The River of Doubt (29 page)

A
S HIS FATHER STRAINED
desperately to catch a glimpse of him in the roiling river, Kermit fought for his life downstream. When his dugout was swept over the second waterfall, the impact had crushed the boat and hurled Kermit, Simplicio, and Kermit’s dog into the water. Kermit was still alive and conscious, but his battle with the river was only beginning. His favorite rifle, the .405 Winchester he had carried in Africa, was knocked from his hands, and the rushing water blinded, choked, and pummeled him. Like a relentless hammer, the torrent drove his broad, hard sun helmet over his face and forced his body down to the jagged riverbed. His waterlogged jacket became an anchor, dragging him to the bottom of the river.

Somewhere in the middle of the raging rapids, Simplicio was also being propelled through layers of white foam and black water. The powerful, rushing water and deadly whirlpools created by the rocky riverbed swept him violently downstream, threatening at any moment to pull him under long enough for his life, in Roosevelt’s words, to be “beaten out on the bowlders beneath the racing torrent.”

While Kermit and Simplicio struggled in the river, Rondon was
walking back along its left bank, unaware of their plight, having found the portage route that he was looking for. As he approached his canoe, preoccupied with his orders for the camaradas, he was suddenly startled by what he saw—or, rather, did not see—in front of him. He had expected to find Kermit’s dugout tied to a tree alongside his own. Turning to his pilot, a well-respected camarada named Antonio Correia, Rondon demanded to know what had happened after he left. He listened in astonishment as Antonio told him that Kermit had blatantly disobeyed his command.

Furious, and worried that Kermit had put his boat and its precious provisions at risk, Rondon turned and hurried with Lyra toward the falls. In the distance, the two men caught sight of Kermit’s dog, Trigueiro, running toward them. The closer the dog approached, the greater Rondon’s concern became and the faster he began to walk, until he and Lyra were practically running along the river’s edge. By the time they reached Trigueiro, it was obvious to both men that the dog had been thrown into the river. Trigueiro was soaking wet. More ominously, he was alone.

Rushing past the dog, Rondon and Lyra raced to the bottom of the first waterfall. As they approached the crest of a small hill, they saw a lone figure climbing toward them on the other side. It was Kermit—drenched, battered, and weak with exhaustion, but alive. Rondon’s first reaction was overwhelming relief. His relief, however, quickly gave way to anger. Rondon was not accustomed to being disobeyed, even by the son of a former president of the United States. By refusing to listen to him, Kermit had endangered the entire expedition. When Kermit was finally standing before him, Rondon’s rage boiled over into sarcasm. “Well,” he said caustically, “you have had a splendid bath, eh?”

Standing on the narrow, muddy trail, water running in rivulets down his pants and pooling at his feet, Kermit tried to explain what had happened to him and, he believed, João and Simplicio. After he was driven to the bottom of the river by the rapids, a back current had carried him to a stretch of swift but calm water. “Almost drowned, his
breath and strength almost spent,” he had spotted an overhanging branch and recognized it as his best and probably last chance for survival. Grabbing the branch, he had hauled himself out of the river. Trigueiro, who had been by Kermit’s side throughout the ordeal, scrambled up the bank next to his master as he collapsed on the shore. João and Simplicio, Kermit now told Rondon, must have swum to safety on the other side of the river, but he did not know what had happened to his canoe or its contents.

Accepting Kermit’s assumption that everyone was probably safe, Rondon and Lyra focused their attention on the problem of portaging around the second waterfall, which they had not even known existed until they heard Kermit’s story, and searching for his canoe and any provisions that might have survived the rapids. As valuable as the canoe itself was the cargo that it had been carrying: essential boatbuilding tools as well as ten days’ worth of rations, the loss of which would be devastating. No sooner had Kermit walked away, however, than João appeared before Rondon and Lyra. As Kermit had guessed, João had emerged from the river on the other side and had somehow managed to make his way back across. But he had not seen Simplicio since the camarada had disappeared over the second waterfall with Kermit.

Rondon ordered an immediate manhunt. It was, he wrote, their “one hope left.” After a frantic search, which extended about a mile downstream, however, the men were able to recover nothing more than a battered paddle and a single box of rations. It was clear to them all what had happened. “Unfortunately the moment arrived when it was impossible to deceive ourselves,” Rondon wrote. “Simplicio was drowned.”

