The River of Doubt (44 page)

Little more than a mile downstream, a single small canoe appeared in front of them, carried along by the swift current like a fallen tree branch. The sight sent a rush of excitement through the four-dugout flotilla, but it was not excitement that burned in the chest of the
seringueiro
in the canoe. Looking up to find a line of dugout canoes coming toward him from the direction of the river’s mysterious headwaters, Raymundo José Marques, an old black man who lived alone on the banks of the River of Doubt, turned his boat and paddled quickly toward the shore.

When Rondon saw Marques, he jumped out of his seat, snatched the cap off of his head, and began waving it like a flag, shouting to the
seringueiro
that there was nothing to fear—they were not Indians. Fortunately for the expedition, Marques did not disappear into the jungle as soon as he reached the bank. Instead, he stood at the river’s edge and listened to Rondon. After a few minutes, he climbed back into his canoe and slowly paddled over to the strange flotilla. Upon reaching it, he tried to explain to Rondon the terror that had driven him ashore. “It was quite impossible for him to expect the arrival of civilized people descending the river from its source,” Rondon later wrote.

Marques’s description of the members of the expedition as “civilized people” only underscored how far the men still were from a settled
area. To anyone who had not spent years in the wilderness, the men would have looked almost inhuman. After weeks of surviving on little more than a few bites of fish and a single biscuit each night, they were gaunt and hollow-cheeked. The clothes on their backs—the only clothing they had left—were in tatters, and wherever their skin appeared, it was bruised, cut, sunburned, and peppered with insect bites. They were filthy and wild-eyed from disease and fear, and their American commander was barely clinging to life.

*  *  *

B
Y THIS
point, Roosevelt was so sick that he could no longer even sit up in his canoe. Neither, however, could he lie down. Each of the four dugouts was packed with men and supplies, and there was not an empty space in any of them. The former president had been reduced to painfully balancing on a row of hard-edged metal food canisters that had been covered with a mud-encrusted canvas sheet. The canvas would have been put to better use as a tent to shield Roosevelt from the tropical sun, but the camaradas had no way to rig it up in the tiny dugout. The best they could do was to place his heavy but crumbling pith helmet over his face, trading the glaring sun for suffocating black heat.

Not only was Roosevelt’s pain intense, but he and the doctor both knew that if they did not reach help soon he would die. In the weeks since Roosevelt had injured his leg while trying to help free the trapped canoes, he had developed a potentially deadly bacterial infection, which thrives in a wet, warm environment. There was no more perfectly engineered growth medium for this infection than the rain forest.

When Roosevelt had sliced his leg open on the river boulder, the defensive barrier that the skin forms against outside bacteria had been broken, and there was little that Cajazeira could do to shore it up. The infection had spread rapidly, and by early April, Roosevelt was in grave danger. The skin around his wound had become red, swollen, hot, and hard, and a deep, pus-filled abscess had formed on the soft
inner portion of his lower thigh. His blood pressure had dropped, and his heart rate had risen. As his temperature soared and he lay on his cot sweating and shaking, it was at times difficult to tell if he was suffering from another attack of malaria or enduring the agonies of his infection.

Cajazeira hovered over Roosevelt as though he were his mother, taking his temperature, cleaning and bandaging his wound, and injecting him with quinine. But the doctor had almost nothing with which to fight the growing infection. “We administered the palliative medication employed in these cases,” he wrote. “Nevertheless, day by day his condition worsened and we started to become seriously concerned.” If left untreated or treated inadequately, the infection could lead to blood poisoning and, ultimately, death. The best defense would have been an antibiotic, but even penicillin, one of the first antibiotics, would not be discovered for another fourteen years, and would not be widely prescribed until World War II.

