The River of Doubt: Theodore Roosevelt's Darkest Journey

by Candice Millard

“I know the American people,” he had said prophetically in 1910, upon returning to a hero’s welcome after an epic journey to Africa. “They have a way of erecting a triumphal arch, and after the Conquering Hero has passed beneath it he may expect to receive a shower of bricks on his back at any moment.”

“The defeated are always held accountable in every way.”

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 creation of the Andes dramatically altered South America’s rainfall patterns and river system. Prior to the rise of the Andes, the Amazon River had flowed in the opposite direction from its present course,

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.

Roosevelt’s admission that his new plan was “slightly more hazardous” than the original was, according to Frank Chapman, the understatement of the century. “In a word,” the bird curator later wrote, “it may be said with confidence . . . that in all South America there is not a more difficult or dangerous journey than that down the [River of Doubt].”

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.

Roosevelt referred to piranha as “the fish that eats men when it can get the chance.”

Rarely in the rain forest do animals or insects allow themselves to be seen, and any that do generally do so with ulterior motives. In a world of endless, life-or-death competition, the need to hide from potential predators and deceive sophisticated prey is a fundamental requirement of longevity, and it has produced a staggering range of specialized attributes and behavior aimed at manipulating—or erasing entirely—any visible form that an enemy or victim might see.

Yet they remained undetected. In a world in which most animals have to fly, run, swing, or scurry in order to elude predators, the sloth has made a virtue out of immobility.

As they were quickly learning, the greatest challenge they faced from the rain forest came not from any creature or adversary that they could confront and defeat, but from the jungle as a whole—in the ruthless efficiency with which it apportioned food and nutrients, in the bewildering complexity of its defense mechanisms, in the constant demands that it placed upon every one of its inhabitants, and in the ruthlessness with which it dealt with the weak, the hungry, or the infirm.

So important and ubiquitous are insects in the ecology of the Amazon that, notwithstanding their generally small size, ants alone make up more than 10 percent of the biomass of all the animals in the rain forest.

At this early point in the Roosevelt-Rondon Expedition, the insects had already become the bane of the men’s existence.

Although Roosevelt had long lectured Kermit about his recklessness, his advice appeared to have had little effect on his son’s actions.

If Roosevelt had hoped that this tragedy had driven some degree of fear or even caution into his son, he was to be disappointed.

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 Cinta Larga believed that death was brought about by witchcraft. If a man became ill and died, the others in his village never blamed their healer,

THE MOST striking fact about the Cinta Larga—and one that would have alarmed the men of the expedition had they known it—was that these Indians were cannibals. Unlike the type of cannibalism much of the world had come to know—among desperate explorers, marooned sailors, and victims of famine—the Cinta Larga’s consumption of human flesh was born not out of necessity but out of vengeance and an adherence to tribal traditions and ceremony.

For centuries, Amazon explorers had counted on these high-fat, high-protein nuts to get them through the rain forest. In fact, Brazil nuts had likely saved the lives of Rondon and his men during their 1909 expedition.

When ripe, these shells crash to the ground like small cannonballs from the branches of the 130-foot-tall Brazil nut tree, sometimes striking gatherers below with stunning force. So hard that they resist the blow of a hammer, Brazil nuts have been known to knock men out cold, even kill them.

“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.”

Roosevelt had never lost his fascination with natural history and his admiration for the life of a field naturalist. While on the River of Doubt, he intended to learn as much as he could from Cherrie, a man who was as knowledgeable as any other living naturalist when it came to the wildlife, especially the bird life, of the Amazon.

No one had trusted Julio before this incident, but the gravity of his crime and the depth of his betrayal were breathtaking. Had the expedition’s American commander had his way, Julio would likely have been shot on the spot. “On such an expedition the theft of food comes next to murder as a crime,” Roosevelt wrote bluntly, “and should by rights be punished as such.”

They were traveling so slowly, and consuming their rations so quickly, that Cherrie estimated they did not have enough food left to last them more than twenty-five days.

The jungle is jealous and voracious. . .. Of all the possible deaths man can die in the jungle, the most dreaded is that which results from being lost.”

So determined was Roosevelt not to endanger the life of anyone else in his expedition that he had made a secret provision for a quick death in the Amazon, should it become necessary. Before he even left New York, he had packed in his personal baggage, tucked in among his extra socks and eight pairs of eyeglasses, a small vial that contained a lethal dose of morphine.

Roosevelt refused to slow down the expedition when each man was fighting for his own life. For him, this was not about suicide, it was about doing the right thing.

