The River of Doubt (9 page)

Thousands of Brazilians waited on shore to greet Roosevelt, but he stayed in the city only long enough to take a tour, meet the governor, and pick up Kermit. He wanted to make sure that he was in Rio de Janeiro, then Brazil’s capital, by October 21, in time for a meeting he had arranged with Lauro Müller, Brazil’s minister of foreign affairs. A week earlier, aboard the
Vandyck
, Roosevelt had written to the minister gently reminding him that Ambassador Don Domicio da Gama had volunteered the Brazilian government’s help in transporting the expedition’s unwieldy boats and five tons of baggage overland from the Paraguay River to where they planned to begin their descent of the Tapajos.

Da Gama had also offered to provide Roosevelt with a guide, but not just any guide. He had promised him Colonel Cândido Mariano da Silva Rondon, the heroic commander of the Strategic Telegraph Commission. The forty-eight-year-old Rondon had spent half his life exploring the Amazon and had traversed roughly fourteen thousand miles of wilderness that was not only unmapped but largely unknown to anyone but the indigenous peoples who lived there. On October 4, the day that Roosevelt had set sail for South America, Rondon had just completed an inspection trip to Barra dos Bugres, the farthest point south on his telegraph line. Upon returning to one of his less remote outposts, he had found a telegram from Müller, an old military-academy classmate of his, waiting for him. Rondon had not been
surprised to receive a cable from Rio—he had instructed the Central Office to send him regular telegrams with news of the outside world, messages that the telegraph operators had nicknamed “the Rondon newspaper”—but he was surprised by its contents: an order to travel with Theodore Roosevelt into the Amazon.

Rondon had accepted the assignment, but, like Cherrie, he had done so with reservations. He had made it clear to his superiors that he would join this expedition only if it was a serious scientific endeavor. He would not be a tour guide, nor would he join a hunting safari. “The fact is,” one of Rondon’s soldiers later wrote, “after Roosevelt made his expedition to Africa, the general assumption was that he was motivated exclusively by hunting concerns.”

Unknown to Rondon, the type of trip that he demanded was increasingly what Roosevelt had in mind. The ex-president had come to the Amazon for neither tourism nor sport but for scientific exploration, and he held the deepest disdain for anyone who wanted anything less. “The ordinary traveller, who never goes off the beaten route and who on this beaten route is carried by others, without himself doing anything or risking anything, does not need to show much more initiative and intelligence than an express package,” Roosevelt sneered. “He does nothing; others do all the work, show all the forethought, take all the risk—and are entitled to all the credit. He and his valise are carried in practically the same fashion; and for each the achievement stands about on the same plane.”

Müller, a sophisticated, cosmopolitan man who reminded Roosevelt of his own secretary of state, John Hay, quickly understood that what his distinguished guest really wanted was an expedition that had much more potential for scientific discovery and historical resonance than the journey that Father Zahm had laid out for him. With a single question—startling for its simplicity in light of the series of events that it set in motion—Müller made Roosevelt an offer. “Colonel Roosevelt,” he asked, “why don’t you go down an unknown river?”

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T
HE RIVER
that Müller had in mind was one of the great remaining mysteries of the Brazilian wilderness. Absent from even the most accurate and detailed maps of South America, it was all but unknown to the outside world. In fact, the river was so remote and mysterious that its very name was a warning to would-be explorers: Rio da Dúvida, the River of Doubt.

Even Rondon, who had discovered and named the river, had been able to tell Müller very little about its course or its character. Rondon had stumbled upon its source five years earlier while on a telegraph line expedition in the Brazilian Highlands, the ancient plateau region south of the Amazon Basin, and he and his men had followed it just long enough to realize that they would need a separate expedition, one solely devoted to mapping its entire length, to know anything of substance about it. When he was told that Roosevelt’s objective was to “unravel the unknown aspects of our wilds,” Rondon himself had proposed the descent of the River of Doubt as one of five possible alternatives to Zahm’s more conventional route. No one who knew Roosevelt would have been surprised to learn that, of the five alternatives, he quickly chose the one that, in Rondon’s words, “offered the greatest unforeseen difficulties.”