Cajazeira wanted to operate on Roosevelt’s leg, but Roosevelt was reluctant to undergo surgery. The Rough Rider was less concerned that the doctor would not be able to give him anesthesia of any kind (he had refused anesthetic during the operation on his left leg twelve years earlier) than that the operation would be performed in an environment teeming with bacteria and disease-carrying insects. “As was only natural, Colonel Roosevelt asked us to postpone surgery, hoping he would be cured without the need for such intervention,” Cajazeira wrote. “We agreed, clearly explaining, however, that we did not believe in such an outcome.”

*  *  *

S
O SICK
was the former president that, when Raymundo José Marques paddled over to the expedition, Roosevelt could not lift himself out of his canoe to meet him. His condition, however, did not diminish the old
seringueiro’s
awe when he learned that the ragged and stricken man he saw lying in the roughest sort of dugout canoe had once been the president of the United States. Astonished, Marques
said to Rondon, “But is he really a President?” Rondon explained that Roosevelt was not president any longer but had once been. “Ah,” Marques replied. “He who has once been a king has always the right of majesty.”

Marques, who was among the poorest of the river’s rubber-tappers, had no food that he could share with the starving men, but he did give them some valuable advice: Upon approaching a settler, he instructed them, they should signal their peaceful intent by firing one of their guns three times in a row and then blowing on a bamboo horn that he would give them as a gift.

The
seringueiros
who lived along the River of Doubt had had little more interaction with the local Indians than had the members of the expedition, but their fear was not theoretical. Most of the time the Cinta Larga remained invisible, revealing themselves to the settlers only in brief glimpses in scattered locations. They had, however, appeared to the tappers who lived along this stretch of the river on one occasion, and the result had been disastrous. A frightened
seringueiro
named Manoel Vieira who lived in a hut just below Marques’s had met some approaching Indians with a rain of gunfire. Soon after, the Indians had responded in kind, riddling Vieira with poisonous arrows. “After this fact no other of such gravity had occurred,” Rondon wrote, “but the rubber tappers did not deceive themselves with regard to the tranquility which they were enjoying. . .. The panic caused by our arrival clearly shows the degree of nervous tension in which those people live, constantly tormented by the expectation of seeing the warlike Indians springing forth from the wilderness.”

As they continued down the river, the men were as agitated and high-strung as the settlers they expected to see at any moment. The rain began again, filling the bottoms of their dugouts with muddy water and drenching Roosevelt. Suddenly, out of the monotony of the river’s sounds—the water sloshing against the side of his canoe, the occasional grunts of his men as they dug their paddles into the black river—a roar of elation erupted all around him. The men had spotted another house along the riverbank, and this time someone was home.

From their canoes, the men could see smoke billowing from the chimney and two small children playing outside. Before Rondon could snatch up his rifle and bamboo horn, the children had looked up from their games, noticed the expedition coming toward them, and disappeared into their house. A moment later, they reappeared with their mother at their side. Seeing his opportunity and hoping to reassure the woman before she panicked, Rondon fired three shots into the air and blew heavily into the old
seringueiro’s
horn. “Unfortunately,” he wrote, “this precaution did not have the desired effect.”

So deep-seated was the
seringueiros’
fear of the Cinta Larga that, when the mother of the two children looked at the expedition’s weak and exhausted men, she not only saw fierce Indians in their place in the canoes, but believed she heard their war whoops echoing through the forest. Terrified, she scooped her children up into her arms and fled downriver, desperately trying to reach her neighbor’s house, where she knew she would find her husband. Driven by fear and blinded by the rain, she stumbled along a rough dirt path that skirted the river’s edge until she tripped and fell into a stream that bisected it. The men watched helplessly from their canoes, their efforts to reassure her only heightening her distress. “She succeeded in getting up with her clothes drenched,” Rondon wrote, “and continued her wild race until she arrived at the house of a neighbour where she fainted.”

As soon as she could talk, the woman told her husband, a rubber-tapper named Honorato, that their house was under attack by Indians. Believing that the confrontation that he had long feared had finally happened, Honorato wasted no time. He and three of his neighbors armed themselves, climbed into a canoe, and made their way upstream, prepared for a bloody battle. As they neared the house, the rain was still coming down and the sun had begun to set, but Honorato could see the fire that his wife had built in preparation for their evening meal, and he could see men standing just outside his door. He and the other men in his canoe silently pulled through the dark water until they reached the bank. Climbing through the soup of mud and half-decomposed leaves under their feet, they sought cover
in the thick woods, where they could wait unseen until the moment was right to attack.

