The River of Doubt (35 page)

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T
HE ACCUMULATION
of disease, hunger, exhaustion, and fear had begun to wear the men down, and their true selves were starting to show through. “There is a universal saying to the effect that it is when men are off in the wilds that they show themselves as they really are,” Kermit wrote. “As in the case with the majority of proverbs there is much truth in it, for without the minor comforts of life to smooth things down, and with even the elemental necessities more or less problematical, the inner man has an unusual opportunity of showing himself—and he is not always attractive. A man may be a pleasant companion when you always meet him clad in dry clothes, and certain of substantial meals at regulated intervals, but the same cheery individual may seem a very different person when you are both on half rations, eaten cold, and have been drenched for three days—sleeping from utter exhaustion, cramped and wet.”

According to Kermit, Roosevelt had always held his children “responsible to the law of the jungle.” He never tolerated greed or sloth, especially during camping trips, when, even only a few miles from home, the children’s courage, patience, and magnanimity could be tested to their limits. “Not even the smallest child was allowed to show a disposition to grab, or select his pieces of chicken,” Kermit recalled. “We were taught that that was an unpardonable offense out camping, and might cause the culprit to be left behind next time.” Roosevelt had witnessed this low threshold for discomfort in some of
his closest friends, and he believed that it showed a shallowness of character that he was determined never to see in his own children.

Roosevelt was proud of his son on this expedition, as he had been proud of him in Africa. Not only did Kermit never fight for the best piece of meat, but the few times that the expedition had meat, he was often the man who had brought it into camp. Kermit also worked as hard as any of the camaradas, and harder than many. He had spent so much time in the river, struggling to bring the dugouts through rapids or free them from the grip of the racing current and immovable boulders, that his shoes had begun to rot right off his feet.

Nearly every time Kermit was in the water, Lyra was right by his side. “Their clothes were never dry,” Roosevelt wrote of his son and his co-commander’s right-hand man. “Their shoes were rotten. The bruises on their feet and legs had become sores. On their bodies some of the insect bites had become festering wounds.” Over the past month, Kermit and Lyra had become a consistently strong team, and the rest of the expedition had come to rely on the two men to get them through tough rapids by lowering the empty dugouts down by rope or coaching the camaradas as they ran them straight over the falls. While working together day after day, Kermit and Lyra had formed a strong bond of trust and friendship—a bond that was certainly stronger than Roosevelt and Rondon’s.

As tense as the relationship between the two commanders had become, however, they had great respect for each other’s previous accomplishments, as well as for each other’s work ethic while on the expedition. Although he was frustrated by his inability to survey the region carefully, no one tried harder than Rondon to keep the expedition on track. Roosevelt worked equally hard, both for the expedition and to satisfy his obligations back home. “He wrote every day, never neglecting his literary work, even when heroic effort was required, in the days after he had been weakened by fever,” Rondon marveled. “As soon as we were camped for the night and the tents were erected he would begin writing, even while the meal was being prepared. Sometimes he would continue writing until 9 o’clock.”

In spite of his privileged background, Roosevelt helped the other men however he could. Cherrie would call Roosevelt “the best camp companion I have ever had.” “There was no camp duty that the Colonel shirked,” Cherrie wrote. “He stood ready and willing to do his share.” So willing was Roosevelt to help that he even washed his naturalist’s clothes one day. Cherrie had just taken a small bundle of clothing down to the river’s edge to wash when Roosevelt appeared and told him that Kermit needed his help in getting the dugouts through some rapids. Cherrie began to roll up his clothes to tuck between some stones until his return, but Roosevelt stopped him. “Never mind those things,” he said, to Cherrie’s great astonishment. “I’ll take care of them.” “That evening when Kermit and I returned to camp we found the washing had been done and hung up to dry,” Cherrie later wrote. “It is the only time I have ever had my clothes washed by an ex-President of the United States!”

Since they had begun their expedition, Cherrie’s admiration for Roosevelt had grown, as had his affection. The long journey had given the two men plenty of time for drawn-out conversations on everything from the Civil War to specimen collecting. Roosevelt had never lost his fascination with natural history and his admiration for the life of a field naturalist. While on the River of Doubt, he intended to learn as much as he could from Cherrie, a man who was as knowledgeable as any other living naturalist when it came to the wildlife, especially the bird life, of the Amazon. “Day after day the Colonel would ply me with questions regarding the birds and other animals that were being collected and preserved,” Cherrie would later recall. “And he wanted to know all about them; their technical relations to one another, their geographical distribution, their food, their voices, their songs and calls, and their habits—especially the last. In short he wanted to know their life histories from ‘a’ to ‘z.’”

These long discussions between Roosevelt and Cherrie, which took place in their canoe and around the campfire, gave Cherrie an opportunity to know Theodore Roosevelt as few men ever had. And Roosevelt, in turn, came to know his taciturn naturalist. “We talked
together often, and of many things, for our views of life, and of a man’s duty to his wife and children, to other men, and to women, and to the state in peace and war, were in all essentials the same,” Roosevelt wrote.

These similarities were surprising given that the two men had come from such different backgrounds. Roosevelt’s father was a wealthy man, able to send his son to the best schools and ensure his comfort no matter what career he chose to pursue. Cherrie, on the other hand, had had no one to rely on but himself. He had gone to work at a wool mill in Iowa when he was just twelve years old, putting in fourteen-hour days and making three dollars for a six-day work week. Three years later, driven by his own ambition, he entered Iowa State College. While Roosevelt played the campus dandy at Harvard, Cherrie worked his way through college by running the campus’s steam pump at night. He tried to study while stoking the pump, but more than once he fell asleep and woke to find that the steam had fallen and the pump, which fed water to the entire campus, had come to a shuddering halt.

