Colonel Roosevelt (70 page)

“
I have already lived and enjoyed as much of life as any nine other men I know,” Roosevelt wrote Chapman. “I have had my full share, and if it is necessary for me to leave my remains in South America, I am quite ready to do so.”

Caution required that he pass along Müller’s warning to
his six colleagues: Father Zahm, George Cherrie, Leo Miller, Anthony Fiala, Frank Harper, and Kermit. Zahm was the least thrilled. He had no interest in
terra incognita
. All he had ever done in Brazil was follow pathways that the Conquistadors had trodden before him, in reasonable safety. He liked his comforts, and preferred not to have his progress slowed by poisoned darts,
pium
flies, and other hazards of jungle travel.

Cherrie and Miller, in contrast, had reacted to the change of plan with the enthusiasm of naturalists offered a new field of study. Fiala’s only concern as director of supplies was how to get five tons of baggage down a river that might be nothing but rapids. Merely transporting the stuff beyond Utiariti would be a challenge. Harper was prepared to travel where needed in his capacity as the Colonel’s secretary, but he saw limited opportunities for stenography in the wilderness.
Roosevelt had told all five men that they need accompany him no farther than José Bonifácio station, near the rise of the Dúvida. Anyone who then wanted to drop out could do so, return south via the Paraguay, and sail for home.

Kermit, of course, needed little encouragement. Neither love for Belle Willard, nor the melancholy that had begun to affect him in adulthood (he was now twenty-four, and inclined to seek comfort in alcohol) could compete with the thrill of another venture into another continental interior, in company with his beloved father.

AT DAYBREAK ROOSEVELT
, Rondon, and Kermit stepped down from the
Nioac
onto marshy ground. It was raining heavily. Under the guidance of
some
camaradas
with dogs, they headed vaguely south. They hacked their way through saturated thickets, sinking often into ponds, gasping the near-liquid air. Mosquitoes hummed on waterproof wings, insatiable for blood. But their bites were nothing to the pinching of fire ants, and potentially lethal stings from
maribundi
wasps. At length the rain gave way to a steamy sun that pulsated down without drying anything. The hunters salted their wounds with sweat, raising sores that soon festered. Palm-needle slashes were of more concern, because any flow of blood into deep water would arouse the surgical interest of piranha fish.

Rondon was used to such torments. Born on the Mato Grosso forty-eight years before, the son of a Borôro mother and a half-Portuguese, half-Guaná father, yet capable of discussing fine points of theology and mathematics, he personified Roosevelt’s ideal of primitive force sheathed in civilized restraint. During their first meeting over tea, Rondon had casually described how he once lost a toe to a piranha. Roosevelt had listened with delight, memorizing every detail for publication:

Rondon’s fellow officers also talked of aqueous anacondas big enough to constrict a cow. While
not entirely believable, these stories did not encourage a meaty
norte-americano
to wade through Brazilian waters without trepidation. But Kermit and Rondon splashed on unafraid, so Roosevelt followed suit.

Hours went by with no sign of tapir. The humid heat became insufferable.
All at once the dogs scented a jaguar. Kermit was off after them with a young man’s energy, and soon disappeared.
Roosevelt tried to keep up with Rondon, but at 220 pounds he was almost twice as heavy as his spry partner. He felt himself flagging when they had to swim across a
bahia
with their rifles held overhead. Afterward his sodden clothes and squelching boots dragged with a weight that would not lighten. By midday, he was reduced to a slow walk. He went on all afternoon, but had to face the fact that he was beginning to be old.

“P
RIMITIVE FORCE SHEATHED IN CIVILIZED RESTRAINT
.”
Colonel Cândido Mariano da Silva Rondon
.
(photo credit i15.1)

FOR THE NEXT FOUR DAYS
Roosevelt let Rondon command the
Nioac
’s final ascent of the Paraguay to São Luís de Cáceres.
He relaxed on deck with Father Zahm, talking literature under the shade of a canvas awning.