Even in a time when great feats of discovery were almost commonplace, a descent of the River of Doubt would be audacious. Not only was the river unmapped—its length and direction unknown and each whirlpool, rapid, and waterfall a sudden and potentially deadly surprise—but it coursed through a dense, tangled jungle that had a dark history of destroying the men who hoped to map it.

One of the Amazon’s earliest explorers, the first nonnative to descend the Amazon River, Francisco de Orellana, suffered more than most. Orellana, who had lost one of his eyes during the conquest of the Incas in Peru, plunged into the Amazon rain forest in 1541, in the hope of discovering the legendary kingdom of El Dorado, whose ruler was said to coat his body in gold dust and then wash it off in a sacred lake. Orellana’s expedition, however, soon changed from a search for gold to a battle for survival. According to a friar who traveled with the
expedition and chronicled its journey, before the men even reached the Amazon River, they were reduced to “eating nothing but leather, belts and soles of shoes, cooked with certain herbs.” Once on the river, they fought nearly every Indian tribe they encountered, eventually losing roughly a dozen men to starvation and three others to poisonous arrows. Incredibly, Orellana survived to repeat the ordeal just three years later, this time losing 172 men to starvation and Indian attacks before himself succumbing to disease and, some said, heartbreak at the disastrous collapse of his ambitions.

Thirteen years later, another ill-fated Spanish expedition, this one led by thirty-four-year-old Pedro de Ursúa, set out to find El Dorado, which was rumored to lie at the headwaters of the Amazon River. Although Ursúa had had many successes in his young life, on this expedition he made the fatal mistake of hiring Lope de Aguirre, a man whose name would later become practically synonymous in South America with deceit and brutality. As soon as the expedition reached the Amazon’s headwaters, Aguirre led a mutiny, murdering Ursúa in his hammock and installing another man, Fernando de Guzmán, as the expedition’s commander. Guzmán then met his own end one morning when Aguirre and a band of men awakened him at dawn and, after reassuring him—“Do not be alarmed, Your Excellency”—shot him at point-blank range with their heavy matchlock guns, known as arquebuses. Aguirre then took command of the expedition and tore through what is now Venezuela, ransacking towns, killing inhabitants, and burning homes. Spanish royalists finally caught up with him in Peru in late October 1561. In a bloody standoff, Aguirre was shot to death by two of his own men. He was then beheaded and his body quartered, gutted, and tossed into the road.

The stories of death and disaster in the Amazon did not end with the withdrawal of the colonial powers from South America. As long as there was a wilderness in the heart of the continent, it seemed, men would be willing to risk their lives to find its riches, or at least discover what lay within. Less than twenty-five years before Roosevelt arrived in South America, a Brazilian engineer officer, Colonel Teles Pires,
hoping to chart the course of an unmapped river that, like the River of Doubt, poured out of the Brazilian Highlands, lost all of his provisions in a descent through whitewater rapids. The expedition was then beset with fever and starvation, and in the end only three men survived. Pires was not one of them.

The very idea of Theodore Roosevelt on a river that was as remote and unknown as the one that had killed Pires and his men was enough to make Foreign Minister Müller quickly regret his impulsive suggestion that Roosevelt change his trip. “Now, we will be delighted to have you do it, but of course, you must understand we cannot tell you anything of what will happen,” Müller hastened to warn Roosevelt. “And there may be some surprises not necessarily pleasant.”

If Müller was nervous about Roosevelt’s decision to descend an unmapped river, Henry Fairfield Osborn was thunderstruck. The news, which Frank Chapman delivered to Osborn after receiving a letter from Roosevelt, set off alarm bells at the American Museum of Natural History. Horrified, Osborn immediately sent a blistering message to Roosevelt that he would “never consent to his going to this region under the American Museum flag.” This was not remotely the journey they had agreed on, and Osborn fumed that he “would not even assume part of the responsibility for what might happen in case [Roosevelt] did not return alive.”