*  *  *

T
HAT NIGHT
, after the men, now numbering only twenty-one, had finished their portage around the last waterfall, they retired to their tents and hammocks. Hunched over his small table, Roosevelt acknowledged in the article he was writing that his son had had a “very
narrow escape.” Had they lost Kermit rather than Simplicio that day, he wrote, he did not think he could have borne the pain of bringing “bad tidings to his betrothed and to his mother.” Kermit’s near-drowning had been a result of the young man’s own recklessness, but Roosevelt felt a heavy weight of responsibility for having chosen to descend this dangerous river, and for having brought his son along with him. Although Kermit had joined the expedition in order to protect his father, Roosevelt’s mission from this point onward would be to protect Kermit, and to ensure that he made it out of the rain forest alive.

Having faced his own mortality and having caused, albeit indirectly, another man’s death, Kermit showed no signs of remorse or even any sense of responsibility when he scribbled a brief account of the day’s events in his journal that night. He recorded the fact of Simplicio’s death as tersely and unemotionally as he did his own near-drowning. “Simplicio was drowned,” he wrote. If he felt sorrow for Simplicio’s death, or regret for his own rash decision to cross to the other side of the river when Rondon had warned him not to, he did not admit it in his diary. Nor did he appear to have any desire to change his ways. If Roosevelt had hoped that this tragedy had driven some degree of fear or even caution into his son, he was to be disappointed.

The man who seemed to be most shaken by what had happened that day was Cherrie. Having spent half his life traveling through South American jungles, he understood the gravity of their situation better than did Kermit or Roosevelt, and he was more concerned about surviving the journey than was Rondon. Although he regretted Simplicio’s death, he was much more disturbed that they had lost Kermit’s dugout and most of its cargo. “The loss of a human life is always a tragedy,” he wrote. “But the loss of the canoe and its contents was an even greater tragedy to the remaining members of our party.” In his last letter home, which he had written the day before they launched their boats on the river, Cherrie had told his wife, Stella, that he hoped to be back in Vermont in time to help sow the spring
crops at Rocky Dell. “We may reach New York by the end of May,” he had written. “I hope we shall for I would like very much to be able to help get in the potatoes and other crops.” He realized now, however, that if he was ever going to see his family or Rocky Dell again, the expedition could not afford any more losses like those they had suffered that day.

Rondon, although angry that Kermit’s disobedience had cost him the life of one of his men, was neither shocked by Simplicio’s death nor deterred by it. “Certainly no one commences an enterprise of the kind in which we were engaged, without having previously become acquainted with the idea of the danger which same may offer, and of the innumerable occasions in which one has to face death,” he wrote. For Rondon, death was merely one of the many costs of achieving a much larger goal that had already cost the lives of countless of his men: opening the country’s interior and integrating the Amazon’s native peoples into Brazilian society.

Few Brazilians, including many of Rondon’s soldiers, shared his passion for contacting and befriending Indians, or even believed that such a thing was possible. Backed by a number of vocal civilians, his men resented the sacrifices that they were expected to make in the name of their commander’s ideals. At one point, a group of rubber plantation owners wrote to the Brazilian newspaper
A Cruz
that Rondon “lets his soldiers die of hunger while distributing food to the savages.” In the most remote reaches of the Amazon, however, Rondon was unreachable and unstoppable. He had never allowed his men’s suffering or even their deaths to affect his work in the wilderness, and he never would. “Death and dangers, in spite of how much suffering they bring,” he wrote, “should not interfere with the expedition’s mission.”

*  *  *

T
HE NEXT
morning, March 16, the men awoke ready to face the river once again. While the rain fell heavily in the still-dark forest, they gathered around Rondon to listen to his Orders of the Day. As a representative
of the Brazilian government, Rondon “perpetuated the name of the unfortunate Simplicio” by officially naming for him the waterfall that had ended his young life. Simplicio was unmarried, so Rondon and Roosevelt agreed that, if they survived this journey, they would send the money that he would have earned to his mother. Unable to do anything more for the young man who had lost his life for their ambition, they carved a short inscription on one side of their camp marker—“In these rapids died poor Simplicio”—and solemnly walked away.

