The River of Doubt: Theodore Roosevelt's Darkest Journey

by Candice Millard

Rondon nominally had a treaty with the Nhambiquara, but there was no reason to believe that this group would honor that treaty—or even that they knew anything about it, or Rondon. The only certainty was that, if they were still alive, the Indians who once lived in this village would see the expedition before the members of the expedition would see them.

Of all the creatures of the rain forest, none are more reliably lethal to man than snakes. Naturalists complain that venomous snakes are hard to find in the jungle. They disappear in a mat of branches and leaves, or hide beneath a fallen tree. But they are there, and when they strike, they are deadly.

In North America, naturalists use an old adage—“Red touching yellow, dangerous fellow”—to help distinguish between nonvenomous snakes and the lethal coral snake, with its distinctive black, red, and yellow bands. This adage, however, is useless in the Amazon, where many of the more than fifty species of coral snakes have red and yellow bands that do not touch, but are deadly nevertheless.

“Despite his two hundred and twenty pounds avoirdupois,” Cherrie later recalled, “he [Roosevelt] did a much livelier dance in attempting to set his foot on the snake than he did when he danced the hornpipe on shipboard.”

Roosevelt, still wearing his heavy, hobnailed boots, watched as the snake’s short fangs plunged into the tough leather and spilled its venom down the side of his boot. He had been spared an agonizing, certain death by a quarter-inch of leather.

As far as the men could see, the River of Doubt had only one virtue: It was as placid as a lowland stream. It moved just quickly enough to relieve the paddlers of some of their work, but it rarely showed any more signs of life than a gentle current that rocked their canoes like a hand on a cradle.

Wallace noted the striking difference between the milky Amazon and the black waters of the Negro where they collide on the northern bank of the Amazon. Seen from above, the meeting of these two colossal rivers looks like black ink spilling over parchment paper.

Clearwater rivers are also less acidic than blackwater rivers. Some, most notably the Tapajos, are so clear that they look blue, perfectly mirroring the sky above them. But most, like the River of Doubt, mix with either blackwater or milky tributaries as they snake through the rain forest, and so look neither blue nor clear by the time they reach their mouth.

Rondon noted—but then came together again to perform a feat that none of them had ever expected to see. The water channel that had been at least a hundred yards wide and proportionally deep just a mile above the rapids now churned through a passage that, at one point, was less than two yards across, transforming the quiet river into a water cannon.

The tent-making bat painstakingly makes small bites along the centerline of large leaves so that they will droop on each side, creating small tentlike shelters that protect them from rain, wind, and sun and render them all but invisible.

As a mammal that is typically grayish-brown in color, the sloth has no natural way of blending into the green coloration of the forest canopy. Each of its hairs has therefore evolved to contain microscopic grooves that become filled with algae, giving the sloth a greenish sheen that allows it to disappear when viewed from the ground.

So perfectly has the sloth adapted to its strange treetop life-style that its hair grows forward to allow the rain to drip effectively from its inverted body, and its sharp, curved claws are so specialized for the job of clinging to branches that the female cannot even pick up her young to carry them on her back—they must climb on by themselves after they are born.

After killing an ant, the crab spider, which is only a fifth of an inch long, carefully consumes the contents of the ant’s body without harming the outer skeleton. It then carries the empty carcass over its own body so that, visually and chemically, the spider “looks” like its prey—allowing it to approach new victims undetected.

For much of its history, South America was home to a striking array of large animals like those Roosevelt would have associated with Africa or Asia. Although the reasons for the abrupt and dramatic loss of life are not certain, many scientists believe that the impact of human migration was decisive. In contrast to Africa and parts of Asia, where animals evolved alongside early humans and learned to fear them, South America was the last continent to be populated by humans, who by that time had become sophisticated hunters. With no understanding of their new predator, the large animals of South America were prime prey for the arriving humans, and most of them were soon driven to extinction.

The Brazilian colonel, Roosevelt wrote, regarded the threat that even jaguars posed as “utterly trivial compared to the real dangers of the wilderness—the torment and menace of attacks by the swarming insects, by mosquitoes and the even more intolerable tiny gnats, by the ticks, and by the vicious poisonous ants which occasionally cause villages and even whole districts to be deserted by human beings. These insects, and the fevers they cause, and dysentery and starvation and wearing hardship and accidents in rapids are what the pioneer explorers have to fear.”