Roosevelt’s admission that his new plan was “slightly more hazardous” than the original was, according to Frank Chapman, the understatement of the century. “In a word,” the bird curator later wrote, “it may be said with confidence . . . that in all South America there is not a more difficult or dangerous journey than that down the [River of Doubt].” Roosevelt was more than willing to accept that danger for himself, but he would not force his men to do the same. Turning to his naturalists, his secretary, and his old friend Father Zahm, Roosevelt assured them that they were free to leave the expedition if they wished. “If they had the slightest hesitation I would take them with me to the headwaters of the unknown river and then go down it myself with Col. Rondon and my son Kermit, and I would send them
back with the collections to the Paraguay and then home,” he later wrote Chapman. To Roosevelt’s surprise, each of the men—even Zahm, who had drafted the original route—agreed to the drastic change of plans.

The journey that Roosevelt had lightheartedly described as his “last chance to be a boy” had suddenly turned into his first chance to be something that he had always dreamed of being: an explorer. “The little boy of six in the nursery on 20th Street had read with fervent interest of the adventures of the great explorer Livingstone,” Roosevelt’s sister Corinne would later write. “He had achieved his ambition to follow those adventures as a mighty hunter in Africa; he had achieved many another ambition, but none was more intense with him than the desire to put [the] ‘River of Doubt’ on the map of the world.”

Roosevelt lived during the last days of the golden age of exploration, a time when men and women of science roamed the world, uncovering its geographical secrets at a breathtaking pace and giving rise to bitter international competitions. The year he was born, the earnest young explorer John Hanning Speke, traveling with the famed Orientalist Richard Burton, discovered the source of the White Nile. In 1909, the year that Roosevelt left the White House, Americans Robert Peary and Matthew Henson won the race to reach the North Pole—the race that had nearly cost Fiala his life and the lives of all his men. Just two years later, in late December 1911, Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen became the first man to reach the South Pole. Robert Scott, a renowned explorer and British hero, made it to the pole a month later, only to find the Norwegian colors flapping in the polar wind where he had planned to plant the British flag. Shocked and dispirited, Scott and his men froze to death on their long, bitter journey back to their ship. Sir Ernest Shackleton and his men, in a legendary attempt to cross Antarctica, narrowly escaped the same fate two years later, the same year that Roosevelt would set off down the River of Doubt.

To Osborn, Roosevelt’s decision to descend this river seemed insane if not suicidal, and he ordered Chapman to tell the former president that the American Museum of Natural History expected him to
adhere to his original plan. However, when Chapman’s letter, with all the weight of the museum behind it, reached Brazil, it had less effect than a leaf falling in the rain forest. Having found the challenge he had been yearning for, Roosevelt was beyond the reach of Osborn’s persuasion. In a letter to Chapman, Roosevelt wrote, “Tell Osborn I have already lived and enjoyed as much of life as any nine other men I know; I have had my full share, and if it is necessary for me to leave my bones in South America, I am quite ready to do so.”

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O
SBORN’S OBJECTION
to Roosevelt’s new expedition was not only that it would take him through one of the most remote and least known regions of the Amazon rain forest, but that it was based on a sudden decision. The months of planning that had taken place in New York the past summer had been for a completely different kind of journey, one that could not be easily, much less quickly, adapted to fit the new route. Even Roosevelt had to admit that the man he had originally entrusted with planning his Amazon expedition was far out of his league when it came to the descent of the River of Doubt. “Father Zahm is a perfect trump,” he wrote to Chapman on November 4. “But he knows nothing of any of the country which we have planned to go through, and in practice can give us no help or advice as to methods of travelling and what we will or will not be actually able to accomplish.”

Zahm put on a brave face, writing to his brother, Albert, that he was “most eager to begin the strictly scientific part of our trip—the exploration of an unknown river and an unknown region,” but the abrupt change of plans must have been deeply disappointing. After little more than a week in South America, he was already beginning to lose control of his trip—a journey that he had conceived of, waited five years for, and lovingly planned. Zahm must have known that it would be unlikely that he would play a central role in the new expedition, if any role at all.

It was becoming apparent to everyone in the expedition that they were not as well prepared for a journey, of any kind, into the Amazon as they had allowed themselves to believe. One of the most essential items for their trip—the motorboats that Father Zahm had ordered—not only were unsuitable for the new expedition, they would have been inappropriate even for the original route. Brazilians who had traveled in the Amazon took one look at the massive boats and bluntly told Roosevelt that it would be impossible to transport them through the jungle.