The River of Doubt (13 page)

Perhaps the only man as anxious as Kermit to get to the River of Doubt and get home was Roosevelt himself. Although the opportunity
to descend an unmapped river had seemed exciting and adventurous when he was in Rio de Janeiro, it now paled in comparison with what was happening on the world stage. While Woodrow Wilson was making high-stakes decisions about the United States’ role in the Mexican Revolution, Roosevelt was headed into one of the few places left on earth where his opinions would go unheard.

Since taking office, Wilson had been doing his best to stay out of Mexico, but it had not been easy. The country’s current president, Victoriano Huerta, once the commander of the federal troops, had achieved his position nearly a year earlier by arresting and, a few days later, ordering the assassination of the acting president, Francisco Madero. Repelled by tales of Huerta’s ruthless and repressive regime, Wilson determined to help remove him from power—by diplomatic means. “Intervention must be avoided until a time comes when it is inevitable, which God forbid!” he told his wife. After sending two envoys in unsuccessful attempts to persuade Huerta to step down, Wilson had announced that United States policy toward Mexico would consist of “watchful waiting.”

Such a passive policy was anathema to Roosevelt, who was constitutionally incapable of watchful waiting. As he had made clear in his 1912 campaign speech at Madison Square Garden, his ambition—more personal even than political—was to “smite down wrong.” With the political situation in Mexico continuing to unravel, Roosevelt, Rondon noticed, walked around Tapirapoan in a state of “constant preoccupation.” At a time when he should have been preparing for the expedition before him, Roosevelt was distracted by a situation that was beyond his control and thousands of miles away.

To Roosevelt’s growing frustration, the expedition remained practically immobile. Not only were the pack animals recalcitrant, but the already massive amounts of baggage—360 enormous boxes and countless smaller ones—had been increased significantly by a set of beautiful, elaborate, and completely impractical gifts that the Brazilian government had waiting for the former American leader in Tapirapoan. Roosevelt’s only success in speeding up the expedition’s departure was
to convince Rondon to divide the nearly two hundred pack animals into two separate detachments: Roosevelt and Rondon would lead the mule train, and Amilcar would lead the larger baggage train, made up of both mules and oxen.

On January 19, the baggage train at last set off across the Brazilian Highlands with the camaradas that Rondon had hired in Tapirapoan—porters and future paddlers—and most of the expedition’s baggage, including the provisions that Fiala had packed in New York as well as his Canadian canoes, drawn on a cart pulled by six oxen. Amilcar’s early departure would help give the overburdened baggage train a head start on the mules, which would doubtless be moving at a much faster pace. But Rondon also wanted Amilcar and his men to ride ahead of the mule train so that they could remove any obstacles from the telegraph road and repair any sagging bridges that might impede Roosevelt’s progress.

The expedition’s route called for the men on muleback to follow the supply train north until they reached an outlying telegraph station in Utiarity, where they would turn west and travel for another month, until they encountered the dark, snakelike upper reaches of the River of Doubt. They were still in the state of Mato Grosso, but they were now crossing a corner of a vast, ancient plateau known as the Brazilian Highlands.

These highlands encompass 580,000 square miles—more than twice the area of Texas—but they were once even larger still. For millions of years, the Brazilian Highlands were connected to the Guiana Highlands in the north, and were separated only after the Amazon River formed twelve million years ago, splitting the enormous, contiguous plateau into northern and southern halves. The crystalline massifs of both plateaus thus rank among the oldest rock formations on earth, dating back to the Precambrian era billions of years ago. In fact, the Brazilian Highlands are so ancient and have endured such extensive erosion that the highest elevation on the plateau is less than ten thousand feet—half the height of the tallest mountains in the
geologically young Andes—and their jagged expanse is marked by steep cliffs, deep ravines, and rolling hills.

