The River of Doubt: Theodore Roosevelt's Darkest Journey

by Candice Millard

Apart from Father Zahm, whose time in South America had been primarily limited to sightseeing, none of the men involved in planning the trip had ever been to South America, or had any knowledge whatsoever of its rivers.

Fiala was looking forward to using the expedition to test a pet theory he had developed about canoes, and took the initiative to order two craft similar to those traditionally built by the native peoples of North America. He was convinced that the lightweight Northern canoes were much better suited for the Amazonian tributaries than the inflexible, heavy dugouts that they would find in South America.

Frank Harper, Roosevelt’s British-born private secretary, concerned about Roosevelt’s safety but otherwise lacking a clear professional basis for his opinion, favored instead a variety of stamped-steel boats manufactured by the W. H. Mullins Company of Salem, Ohio.

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.’”

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.

To add to the chaos, Father Zahm had decided at the eleventh hour to hire another man, a Swiss handyman named Jacob Sigg. Although Zahm had first met Sigg only a short time earlier, he envisioned the handyman as a perfect jack-of-all-trades—and, perhaps more important, as a capable personal assistant for the priest himself. These qualities, real or imagined, persuaded Zahm to overlook what even he himself acknowledged to be the handyman’s “checkered career.”

But even at sea there was no escaping the sheer size and power of the giant river, a nonstop deluge that by itself accounts for approximately 15 percent of all fresh water carried to sea by all of the planet’s rivers put together.

The river’s mouth is so vast that the island that rests in the middle of it, Marajó, is nearly the size of Switzerland, and the muddy plume that spills into the Atlantic reaches some hundred miles out into the open sea.

The route that Father Zahm had drawn up entailed travel along five of the best-known rivers on the continent: the Paraná, the Paraguay, the Tapajos, the Negro, and the Orinoco, each of which appeared on even the most rudimentary maps of South America. Within days of his arrival in Brazil, however, Roosevelt would abandon Zahm’s tame itinerary and commit himself to an expedition that was much more interesting—and exponentially more dangerous.

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?”

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.”

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.

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.

Even worse for Fiala and Sigg, soon after they disembarked, the two men found themselves the lone custodians of this mountain of bags, boxes, and crates. Leo Miller and Cherrie promptly excused themselves, explaining that they needed to start doing some collecting, and fled to Asunción, Paraguay, leaving their companions to struggle with what Miller referred to as the expedition’s “appalling amount of luggage.”

More than 1200 kilometers awar

Roosevelt considered the Panama Canal to be one of the greatest achievements of his presidency, and he believed that the canal’s architectural genius and the indelible mark that it—and, through it, he—would leave on the world more than justified the small South American revolution he had had to foment in order to make it a reality.

Indeed, except for indigenous tribesmen, only a handful of men in the history of Brazil had ever reached the headwaters of the River of Doubt and survived to tell the tale.

In early August, the men, struggling through a dense, tangled jungle that Rondon described as “monstrously fecund,” stumbled upon a strange, twisting stream. In some places the stream plunged underground. In others it spread out to nearly forty feet in width. It seemed to flow in a general north-northwest direction, but it twisted so wildly that it was impossible to be sure where it would lead. After following it briefly, the men, their provisions perilously low, gave up. They had neither the strength nor the time to solve the mystery of the river, prompting Rondon to christen it Rio da Dúvida—the River of Doubt.

So difficult were they to catch that, out of desperation, one lieutenant, a man named Pyrineus, finally threw dynamite into a pond above a waterfall. As he splashed through the water below, eagerly gathering his spoils, he made the mistake of holding a piranha in his mouth while his hands were busy scooping up others. The fish had at first been stunned by the dynamite and so lay slack between his teeth, but as soon as it recovered, it attacked. Before Pyrineus had time to react, the piranha had taken a bite out of his tongue. He would have bled to death had the expedition’s doctor not stanched the wound with moss.

By the time the expedition emerged from the jungle in late December 1909, the men who were still alive were so weak that many of them could hardly crawl. All of them had parasitic insects wriggling under their skin. Those who were not completely naked were wearing only rags, and all were on the brink of starvation. However, over the course of 237 days, they had covered six hundred miles of unmapped territory, and Rondon took great satisfaction in the tremendous leap forward that he and his men had made toward the understanding of Brazil’s mysterious interior. Then he set about planning his next expedition.