As a result of such relationships, virtually every growing thing teems with insects; a single tree in the Amazon can serve as home to more than forty different species of ant, rendering even the most casual contact with it a nightmare of painful bites.

“Our hands and faces were swollen from the bites and stings of the insect pests,” Roosevelt complained. Each night when he sat down at his little portable table to work on his Scribner’s articles, Roosevelt had to pull long, fringed gauntlets over his hands and arms and drape his sun helmet in mosquito netting that hung heavily over his face.

Compared with the creatures of the Amazon, including the Indians whose territory they were invading, they were all—from the lowliest camarada to the former president of the United States—clumsy, conspicuous prey.

On the theory that the risk to their canoes from another haul through the jungle was even greater than the threat of smashing them to matchsticks in the roiling river, they decided to plunge ahead and take their chances on the water.

No one worked harder than Kermit to get the expedition past these rapids and back onto the river. He was at his best when he had a mission. Left to his own devices, he had a tendency to brood, even to fall into a quiet depression, but, given a cause, he worked harder than anyone around him.

Perhaps Fiala’s stories of losing his provisions to the icy waters of the Arctic had stayed with them, because that night, as beaten by the river and jungle as they were, they hauled their provisions out of the canoes and up the slippery, overgrown bank. At the time it seemed like nothing more than a mild precaution.

When splitting the provisions with Miller and Amilcar before they launched their boats, the River of Doubt party had taken fifty of the ninety food tins that Fiala had packed, as well as the seventy-five United States Army emergency rations he had purchased as a precaution.

With grim certainty, the officers calculated that, if the expedition continued to advance at this slow rate, they would be without food of any kind, beyond what they could catch or forage, for the last month of their journey.

No other nonnative had ever been down the River of Doubt, and even the Nhambiquara who lived near its headwaters had not been able to tell Rondon what he might expect from the Indians who lived on its banks.

“Looking at the way the work was done, at the good-will, the endurance, and the bull-like strength of the camaradas, and at the intelligence and the unwearied efforts of their commanders,” he wrote, “one could not but wonder at the ignorance of those who do not realize the energy and the power that are so often possessed by, and that may be so readily developed in, the men of the tropics.”

Roosevelt had absolutely no use for Julio, calling him an “inborn, lazy shirk with the heart of a ferocious cur in the body of a bullock.” But Rondon was determined to make him work.

After receiving only a lackluster response to his order to leave the saloons and assemble before him in the street, Rondon had turned toward the largest tavern in town, dug his spurs into his horse’s sides, and charged at full speed through the front doors. As men scrambled to get out of his way, he vaulted a table and bounded out the back door. One of his officers then solemnly announced that Rondon would smash every bottle in town if the saloons did not close. Moments later, the soldiers staggered into the street, swept along by anxious barkeepers.

Few among them would have been surprised by this revelation. Not only were the animals of the rain forest masters of disguise, but Roosevelt, the mighty hunter, was famously myopic.

Roosevelt got his first gun and his first pair of glasses at about the same time. Unfortunately, the gun came first. Roosevelt could not understand why his friends were consistently spotting and shooting game that he could not even see. It was not until he confessed his difficulties to his father that his myopia was finally diagnosed and he was fitted with a strong pair of lenses. Those glasses, he wrote, “literally opened an entirely new world to me. I had no idea how beautiful the world was until I got those spectacles.”

Not only did his glasses constantly fog over in the heavy humidity, it was almost impossible for him to see when it rained, which it did several times a day. While this frustrating and potentially dangerous disability would have kept most men out of the rain forest, Roosevelt refused even to acknowledge that it was a problem. “It was a continual source of amazement to see how skillfully father had discounted this handicap in advance and appeared to be unhampered by it,” Kermit wrote.

So strong was their sense of urgency that Rondon was persuaded to abandon the fixed-station survey and resort to a faster, although less accurate method of mapping the river.

That night, as they made camp in the darkened forest, the men felt a deep sense of satisfaction and even relief. In just half a day on the river, they had managed to make nearly ten miles of crucial progress. But while their daring had paid off that day, they knew the odds of repeating that success were slim. The more chances they took, the more likely they were to lose everything.

