The River of Doubt (24 page)

The coral snake, which lurked under the brush as Roosevelt and his men waded ashore to make camp that night, had venom as deadly as that of the pit viper. A member of the Elapidae family, which includes cobras and mambas, the coral snake is not as aggressive as a pit viper and has much shorter fangs, but its venom is just as potent and certainly as painful. Once injected, the venom immediately attacks the victim’s nervous system, causing excruciating and irreversible paralysis. Eventually the respiratory system collapses, and the victim, acutely aware of what is happening to him, slowly suffocates to death.

So lethal is the bite of a coral snake that, in rural Brazil at the time of Roosevelt’s expedition, local people did not even attempt to treat it. No antivenom existed, and the moment someone was bitten, he was given up for dead. In North America, naturalists use an old adage—“Red touching yellow, dangerous fellow”—to help distinguish between nonvenomous snakes and the lethal coral snake, with its distinctive black, red, and yellow bands. This adage, however, is useless in the Amazon, where many of the more than fifty species of coral snakes have red and yellow bands that do not touch, but are deadly nevertheless.

While the camaradas noisily cleared a space in the overgrown shoreline for their campsite, they at first did not notice the three-foot-long coral snake, which had darted out of its hiding place. As their callused and dirt-streaked bare feet moved upon the thin layer of leaf litter, the snake slithered by, growing increasingly agitated. When threatened, a coral snake thrashes its body and tail, often in prelude to an attack. Perhaps it was this whiplike movement that finally attracted the attention of one of the camaradas, just as he was about to plant his foot squarely on the venomous snake. Terrified, the man grabbed an ax and swung wildly, driving the snake away from his feet—and toward Roosevelt.

Roosevelt reacted quickly, although perhaps not with his usual athletic
grace. “Despite his two hundred and twenty pounds avoirdupois,” Cherrie later recalled, “he [Roosevelt] did a much livelier dance in attempting to set his foot on the snake than he did when he danced the hornpipe on shipboard.” When Roosevelt’s foot finally came thundering down, it missed its mark, crushing the snake’s body rather than its lethal head. Rearing back, the snake attacked. Roosevelt, still wearing his heavy, hobnailed boots, watched as the snake’s short fangs plunged into the tough leather and spilled its venom down the side of his boot. He had been spared an agonizing, certain death by a quarter-inch of leather.

A
FTER THREE DAYS ON
the River of Doubt, not one of the men in the expedition would have disputed Rondon’s choice of name for this winding, enigmatic river. Not only did it continue to keep its ultimate destination a mystery, but it defied even the most experienced rivermen among them to predict where it would take them in the course of a single day. “The number of twists and turns and doublings back and forth of the river were almost incredible,” Cherrie wrote. As far as the men could see, the River of Doubt had only one virtue: It was as placid as a lowland stream. It moved just quickly enough to relieve the paddlers of some of their work, but it rarely showed any more signs of life than a gentle current that rocked their canoes like a hand on a cradle. When they set off on the morning of March 2, the river was reassuringly familiar, lazily spreading through the forest and carrying them in a northwesterly direction. By the middle of the afternoon, however, the paddlers felt a subtle but disturbing change. The current had begun to quicken.

Each of the Amazon’s thousands of tributaries starts at a high point—either in the Andes, the Brazilian Highlands, or the Guiana
Highlands—and then steadily loses elevation and picks up speed until it begins to approach the Amazon Basin. Scientists have divided these tributaries into three broad categories—milky, black, and clear—in reference to the color that they take on while carving their way through three different types of terrain. Alfred Russel Wallace, British naturalist and friend of Henry Walter Bates and Charles Darwin, made the distinction widely known in the mid-nineteenth century when he published his
Narrative of Travels on the Amazon and Rio Negro.
Wallace noted the striking difference between the milky Amazon and the black waters of the Negro where they collide on the northern bank of the Amazon. Seen from above, the meeting of these two colossal rivers looks like black ink spilling over parchment paper. The visual effect is heightened because the Negro, which is warmer and thus lighter in weight, rides on top of the Amazon, and the rivers do not fully blend until they have traveled dozens of miles together downstream.

Milky rivers, such as the Amazon and the Madeira, generally have their origins in the west and are clouded by the heavy sediment load that they carry down from the youthful Andes. Blackwater rivers, on the other hand, usually come from the ancient Guiana Highlands in the north and so wash over nutrient-poor, sandy soils. Scoured by millions of years of hard rains, these soils cannot retain decomposing organic matter—mostly leaves—which, when swept into a river, literally stains the water black like tea.

Although during the rainy season the River of Doubt is nearly as black as the Negro and as murky as the Amazon, it is technically a clearwater river. Like the Amazon’s largest clearwater rivers, the Tapajos and the Xingu, it has its source in the Brazilian Highlands, and so it picks up very little sediment as it flows over ancient and highly eroded soil. Clearwater rivers are also less acidic than blackwater rivers. Some, most notably the Tapajos, are so clear that they look blue, perfectly mirroring the sky above them. But most, like the River of Doubt, mix with either blackwater or milky tributaries as they
snake through the rain forest, and so look neither blue nor clear by the time they reach their mouth.

For Roosevelt and his men, the color of the River of Doubt was of interest primarily for what it revealed about the speed and character of its course. The same eroded crystalline plateau that kept the river largely sediment-free was also banded with alternating layers of soft young rock and hard ancient rock, each of which had been exposed by the carving force of the river, creating a perfect breeding ground for waterfalls and rapids.

