The River of Doubt (59 page)

Renowned, and later criticized, as a big-game hunter, Roosevelt—posing here with Rondon and a bush deer he killed before reaching the River of Doubt—would find that, once on the river, he and his men were more often prey than predator.

For much of their month-long overland journey, Roosevelt (right), Rondon (left), and their men rode under the humming wires of the telegraph poles that the Rondon Commission had erected, at the cost of countless lives, across eight hundred miles of the Brazilian interior.

Overloaded and underfed, the expedition’s pack oxen died at an alarming rate during the trip to the River of Doubt. In a futile attempt to save themselves, many of the oxen bucked off their loads, abandoning crates of provisions that the men would desperately need on the river.

“Why they do not grind off their noses I cannot imagine,” Roosevelt marveled after watching a group of Pareci Indians at a telegraph station play a game that required them to butt a ball, a hollow sphere of rubber, by diving headfirst at the ground.

The Nhambiquara Indians, whom Roosevelt considered “light-hearted robbers and murderers,” had answered Rondon’s first attempt at contact in 1909 with a fusillade of curare-tipped arrows. Rondon had ordered his soldiers not to return fire, obliging them, as always, to live by his admirable if suicidal motto: “Die if need be, but kill never.”

During the overland journey, the members of the expedition—from left to right, Father Zahm, Rondon, Kermit, Cherrie, Miller, four members of the Brazilian contingent, Roosevelt, and Fiala—gathered for their evening meal around two ox hides spread over the damp ground. Refusing to sit in a chair unless Rondon also had one, Roosevelt told his co-commander that “he would accept nothing, and do nothing, that might have an appearance of special attention to his person. And consequently just as he saw me sit so would he sit himself.”

PUBLISHED BY BROADWAY BOOKS

Copyright © 2005 by Candice Millard

All Rights Reserved

A hardcover edition of this book was originally published in 2005 by Doubleday.

Published in the United States by Broadway Books, an imprint of The Doubleday Broadway Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
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Map of South America by Jeffrey L. Ward.
Sketch of the River of Doubt by Theodore Roosevelt, courtesy of the Theodore Roosevelt Collection, Harvard College Library.
Photo permissions appear.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Millard, Candice.
The river of doubt : Theodore Roosevelt’s darkest journey /
Candice Millard.—1st ed.
p.  cm.
1. Roosevelt River (Brazil)—Description and travel. 2. Amazon River Valley—Description and travel. 3. Rain forests—Amazon River Valley. 4. Natural history—Amazon River Valley. 5. Roosevelt-Rondon Scientific Expedition (1913–1914) 6. Roosevelt, Theodore, 1858–1919—Travel—Brazil—Roosevelt River. 7. Presidents—United States—Biography. I. Title.
F2546.M587 2005
918.1′13045—dc22               2005046541

eISBN: 978-0-307-57508-1

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