The River of Doubt: Theodore Roosevelt's Darkest Journey

by Candice Millard

“I love peace, but it is because I love justice and not because I am afraid of war,” Roosevelt told the spellbound crowd.

Far from its outward appearance, the rain forest was not a garden of easy abundance, but precisely the opposite. Its quiet, shaded halls of leafy opulence were not a sanctuary but, rather, the greatest natural battlefield anywhere on the planet, hosting an unremitting and remorseless fight for survival that occupied every single one of its inhabitants, every minute of every day. Though frequently impossible for a casual observer to discern, every inch of space was alive—from the black, teeming soil under Roosevelt’s boots to the top of the canopy far above his head—and everything was connected. 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.

UNLIKE THE woods of New England, where Roosevelt had spent years exploring and learning about nature, the rain forest floor was not covered with thick leaf litter or plant life, but appeared largely empty, characterized only by a shallow layer of soil shot through with thin white threadlike fibers. Just as unusual, each tree in the Amazon rain forest appeared to be nearly unique. Many trees had commonly shaped leaves, but stands or groupings of a single tree species were very rare, and after identifying one tree the men could search for hours before finding another of the same kind. The trees themselves were often strange and complex, characterized by huge buttresses, flowering trunks, or apparent branches that plunged back into the earth or were wrapped in enormous looped or curled vines. Most important, other than insects, which teemed everywhere, the forest seemed virtually empty, with little or no sign or sound of any inhabitants. 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.

While the process of evolution has continuously altered and selected the features of life everywhere on the planet, in few places have its workings been as conspicuous or its results as refined as in the Amazon. The extraordinary range of forms that characterizes the Amazon rain forest has been attributed to many causes, all of which are likely to have played some role in creating the immense cornucopia of living things that surrounded the expedition. Perhaps the most frequently cited factor in the species richness of the Amazon is the region’s latitude, which has for millions of years produced generally stable temperatures and moist environmental conditions that have favored the uninterrupted development of the jungle and its inhabitants. Another prominent explanation is the repeated isolation and reconnection of the jungle to other continents and habitats over the broad sweep of time. Whereas some regions, such as Africa, have undergone fewer changes, and reflect a comparatively lower number of unique plant and animal species, the South American continent has at different points been cut off from, or rejoined to, other landmasses. The separation of South America from the rest of Gondwanaland, for example, created opportunities for the development of new indigenous species. That isolation was then interrupted by the rise of the Panamanian Land Bridge, which permitted the arrival of new species from North America, and started new rounds of selection. Within the Amazon itse...

As the men of the expedition arose and started their morning routine, Roosevelt was able to admire the complexity of the jungle before him, but could only guess at the mysteries that it held beyond his view. So complex and interdependent was the ecosystem he and his men had entered that the jungle itself could appear to take on the attributes of a living being. If Roosevelt had been able to see the rain forest from a distance, he could have watched it breathe. As the trees transpire, or, in a sense, sweat, they pump water into the atmosphere from their leaves. In the warm air, the water quickly evaporates and is recycled as rain. 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.

Roosevelt sought comfort and distraction in the world that he knew best: his library. For his trip to Africa, he had spent months choosing the books that he would take with him, ordering special volumes that had been beautifully bound in pigskin, with type reduced to the smallest legible size, so that the books would be as light as possible. Roosevelt, Kermit wrote, “read so rapidly that he had to plan very carefully in order to have enough books to last him through a trip.” He had not had that luxury when preparing for his South American journey, however. “The plans for the Brazilian expedition came into being so unexpectedly that he could not choose his library with the usual care,” Kermit noted. 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.”

SO SICK was the former president that, when Raymundo José Marques paddled over to the expedition, Roosevelt could not lift himself out of his canoe to meet him. His condition, however, did not diminish the old seringueiro’s awe when he learned that the ragged and stricken man he saw lying in the roughest sort of dugout canoe had once been the president of the United States. Astonished, Marques said to Rondon, “But is he really a President?” Rondon explained that Roosevelt was not president any longer but had once been. “Ah,” Marques replied. “He who has once been a king has always the right of majesty.”

In October 1918, Roosevelt turned sixty years old. Although sick, frustrated, and brokenhearted over Quentin’s death, he continued to fight, refusing to bow to the sorrow and grief that he had outrun his entire life. “When the young die at the crest of life, in their golden morning, the degrees of difference are merely degrees in bitterness,” he had written to his sister Corinne. “Yet there is nothing more foolish and cowardly than to be beaten down by sorrow which nothing we can do will change.” By November, he was back in the hospital, so ill he was hardly able to walk or even stand. When told that he might be confined to a wheelchair for the rest of his life, Roosevelt paused and then replied, “All right! I can work that way too.”