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October 18 - November 6, 2021
The Nhambiquara lived by the laws of the wilderness, which demanded that, as Roosevelt explained, “friends proclaim their presence; a silent advance marks a foe.”
“Evidently to have done so would have been rather bad manners—like using a knife as an aid in eating ice cream.”
Roosevelt and his men may have regarded themselves as explorers, but the Indians would know them only as invaders.
Even from the air, however, the river’s path into the jungle lowlands was so capricious, and the terrain so uneven, that it frequently disappeared entirely beneath the dense green canopy, making it nearly impossible to follow.
As Roosevelt at last stood on that bridge, listening to the swift, muddy water slap against the warped planks beneath his feet, he peered into the dark stretch of jungle ahead of him. This world, which he was about to enter for better or worse, was strange and utterly unfamiliar, and while his first glimpse into it was exciting, it was also deeply sobering. No one, not even the inscrutable Rondon, could predict what was around the next bend.
Roosevelt was about to become an explorer in the truest, and most unforgiving, sense of the word. It was an opportunity he had dreamed of from his earliest childhood. Now, however, he realized that he would be called on to pay the full cost of his ambitions—and he found himself gravely unprepared for what might lie ahead.
As they plunged deeper and deeper into the jungle, the riot of nature that enveloped them—from the crowded canopy overhead to the buzzing, insect-laden air around their faces to the unseen depths of the black river—became increasingly strange, unfamiliar, and threatening, to say nothing of the constant threat of Indian attack, which transformed every shadow into a potential enemy.
Even for Roosevelt, this trip, which was a rare opportunity for both adventure and achievement, was simply another trophy, one that he could keep next to his memories of his ranching days in the West, the Battle of San Juan Hill, and his seven years in the White House. If he survived, he would return as quickly as possible to the United States and the hectic political life that he had led before he had even set foot on South American soil.
For Rondon, however, the descent of the River of Doubt was not an isolated event. It was an integral part of a quarter-century of extraordinary effort and sacrifice.
But if he was going to descend this river, he intended to carry out his work with the same discipline and rigorous attention to detail that he had applied to each of his expeditions, no matter how grueling or dangerous. This expedition was an opportunity to write history, and Rondon was not going to rush through it—whatever the cost.
he had adopted a philosophical attitude about the danger that he faced on the River of Doubt. “If our canoe voyage was prosperous we would gradually lighten the loads by eating the provisions,” he wrote. “If we met with accidents, such as losing canoes and men in the rapids, or losing men in encounters with Indians, or if we encountered overmuch fever and dysentery, the loads would lighten themselves.”
“For several minutes we stood upon the fragile structure that bridged the unexplored river and stared at the dark forest that shut our erstwhile leader and his Brazilian companions from view,” Miller would later write. “And then, filled with misgivings as to whether or not we should ever see them again, we turned our thoughts to the task before us.”
but he was puzzled by a distinct and eerie absence of sound. In the midst of all this lush life was a seemingly incongruent stillness.
Roosevelt realized, however, that great difficulty often brought out the worst in a man.
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.
A significant part of Rondon’s job over the past twenty-four years had been not only adding to the cartographic knowledge of his continent but correcting these mistakes.
A long, linked mat of fungi under the soil consumed the dead and fed the living, completing an ever-changing cycle of remarkable life and commonplace death which had throbbed without pause for millions of years—and of which Roosevelt and his men, knowingly or not, had now become a part.
These odd characteristics were not mere natural curiosities or local quirks, but direct reflections of the deadly, exquisitely efficient competition for survival that was taking place all around Roosevelt and his men. They also reflected the profound impact of that evolutionary competition on all forms of life in the Amazon, where it has produced some of the most phenomenally diverse and specialized plants and creatures anywhere on earth.
As in the development of a modern economy, with its ever-increasing specialization of labor and markets, each increase in competition among the inhabitants of the rain forest has itself been a powerful source of further speciation, rewarding entrepreneurial variations of life that can exploit skills and opportunities that previously went unrecognized or did not exist.
The same abundant precipitation and steady temperatures that support life also leach minerals from the soil, and intense tree-and-plant growth exploits every available nutrient, leaving the floor of many tropical jungles, including the Amazon, permanently hovering at the margin of exhaustion.
As the ex-president stood at the river’s edge, surveying the jungle he hoped to master and explore, the forest surrounding him met the dawn by exhaling thin white clouds of condensing moisture that rose over the canopy above him like the breath of a wolf on a winter morning.
They knew that rain, sun, and insects would likely destroy the markers long before they would be discovered by anyone who could read them, but they felt compelled nonetheless to leave behind a historical record of their journey.
It was a tangible connection to civilization and a constant reminder of who they were and why they were there. Rondon had learned through excruciating hardship how important routine, discipline, and military ritual were in maintaining morale during an expedition into the Amazon.
“I never saw a man who talked so much. He would talk all of the time he was in swimming, all of the time during meals, traveling in the canoe and at night around the camp fire. He talked endlessly and on all conceivable subjects.”
His face cast in shadow beneath his deep sun helmet, Roosevelt watched as the jungle glided past him, its towering trees and blue sky reflected, like a trembling, inverted world, in the water’s dark surface.
