The River of Doubt: Theodore Roosevelt's Darkest Journey

by Candice Millard

No one was happier to hear the news of Zahm’s departure than Kermit. “Father Zahm is being sent back from here,” he wrote Belle. “He showed him[self] so completely incompetent and selfish that he got on everyone’s nerves, and then he tried a couple of things that made it easy to send him back.”

Kermit had joined the expedition so that he could protect his father, but it was Roosevelt who now feared for his son.

Although Fiala had done his best to please Roosevelt, his knowledge of Arctic exploration, and the hard lessons he had learned there, had failed to translate to the Amazon.

“Through all the lightening of the baggage I have kept my books,” he wrote Belle. “It means a lot to go to a quiet place to read the poems that we both like, and those that I always associate with you.” The poems were from The Oxford Book of French Verse. Besides this volume and The Oxford Book of English Verse, the rest of Kermit’s books were written in Portuguese—with the notable exception of his copies of The Iliad and The Odyssey, which were in the original Greek.

Rondon “would not have minded the walk at all from the physical standpoint,” Roosevelt wrote, “but he simply could not bear to have us take action which he regarded as an admission that we were not doing the thing in splendid style.”

The Brazilians whom Rondon had assigned to accompany Fiala, however, told their colonel a very different story. It was true that the boats had capsized, they said, but Fiala did not save himself—in fact, he very nearly caused the drowning death of the man who ultimately rescued him from the rapids.

The Brazilians on his team thought that their commander had lost his mind and balked at the idea of boarding such an insubstantial-looking canoe, especially since Rondon held them responsible for Fiala’s safety. However, when they saw “how buoyantly the canoe rode the rapids,” Fiala later proudly recalled, “how a twist of the paddle would deflect it around a rock on which a dugout would crash and smash, they gave cries of delight.” Fiala’s selection of his Canadian canoes had been vindicated.

Gradually, however, Rondon had won the Indians over, by first wooing them with gifts and then luring them to his campsite by playing a phonograph at night, sending the strains of a Wagnerian opera into the forest like a beautiful, incorporeal siren.

In 1908, Hermann von Ihering, the German-born director of the São Paulo Museum, argued that it was a shame, but the Indians would surely not survive Brazilian ambitions, and they should not be allowed to stand in their way. “I feel for them as a man,” he wrote, “but as a citizen in keeping with my political belief, I cannot stand by and watch the march of our culture halted by Indian arrows. And certainly the life of the backwoodsman and colonist is worth more to us than the life of the savage. The fate of the Indians is certain. Many of them will accept our culture, the remainder will continue to be our enemies and, as such, will gradually disappear.”

Outraged by the museum director’s blatant disregard for Indian lives—von Ihering had even gone so far as to note in an article that it was “worth registering here what the American General Custer said: ‘the only good Indian is a dead Indian’”—Rondon engaged him in a public debate. In 1910, the momentum generated by this debate resulted in the formation of Brazil’s Indian Protection Service—SPI—the country’s first agency devoted to the protection of its native inhabitants, and Rondon was named its first director.

Rondon believed that his mission in protecting and pacifying the Indians was larger than his own life, larger than any of their lives. He would rather die than surrender his ideals, and he obliged his men to follow suit.

As a young rancher in the Dakota Territories, Roosevelt had barked, “I don’t go so far as to think that the only good Indians are dead Indians, but I believe nine out of every ten are, and I shouldn’t like to inquire too closely into the case of the tenth.” By the time he became president, his views had tempered, and he, like Rondon, believed that the country’s “aim should be [the Indians’] ultimate absorption into the body of our people.”

The Nhambiquara lived by the laws of the wilderness, which demanded that, as Roosevelt explained, “friends proclaim their presence; a silent advance marks a foe.”

The Nhambiquara were violent and unpredictable, but at least they had forged a semblance of peace with Rondon. The Indians of the River of Doubt, in contrast, were utterly unknown even to Rondon, and there was no reason to think that they would welcome the expedition into their territory with any more tolerance or self-restraint than the Nhambiquara had shown when they had rained arrows down on Rondon at his first approach. Roosevelt and his men may have regarded themselves as explorers, but the Indians would know them only as invaders.