As the light of the fire flickered over the faces of the men who had invaded his home, however, Honorato began to realize that something was not right—these men were not Indians. This realization, and Honorato’s willingness to step forward and investigate rather than take cover and shoot, very likely saved the lives of many of the men in the expedition that night. Stepping inside, Honorato found Theodore Roosevelt and Brazil’s greatest explorer resting in his home while a group of starving and exhausted men made dinner over his wife’s fire.

Although their first meeting had nearly ended in tragedy, the Honoratos and their neighbors proved to be extremely valuable to the men of the expedition. They were, Roosevelt wrote, “most hospitable” to their unexpected guests, and, as Raymundo Marques had promised, they agreed to sell the expedition provisions and two large canoes, and they helped them hire a guide. Honorato also explained to the men exactly where they were. The River of Doubt, the western branch of the Aripuanã, was known to the
seringueiros
as the Castanha—ironically, the Portuguese word for Brazil nut, the nuts that the men had searched so desperately for upriver. Even at this point, however, the river was not known to anyone but the settlers and Indians who lived on it. “It was astonishing,” Roosevelt wrote, “when we were on a river of about the size of the upper Rhine or Elbe, to realize that no geographer had any idea of its existence. But, after all, no civilized man of any grade had ever been on it.”

The Honoratos invited the men to spend the night at their home. It seemed, as Antonio Correia said to Kermit, “like a dream to be in a house again, and hear the voices of men and women, instead of being among those mountains and rapids.” The reminder of all that they had missed over the past two months, and were missing still, was painful. Even the sight of a brood of chicks, hopping around the Honoratos’ simple hut and pecking at the forest floor, stirred Cherrie to the core. “How nice it was to see them!” he wrote in his diary. “How it made me think of home.”

Sitting outside after the first real meal that they had had in weeks, Cherrie and Kermit shared the scotch they had been saving to celebrate the first signs of deliverance from their river journey. As the alcohol slipped down their throats and filled their chests with a warm flush, they looked up into the dark Southern sky and saw the familiar outline of the Big Dipper suspended among the other stars. “Upside down to be sure, but how good it looks,” Cherrie wrote.

*  *  *

W
HILE THE
men celebrated their warm reception by the rubber men, and savored the prospect of returning to their loved ones in the outside world, they understood only part of the good fortune that had brought them down the River of Doubt alive. As significant as their own efforts had been in triumphing over the churning river, and the unforgiving rain forest that surrounded it, the men remained unaware of the single most important factor in their survival: the decision of the Cinta Larga to let them go.

From the moment they had begun their river journey, their presence had been the subject of ongoing discussion and debate within the clannish communities of Cinta Larga that lined the River of Doubt, provoking a range of reactions from curiosity to fear to covetous fascination with their strange tools and clothing. The ability of Cinta Larga tribesmen to destroy the expedition and all its members was never in doubt. Despite their simplicity, the Indians’ weapons were marvels of efficient lethality, refined over thousands of years of experience to kill silently and swiftly. If their poisoned arrows were not enough to dispense with Roosevelt and his men, every Cinta Larga warrior had a lifetime of practice with the war clubs that were carefully designed to dispatch any survivors with a single, savage blow.

The men of the expedition were armed with modern firearms, to be sure, but in the dark jungle at night, when the Cinta Larga preferred to surprise their enemies, there was little chance that Roosevelt or his men would ever have seen their attackers. From the moment they launched their boats on the River of Doubt, the expedition had repeatedly
encountered signs of the Indians’ presence—passing through their villages, discovering their trail markings, examining their arrows, even hearing their voices. But not once had they so much as glimpsed a single tribesman.