The River of Doubt: Theodore Roosevelt's Darkest Journey

by Candice Millard

“These men said that where they had been working the sun never shone, for his light was stopped on the unbroken green which, except where the big rivers flowed, roofed the whole land.” Nicknamed “Mad Maria” by the engineers who designed it, the railroad took five years to finish, and by the time it was ready in 1912, the South American rubber trade had gone bust, and the estimated six thousand men who had died of disease and starvation trying to build it had lost their lives for nothing.

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.”

Acting in concert, but with highly specialized roles, columns of hundreds of thousands of army ants can fan out in raiding parties fifty feet across at their front lines, harvesting huge numbers of tarantulas, roaches, beetles, scorpions, snakes, lizards, birds, and nearly anything else in their path

In the end, Theodore simply gave up on Elliott. He finally had his brother admitted to an asylum in Paris and declared incompetent and insane.

According to one account, many years later, one of the first outsiders known to seek help from the Cinta Larga was an English engineer who had become lost in the jungle and had stumbled upon a Cinta Larga village when he was on the verge of starvation. Having nothing else to offer as a gift, he gave the Indians his only possession: his knife. The Cinta Larga took the knife and, in return, gave the man food. After watching him eat his fill, one of the Indians walked up behind him and slit his throat, killing him with the very knife he had given them.