The expedition had now turned into a race against time. The survival of every man would depend on their collective ability to master the churning river, evade its ever-present dangers, and discover a route out of the deepest rain forest before their supplies ran out.

The Madeira, which is so large that its basin is more than twice the size of France, winds for more than two thousand miles through western Brazil and has more than a dozen tributaries.

The difference between Roosevelt’s expedition and those of the countless rubber-tappers who had tried unsuccessfully to negotiate the Amazon’s wild tributaries was that Roosevelt was going to descend the River of Doubt, not attempt to fight his way up it. This strategy would allow him to harness the river’s great strength rather than oppose it. But it represented a gamble of life-or-death proportions, because, from the moment the men of the expedition launched their boats, they would no longer be able to turn around. The river would carry them ever deeper into the rain forest, with whatever dangers that might entail.

No one, not even the inscrutable Rondon, could predict what was around the next bend. Roosevelt was about to become an explorer in the truest, and most unforgiving, sense of the word. It was an opportunity he had dreamed of from his earliest childhood. Now, however, he realized that he would be called on to pay the full cost of his ambitions—and he found himself gravely unprepared for what might lie ahead.

Roosevelt, Rondon, and their men were about to begin the most difficult leg of their journey, but they were already at the limits of their endurance. After spending more than a month slogging through the muddy highlands, with long days on muleback, nearly constant downpours, illness, worry, death, and sorrow, the men were exhausted, homesick, and wary—not just of the river they were about to descend but also of one another.

Unknown to Roosevelt, Rondon had not only ordered his men to eat less so that the Americans could eat more, but had intentionally overloaded the pack oxen and abandoned entire crates of the camaradas’ provisions in the hope that he would not have to ask the Americans to leave behind any of their ponderous baggage.

Now that the expedition had finally reached the River of Doubt, it found itself with twenty-two men, hundreds of pounds of supplies, and not a single boat.

There was no comparison between these massive, clumsy dugouts and the sleek 160-pound canvas-covered canoes that Fiala had ordered for the expedition and which were now carrying him safely down the Papagaio River. Little more than hollowed-out tree trunks, the dugouts would be nearly impossible to maneuver when the expedition encountered rapids.

These particular dugouts, moreover, were in questionable condition. In fact, Roosevelt’s recounting of them sounded ominously like a description of the Seven Dwarfs. “One was small, one was cranky, and two were old, waterlogged, and leaky,” he wrote. “The other three were good.”

At up to twenty-five hundred pounds apiece, the dugouts were also enormously heavy.

Any slip with the heavy, waterlogged boats during a portage, in the rushing current, or merely during routine loading and unloading as they bobbed near the shore, could easily crush a man’s hand or leg if it did not kill him outright.

In the harsh, primitive conditions that lay ahead, the prospect of such accidents took on grave significance; the men understood that on the River of Doubt the difference between any injury and death was likely just a matter of time.

In the tangled vines that shrouded the shoreline, what appeared to be partially submerged logs suddenly blinked and slid beneath the surface, revealing themselves as caimans—South American alligators. Rhythmic eddies in the water betrayed the passage of anacondas, which can weigh as much as five hundred pounds. The men were by now well acquainted with the razor-toothed piranha; every time they were forced to wade while maneuvering their sluggish dugouts, they would be at risk of attack.

In the rain forest, it seemed that every living thing—from animals to insects to bacteria—was ready to attack, whether in offense or self-preservation.

Compounding all these dangers was the critical factor of time. The kind of delays that they had experienced during the overland journey would be more than frustrating while they were on the river: They would be deadly. Not only would each extra day they were forced to spend on the river leave the men more vulnerable to predators, disease, and Indian attack, but it would bring them that much closer to starvation.

With no experience in the rain forest, however, Fiala had no basis for his assumption that the expedition would be able to find enough game to sustain itself, and his expectations would prove to be wildly unrealistic.