There was no doubt in anyone’s mind that they had another hard and dangerous day ahead of them. The day before, during their desperate search for Simplicio, they had found another series of rapids downstream, even worse than the one that had drowned the camarada. Further complicating the situation was the fact that they now had twenty-one men and only five canoes, and none of the trees near their camp were suitable material for dugouts. Some of the men would have to walk.

At 7:00 a.m., in a blinding rain, Kermit climbed into the expedition’s large new canoe and set off ahead of the rest of the boats, just as he had for the past two and a half weeks. After only half an hour on the river, the men reached the rapids that they had known awaited them. As Kermit had already explored the left side of the river in his search for Simplicio, Rondon and Lyra paddled to the right side, where they found a channel that circumvented the worst part of the rapids. Luiz and Antonio Correia, the expedition’s two best watermen, were then charged with the job of lowering the empty dugouts by ropes from the right bank. At the same time, the rest of the camaradas would begin cutting a half-mile-long portage road along the left bank for the baggage carry. Having satisfied himself that all of his men were suitably engaged in useful work, Rondon took his favorite dog, Lobo, and set off over a hill just behind their camp in the hope of finding game or, failing that, Brazil nuts.

Although the rest of the men rarely left camp alone, especially after they saw the abandoned Indian village and found the pateran,
Rondon was most at ease when he was on his own. He was, and had always been, a loner. He had found his own way in the world, first as an orphan and then as an outsider at the military academy in Rio de Janeiro. Even after he had married, he had been separated for long periods of time and by hundreds of miles from his wife and children.

Francisca Rondon had suffered as much as any of her husband’s soldiers over the past twenty-two years. She had been raised as a sheltered city girl in Rio de Janeiro, the daughter of one of Rondon’s professors at the military school, but soon after she married, she had left that life behind, moving to remote Mato Grosso to be closer to Cândido. Since then, she had given birth to seven children, endured isolation and illness—including malaria and yaws, an infectious tropical disease that attacks the skin and bones—and been forced to carry on without her husband for months and even years at a time. She finally taught herself telegraphic code so that she could send brief messages to him while he was in the field. On their ninth wedding anniversary, in February 1901, Rondon had sent her a wistful telegram: “This day brings us sweet remembrances of the past. Let us accept our sad life. Miss you deeply. Embraces. Candido.”

In the field, surrounded by hundreds of men, Rondon had found his job as commander to be a lonely and friendless one. But for a handful of close confidants, such as Lyra and Amilcar, Rondon’s only companionship had come from his dogs. At times he had as many as twenty dogs in his camp, and he always had a favored pack of three or four that were constantly by his side. They did not complain or mutiny, and they were cheerful, trustworthy, and devoted to their master. There was no question that Rondon cared more for these dogs than he did for his own men, or that he worried about their safety and comfort. He showered them with affection, shared his food with them, and, on one occasion, even halted a march so that they could rest. On another march, he had carried one of his dogs in his arms so that he “would not die of exhaustion.” Although he rarely devoted more than a single sentence in his journal to the death of one of his men, Rondon penned heartfelt eulogies to his dogs. After his dog
Vulcão died, for instance, he wrote, “Travel companion who guarded my tent . . . Poor companion! How I feel your death. . .. You who served me so well, without my being able to pay you back for half of your dedication.”

Now, contentedly walking through the forest with faithful Lobo at his side, Rondon turned north after cresting the hill behind the expedition’s camp and headed back in the direction of the River of Doubt. After following the river about a mile downstream, he came to a point at which a narrow canal split off from the main waterway. Making his way through the tangle of trees and vines along the canal, Rondon suddenly heard the unmistakable quavering whinny of the coatá, or spider monkey, the largest primate in the Amazon rain forest. Taking “a thousand precautions” so that he would not frighten the monkey, Rondon crouched down in the thick vegetation and slowly made his way toward the sound. As he scanned the trees’ highest branches, where he knew the coatá lived, he could imagine his men’s delight when he walked into camp holding a twenty-pound spider monkey by its long, dark tail.