After graduation, Roosevelt stepped into the rough-and-tumble but exciting world of New York politics. Cherrie took a bland but steady job as an engineer, but after just two years, he made his escape. Cherrie’s life as an ornithologist had led not only to quietly collecting specimens in the Amazon—a dangerous enough activity in its own right—but also to entanglements with various South American insurrections. He had spent the better part of two and a half years as a gunrunner for one revolutionary chief, and had languished in a South American prison for three months, each day expecting to be hauled outside and shot. In spite of all he had endured in South America, however, he had never managed to stay away for long.

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R
OOSEVELT COULD
understand the continent’s appeal to his naturalist. He himself had begun to develop a deep-seated admiration for South Americans, especially the expedition’s own camaradas. The
former president, who had himself once believed that the white race was superior to others, had been deeply impressed by the camaradas’ endurance and good cheer on this dangerous and dispiriting journey. “They say that the Brazilians are indolent!” he told Rondon one day. “Well, my dear Colonel, a country that has men like these has assured a great future for itself, and will certainly carry out the biggest undertakings in the world.”

One camarada stood out above the rest, impressing everyone in the expedition with his hardy health, great discipline, and strength of character. His name was Paixão—Paishon—and he, like Lyra and Amilcar, was a veteran of Rondon’s telegraph line expeditions. He was a sergeant in Brazil’s Fifth Battalion of Engineers, and Rondon had made him the commander of a military post near the Juruena River. A few years earlier, Paishon had received a visit from a band of Nhambiquara Indians, and even they had been impressed with him. “He acquitted himself so well on this occasion,” Rondon proudly wrote, “that in a very short space of time, he succeeded in conquering the confidence of these Indians and acquiring great prestige among them.”

When Paishon accepted Rondon’s invitation to join the expedition, Rondon had placed him in charge of the other camaradas, who came to admire the burly black man even though he was a stern disciplinarian. Like Rondon, Paishon expected his men to work as hard as he did. In fact, since the expedition had begun, he had worked so hard that he had torn his one pair of pants to shreds. He walked around with them literally hanging off of him in tatters until Roosevelt gave him one of his own pairs.

The only man who had not earned Roosevelt’s admiration, or that of any other man in the expedition, was Julio. He shamelessly begged for special favors, lobbying to get extra food or, futilely, demanding that Kermit give him some of the tobacco that he willingly shared with the men who worked well and hard, something Julio had never done. “Nothing could make him do his share,” Roosevelt grumbled. The only incentive that seemed to work with the muscular Brazilian
was when Lyra finally resorted to threatening to leave him in the jungle if he did not pull his own weight.

One night, Paishon discovered Julio stealing from the expedition’s limited store of rations. Shocked and enraged, the senior camarada raised his powerful fist and struck Julio in the mouth. Julio immediately ran to Roosevelt and Rondon, unashamed of his own, much more serious crime. “Julio came crying to us, his face working with fear and malignant hatred,” Roosevelt wrote. Although it was immediately clear to both commanders who was at fault, they agreed to investigate the matter. It did not take long for them to conclude that Julio was thoroughly guilty and that, in Roosevelt’s words, he had “gotten off uncommonly lightly.”

No one had trusted Julio before this incident, but the gravity of his crime and the depth of his betrayal were breathtaking. Had the expedition’s American commander had his way, Julio would likely have been shot on the spot. “On such an expedition the theft of food comes next to murder as a crime,” Roosevelt wrote bluntly, “and should by rights be punished as such.”

O
VER THE NEXT FOUR
days, the expedition advanced less than four miles. All day on March 23, the men had been haunted by a distant roar that was as ominous as the sight of a still-smoldering fire in an empty Indian village. The sound disappeared on the 24th, and they were tempted to tell themselves that they had been hearing things, and that they were not really headed straight into a savage series of rapids. However, Antonio Correia, the expedition’s best paddler, warned them that not only were more rapids awaiting them downstream, but they would be worse than any they had encountered for many days. “I was brought up in the water,” he said, “and I know it like a fish, and all its sounds.”

In fact, Antonio had underestimated the gravity of their situation. The rapids ahead of them were worse than any they had yet seen on the River of Doubt. On the 24th, the men reached the first set of rapids after less than thirty minutes on the river. After that, they rarely had more than fifteen minutes of smooth water between rapids for the next two days. They spent far more time carrying their cargo and canoes than the dugouts carried them. Every hour of the day,
moreover, a low range of hills along the horizon cast its dark and foreboding shadow over them, threatening more heartbreak ahead. The range, Cherrie lamented in his diary, “probably means many more rapids before we will have passed it!”

The skies had been clear for the past five days, and, without the rain, the river had begun to fall, exposing debris that had previously been covered by the high water and sharpening the boulder-strewn rapids. The men spent the entire day on March 26 circumventing a single set of rapids. Lyra directed Antonio and Luiz Correia and one other paddler as they guided the dugouts down one side of the river. The rest of the men carried the cargo and set up camp at the foot of the rapids, surrounded by vines that, in Roosevelt’s words, were “as big as cables [and] bore clusters of fragrant flowers.”

In spite of the hope that Lyra’s pacu had brought the members of the expedition a week earlier, their food situation had become increasingly desperate. Any food they captured or found now was cause for celebration. In their writings, Roosevelt, Rondon, Kermit, and Cherrie all made special note of the meal that they had on March 26, which seemed to them to be a veritable feast. On that day, the men found
palmito
, honey, wild fruit, and even some small knobby-shelled coconuts in the jungle near their camp. One of the camaradas also caught two big piranha, and, best of all, they discovered about a bushel’s worth of Brazil nuts. “This is a very important find,” Cherrie wrote in his diary that night. “For we may need them very much if our provisions give out.”