More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Zahm had decided to wait for Roosevelt. He waited through Roosevelt’s trip to Africa, his controversial campaign, his electoral defeat, and his brooding isolation on Oyster Bay. He waited until, on the cusp of sixty-two and in failing health, he felt that he could not wait any longer.
“BY GEORGE! You here!” Roosevelt cried when he blew into the museum’s dining room for his luncheon with Chapman and found Father Zahm in the midst of the scientists and staff who were to be his own expedition advisers. Zahm’s unexpected appearance caught Roosevelt off guard, but, with a veteran politician’s skill, he recovered nicely. “You are the very man I wish to see,” he boomed. “I was just about to write you to inform you that I think I shall, at last, be able to take that long-talked-of trip to South America.”
Zahm’s grasp of the actual requirements of such a journey, however, was far from certain. Zahm had billed himself as something of an expert on South America. In addition to his travels through the continent, he had also written several books on the subject. However, both Up the Orinoco and Down the Magdalena and Along the Andes and Down the Amazon—which Zahm had published under the pen name H. J. Mozans, Ph.D.—had generated skepticism within the country’s relatively small circle of South American travelers.
“[I] would like to get a fairly good idea of . . . the amount of mischance to which we would be exposed,” he wrote Zahm. “I don’t in the least mind risk to my life, but I want to be sure that I am not doing something for which I will find my physical strength unequal.”
Despite his current job as a department-store clerk, nearly every explorer at the turn of the twentieth century knew who Anthony Fiala was. Indeed, his story was a cautionary tale of what can happen when an expedition goes terribly wrong and its commander survives to face derision from his peers and exclusion from his profession.
Ten years earlier, Fiala—tall and thin, with a prominent nose and a small, angular face—had been in a high-stakes race with an elite group of men for one of history’s greatest geographical prizes: the North Pole.
On hearing details about the expedition, the renowned British naturalist and explorer Henry Feilden excoriated it as “an ill conceived, badly managed, undisciplined venture,” and its commander as “utterly incompetent.” Fiala, Feilden wrote, “may be a fairly good cook but not a leader of men.” It was clear that no one would be sending Anthony Fiala on another expedition anytime soon.
Had Roosevelt been concerned about the trip he was about to take, he certainly would have hesitated to hire a man whose sole exploring experience had been in the Arctic—a region that had almost nothing in common with the Amazon—and who, while there, had led his men to a disaster of legendary proportions. But, given Zahm’s enthusiasm about Fiala, Roosevelt, almost in passing, agreed to hire him—not merely as an extra hand, but as the man in charge of equipping the entire expedition.
Despite the central role of river travel in the planned route, the specific requirements of that travel were largely a matter of mystery to those charged with outfitting the expedition. 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.
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.’”
With the addition of Cherrie and Miller to the expeditionary team, Osborn relaxed, secure in the knowledge that Roosevelt would come home safely.
As president, Roosevelt had provoked more controversy in South America than in any other region of the world, and although four years had passed since he had left the White House, South Americans had not forgotten his policies or his unapologetic imperialism.
Nearly a decade later, South America still bristled at the inherent condescension and implied threat of the doctrine and its corollary. A few weeks before his departure, Roosevelt had received a letter from former New York Congressman Lemuel Quigg—a longtime supporter of Roosevelt’s who had traveled through much of South America as a journalist—warning him that, if he planned to talk about the Monroe Doctrine on his trip, he could expect the political equivalent of being tarred, feathered, and ridden out of the continent on a rail.
The United States government was concerned about the revolution not only because Mexico was its closest neighbor to the south, or even because thousands of American expatriates were living there at the time, but because Americans had invested millions of dollars in the country. If the revolution continued to spin out of control, Wilson could decide at any moment to intervene—a step that South Americans expected, and bitterly resented.
Their grandfather, whom Roosevelt had idolized, had paid another man to fight for him during the Civil War, and Roosevelt had never gotten over it.
It was relatively common at that time for wealthy men to pay poor men to take their place on the battlefield, and Roosevelt’s father had taken this route not out of fear but out of respect for his wife, who was a Southerner and whose brothers were fighting in the Confederate Army. But Roosevelt could never understand what he saw as the one flaw in his father’s otherwise irreproachable character. He would never miss a war, and neither would his sons.
Thin and fair, with high cheekbones and deep-set eyes, Kermit did not look much like his heavy-featured father, nor did he have the elder Roosevelt’s big, boisterous personality, but it was often said that he was, in many ways, more like his father than any of Roosevelt’s other children. Not only did he love adventure, he loved to learn. He was a voracious reader, and he had an uncanny ability with languages.
The Xingu Valley, which covers 195,000 square miles of northeastern Brazil, had not been explored until 1884, and there were still far more native inhabitants in that stretch of the country than settlers.
Kermit was tough, fearless, and independent, but, as his parents well knew, he was not invulnerable to setbacks or disappointment. Of all of Roosevelt’s children, Kermit was the most sensitive. Even in childhood he had had a quiet, brooding disposition that gave him a gravitas that was startling for his age. “Kermit was a very solemn little boy,” his older brother, Theodore Jr., recalled. “He was not talkative. As a result when he said anything it gave the impression of a carefully weighed accurate statement.”
Edith had spent half her life waiting for Theodore to come home—from the battlefield, the campaign trail, hunting trips, and grand adventures.