At around three-thirty that afternoon, the men heard a low roar that traveled upstream like distant thunder before a rainstorm. Over the ensuing weeks, this roar would become for them one of the most alarming sounds in the Amazon: the sound of rapids. With a heightened sense of expectation, they allowed themselves to be swept along on the swift current until they reached the first rapid. Although lively, it was small, and the expedition’s three canoes and two balsas easily bumped through its turbid water. The men’s relief at having successfully navigated this first obstacle, however, was short-lived. “Instead of finding quiet waters at the foot,” Cherrie wrote, “the current ran faster and faster until we were whirled along as though through a mill race.”

Suddenly the river made a sharp turn, and when they rounded the bend, the men saw a seething cauldron of white water, the prelude to world-class rapids. Surprised by the stark transformation of their placid river, they quickly drove their canoes ashore so that they could decide what to do next from the relative safety of the bank. It was impossible from this vantage point to tell exactly what was whipping the river into such a frenzy, but they did not want to find out while they were still in their clumsy dugouts. Leaving the camaradas behind to set about clearing a spot for their camp, the officers cut a path along the bank so that they could see for themselves what awaited them downstream.

They were disheartened by what they found. Stretching before
them for nearly a mile was a series of rapids that included two roughly six-foot waterfalls. The river sped, Rondon wrote, “with enormous velocity” through rocks of friable sandstone that had been “deeply cut out, smashed to pieces and thrown one on the top of the other by the rushing force of the waters.” Once over the falls, the river briefly divided into two branches as it swept past a small island—“the last stronghold of resistance which that ruined ground offered,” Rondon noted—but then came together again to perform a feat that none of them had ever expected to see. The water channel that had been at least a hundred yards wide and proportionally deep just a mile above the rapids now churned through a passage that, at one point, was less than two yards across, transforming the quiet river into a water cannon.

“It seemed extraordinary, almost impossible, that so broad a river could in so short a space of time contract its dimensions to the width of the strangled channel through which it now poured its entire volume,” Roosevelt marveled. In fact, so narrow was this gorge that Kermit took a picture of Cherrie kneeling at its chipped and worn edge and spanning it with his rifle. “No canoe could ever live through such whirlpools,” the naturalist would later write. “Only one glance at the angry waters was necessary for us to realize that a long portage would have to be made.”

*  *  *

T
HE PORTAGE
around the River of Doubt’s first serious set of rapids lasted for two and a half days. Rondon put everyone to work except Franca, the cook, and an ill camarada, who had already begun to sweat and shiver with fever. Even Kermit, who was suffering from a renewed attack of the boils that had tortured him during the overland journey, helped move their camp to the foot of the falls and, with Lyra, hauled the expedition’s heaviest, waterlogged dugout up from the river. It was only by applying block and tackle that the camaradas were able to get all of the dugouts out of the water, up the bank, and onto level ground. There must have been few men in the portage team
who did not recall with deep regret the expedition’s abandonment of Fiala’s 160-pound canvas-covered canoes.

The camaradas had already prepared a corduroy road of heavy logs upon which they would drag the canoes. With axes and machetes, they had hewn a rough path through the jungle’s tangle of trees and snaking vines. Then they began chopping down trees, a job made infinitely more difficult by the broad, load-bearing buttresses that supported most large boles. These trees were cut into hundreds of thick, six-foot-long poles, which were placed on the ground at two-yard intervals to serve as rollers for the unwieldy canoes.

Once the road had been laid, the real work could begin. Harnessing themselves to a drag rope, the camaradas lined up two by two like draft horses to pull the dugouts over the crude skidway. The only help came from one man who stood behind them with a lever and tried to pry the canoes over the gnarled, uneven logs. It was in this way—“bumping and sliding,” Roosevelt wrote—that the seven dugouts painfully “twitched through the woods.” For the camaradas, the pain was not limited to their massive, awkward loads, or even to the rough rope that blistered their sweat-slick hands and sawed heavily into their shoulders. As they cut through the jungle, twisted vines and sharp, grasping branches tore at their clothes and slashed their skin. The hot, humid air felt thick in their throats, and they fought off a dizzying sensation of claustrophobia as they fumbled through the close, dense, and seemingly endless fortress of trees along the river-bank.

As the men had feared, the price of encountering impassable rapids was prolonged, intimate exposure to a jungle that seemed increasingly dangerous and enigmatic. Common sense and scientific respect for the jungle told them that there must be an abundance of animal life in this part of the Amazon, as in every part, but there was very little to be seen. The men frequently saw trails left by tapirs and peccaries, piglike mammals, but they were always empty. So far, they had had little opportunity to hunt, and no luck even fishing. The only creatures in evidence were the insects, which seemed to grow increasingly
bold and aggressive the deeper the men traveled into the rain forest.

In fact, as the men of the expedition labored to build their portage road, the jungle around them was teeming with life. While on land, the members of the expedition could not sit, step, lean, or stand without entangling themselves in the predatory ambitions of some creature or, more often, hundreds of creatures of the Amazon. Yet the same evolutionary competition that filled each branch, shadow, and muddy puddle with an unparalleled diversity of living things also ensured that those forms of life were virtually invisible to Roosevelt and his men. Those glimpses of activity that they did manage to see, moreover, were often calculated for the specific purpose of confusing and misleading them.

Rarely in the rain forest do animals or insects allow themselves to be seen, and any that do generally do so with ulterior motives. In a world of endless, life-or-death competition, the need to hide from potential predators and deceive sophisticated prey is a fundamental requirement of longevity, and it has produced a staggering range of specialized attributes and behavior aimed at manipulating—or erasing entirely—any visible form that an enemy or victim might see. So refined is the specialization of life in the rain forest that every inch of the jungle, and each part of the cycle of day and night, has plant, animal, and insect specialists that have adapted to exploit the unique appearance-altering potential it offers.