The River of Doubt: Theodore Roosevelt's Darkest Journey

by Candice Millard

Osborn, who would earn a place in history for naming the Tyrannosaurus Rex, did not have the specialized regional knowledge necessary to help the former president with his plan, but he pledged the full support of the museum staff,

The world’s fifth-largest nation, Brazil encompasses 3.3 million square miles, making it more than two hundred and fifty thousand square miles larger than the contiguous United States.

In 1903, Roosevelt’s third year in the White House, the United States government decided, after much heated debate, that Panama rather than Nicaragua would be the best location for a canal that would connect the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. At that time, Panama was a state within Colombia, and so Roosevelt had offered Colombia twelve million dollars for the right to build the canal. When the Colombian Senate countered with restrictive treaty language and a demand for more money, Roosevelt’s response was impatience and contempt. He wrote to his secretary of state, John Hay, that the United States should not allow the “lot of jackrabbits” in Colombia “to bar one of the future highways of civilization,” and he proceeded quietly to encourage and support a Panamanian revolution that had been bubbling under the surface for years. On November 3, 1903, with U.S. Navy ships lined up in nearby waters, Panama declared its independence. Fifteen days later, John Hay and Philippe Bunau-Varilla, a Frenchman who had been the canal’s chief engineer, signed the Hay-Bunau-Varilla Treaty, which gave the United States control of the Canal Zone, a five-mile-wide swath of land on either side of the waterway. A decade later, the Colombians were still fuming.

“I love peace, but it is because I love justice and not because I am afraid of war,”

“It just seems like a dream, dearest, and I get so afraid that I may wake, for if it’s a dream I want to stay asleep forever.”

Rondon later wrote, restraining his contempt for Zahm, but just barely. “We, however, did not share in our friend’s astonishment, inasmuch as we consider this and other differences as natural consequences of the methods adopted for the education of the Indians. . .. If we propose to educate men, so that they may incorporate themselves into our midst and become our co-citizens, we have nothing more to do than to persevere in applying the methods up to the present adopted in Brazil: if, however, our intention is to create servants of a restricted and special society, the best road to follow would be the one opened by the Jesuitic teachings.”

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.

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. Others can transform themselves into trees once they reach the canopy, abandoning their host and winding their viny stems together into a trunk.

Another adaptation to this and other dangers is for the vine simply to abandon its connection to the ground and to derive its water and nutrients entirely in the canopy, becoming an air plant or epiphyte, a category of plant that has generated literally thousands of species, including bromeliads and orchids.

Amazon river system is a prodigy of speciation and diversity, serving as home to more than three thousand species of freshwater fishes—more than any other river system on earth.

By comparison, the entire Missouri and Mississippi river system that drains much of North America has only about 375 fish species.

a single tree in the Amazon can serve as home to more than forty different species of ant, rendering even the most casual contact with it a nightmare of painful bites.

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.

The intersection of their world and that of Roosevelt and Rondon was not simply a clash of different cultures; it was a collision of the Industrial Age and the Stone Age, the modern world and the ancient.

The tribe’s trails were marked, but ingeniously so. Markers appeared only once every twelve or eighteen feet and were simply small branches that the blazer had half broken and then bent backward. To anyone but a Cinta Larga, these markers were indistinguishable from any of a million other broken and bent branches in the rain forest. A change of direction was indicated by nothing more than a slightly larger broken branch whose bent end vaguely pointed the way. Only the Cinta Larga knew, moreover, that the markers also showed the direction to and from their camp: In a system like that used in modern maritime navigation, markers were placed so that when approaching the tribe’s camp they appeared on the left side of the trail, and leading away from camp they appeared on the right.

Among the books that had made it onto the dugout canoes for their river journey were Thomas More’s Utopia, the plays of Sophocles, the last two volumes of Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, and Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus. “These and many others comforted me much,” Roosevelt wrote, “as I read them in head-net and gauntlets, sitting on a log.”

Books Roosevelt read in the Amazon

When Henry Ford had introduced the Model T in 1908, the Amazon had been the world’s sole source of rubber. The wild popularity of these automobiles, and the seemingly insatiable demand for rubber that accompanied them, had ignited a frenzy in South America that rivaled the California gold rush.

an Englishman named Henry Wickham had smuggled Hevea brasiliensis seeds, the most popular species of Amazonian rubber tree, out of Brazil. Those seeds had then been cultivated at Kew Gardens, and the British had eventually planted their predecessors in tropical Malaysia.

If left untreated or treated inadequately, the infection could lead to blood poisoning and, ultimately, death. The best defense would have been an antibiotic, but even penicillin, one of the first antibiotics, would not be discovered for another fourteen years, and would not be widely prescribed until World War II.

In the 1920s, after meeting Rondon on a trip to Brazil, Albert Einstein nominated him for the Nobel Peace Prize, and, in 1956, the Brazilian government renamed a territory of ninety-four thousand square miles—nearly twice the size of England—Rondônia in his honor. Two years later, on January 19, 1958, having explored and mapped more of the Amazon than any other man alive, and having made first contact with dozens of isolated Indian tribes, Cândido Mariano da Silva Rondon died in his own bed at his home in Rio de Janeiro.

“In this manner,” the magazine reported, “one of earth’s last Stone Age peoples took their first fearful steps into a bewildering new world of men who know how to fly to the moon.”