The River of Doubt: Theodore Roosevelt's Darkest Journey

by Candice Millard

In 1909, the year that Roosevelt left the White House, Americans Robert Peary and Matthew Henson won the race to reach the North Pole—the race that had nearly cost Fiala his life and the lives of all his men. Just two years later, in late December 1911, Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen became the first man to reach the South Pole.

Shocked and dispirited, Scott and his men froze to death on their long, bitter journey back to their ship. Sir Ernest Shackleton and his men, in a legendary attempt to cross Antarctica, narrowly escaped the same fate two years later, the same year that Roosevelt would set off down the River of Doubt.

In a letter to Chapman, Roosevelt wrote, “Tell Osborn I have already lived and enjoyed as much of life as any nine other men I know; I have had my full share, and if it is necessary for me to leave my bones in South America, I am quite ready to do so.”

One of the most essential items for their trip—the motorboats that Father Zahm had ordered—not only were unsuitable for the new expedition, they would have been inappropriate even for the original route. Brazilians who had traveled in the Amazon took one look at the massive boats and bluntly told Roosevelt that it would be impossible to transport them through the jungle.

Even worse for Fiala and Sigg, soon after they disembarked, the two men found themselves the lone custodians of this mountain of bags, boxes, and crates. Leo Miller and Cherrie promptly excused themselves, explaining that they needed to start doing some collecting, and fled to Asunción, Paraguay, leaving their companions to struggle with what Miller referred to as the expedition’s “appalling amount of luggage.”

He knew that his expedition through the Amazon would be difficult, but he suspected that it would be “less unhealthy than a steady succession of dreary ‘banquets,’ and of buckets of sweet tepid champagne.”

The excitement with which Roosevelt was met in nearly every city he visited—in countries whose governments and citizens supposedly feared and hated him—was testimony to the Rough Rider’s legendary charm. Not everyone in South America admired Theodore Roosevelt, however, and he soon found that his detractors were as loud and passionate in their derision as his supporters were in their praise.

Chile was a notable exception. Students at the university in Santiago disagreed with Roosevelt on several serious issues, not the least of which was the Panama Canal.

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.

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.

Although Roosevelt had steered clear of Colombia, he would not be able to avoid a hostile encounter in Chile, where Colombian students had organized protests against him.

“The human multitude, showing marked hostility, shouted with all their might vivas!—to Mexico and Colombia, and Down with the Yankee Imperialism!” a journalist for Lima’s West Coast Leader excitedly reported.

At a state reception welcoming him to Chile, he vigorously debated Marchial Martínez, a former Chilean ambassador to the United States, about the continued relevance of the Monroe Doctrine. Days later, in an electrifying speech, he gave an impassioned, utterly unapologetic defense of the Panama Canal.

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

“I took the action I did in Panama because to have acted otherwise would have been both weak and wicked. I would have taken that action no matter what power had stood in the way. What I did was in the interest of all the world, and was particularly in the interests of Chile and of certain other South American countries. I was in accordance with the highest and strictest dictates of justice. If it were a matter to do over again, I would act precisely and exactly as I in very fact did act.” As these words rang through the hall, the audience leapt to its feet, cheering and applauding the Yankee imperialist.

Kermit had had so many recurring bouts of malaria since he had moved to Brazil that the disease had become almost commonplace for him.

When Kermit read Belle’s reply, all of his worrying, all of the excruciating weeks of waiting, were forgotten. He was obliged to attend a formal luncheon and an elaborate dinner that day, but he floated through both events in a joyous fog. “I don’t remember a word I said tho’ I remember all I thought for I was with you the whole time,” he wrote her. “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.”

But the assassination attempt in 1912 had, with a shocking suddenness, changed all of that. Kermit, already living and working in Brazil at that time, had been hit perhaps hardest of all by the reality of his father’s mortality. “It was a bad time to be far away,” he admitted to Belle. “And the way in which I was told didn’t help matters. I guess the man must have been worrying how to tell me, and got mixed up. He’s a big up-from-the-soil sort of foreman; and looked rather embarrassed, and then said, ‘Well I guess that they’ve shot Roosevelt all right.’ . . . It was almost impossible to get anything more out of him. It was exactly like one of those ‘breaking the news’ anecdotes; but it doesn’t amuse you very much when it happens to you.”