Although the confidence of most of the men in the expedition had been shaken, Kermit’s determination to forge ahead was as strong as ever. He had postponed his own life to join this expedition, and he had been frustrated for months by its glacial pace. Young, strong, and skilled at working in the wilderness, he also appeared to be blithely certain of his own ability to survive this journey. It was his aging father’s health and safety that concerned him, not his own, and he believed that it was more important to move quickly through the rain forest than to fritter away their time and provisions by being overly cautious.

So determined was Roosevelt that his children grow up to be strong, fearless adults that he had said that he would “rather one of them should die than have them grow up weaklings.”

Even the most courageous man, he believed, when confronted by real danger in the wilderness—whether it be an angry lion or a roaring river—could suffer from buck fever. “What such a man needs is not courage but nerve control, cool-headedness,” he explained. “This he can get only by actual practice.”

The problem was that Roosevelt’s lessons in manliness may have struck too deep a chord in his second son. Kermit had become almost too fearless, and certainly too reckless for even his father’s comfort. Although Roosevelt was proud of his son’s physical strength and courage, he worried that Kermit’s thirst for adventure was ungoverned by the kind of wisdom that comes with age, and untempered by even a small measure of caution.

Although Kermit had joined the expedition in order to protect his father, Roosevelt’s mission from this point onward would be to protect Kermit, and to ensure that he made it out of the rain forest alive.

Having faced his own mortality and having caused, albeit indirectly, another man’s death, Kermit showed no signs of remorse or even any sense of responsibility when he scribbled a brief account of the day’s events in his journal that night.

For Rondon, death was merely one of the many costs of achieving a much larger goal that had already cost the lives of countless of his men: opening the country’s interior and integrating the Amazon’s native peoples into Brazilian society.

Rondon was most at ease when he was on his own. He was, and had always been, a loner. He had found his own way in the world, first as an orphan and then as an outsider at the military academy in Rio de Janeiro. Even after he had married, he had been separated for long periods of time and by hundreds of miles from his wife and children.

Although he rarely devoted more than a single sentence in his journal to the death of one of his men, Rondon penned heartfelt eulogies to his dogs.

The others had alarming news of their own. While Rondon was gone, they had lost another canoe. Luiz and Antonio Correia had successfully brought one of the dugouts down the channel, but as they were lowering the large canoe that they had built themselves just a few days earlier, the rope had broken and the canoe had been swept into a colony of boulders. Luiz had almost been swept away with it. The other camaradas had managed to save him, but they had not been able to save the canoe, or the ropes and pulleys that it had carried.

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.

When the strange, pliable substance made its way across the channel, the British soon discovered that it worked extremely well as an eraser, and so began referring to it as “rubber.” By the end of the eighteenth century, rubber was well known and widely used throughout Europe and the New World. By the middle of the nineteenth century, the Amazon was exporting more than 150 metric tons of it each year.

If they did not make their quotas, Arana’s men would burn them alive, hang and quarter them, or shoot off their genitals. During the twelve years that Arana held his reign of terror along the banks of the Rio Putumayo, the native population plummeted from more than fifty thousand to less than eight thousand. Those who survived did so with horribly disabling and disfiguring wounds that became known as “la marca arana,” the mark of Arana.

George Cherrie observed. “The distant villager is incapable of picturing a much larger group of human beings living together than that in his own tiny settlement. . .. They picture the rest of the world as one of jungles, great rivers, and vast seas; with here and there tiny pools of humanity no larger than their own. Thus it is that they look upon the stranger from afar as a traveller between villages.”

The same rapids that had already cost the expedition the life of one man and had nearly robbed Roosevelt of his son had kept the Cinta Larga in a time capsule, which had been sealed for millennia.

While the world in which Roosevelt lived had undergone dramatic recent changes, including skyscrapers, automobiles, and even airplanes (Orville and Wilbur Wright had made their first successful flight over Kill Devil Hill eleven years earlier), the Indians in this region were still using the simplest of tools.

After watching the men from the shadows of the forest, the Cinta Larga mothers warned their children to sleep close to the fire at night so that they would not grow a patchy layer of fur like these strange creatures.

The Cinta Larga were as skilled at hunting as they were at trailblazing. While the men of the expedition slowly starved, wandering through what seemed to them to be a lush but empty rain forest, the Indians saw, heard, and smelled game everywhere they turned.