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July 25 - August 2, 2016
Roosevelt, like his wife, had been born into New York’s highest society.
BEFORE HE was a president, before he was a Rough Rider, a cowboy, or even a Harvard man, Roosevelt was a naturalist. From his earliest childhood, the sickly, privileged young man from New York City had been fascinated to the point of obsession with plants, animals, and insects, thrilling to the stories of famous adventurers and longing for the day when he could join the ranks of the pioneering natural scientists he read about so intently.
time he was in the White House, Roosevelt was not merely the most powerful elected official in the country, but one of its most knowledgeable and experienced naturalists.
Theodore, along with two cousins, founded the Roosevelt Museum of Natural History. “The collections were at first kept in my room,” he remembered, “until a rebellion on the part of the chambermaid received the approval of the higher authorities of the household and the collection was moved up to a kind of bookcase in the back hall upstairs.” When Roosevelt was only fourteen years old, he began contributing specimens to New York’s American Museum of Natural History, the museum that his father had helped found in 1869. After a family vacation in the Adirondacks, he proudly donated a bat, a
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although Charles Darwin had published On the Origin of Species more than half a century earlier—was still shunned by many Americans as sacrilege and derided by most Catholics as, in the words of one journalist, “the ‘philosophy of mud’ and the ‘gospel of dirt.’”
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.
Nearly a decade later, South America still bristled at the inherent condescension and implied threat of the doctrine and its corollary.
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.
“I think he feels like Christian in Pilgrims Progress when the bundle fell from his back,” Edith wrote her sister-in-law Bamie from her stateroom. “In this case it was not made of sins but of the Progressive Party.”
Roosevelt South American Scientific Expedition—
The river’s mouth is so vast that the island that rests in the middle of it, Marajó, is nearly the size of Switzerland,
“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.
Waiting for Roosevelt at the lonely telegraph office was a short, devastating message informing him that Margaret had died three weeks before, from typhoid fever contracted on her journey to South America. It was the same infectious disease that had killed his mother thirty years earlier.
The hum of the telegraph wires, as familiar now as the weary clop-clop-clop of their mules’ hooves on the wet clay and sand soil, was the only sign of civilization in the broad scrub forest before them.
Although Roosevelt had left New York with more boats than he would possibly need in the Amazon, he had, incredibly enough, arrived at the river with no boats at all.
Seven Dwarfs. “One was small, one was cranky, and two were old, waterlogged, and leaky,” he wrote. “The other three were good.”
The Brazilian colonel was interested not in adventure but in geographical precision, and he was determined to survey the river carefully and completely, from its headwaters to its mouth. Little more than a century earlier, Alexander von Humboldt, the world-renowned German naturalist and explorer, had conducted the first thorough cartographical survey of South America, producing hundreds of maps based on seven hundred observations. Filling in these maps with the detail necessary to make them truly useful was an ongoing project,
To determine latitude and longitude, they used the same instrument that Humboldt himself had used—a sextant, which measures the angle between the horizon and the sun, moon, or stars.
that Kermit had to land, cut away the vegetation, and set up the sighting rod 114 times that first day alone.
Some Amazonian plants, for example, can shift as necessary between treelike form, when they receive sunlight, and a climbing vine, when they find themselves in shade.
Rondon had learned through excruciating hardship how important routine, discipline, and military ritual were in maintaining morale during an expedition into the Amazon.
“We did not know whether we had one hundred or eight hundred kilometers to go,” Roosevelt wrote, “whether the stream would be fairly smooth or whether we would encounter waterfalls, or rapids, or even some big marsh or lake.”
Orellana named these women the Amazons, after the famed women warriors of Greek mythology, who were said to have removed their right breast so that they could more effectively shoot a bow and arrow. It is from the Greek word a-mazos, or “no breast,” that the word “Amazon” is derived.
Charles-Marie de La Condamine saw natives extracting a milky substance from a tall tree. After the strange liquid, which the Indians called caoutchouc, had coagulated, it was used to make everything from boots to bottles.
La Condamine’s discovery meant great wealth for a few South Americans and Europeans, but nothing but sorrow and terror for Amazonian Indians.
Rubber barons were notorious for treating their slave laborers with exceptional cruelty. Julio
Thrilled that the River of Doubt was going to have a prominent place on the map of South America, Rondon, perhaps in a gesture of forgiveness toward the impulsive young American who had cost him the life of one of his men, decided that he would name this tributary, the river’s largest, the Rio Kermit.
Rondon had fought against mutiny and its precursors—fear and frustration—his entire career. He knew its signs, and he knew that this expedition had all the right ingredients for it.
THE AFTERNOON OF MAY 19, 1914, just three weeks after his expedition’s emotional reunion with Lieutenant Pyrineus on the banks of the River of Doubt, Roosevelt triumphantly entered New York Harbor on the steamship Aidan, all flags flying.