The great river was now at its maximum flood, inundating the flat country so widely that they could have been crossing a motionless lake. Palm trees—the tallest he had ever seen—protruded incongruously. Some were rubied around the crown with orchids. Restless green parakeets added and subtracted emeralds. Lower down, apparently weightless
Jesus Cristo
birds walked on the water.

Now that he saw with one eye only, he relied heavily on his hearing to identify species of avifauna—as he had in boyhood, before he got his first spectacles. The dense air was full of bird calls that he found more interesting than beautiful. If this was tropical song—the
curu-curu
of screamer storks, querulous wails of wood ibises and plover, macaws squawking
ar-rah-h ar-rah-h
and flycatchers sneezing
kis-ka-dee
—it amounted to discord compared to the choral symphony he was used to every spring at home. Howling monkeys and the amazing whistle of the locomotive cicada added to the din. There was no diminuendo at night, just an abrupt switch to the shrilling of crickets.

He rejoiced all the same in the novelty of an America so unlike his own, it could have been attached to another continent. Brazil’s environment struck him as an illogical clash of extremes. The intensity of tropical coloration, whether in feathers or flowers, made no biological sense. Only a vulgarian could consider the toucan beautiful. Giant
tamanduá
anteaters lurched through papyrus groves on upside-down paws, as if crippled. The marsh fringes evaporated, in the fiery heat, at such a rate that stranded fish lay around dying. They shone silver at first, but later turned dull and began to stink. Then cloudbursts replenished the lagoons, and overfed vultures and caymans took their pick of the carrion.

One evening this liquid landscape turned gold, and reflected a sunset of such prismatic beauty that Roosevelt exclaimed, “Wonderful, wonderful!” Off to port, the Serra Amolar loomed, its dark profile etched with rose, as if it was about to erupt. The immense curve of the sky, feathered with cirrus, was duplicated in the water. Priest and ex-president sat dwarfed and humbled in their deck chairs. They were unable to move until the radiance had burned itself out, and a crescent moon replaced the gold with silver. Both of them were storing up purple prose for publication. Zahm fancied that he heard, in the sound of the Paraguay churning astern, the “cadenced voice” of the
mãe d’agua
, or water-mother, that “beauteous siren of Brazilian fable,” whose mermaid-like body was enough to tempt a man to plunge into her element, and be lost forever.

As far as Kermit was concerned, the sooner Zahm took a dive the better. He thought his father’s friend was vain, lazy, and manipulative, a
faux
intellectual whose remarks sounded as though they had been memorized in the library at Notre Dame. But Zahm’s erudition was genuine. His quotations from Shakespeare and Dante and other poets in Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese were accurate, if excessive. He was a master of historical geography, relating every squalid village or stone fort along the river to the annals of the Conquistadors.

As such, and for as long as this placid passage up the river lasted, Zahm was an ideal travel guide. That did not persuade Kermit that he would be of any use, once the expedition proper began. Sooner rather than later,
Roosevelt—who tended to like people too readily, and discount their liabilities—was going to have to realize that this sedentary old cleric was
de trop
.

KERMIT DID NOT
know it, but on passing through Corumbá (loud cries of “
Viva”;
the hot, mimosa-fragrant little city on holiday; its sole hotel proclaiming welcome in brilliant lights), Roosevelt had updated his last will and testament. He had no plans to die in Brazil. However, he was fatalistic enough to understand that a river named Doubt might not deliver him safely to the Amazon—assuming it flowed that far. If not, or if it proved too much for him, it could turn out to be the Styx.

On 5 January the
Nioac
reached São Luís de Cáceres, its last scheduled stop and the official point of departure for the expedition’s ascent to Mato Grosso. From now on, travel would be progressively more awkward: northward in boats up the Sepotuba, a rough affluent of the upper Paraguay, then, as hills and mesas crowded in, by mule and ox wagon westward across the
sertão
grasslands of the interior. Rondon estimated it would take them about seven weeks to reach the rise of the Dúvida, nearly five hundred kilometers from Cáceres as a crow flew. No man could guess how many more weeks they would need to trace the river’s full length, but they were unlikely to reach their final destination, Manáos, much before the beginning of April.