“I did not like Kermit to come on this trip with me,” Roosevelt wrote his daughter-in-law Eleanor, “but he did not wish to be married in my absence, and moreover felt that this semi-exploration business was exactly in his line.”

However, in a letter to Belle, Kermit confessed that he was determined to go on this expedition not for his own sake but for his father’s, and he would count the days until the journey’s end. “It just doesn’t seem as if I could live so long without seeing you, but I feel so very sure that I am doing what you would want me to do,” he wrote her. “Yesterday mother gave me another long talk about father, and about some other ways I must look after him. She’s dreadfully worried about him, and there’s nothing for me to do but go.”

“We would have both felt that I must go with father,” he wrote to Belle that night. “If I weren’t going I should always feel that when my chance had come to help, I had proved wanting, and all my life I would feel it.”

Since there were no lines of communication at that time between Mato Grosso and the Brazilian capital, the remote, impoverished people of Mato Grosso could not look to the government for aid.

In 1867, half the refugees in Cuiabá, roughly six thousand people, died from smallpox. In the midst of famine, widespread disease, and war, Rondon survived. His mother did not.

Besides his extraordinary discipline, Rondon’s extreme poverty and rural background made him an outcast. Too poor even to afford textbooks, he never left campus with the other boys on the weekends, and he was nicknamed “the hairy brute” because he was so awkward in social situations.

Living on a meager diet of rice and beans, and working night and day in an effort to complete a two-year degree in only one year, he became so malnourished that he finally collapsed while descending a flight of stairs on his way to a math class.

After returning to school, he earned a bachelor’s degree in mathematics and the physical and natural sciences, and, while still in his early twenties, was promoted to military engineer, a title that ensured him a lifelong professorship or a well-respected position as an intellectual at the military headquarters in Rio—positions that would have been the culmination of a dream for many men, especially a poor caboclo from remote Mato Grosso.

His determination to protect South American Indians and incorporate them into mainstream Brazilian society—a passion that would come to override all others in his life—grew less out of his ethnic background than his philosophical convictions.

Although Positivists claimed to be, as one historian put it, “the respectful heirs of Catholicism,” the country’s dominant faith, their beliefs were in direct contradiction to that religion. Largely a philosophy of humanity, Positivism chose scientific knowledge and observed facts over mysticism and blind faith, putting its trust in the inevitable pull of progress, a type of Darwinian evolution toward civilization.

Less than six months after the founding of the Republic, Rondon was given an unexpected opportunity to put his Positivist beliefs to work for the good of Amazonian Indians. He was chosen as the head of the Strategic Telegraph Commission—thereafter known as the Rondon Commission—a job that would put him in direct contact with the Amazon’s most isolated tribes.

In 1900, Rondon began an expedition with eighty-one men. By the end of the year, only thirty were left. Of the missing, seventeen had deserted, and the rest were either hospitalized or dead.

Assignment to Rondon’s unit became a punishment, reserved for those enlisted men who had proved themselves to be lazy, violent, or, frequently, both. Many of his men were recruited directly from Rio de Janeiro’s prisons. Had they known what hardship they would face on one of Rondon’s expeditions, most of them would have likely begged to remain in jail.

A supply train of five hundred oxen and 160 mules was supposed to meet him at the next telegraph station, Juruena, but only forty animals survived the journey.

By the time the expedition emerged from the jungle in late December 1909, the men who were still alive were so weak that many of them could hardly crawl. All of them had parasitic insects wriggling under their skin. Those who were not completely naked were wearing only rags, and all were on the brink of starvation. However, over the course of 237 days, they had covered six hundred miles of unmapped territory, and Rondon took great satisfaction in the tremendous leap forward that he and his men had made toward the understanding of Brazil’s mysterious interior. Then he set about planning his next expedition.

In fact, the language of Corneille and Molière was the only language that Rondon and Roosevelt—now officially co-commanders of the expedition—had in common.

Unless Kermit was around to translate, the two men had to rely on French—a language that Roosevelt admitted to speaking “as if it were a non-Aryan tongue, having neither gender nor tense.” Despite this barrier, the two colonels seemed to have little difficulty communicating, and by the time their combined party reached the Brazilian river town of Corumbá on December 15, they had already developed a deep and lasting respect for each other.

