The River of Doubt (6 page)

While the chaos and costs surrounding the expedition’s boats grew, Fiala set about providing for the rest of their needs, procuring the food and provisions the men would require, as he understood them. The quantity and variety were impressive, but the question of what items to include was something else entirely. Nearly as much thought seemed to have been put into the purchase of luxuries and incidentals as necessities. Fiala ordered pancake flour, sliced bacon, boned chicken, dehydrated potatoes, safety matches, and soap, but he also stocked up on smoking pipes (three dozen), two kinds of tobacco, malted milk, and twenty-four rolls of Challenge toilet paper. One heavy zinc-lined case included nothing but spices and gourmet condiments: tins of ground mustard, celery salt, poultry seasoning, paprika, cinnamon, nutmeg, chutney, orange and grapefruit marmalade, Tabasco sauce, and olive zest. Ever mindful that the expedition would be led by a former president, Fiala even sent Roosevelt a variety of teas so that he could select his favorite kind. “I am sending you five samples of tea,” he wrote in early September, “and would appreciate it very much if you would test these and let me know which variety you prefer for your jungle trip.”

*  *  *

B
ACK AT
the American Museum of Natural History, Frank Chapman was looking for someone to accompany Roosevelt into the Amazon who actually had firsthand experience in that part of the world. Chapman and the museum’s president, Henry Fairfield Osborn, were concerned about Roosevelt’s safety, not only because he was an old
friend but because they had the interests of their institution to consider. A former president of the United States was about to travel through the Amazon under the museum’s auspices. If the expedition did not go well, or if Roosevelt was injured or became ill—or if the unthinkable happened and he was killed—the museum’s reputation could be damaged beyond repair.

Roosevelt expected the journey to be safe and uneventful, but he was not deterred by the possibility that he could be wrong. Osborn could not have been happy to hear Roosevelt say, as he often did, that he did not mind risking his life on this expedition. After being told that he might encounter hostile Indians, white-water rapids, and deadly, disease-carrying insects, Roosevelt had said, “I’ll reply to you as I did to the doctors who said they would not be responsible for the consequences if I delivered my address after being shot and wounded in Milwaukee: ‘I’m ahead of the game and can afford to take the chances.’”

The museum, however, could not afford to take chances, so Chapman was determined to find a naturalist who not only was talented and experienced but could be counted on to ensure that Roosevelt returned from the Amazon—alive. In making his choice, Chapman knew that he could have his pick of the finest scientists and explorers in the country: Few scientists would pass up an opportunity to work for the American Museum of Natural History. As fate would have it, however, the man Chapman had picked for the job—a nearly forty-eight-year-old ornithologist and veteran explorer named George Cherrie—was also the only man who was likely to turn it down.

George Cherrie had spent the past quarter-century, more than half his life, collecting birds in South America. Although he had the lean, carved muscles of a jaguar and skin that looked as if it had been soaked in tannin and left to dry in the sun, Cherrie also had the refined features of a venerated statesman. His hair was closely clipped and graying, and he had a handsome face, a modest mustache, and a calm, dignified expression that unfailingly inspired trust and respect. If you were about to go into the Amazonian jungle, George Cherrie
was the man you wanted by your side. Chapman had known Cherrie for more than thirty years and had recently accompanied him on an “exceptionally trying” collecting trip in Colombia. “He speaks Spanish like a native, is accustomed to roughing it, and is, besides, a capital traveling companion,” Chapman told Father Zahm.

Cherrie received Chapman’s letter on a scorching-hot day in July, while he was “lounging in comfortable fashion” in the speckled shade of an apple tree on his Vermont farm—Rocky Dell. Tearing open the envelope postmarked “New York” with his leathery hands, he found an invitation to join Roosevelt’s expedition—a journey that would begin in the fall and, he knew, last well into the spring. “Having just returned from my twenty-fifth trip to that country,” he later observed dryly, “my enthusiasm did not break bounds.” Besides his reluctance to leave his family and his farm, which had been obliged to struggle on without him far too long and too often, Cherrie had little interest in tagging along with an official entourage or spending time, as he put it, “camping with royalty.”

Despite such misgivings, Cherrie agreed to make the trip to New York in ten days to learn more about the expedition. Once he was at the museum, Chapman was able to remind him of the excitement of their recent adventures and the possibility of collecting specimens that were new to science. Chapman also offered the naturalist a salary of $150 per month, guaranteeing that he would be making nearly three times the average American worker’s wage, and far more than he could have expected to receive from his own farm. By the end of the visit, Cherrie had agreed to repack the luggage he had so recently put down and to leave behind his family and farm for yet another long trip through the South American wilderness.

As extra insurance, Chapman also recruited another museum scientist, Leo Miller, who at twenty-six was already highly regarded by his colleagues, to accompany Roosevelt. Miller, who was already in South America collecting both birds and mammals for the museum, would be the designated mammalogist on the Roosevelt expedition, leaving the birds to Cherrie. This division of labor, Chapman reported
to Osborn, would have the effect of “practically doubling the efficiency of the collecting force.”

With the addition of Cherrie and Miller to the expeditionary team, Osborn relaxed, secure in the knowledge that Roosevelt would come home safely. Although the museum president would later insist that his friend had “prepared with the utmost intelligence and thoroughness for what he knew would be a hazardous trip,” the truth was that at this point Roosevelt viewed the expedition as neither hazardous nor deserving of much time or thought. Osborn, however, had two reasons to feel confident. He had hired tough, experienced naturalists to accompany Roosevelt. Even more important, the expedition’s intended route, although strenuous, was relatively well known and not particularly dangerous.

There was no cause for concern—so long as Roosevelt’s plans did not change.

