The River of Doubt (28 page)

Within the course of just four hours that day, the men would run six sets of rapids. But while Kermit, in his small canoe, safely skimmed past every whirlpool he encountered, his father’s large, lumbering dugout was not as agile, or as fortunate. While running “one set of big ripples,” as Roosevelt described it, his canoe was suddenly caught in the powerful, suctioning grip of a vortex. The dugout began to fill with water so fast that Cherrie and Dr. Cajazeira were forced to leap overboard to lighten the load. With strong, swift strokes, the camaradas fought their way out of the whirlpool, but the canoe had come perilously close to being swamped, and all of its cargo, and perhaps even its men, lost.

That night, as they made camp in the darkened forest, the men felt a deep sense of satisfaction and even relief. In just half a day on the
river, they had managed to make nearly ten miles of crucial progress. But while their daring had paid off that day, they knew the odds of repeating that success were slim. The more chances they took, the more likely they were to lose everything.

“We had already met with misfortune,” Cherrie would later write, “but the following day was to be one of tragedy.”

O
N THE MORNING OF
March 15, the men awoke with a renewed determination. They had survived a week-long series of raging rapids, one following hard on the heels of another, and they had weathered the loss of two canoes. They had built a new dugout, and they had driven it straight through six more sets of rapids. They were wet, hungry, and exhausted, but they were hopeful that they could survive just about anything the river had in store for them.

Even the river itself seemed to cooperate. When they climbed aboard their canoes at 7:00 a.m., an unusually early start time for the expedition, the river was so smooth and unchallenging, though still swift, that they were free once again to admire the beauty and complexity of the jungle.

This idyllic interlude was heartbreakingly brief. After the expedition had traveled only three miles, the land on either side of the river began to rise like an emerging mountain chain, and the men quickly found themselves surrounded by high, boulder-strewn hills. The river still twisted and turned too tightly for them to be able to see very far ahead, but they could hear a familiar distant roar.

Like the first set of rapids that they had been forced to portage around two weeks earlier, this wide stretch of white water was split down the center by a small island. Pushing past the island, the river rushed heavily over a low waterfall. Beyond the waterfall, all they could see was, in Rondon’s words, “furious bubblings.” Although they had successfully passed through half a dozen rapids only the day before, Rondon drew the line here. Even with time slipping away and their rations in short supply, they could not risk running these rapids. They would have to make another portage.

Rondon quickly ordered his three paddlers to pull over to the bank, and he gestured to João and Simplicio, the two camaradas who were in the lead canoe with Kermit and his dog, Trigueiro, to do the same. After their boat had been tethered to a tree, Rondon, Lyra, and their prowman, Joaquim, climbed up the muddy bank and set out to find a route for the expedition’s portage. With the easy self-assurance of an experienced commander, Rondon strode into the forest-cloaked hills, confident that his orders were being carried out in full.

*  *  *

A
S
R
ONDON
disappeared from sight, Kermit decided to take a chance. Sitting in his cramped dugout as it bumped heavily against the bank, he ordered his paddlers to cross over to the small island that bisected the rapids so that he could see if the right side of the river was more passable than the left. Although the confidence of most of the men in the expedition had been shaken, Kermit’s determination to forge ahead was as strong as ever. He had postponed his own life to join this expedition, and he had been frustrated for months by its glacial pace. Young, strong, and skilled at working in the wilderness, he also appeared to be blithely certain of his own ability to survive this journey. It was his aging father’s health and safety that concerned him, not his own, and he believed that it was more important to move quickly through the rain forest than to fritter away their time and provisions by being overly cautious.

For Kermit, feeling confident in the wilderness was second nature.
His father had hammered it into him, as well as each of his children, from a very young age. So determined was Roosevelt that his children grow up to be strong, fearless adults that he had said that he would “rather one of them should die than have them grow up weaklings.” To ensure that none of them would ever be the kind of weakling he himself had been before he had resolved to “make” his body, Roosevelt had put his children through frequent and, for some of them, terrifying tests of physical endurance and courage. Most of these tests took place during what came to be known in the Roosevelt household as scrambles, long point-to-point walks led by Roosevelt himself. The only rule during these walks was that the participants could go through, over, or under an obstacle, but never around it. Roosevelt and his children, as well as a revolving crowd of cousins and friends, would not turn aside “for anything,” Ted Jr. would later write. “If a haystack was in the way we either climbed over it or burrowed through it. If we came to a pond we swam across.”

Roosevelt used these scrambles, as well as other, separate excursions, to attack his children’s wilderness fears, which he referred to as buck fever—“a state of intense nervous excitement which may be entirely divorced from timidity.” Even the most courageous man, he believed, when confronted by real danger in the wilderness—whether it be an angry lion or a roaring river—could suffer from buck fever. “What such a man needs is not courage but nerve control, cool-headedness,” he explained. “This he can get only by actual practice.”