The highlands, as Roosevelt soon learned, are as varied as they are vast. On the first day out of Tapirapoan, the expedition passed through an open pastureland that was dotted with widely spaced trees. On the second day, the men plunged into dense tropical jungle. “Away from the broad, beaten route every step of a man’s progress represented slashing a trail with the machete through the tangle of bushes, low trees, thorny scrub, and interlaced creepers,” Roosevelt wrote. By the next morning, however, the mule train had climbed a steep slope into the cool, dry air of a high plateau that rested roughly two thousand feet above sea level—a region that the Brazilians refer to as
chapadão
, or tableland. The men were surprised by the region’s aridity, its conspicuous lack of wildlife, even mosquitoes, and the nights that turned so cold that, for the first time since beginning their journey, they had to wrap themselves in blankets while they slept.

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. “The whole region,” Lauro Müller, Brazil’s minister of foreign affairs, had told Roosevelt, “would have to be remapped after the discoveries of the telegraph commission.” It was in exploring the Brazilian Highlands that Rondon and his men had lost all their oxen and had nearly starved to death. Rondon knew the region better now, but it was no more settled or welcoming to travelers than it had been on his first journey across it. In fact, his knowledge of the highlands only served to underscore for Rondon how difficult and dangerous their journey to the River of Doubt would be.

*  *  *

W
ITHIN DAYS
of leaving Tapirapoan, Roosevelt and the rest of his men could for the first time clearly see signs of the hardships that lay ahead of them. Although they were still hundreds of miles away from
the River of Doubt, the fabric of their expedition was beginning to unravel.

The men were already obliged to get by with much simpler and less frequent meals. “Until Tapirapoan, our food was abundant, very good, and quite varied,” the expedition’s Brazilian doctor wrote. “Nevertheless, due to the conditions of the backland, we presently had to change the eating habits we had heretofore adopted, despite the great interest Colonel Rondon had placed on providing our guests with the same privileges granted to them up to that time.”

Meals usually consisted of fresh meat from one of the oxen, black beans, rice, biscuits, and coffee, but in an effort to save provisions as well as time, Rondon had ordered that their midday meal be omitted completely. Breakfast was served anytime between 6:00 and 8:00 a.m., but then the men did not eat again until 8:00 p.m. at the earliest, and, on some nights, not until 11:00 p.m. For the men, the sometimes seventeen-hour stretch between the two meals was difficult. Even Cherrie, the consummate experienced explorer, complained in his diary one night, after a long ride without anything to eat until 10:00 p.m., that they were “all nearly famished.”

More troubling than their own growing hunger was the visibly deteriorating condition of their mules and oxen. The open, sandy stretch of the Brazilian Highlands was extremely inhospitable for the pack animals. “It was rarely that we saw here a tree more than fifteen or twenty feet high,” Father Zahm recalled. “And certain areas were as treeless as the desert lands of New Mexico or Arizona. . .. During our first day in this arid land we did not find a drop of water for a stretch of twenty miles.” There was no way to carry heavy bags of grain, so the mules and oxen were simply set free at night to wander in an often fruitless search for grass and water. Then, as the rainy season downpours began in earnest, the dry dirt trail on which they were traveling turned to mud, forming a slick hazard for the animals.

Worse trouble lay ahead. For the men in the mule train, the first warning signs appeared when they began to see the skeletons of oxen and mules that had starved to death or been eaten during previous expeditions,
most likely Rondon’s. Although their startlingly white bones, bleached by the sun to a ghostly hue, indicated that they had died many months, if not years, earlier, that knowledge was of little comfort to Roosevelt and his men as they encountered unharnessed oxen from their own baggage train staggering slowly along the road. Having grown too weak from hunger and hard use to keep up with the rest of the train, the unfortunate beasts had simply been released and left to die.

The men were stunned by the sight they encountered next: Strewn across their path, settling into the thick mud, were unopened supply crates, all clearly marked “Roosevelt South American Expedition.” The pack animals, who were still making their weary way across the plateau ahead of the mule train, had begun bucking off their heavy loads.

As the officers in the mule train rode slowly past the boxes on their tired mounts, they wondered what they were leaving behind and how precious it might seem to them in the months to come. “What became of this food which we had so carefully selected in New York, and which we had looked after so solicitously for thousands of miles, it would be interesting to know,” Zahm wrote. “It was impossible for anyone to collect it and add it to our other stores which had been sent ahead, and impossible for our pack animals to carry it, for their burdens were already as great as they could bear.”