It must have been clear to Edith, however, that Fiala had no more ability to know whether the Roosevelt party was in good health or bad than she did. The story of his own disaster on a much less dangerous river did not ease her mind, nor did the April release of the first articles in the series that Roosevelt was writing for Scribner’s. Filled with stories of man-eating fish and warlike Indians, these articles only served to feed Edith’s fears and multiply in her mind the dangers that her husband and son were facing.

KERMIT’S BROODING temperament and early taste for alcohol were character traits that Roosevelt had seen in his only brother, Elliott, who had died at the age of thirty-four from complications related to alcoholism and morphine addiction. In childhood, Elliott had been as charming and lighthearted as his older brother had been awkward and serious. He had been the stronger, taller, more athletic of the two Roosevelt boys, but as he had approached adolescence, Elliott had begun to lose his footing, developing, as one biographer put it, “an inclination toward poetic introspection” and a desire for solitude that was hauntingly similar to that of his future nephew.

Roosevelt had molded Kermit in his own image, creating a young man who, given a goal, would fight with everything he had to achieve it. But, although Roosevelt was proud of his son’s growing independence, he had always remained the patriarch, continuing to make the final decisions. On this night, Kermit not only refused to do what his father asked of him but demanded that Roosevelt step back and let his son determine his, and the entire expedition’s, course of action.

“Julio has killed Paishon!”

The murder sparked a deep-seated outrage in Rondon. Despite his great discipline, the Brazilian colonel was, Kermit would later write in his diary, “in a blind rage to kill” Julio.

The idea of a fish catching its lunch on the banks of the river rather than inside it, however, was not beyond the realm of possibility in the Amazon, as the high-jumping arawana, or water monkey, proved.

THE POSSIBILITY that they might not return home alive, once a remote and abstract idea, had become a corrosive, everyday burden for the members of the expedition.

The penetration of outside pioneers into the Amazon had been far from organized or peaceful, centering on rough, impoverished rubber-tappers, or seringueiros. Those tappers who had reached this far up the River of Doubt were likely alone, afraid, and in dangerous straits themselves. In approaching their huts from upriver, moreover, the members of the expedition were crossing the frontier from the wrong direction. The only humans the settlers expected to see coming from the river’s headwaters were hostile Indians, and they would do whatever they felt was necessary to defend themselves.

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.

Labor in Malaysia was also not only cheap but readily available, and much more easily controlled. So successful had been the transfer of rubber trees to the Far East that by 1913 Malaya and Ceylon were producing as much rubber as the Amazon.

By the time Roosevelt’s expedition descended the River of Doubt, the seringueiros had become the point of intersection between the Amazonian wilderness and the outside world.

Settling the Amazon, however, was even more perilous than settling the American West. Not only was it a difficult, lonely life, but it was an almost impossible job.

Besides Rondon, few Brazilians at that time believed that the Amazonian Indians had any rights at all, certainly not to something as valuable as land.

BY THIS point, Roosevelt was so sick that he could no longer even sit up in his canoe. Neither, however, could he lie down. Each of the four dugouts was packed with men and supplies, and there was not an empty space in any of them.

Not only was Roosevelt’s pain intense, but he and the doctor both knew that if they did not reach help soon he would die.

the men remained unaware of the single most important factor in their survival: the decision of the Cinta Larga to let them go.

The ability of Cinta Larga tribesmen to destroy the expedition and all its members was never in doubt.

In a world of unpredictable, resourceful enemies, invisibility was not merely advantageous, but a matter of life and death. A single unguarded moment could be fatal, and the only look that an enemy was likely to get of a Cinta Larga warrior was a colorful flash of feathers and war paint before a swift and violent death.

In fact, none of the men—with the notable exception of the seemingly invincible Rondon—was healthy.

Although the operation to lance Roosevelt’s abscess had been successful, easing some of his pain as well as Cajazeira’s concern, the former president was still dangerously ill. The bacterial infection had continued to spread, and he had developed another abscess,

In just three months, Roosevelt had lost fifty-five pounds—one-quarter of his original body weight.

Physically at least, Theodore Roosevelt was not the same man he had been when he left New York nearly eight months earlier.

Roosevelt had been eager to tell the story of his expedition’s journey, but the scale of that achievement was so extraordinary that, to his surprise and outrage, he was met not with praise, but with skepticism and disbelief. Even before he had left his hospital bed in Manáos, some of the world’s most prominent and respected geographers had stepped forward to question his accomplishment.