O
N THE MORNING OF
October 4, 1913, the day he was to set sail for South America, Roosevelt arrived at Pier 8 in Brooklyn, New York. As he stepped from his car, he could see the
Vandyck—
a two-year-old, ten-thousand-ton steamship—towering, tall and majestic, above the farewell party that had gathered on the dock to wish him bon voyage. It was a bright, crisp, blue-sky morning, the perfect day for slipping away.

As soon as Roosevelt boarded the
Vandyck
, joking as he scaled the steep gangplank that “this is where I commence my mountaineering,” he went straight to his suite of rooms to put away the belongings he had packed for the roughly two-and-a-half-week-long sea voyage ahead of him. Among those waiting patiently to shake hands with Roosevelt were three South American ambassadors who had come to Pier 8 to wish him a successful and, they dared to hope, uncontroversial journey. For the ambassadors—from the so-called ABC Powers of Argentina, Brazil, and Chile—Roosevelt’s visit to their countries was as much a subject of concern as of pride, and with good reason. As president, Roosevelt had provoked more controversy in South
America than in any other region of the world, and although four years had passed since he had left the White House, South Americans had not forgotten his policies or his unapologetic imperialism.

Roosevelt was an avid proponent of the Monroe Doctrine, and he had even attached his own imperialistic twist to it. Enunciated by President James Monroe in 1823, the doctrine sent a clear message to any European powers with colonial ambitions in South America that the United States would not stand idly by and allow the oppression, control, or colonization of any country in its hemisphere. On the contrary, such an act would, by definition, be considered hostile to the United States. The doctrine was put to the test in 1904, when Germany threatened to use military force against the Dominican Republic in an effort to collect unpaid debts. The small Latin American country turned to Roosevelt, who was then in the last year of his first term in the White House, for protection. In response, the president not only upheld the doctrine but added to it, creating what became known as the Roosevelt Corollary.

Whereas the Monroe Doctrine barred Europe from intervening in the affairs of any country in the Western Hemisphere, the Roosevelt Corollary asserted America’s right to intervene whenever it felt compelled. “If a nation shows that it knows how to act with reasonable efficiency and decency in social and political matters, if it keeps order and pays its obligations, it need fear no interference from the United States,” Roosevelt declared as he defined his corollary to Congress on December 6, 1904. “Chronic wrongdoing, or an impotence which results in a general loosening of the ties of civilized society . . . may force the United States, however reluctantly, in flagrant cases of such wrongdoing or impotence, to the exercise of an international police power.” Roosevelt went on to add that the colossus to the north would intervene “only in the last resort,” but that did little to reassure South Americans, or temper their outrage.

Nearly a decade later, South America still bristled at the inherent condescension and implied threat of the doctrine and its corollary. A few weeks before his departure, Roosevelt had received a letter from
former New York Congressman Lemuel Quigg—a longtime supporter of Roosevelt’s who had traveled through much of South America as a journalist—warning him that, if he planned to talk about the Monroe Doctrine on his trip, he could expect the political equivalent of being tarred, feathered, and ridden out of the continent on a rail.

The controversy surrounding the Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine had become even more acute in the months preceding Roosevelt’s departure for South America, because the corollary was about to be tested. As Roosevelt prepared to set sail, Mexico was, as he had written to Kermit, “bubbling like a frying-pan,” and Woodrow Wilson faced the unwelcome possibility of being forced to put Roosevelt’s theory into action. The Mexican Revolution had been raging since 1910 and had already brought about the forced resignation and exile of one of the country’s presidents and the imprisonment and assassination of another. The United States government was concerned about the revolution not only because Mexico was its closest neighbor to the south, or even because thousands of American expatriates were living there at the time, but because Americans had invested millions of dollars in the country. If the revolution continued to spin out of control, Wilson could decide at any moment to intervene—a step that South Americans expected, and bitterly resented.

*  *  *

I
F THE
United States did go to war with Mexico, Roosevelt was confident that his two oldest sons would be among the first to enlist. Theodore Jr. and Kermit had been raised by a father who was almost obsessed by war. Their grandfather, whom Roosevelt had idolized, had paid another man to fight for him during the Civil War, and Roosevelt had never gotten over it. It was relatively common at that time for wealthy men to pay poor men to take their place on the battlefield, and Roosevelt’s father had taken this route not out of fear but out of respect for his wife, who was a Southerner and whose brothers
were fighting in the Confederate Army. But Roosevelt could never understand what he saw as the one flaw in his father’s otherwise irreproachable character. He would never miss a war, and neither would his sons. “I should regard it as an unspeakable disgrace if either of them failed to work hard at any honest occupation for his livelihood, while at the same time keeping himself in such trim that he would be able to perform a freeman’s duty and fight as efficiently as anyone if the need arose,” Roosevelt had written to the British historian and statesman George Otto Trevelyan after a post-Africa tour of Europe with Kermit in 1910.

The importance of a Latin American conflict loomed particularly large for Kermit, who had embraced the region and was quickly earning a reputation for himself in Brazil as a disciplined and high-minded young man. Thin and fair, with high cheekbones and deep-set eyes, Kermit did not look much like his heavy-featured father, nor did he have the elder Roosevelt’s big, boisterous personality, but it was often said that he was, in many ways, more like his father than any of Roosevelt’s other children. Not only did he love adventure, he loved to learn. He was a voracious reader, and he had an uncanny ability with languages. By the end of his life, Kermit spoke Arabic, Urdu, Hindustani, and Romany, not to mention French, German, and Spanish. He read Greek in the original, had earned his porters’ respect and gratitude in Africa by learning Swahili, and was now speaking Portuguese like a native Brazilian.