The men also began to show signs of strain. Three Brazilians—a doctor, a lieutenant, and a botanist—had already resigned their posts, having lost all faith in what they now believed was a fatally unorganized and mismanaged expedition. Worse than the malcontent officers, however, was a volatile camarada who had been assigned to Amilcar’s baggage train in Tapirapoan. Julio de Lima, a full-blooded Portuguese from Bahia, had already given his captain good reason to worry. Just a few weeks into the overland journey, he viciously attacked another camarada with a knife and was prevented from injuring or even killing him only because Amilcar and one of his lieutenants, Vieria de Mello, stepped in and wrenched the weapon
from his hand. Amilcar punished Julio—the only time he was forced to punish one of his men during the overland journey—but he was left with a foreboding about the violent camarada that he could not shake.

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D
RAWN TOGETHER
by their ordeal, the men of the expedition quickly grew to know one another well. After riding together all day long, they shared tents at night and during pounding rainstorms—which were now all too frequent—and they ate every meal together. Each night, after erecting tents, organizing baggage, and peeling off their drenched clothes, the men would gather around two oxhides that had been spread over the damp ground and laid with rations of rice, beans, pork, and beef. The men, Rondon noted, “squatted in the Yedo and Tokyo fashion, some with a certain amount of elegance and others in a very clumsy posture; but they honoured our table with that joviality which can only be prepared by the exercise of long marches in the open, breathing the fresh and oxygenated air of the virgin forests and drinking from the running waters of the rivers.”

It was during these dinners, and afterward, as they sat under the bright Southern stars, that the Brazilians and Americans began to forge the mutual respect and friendship that often develops between men who camp together for long periods of time in rough conditions—even men who do not share a common language. They relied on expressions, gestures, and an international amalgam of tongues that, in Roosevelt’s words, consisted of “English, Portuguese, bad French, and broken German.” Their conversation often centered on the river toward which they were riding—its length, its character, where it would take them, and when they would reach its end. But the River of Doubt still seemed impossibly far away, and their past lives were ever present in vivid, and often disturbing, memories.

It was not long before the men began to tell stories from their former expeditions into the wilderness—whether South American, North American, African, or Arctic. Although Roosevelt was widely
considered the best raconteur, the competition from this group of well-traveled, adventurous, and courageous men was impressive. Rondon enthralled his audience with memories of long expeditions through uncharted land. 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.” And Miller, Roosevelt recalled, “told of the stone gods and altars and temples he had seen in the great Colombian forests, monuments of strange civilizations which flourished and died out ages ago, and of which all memory has vanished.”

Cherrie, who had had perhaps a wider range of experiences than any man present, remained relatively silent until one night, when the conversation turned to cavalry battles. Despite himself, the taciturn naturalist nodded somberly when someone mentioned the powerful psychological effect of a shining, razor-sharp lance. Their curiosity aroused by Cherrie’s obvious firsthand knowledge of the subject, the men would not leave him alone until he told his story.

“It was while he was fighting with the Venezuelan insurgents in an unsuccessful uprising against the tyranny of Castro,” Roosevelt wrote of Cherrie’s involvement in the effort to topple Venezuelan tyrant Cipriano Castro. “He was on foot, with five Venezuelans, all cool men and good shots. In an open plain they were charged by twenty of Castro’s lancers, who galloped out from behind cover two or three hundred yards off. It was a war in which neither side gave quarter and in which the wounded and the prisoners were butchered. . .. Cherrie knew that it meant death for him and his companions if the charge came home; and the sight of the horsemen running in at full speed, with their long lances in rest and the blades glittering, left an indelible impression on his mind. But he and his companions shot deliberately and accurately; ten of the lancers were killed, the nearest falling within fifty yards; and the others rode off in headlong haste. A cool man with a rifle, if he has mastered his weapon, need fear no foe.”