Roosevelt had learned only two words of Portuguese—mais canja, which means “more soup”—and

Roosevelt remembered. “If we swam the Potomac, we usually took off our clothes. I remember on one such occasion when the French Ambassador, [Jules] Jusserand . . . was along, and, just as we were about to get in to swim, somebody said, ‘Mr. Ambassador, Mr. Ambassador, you haven’t taken off your gloves,’ to which he promptly responded, ‘I think I will leave them on; we might meet ladies!’”

Rondon had arranged ahead of time for 110 mules and seventy pack oxen to be on hand for the expedition’s overland journey. He had also put Captain Amilcar Botelho de Magalhães, a trusted friend who had traveled with him on several previous expeditions, in charge of the baggage train. The problem was that the Americans had brought with them much more baggage than Rondon had expected.

Father Zahm, however, was unhappy with his ride in the auto van. According to Rondon, the priest was deeply offended that he had had to ride “beside the driver, a black man—which [he] never forgave.”

Father Zahm, on the other hand, had no problem voicing his complaints about the “ignorant and careless negro” who, as a favor to Rondon, had driven him to Utiarity. And he thereafter, Rondon wrote, referred to that truck ride as a “measure of how much he had suffered during the expedition.”

Even now, Father Zahm came up with a new idea for the remainder of his journey with the expedition, and proposed it to Rondon. Given the discomforts of traveling, the priest explained, the best solution would be for him to ride in a divan chair on the shoulders of four strong Indians. This suggestion seemed straightforward and practical to Zahm. But Roosevelt and Rondon must have been rendered almost speechless by the image of Father Zahm riding across the highlands like Montezuma on the bent backs of his subjects.

Surprised that Rondon had recoiled at his suggestion, Father Zahm reassured him that, in Peru, carrying a member of the Roman Catholic clergy in such a fashion was “an honour worth disputing.”

When it was clear that Rondon would not relent, Zahm appealed to Roosevelt, a decision that proved to be his undoing. “Indians are meant to carry priests,” he explained to his old friend, “and I have resorted to such transportation several times.”

Rondon’s injunction against violence directed toward an Indian—any Indian, for any reason—was categorical. In fact, he valued the lives of the Amazonian Indians above his own life—or the lives of his men. Surely there was not a soldier in the Rondon Commission who could not recite by heart his colonel’s now famous command: “Die if you must, but never kill.” Rondon’s success in the Amazon had depended on this dictum. It was the only reason the Indians had ever dared to trust him.

The Madeira, which starts its journey near the Bolivia-Brazil border in the Brazilian Highlands, has at least thirty major waterfalls and rapids, with sixteen powerful cataracts in one 225-mile stretch alone.

from the moment the men of the expedition launched their boats, they would no longer be able to turn around.

The river would carry them ever deeper into the rain forest, with whatever dangers that might entail. When they reached a series of rapids, they would have to portage around them—or mumble a prayer and plunge ahead. In either case, the option of returning the way they came was no longer available to them. They would find a way through, or they would perish in the attempt.

After months of inattention, Roosevelt had now come face to face with the acute logistical shortcomings and rapidly escalating risks that his own casual approach to the expedition and its route had produced.

Now that the expedition had finally reached the River of Doubt, it found itself with twenty-two men, hundreds of pounds of supplies, and not a single boat.

Forced to find a local substitute for such vital equipment, the men were obliged to make do with a set of seven roughly hewn dugouts that Rondon purchased from a group of Nhambiquara Indians, and which were now tethered to the base of the telegraph bridge. Rondon assured Roosevelt that these dugouts were all “recently built,” but they had been built by one of the Amazon’s most primitive tribes, a group that was reviled by other tribes for its lack of even the most rudimentary hammock.

These particular dugouts, moreover, were in questionable condition. In fact, Roosevelt’s recounting of them sounded ominously like a description of the Seven Dwarfs. “One was small, one was cranky, and two were old, waterlogged, and leaky,” he wrote. “The other three were good.”