It would be a measure of his profound respect for Rondon that, years later, Roosevelt would count the Brazilian officer among the four greatest explorers of his time—alongside Roald Amundsen, Richard Byrd, and Robert Peary.

For Rondon, however, a life spent at the edge of Brazil’s frontier—and at the margins of its society—had instilled a powerful mistrust of imposed solutions and a determination to respect the workings of law and rationality even when none appeared to exist.

Although a military officer, Rondon approached his duties with a pacifist’s idealism that would ultimately secure him a place not merely as Brazil’s greatest explorer, but as one of its pioneering social thinkers.

In the White House, Roosevelt used to torture the members of his Cabinet with long “point-to-point” walks through Rock Creek Park, the enormous forested park that runs through Washington, D.C.

In the early twentieth century, modern maps of the Brazilian Highlands, drawn up by the world’s most respected and experienced cartographers, were strikingly wrong.

Roosevelt and his son shared stories from their year-long hunting safari in Africa, during which they had earned the nicknames Bwana Makubwa, or “Great Master,” and Bwana Mardadi, “Dandy Master.”

As they listened to Fiala’s stories of disaster and near-death in the polar north, Roosevelt and the other officers could not have helped but reflect on the fact that the commander of that expedition was the quartermaster of theirs. Fiala was not leading them into the Amazon, but he had chosen and packed everything that they would rely on to keep themselves alive during the months to come.

The trucks, which belonged to the Rondon Commission, each carried two tons of freight and had been outfitted with wide, slatted belts that wrapped around the wheels on each side like tank treads, forming what Miller referred to as an “endless trail” through the thick mud. This invention, which anticipated the use of the first military tank two years later, during World War I, amazed and elated the explorers. “It was a strange sight to see them racing across the uninhabited chapadão at a speed of thirty miles an hour,” Miller wrote. “Surely this was exploring de luxe.”

Father Zahm, however, was unhappy with his ride in the auto van. According to Rondon, the priest was deeply offended that he had had to ride “beside the driver, a black man—which [he] never forgave.” While in Bahia, Father Zahm had been impressed with the successful mingling of the races. “Truth to tell,” he wrote, “there is not a little to say in favor of the fusion of the European and African races in Brazil. For some of the most distinguished men the country has produced have had a strain of Negro blood in their veins.” However, whatever his intellectual and theoretical opinions about racial integration, he clearly believed that the United States was not ready to take such a drastic step—and neither was he.

More than a decade earlier, while he was campaigning in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, Roosevelt’s carriage had been struck by a runaway trolley. One of his secret-service agents had been killed instantly, and he had been thrown thirty feet.

Even six years after the accident, when Roosevelt was in his second term in the White House, he wrote Kermit that he had “never gotten over the effects of the trolley-car accident . . . when, as you will remember, they had to cut down to the shin bone. The shock permanently damaged the bone, and if anything happens there is always a chance of trouble which would be serious.”

Kermit, realizing that he had come close to losing his father that day, had been traumatized by the accident. Afterward, he had declared that, from then on, he “must be on hand to protect his Father.” In fact, that accident, and the threat that it would forever after pose to Roosevelt’s life, was one of the principal reasons Kermit had felt compelled to join this expedition into the Amazon.

IN LATE January, upon reaching Utiarity, the remote telegraph station that constituted one of the last, tentative outposts of official exploration into Brazil’s dark interior, Roosevelt learned that his fears about the risk of illness had already been realized. Thousands of miles away, in New York City, the deadly diseases of the tropics had claimed their first victim from his expedition: his young cousin Margaret Roosevelt.

Edith, shaken by the sudden loss of her cousin and young companion, had attended the funeral two days later. “Poor Henry Hunt there,” she had written that night. She felt pity for the man who had fallen in love with Margaret on the Vandyck and had lost her before he had even had a chance to win her.

Utiarity’s grounds were nothing but forlorn-looking stretches of stone-pocked dirt encircled by a seemingly endless green expanse of trees and vines. Wherever the citizens of Utiarity looked, there was wild nature, waiting to reclaim what was rightfully her own.