Roosevelt realized, however, that great difficulty often brought out the worst in a man. Deep in the Amazon, the expedition was utterly isolated and far from help of any kind. The camaradas—who outnumbered the officers nearly three to one—could mutiny as easily as sailors at sea.

They looked, Roosevelt wrote, “like pirates in the pictures of Howard Pyle and Maxfield Parrish.” One glance at them revealed the almost unbridgeable difference between their hardscrabble world and Roosevelt’s refined and privileged one.

It would take time for the officers, especially the Americans, to get to know their paddlers and to learn those on whom they could rely, even trusting them with their own lives, and those on whom they should never turn their backs.

Little more than a century earlier, Alexander von Humboldt, the world-renowned German naturalist and explorer, had conducted the first thorough cartographical survey of South America, producing hundreds of maps based on seven hundred observations.

By the early twentieth century, the existing maps of the Brazilian interior were largely, and notoriously, wrong, indicating mountains where none existed and rivers misplaced by hundreds of miles. A significant part of Rondon’s job over the past twenty-four years had been not only adding to the cartographic knowledge of his continent but correcting these mistakes.

To determine latitude and longitude, they used the same instrument that Humboldt himself had used—a sextant, which measures the angle between the horizon and the sun, moon, or stars.

Roosevelt was not pleased with the fixed-station survey. Not only did it slow the expedition to a glacial pace—the boats traveled only six miles in five hours—but it placed his son in a particularly dangerous position. If there were sunken trees, hidden whirlpools, sudden waterfalls, or hostile Indians, Kermit would encounter them first. In spite of his concerns, however, Roosevelt refrained from asking Rondon to adopt a faster method of survey.

Beyond their little circle of light, however, the jungle was so black that, had a sudden rain doused their fire, the men would not have been able to see their own hands, much less one another. Only six miles into their expedition, they could already feel their isolation.

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.

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.

The same abundant precipitation and steady temperatures that support life also leach minerals from the soil, and intense tree-and-plant growth exploits every available nutrient, leaving the floor of many tropical jungles, including the Amazon, permanently hovering at the margin of exhaustion.

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. While most plants naturally seek the sun, other Amazonian vines have adapted to seek out the dark bases of large canopy trees that might offer reliable support, and only then to turn upward toward the light.

In reaction to the attempts of freeloading vines and epiphytes to benefit from their hard-won position in the canopy—and to protect themselves from being shaded over by such parasites—trees have developed many protection methods of their own. Some have developed smooth bark that keeps tendrils from attaching, and still others have adapted to slough off bark, leaves, or indeed entire branches to send epiphytes and vines crashing to the forest floor.

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, in contrast, was much more flexible than his co-commander and, as a result, better liked. Roosevelt had endured some cold nights hunting down runaway cattle in the Dakota Badlands, and he had led a regiment to war, but he had never had to bring a band of starving, desperate men out of the jungle. Even on this expedition, he was more figurehead than commander, and when there were decisions to be made, he deferred to Rondon. Roosevelt’s job had, in a way, become that of expedition raconteur. He regaled the men every night with stories of his days in the Wild West or on the African savanna.

Rondon himself was stunned by his loquacious co-commander. “And talk!” he wrote. “I never saw a man who talked so much. He would talk all of the time he was in swimming, all of the time during meals, traveling in the canoe and at night around the camp fire. He talked endlessly and on all conceivable subjects.”

Sometimes a sound is heard like the clang of an iron bar against a hard, hollow tree, or a piercing cry rends the air; these are not repeated, and the succeeding silence tends to heighten the unpleasant impression which they make on the mind.”

The Amazon’s sudden, inexplicable sounds were especially terrifying at night, when they were all in the pitch-black forest, with no way to see a potential attacker and no sure means of escape.

Floating in the shallow water near the bank, the 220-pound former president looked to Rondon “like some sort of a great, fat fish which had come to the surface,”

Instances of candirus parasitizing people are rare, but in the one case in which a doctor fully documented his removal of a candiru from a young man, the victim’s explanation of how the fish had entered his urethra was nearly as shocking as the fact that it was there at all.