If he thought that his reticence might spare her worry, he was wrong. “I can but hope that the wild part of his trip is being more systematically arranged than is apparent,” she had written Kermit just a few weeks before they sailed.
In offering his services, Sigg had told Zahm, who had no real ability to check out his story,
Although he had had his colleagues’ hearts in their throats, Cherrie was casually but completely prepared for his twenty-sixth expedition to South America when the Vandyck slipped its moorings and plowed through the muddy East River en route to the sea.
Although the real expedition had yet to begin, the Rooseveltian therapy of adventure and danger in a strange land was already working. Roosevelt had put the Progressive Party and his failed campaign behind him, and his thoughts and energy were focused on achieving something significant, something important in the Amazon.
“If we have reasonably good luck we shall accomplish something worth accomplishing,” he wrote to his daughter Ethel. “But of course there is enough chance in it to make me reluctant to prophesy.”
Frank Harper studied his new Kodak camera—an invention that was fast becoming a national craze—which he had bought for the trip.
Most of them had known Roosevelt only as a remote and exalted president of the United States, but he soon put them at ease with his tales of hunting grizzlies and stalking lions and his sincere interest in their own lives. “The Colonel’s friendly interest in each member of the party and his almost boyish enthusiasm for the project in hand won our confidence and loyalty at the outset,” Cherrie wrote.
Arms crossed and legs flying, he danced a rousing hornpipe “in true sailor fashion,” Cherrie recalled, and brought down the house.
The longer he had remained in Brazil, and the more lonely and isolated he had become, the more perfect Belle Willard had seemed. Finally, Kermit had come to the conclusion that he simply could not live without her. His heart bursting, he picked up a piece of the ship’s stationery and sat down to write the most important letter of his life.
Three days before reaching Bahia, the steamer crossed the equator, an event that the crew and passengers celebrated with practical jokes and deck games, in keeping with nautical tradition.
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.
As reflected by the very route that the Vandyck was following around the bulging coastline of South America, the continent had once been connected to Africa, fitting neatly under the chin of West Africa, just below what is today the string of small countries that reaches from Liberia to Nigeria.
Prior to the rise of the Andes, the Amazon River had flowed in the opposite direction from its present course, descending northwestward and separated from the Atlantic Ocean to the east by a high stone ridge.
By creating a barrier that reaches as high as twenty thousand feet, the Andes serve as a trap for moisture-laden winds from the interior, forcing clouds high into the atmosphere, where they condense and bathe the Andes’ eastern slopes and the basin’s lowland forests in nearly constant precipitation.
Although more than two-thirds of the Amazon Basin rests within Brazilian borders, the vast majority of Brazilians in the early twentieth century, crowded along the sun-soaked eastern coast, had little interest in knowing what lay within the basin and no way to find out even if they had.
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.
The potential political consequences of such a vast, unknown territory in the heart of their country had been brought home to Brazilian leaders in 1865, when Paraguay invaded Brazil along its southern boundary and more than a month passed before the emperor, Pedro II, knew anything about it.
Stringing the line through the jungle had since cost the Strategic Telegraph Commission the lives of countless men, but the battalion had explored thousands of miles of wilderness and was slowly mapping large swaths of the northern and southern highlands and the wide Amazon Basin.
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.
Da Gama had also offered to provide Roosevelt with a guide, but not just any guide. He had promised him Colonel Cândido Mariano da Silva Rondon, the heroic commander of the Strategic Telegraph Commission. The forty-eight-year-old Rondon had spent half his life exploring the Amazon and had traversed roughly fourteen thousand miles of wilderness that was not only unmapped but largely unknown to anyone but the indigenous peoples who lived there.
Rondon had accepted the assignment, but, like Cherrie, he had done so with reservations. He had made it clear to his superiors that he would join this expedition only if it was a serious scientific endeavor. He would not be a tour guide, nor would he join a hunting safari. “The fact is,” one of Rondon’s soldiers later wrote, “after Roosevelt made his expedition to Africa, the general assumption was that he was motivated exclusively by hunting concerns.”
THE RIVER that Müller had in mind was one of the great remaining mysteries of the Brazilian wilderness. Absent from even the most accurate and detailed maps of South America, it was all but unknown to the outside world. In fact, the river was so remote and mysterious that its very name was a warning to would-be explorers: Rio da Dúvida, the River of Doubt.
Not only was the river unmapped—its length and direction unknown and each whirlpool, rapid, and waterfall a sudden and potentially deadly surprise—but it coursed through a dense, tangled jungle that had a dark history of destroying the men who hoped to map it.
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.
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.
The stories of death and disaster in the Amazon did not end with the withdrawal of the colonial powers from South America. As long as there was a wilderness in the heart of the continent, it seemed, men would be willing to risk their lives to find its riches, or at least discover what lay within.
The very idea of Theodore Roosevelt on a river that was as remote and unknown as the one that had killed Pires and his men was enough to make Foreign Minister Müller quickly regret his impulsive suggestion that Roosevelt change his trip. “Now, we will be delighted to have you do it, but of course, you must understand we cannot tell you anything of what will happen,” Müller hastened to warn Roosevelt. “And there may be some surprises not necessarily pleasant.”
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].”
The journey that Roosevelt had lightheartedly described as his “last chance to be a boy” had suddenly turned into his first chance to be something that he had always dreamed of being: an explorer.
Roosevelt lived during the last days of the golden age of exploration, a time when men and women of science roamed the world, uncovering its geographical secrets at a breathtaking pace and giving rise to bitter international competitions.