COMPOUNDING THE misery wrought by the rain was an overarching sense of isolation and uncertainty, a feeling that was magnified by strange noises that shattered the forest’s silence and set the men’s nerves on edge.
“Frequently at night, with my camp at the edge of the jungle,” he wrote, “I have lain in my hammock listening, my ears yearning for some familiar sound—every sense alert, nerves taut. Strange things have happened in the night.”
certain Amazonian fish, such as the tam-baqui, have evolved teeth that look like sheep molars and are tough enough to crack open even the hard, cannonball-sized shell of the Brazil nut.
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.
The three-foot-long arawana, for example, has a huge mouth and a bony tongue and can leap twice its body length. Nicknamed the “water monkey,” it snatches large insects, reptiles, and even small birds from the low branches of overhanging trees.
Compared with the creatures of the Amazon, including the Indians whose territory they were invading, they were all—from the lowliest camarada to the former president of the United States—clumsy, conspicuous prey.
No one worked harder than Kermit to get the expedition past these rapids and back onto the river. He was at his best when he had a mission. Left to his own devices, he had a tendency to brood, even to fall into a quiet depression, but, given a cause, he worked harder than anyone around him. He thrived on the challenge, and Roosevelt marveled at his son, who had grown a heavy beard and was “dressed substantially like the camaradas themselves,” as he worked tirelessly to defeat the rapids that stood between him and home.
“The flicker of the lights showed the tropic forest rising in the darkness round about,” he wrote. “Olive and copper and ebony, their skins glistened as if oiled, and rippled with the ceaseless play of the thews beneath.”
In the most remote reaches of the Amazon, however, Rondon was unreachable and unstoppable. He had never allowed his men’s suffering or even their deaths to affect his work in the wilderness, and he never would. “Death and dangers, in spite of how much suffering they bring,” he wrote, “should not interfere with the expedition’s mission.”
“The very pathetic myth of ‘beneficent nature,’” Roosevelt wrote, “could not deceive even the least wise being if he once saw for himself the iron cruelty of life in the tropics.”
“There is a universal saying to the effect that it is when men are off in the wilds that they show themselves as they really are,” Kermit wrote. “As in the case with the majority of proverbs there is much truth in it, for without the minor comforts of life to smooth things down, and with even the elemental necessities more or less problematical, the inner man has an unusual opportunity of showing himself—and he is not always attractive. A man may be a pleasant companion when you always meet him clad in dry clothes, and certain of substantial meals at regulated intervals, but the same cheery
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Roosevelt had witnessed this low threshold for discomfort in some of his closest friends, and he believed that it showed a shallowness of character that he was determined never to see in his own children.
ONE OF Roosevelt’s most entrenched beliefs, as a cowboy, a hunter, a soldier, and an explorer, was that the health of one man should never endanger the lives of the rest of the men in his expedition.
“It is his duty to go forward, if necessary on all fours, until he drops.”
Roosevelt had never allowed himself to fear death, famously writing, “Only those are fit to live who do not fear to die.”
“The truth is, he believes in war and wishes to be a Napoleon and to die on the battle field,” former President William Howard Taft had written of his estranged friend. “He has the spirit of the old berserkers.”
“If I had to die anywhere, why not die in helping to open up to the knowledge of the world a great unknown land and so aid humanity in general and the people of Brazil in particular?”
The Roosevelt men were rough around the edges, but they were also vulnerable to what Roosevelt’s older daughter, Alice, characterized as a “melancholic streak” that, she believed, ran in the family. Of all Roosevelt’s sons, Kermit was perhaps at greatest risk of falling prey to this family melancholy. Although he was smart and strong, he did not have his father’s ability to forge his own happiness.
When Roosevelt saw his brother’s body, he was “more overcome than I have ever seen him,” Corinne later recalled. He “cried like a little boy for a long time.”
Recognizing the resolve on his son’s face, Roosevelt realized that if he wanted to save Kermit’s life he would have to allow his son to save him. “It came to me, and I saw that if I did end it, that would only make it more sure that Kermit would not get out,” Roosevelt would later confide to a friend. “For I knew he would not abandon me, but would insist on bringing my body out, too. That, of course, would have been impossible. I knew his determination. So there was only one thing for me to do, and that was to come out myself.”
“Kermit,” Roosevelt would later write, “was the only man who believed we could get the canoes down at all.”
“In the weeks of trying hardships when the fates seemed all against us, despite the fever and dysentery that were sapping his strength, he never failed, day after day, to make inquiry about his camp companions including the canoemen and camp helpers,” Cherrie wrote of Roosevelt.
“Under such conditions,” Roosevelt wrote, “whatever is evil in men’s natures comes to the front.”
but it was still hard for them to believe that, as Roosevelt wrote, “the poor body which but half an hour before had been so full of vigorous life” would never move again.
Together they laid the blood-soaked body in its shallow grave, heaped a low mound over it, placed a rude cross at the head, and fired a volley in Paishon’s honor. “Then we left him forever,” Roosevelt wrote, “under the great trees beside the lonely river.”