Roosevelt’s children never suffered from a lack of opportunity to master their buck fever. On one occasion, their father found a big hollow tree that had a wide opening twenty feet up—perfect, he thought, for dangling small children in. “With much labor, I got up the tree,” Roosevelt proudly wrote to his sister Bamie, “and let each child in turn down the hollow by a rope.” His method for teaching his children to swim was not much gentler. He took them to a dock and ordered them to leap into the deep water. His oldest child, Alice, was particularly frightened of diving, but her father was not about to let
her off the hook. He would shout, “Dive, Alice! Now, dive!” until, finally, trembling with fear, she would launch her tiny body into the cold, dark water.

Kermit, although he was always a sober little boy and less demonstrative than his siblings, worked as hard as any of the children to please his father and prove himself. There was never any question that he had been paying attention during his childhood scrambles across Oyster Bay. The problem was that Roosevelt’s lessons in manliness may have struck too deep a chord in his second son. Kermit had become almost too fearless, and certainly too reckless for even his father’s comfort. Although Roosevelt was proud of his son’s physical strength and courage, he worried that Kermit’s thirst for adventure was ungoverned by the kind of wisdom that comes with age, and untempered by even a small measure of caution.

Roosevelt’s letters home from Africa had been filled with stories of Kermit’s utter disregard for danger and his own incessant fretting. To his sister Corinne, he had written, “Kermit is a great pleasure to me, and of course often a cause of much concern. Do you remember how timid he used to be? Well, my trouble with him now is that he is altogether too bold, pushing daring into recklessness.” Kermit had faced down charging lions, elephants, and rhinoceroses in Africa. He had disappeared into the bush for two months with one of their guides and returned, Roosevelt wrote, “a better hunter than I am.” But Roosevelt knew that all of his son’s courage and skill could not save him if he continued to act carelessly. “Since I have been out here twelve men have been killed or mauled by Lions,” he had written Corinne, “and, naturally, when Kermit shows a reckless indifference to consequences when hunting them, I feel like beating him.”

Now, on the River of Doubt, Roosevelt’s old fears for his son’s safety had returned with a vengeance, and he winced every time Kermit climbed into his dugout to set off ahead of the rest of the expedition. Roosevelt wrote that Kermit was a “great comfort and help” to him on this expedition, but he admitted that he could never completely
relax while his son pushed along on the unknown river so far ahead of him. “The fear of some fatal accident befalling him,” he wrote, “was always a nightmare to me.”

Although Roosevelt had long lectured Kermit about his recklessness, his advice appeared to have had little effect on his son’s actions. It certainly did not that afternoon on the River of Doubt, as he ordered his paddlers to carry him to the island that rested in the center of the rapids. Feeling that they had no choice but to obey Kermit’s command, João and Simplicio braced their paddles against the bank and shoved off. The three men successfully rode the current downstream and halfway across the river to the island. As soon as they disembarked, however, they realized that Rondon was right: There was no safe channel on either side of the river.

Now they were not only stranded on the island, they were farther down the river than they had been—and closer to the thundering waterfall. Kermit ordered the camaradas to board the dugout and cross back to the left bank. Both João and Simplicio, Roosevelt wrote, were “exceptionally good men in every way,” but they balked at this command. Kermit had to repeat his order before they reluctantly dug their paddles into the rushing river.

The three men were on their journey back when their canoe was suddenly struck by one of the shifting whirlpools that they had seen the day before. The vortex spun them around and, as Kermit shouted to his steersman to turn the dugout so that it would take the inevitable blow head-on rather than broadside, forced them over the fall. Incredibly, when they reached the bottom, their small canoe, which Roosevelt complained was “the least seaworthy of all,” was still upright. However, it had taken in so much water it could hardly float. Realizing that their only chance for survival was to make it to the shore, João and Simplicio paddled as fast and as hard as they could. They had just pulled themselves to within grasping distance of the bank when another whirlpool sucked them in and spat them back out into the middle of the river.

Fighting to save not just his companions but their crude canoe,
João leapt into the water and desperately grabbed a hawser that had been tied to the bow. Straining against the rope, he tried to drag the dugout back to the bank as he slipped and stumbled over the riverbed. The current, however, was too strong for him. It quickly ripped the hawser out of his hands, flipped the canoe over, and hurled it downstream. The last thing that João saw as the dugout swirled out of sight was Simplicio and Kermit clinging to its splintered, capsized hull.

*  *  *

F
ROM THEIR
canoe above the rapids, Roosevelt and Cherrie had watched in horror as Kermit, João, and Simplicio struggled to maintain control of their dugout and then disappeared over the waterfall. Shouting to their paddlers to pull over, they had scrambled out of their canoe and raced along the uneven bank until they reached the bottom of a second waterfall. What they saw there would have stopped any father’s heart. Kermit’s dugout lay among the rocks, as Cherrie would later write, “crushed to splinters.”