54.

TO THE AMAZEMENT
of democracies around the world, the Chancellor declined to step down. He stated that he served the Kaiser, and would continue in office, with Falkenhayn at his elbow, as long as His Majesty needed him. Court-martial proceedings against Reuter and Forstner were intitiated, but their ultimate acquittals, given Prussian solidarity, were not in doubt. Socialist demonstrations of
rage and shame broke out in seventeen German cities, including Leipzig and Berlin. The government’s only reaction was to punish two army recruits for publicly confirming Forstner’s reported insults.

By the end of 1913,
l’affaire Zabern
was yesterday’s news. But the oracular Georges Clemenceau remained under no illusion as to what tomorrow’s would be. In an editorial addressed to his peace-minded younger countrymen, he bade them hear (if they would not see) “the cannons on the other side of the Vosges,” and warned that the noise would soon be too loud to ignore.

PART TWO
1914–1919

ON THE FIRST DAY
of 1914, Roosevelt got up before dawn to hunt tapir in the marsh country east of Corumbá, Brazil.

For a week he had been cruising the headwaters of the upper Paraguay in a chartered side-wheeler, the
Nioac
. It was less grand than the presidential gunboat that had brought him up the big river, courtesy of the Paraguayan navy. But it was flat-bottomed enough to steam inland along such shallow tributaries as the Rio São Lourenço, where it now lay at anchor, a few kilometers above the inflow of the Cuyabá. Neither stream was easily distinguishable at present: Brazil’s rainy season had set in, and an annual flood was coursing down from the central divide, filling the vast sump of the flats to capacity.

Knowing that he had a long wet day ahead of him,
Roosevelt stoked himself with hardtack, ham, sardines, and coffee. Breakfast was his favorite meal, preferably including beefsteak or buttered hominy grits, and fruit with cream. When he got the chance, he could eat twelve fried eggs in a row. Over the last couple of years, he had become portly. His paunch did not compare with the
world-class embonpoint of William Howard Taft, but he lacked Taft’s compensatory height. Edith was concerned enough to have persuaded him to do without lunch whenever possible. He joked to Ethel that the only result was to make him greedier at either end of the day.

This morning he ate with more purpose than pleasure.
He had come north from Patagonia intent on natural history and exploration. The trouble was, wealthy Brazilians ranching along the Paraguay still thought of him as a mighty hunter. They were slowing his ascent to Mato Grosso, the central wilderness, with elaborate shooting parties in his honor. (He had managed to beg off a “Roosevelt rodeo.”) The great
fazendas
of Las Palmeiras and São João, with hundreds of peons and well-stocked stables, had been placed at his disposal. He did not want to appear ungracious toward his hosts. They and their governmental colleagues in Rio de Janeiro—not to mention the similar elites of Argentina, Uruguay, and Chile—had treated him so royally, and paid him such large lecture fees, that he had to conceal his impatience to be done with “state-traveling.” In any case, he felt obliged to collect, in behalf of the American Museum of Natural History, some of the large, water-loving mammals of southern Brazil, before proceeding north on his expedition proper.

He had already shot a large female jaguar, fulfilling a dream he had confessed to Father Zahm five years before. Kermit (a bridge builder no longer, having signed on as his companion and interpreter) had bagged an even larger one, male, the next day. But that was the luck of youth. The earlier cat was at any rate a good specimen—probably the last dangerous game Roosevelt would ever pursue. In his fifty-sixth year, his interest in hunting was waning.
He had not found jaguar meat as good to eat as the elephant heart that so satisfied him on Mount Kenya.

All he wanted now was a tapir, and maybe a white-lipped peccary, to present to George Cherrie and Leo Miller for preservation. Then he would be free to embark on a inland journey quite different from the one he had originally planned—for that matter, the most antipodean contrast to his African safari imaginable. It was a Brazil-backed venture, focusing on geography rather than mammalogy or ornithology, called the “
Expediçào Cíentifica Roosevelt-Rondon.
”

THE LAST NAME
belonged to Colonel Cândido Mariano da Silva Rondon,
a tiny man with a sun-bleached mustache, also preparing for today’s hunt.
Roosevelt had met up with him only twenty days before, in a Livingstone-Stanley encounter downriver. The two colonels had bonded at once, with a mutual sense that fate had brought them together. Their common language was French, which each spoke as well, or as badly, as the other.

Dr. Lauro Müller, Brazil’s courtly minister for foreign affairs, was the authority
behind their joint mission.
It had been he who, welcoming Roosevelt to Rio last October, had persuaded him to abandon Father Zahm’s idea of going down the Tapajoz and up into Venezuela. The Tapajoz was well mapped, and the dry, stony hills beyond were of little interest to anybody but collectors of cacti. Müller suggested that the American expedition might more profitably divert itself inland to Utiariti, the virtual center point of Brazil. From there, it could march eastward along the rim of the Amazonian drainage basin, to the threshold of—
quem sabe?
—thrilling discoveries.

So deep a venture into Mato Grosso, passing through dangerous Indian country, would require the services of an expert guide. Happily, Müller knew an army engineer who hailed from that region and was part Indian himself.
Cândido Rondon was not only “an officer and a gentleman,” but also “a hardy and competent explorer, a good field naturalist and scientific man, a student and a philosopher.” For years he had been on assignment for the national telegraphic commission, laying lines across some of the remotest parts of the Brazilian interior. In the course of his duties, which included surveying, he had made many findings of geographical and cartographical interest.

One such, Müller said, was the source of
a mysterious river on the high western slope of Mato Grosso. It was assumed to flow north, possibly into the Rio Madeira, a major tributary of the Amazon. If so, it might be more than a thousand kilometers long. Rondon could not guess any more than that, and had named it
Rio da Dúvida
, the River of Doubt.

Perhaps Roosevelt would like to go down this river with him, for the mutual benefit of the American Museum and the Brazilian government, which was eager to develop the resources of Amazonas. There were vast stands of rubber trees in that province, but until all its rivers were mapped, it would be difficult for prospectors to stake valid claims. Perhaps, also,
Roosevelt would advertise the open spaces of Mato Grosso as ideal for European settlement, as he had those of British East Africa in
African Game Trails
. In return, the two colonels could count on the support of a team of Brazilian army officers, all trained in field specialties, and as many
camaradas
—muleteers, porters, guards, and tent-raisers—as they needed to back up their descent of the Dúvida.

Short of throwing in an unlimited supply of canned peaches, Roosevelt’s favorite dessert,
Müller could not have more shrewdly sabotaged the itinerary Father Zahm had worked on for so long. His scheme was that of a master politician, whom many expected to be president of Brazil one day. It made sense at many levels, promising a rich harvest of specimens and topographical information, while increasing the commercial potential of Roosevelt’s book, and almost literally putting Mato Grosso on the map. (
Müller dreamed of building a new capital city for Brazil there.) Strategically, too, the symbolism of a Brazilian-American expedition into Amazonas, quasi-military in character
and headed by the former President of the United States, would be salutary at a time when expansionist imperialism was rampant in Europe. Brazil was a gigantic, not fully formed republic whose land borders had been defined only in the last ten years. Unless it assured itself of American protection, Müller could see a day when the Amazon basin might be co-opted as a free-passage, free-trade zone, like that of the Congo after the Treaty of Berlin.

Roosevelt had reacted to Müller’s proposal with entire predictability. “
I want to be the first to go down the unknown river.”

The minister warned him that his personal safety could not be guaranteed in a part of the country where many explorers had died. This caution had no more effect than worried letters from Frank Chapman and Henry Fairfield Osborn, president of the American Museum.