At up to twenty-five hundred pounds apiece, the dugouts were also enormously heavy. Should the river prove so impassable that the expedition was forced to portage around it, the boats would be an excruciating burden and distraction as the men, vulnerable and exhausted, tried to haul them through the forest. The weight of the craft also greatly increased the stakes of even a minor mishap. Any slip with the heavy, waterlogged boats during a portage, in the rushing current, or merely during routine loading and unloading as they bobbed near the shore, could easily crush a man’s hand or leg if it did not kill him outright.

These minuscule black flies gorge themselves on blood like mosquitoes but descend by the hundreds, inflicting red pinpoint bites that not only itch but leave their victims looking as if they have been shot with buckshot.

In the face of such evident flaws in the expedition’s preparations, and the potential risks associated with any delay, the differences between its American and Brazilian leaders grew wider.

As the men inventoried their baggage, their concern about Fiala’s preparations began to turn into alarm. “Most of his equipment was useless, or as it has been appropriately termed ‘doodle-dabs,’” Miller wrote to Frank Chapman at the American Museum of Natural History. The rations were an even larger, and more critical, problem than the equipment. When the men pried open several of Fiala’s crates, they were stunned by what they found. “We discovered here whole cases of olive oil, cases of mustard, malted milk, stuffed olives, prunes, applesauce, etc., etc.

There are electric fishes that eat nothing but the tails of other electric fish, which can regenerate their appendages, thus ensuring the predator a limitless food supply.

During telegraph line expeditions, Rondon and his soldiers regularly offered up their weakest ox to a school of piranha so that the rest of their herd could safely cross a river.

In North America, naturalists use an old adage—“Red touching yellow, dangerous fellow”—to help distinguish between nonvenomous snakes and the lethal coral snake, with its distinctive black, red, and yellow bands. This adage, however, is useless in the Amazon, where many of the more than fifty species of coral snakes have red and yellow bands that do not touch, but are deadly nevertheless.

Having faced his own mortality and having caused, albeit indirectly, another man’s death, Kermit showed no signs of remorse or even any sense of responsibility when he scribbled a brief account of the day’s events in his journal that night. He recorded the fact of Simplicio’s death as tersely and unemotionally as he did his own near-drowning. “Simplicio was drowned,” he wrote. If he felt sorrow for Simplicio’s death, or regret for his own rash decision to cross to the other side of the river when Rondon had warned him not to, he did not admit it in his diary. Nor did he appear to have any desire to change his ways. If Roosevelt had hoped that this tragedy had driven some degree of fear or even caution into his son, he was to be disappointed.

Although he rarely devoted more than a single sentence in his journal to the death of one of his men, Rondon penned heartfelt eulogies to his dogs. After his dog Vulcão died, for instance, he wrote, “Travel companion who guarded my tent . . . Poor companion! How I feel your death. . .. You who served me so well, without my being able to pay you back for half of your dedication.”

The idea that Indians might attack the expedition for reasons of fear or self-defense offered little comfort to Roosevelt, who noted wryly, “If you are shot by a man because he is afraid of you it is almost as unpleasant as if he shot you because he disliked you.”

During their portages, the men of the expedition crashed through the underbrush, scaring off game and announcing their presence to the Indians.

The Cinta Larga were as skilled at hunting as they were at trailblazing. While the men of the expedition slowly starved, wandering through what seemed to them to be a lush but empty rain forest, the Indians saw, heard, and smelled game everywhere they turned. Their ability to move soundlessly through the forest also helped them to sneak up on their prey as the members of the expedition never could, and their skill with a bow and arrow was uncanny.

the Cinta Larga were talented mimics and could re-create nearly any animal call. In fact, so familiar were they with these calls that they used them not only to draw game within striking distance but even to express time.

If a man became ill and died, the others in his village never blamed their healer, a man who used plants and religion to cure the sick. Instead, they looked around their own village, and if they did not find anyone suspicious, they assumed that someone from another village must have performed the dark magic. The only response was to avenge the death by attacking the offending village.

Although skilled with both clubs and poison, the Cinta Larga’s most lethal weapons were bows and arrows. As Rondon learned when he examined the arrows that had killed Lobo, the Cinta Larga’s arrows were exquisitely made and deadly accurate. Made from bamboo, the shaft was adorned with braids of peccary hair and topped with a knife-shaped bamboo tip. The arrows were, on average, five feet long—nearly as tall as the Cinta Larga men, and taller than many of the women—and were adorned with hawk wings or curassow feathers, which stabilized them in flight.