The River of Doubt (14 page)

Few tales of exploration or even warfare, however, could compete with Anthony Fiala’s memories of spending two years trapped in the
frozen north. The supply ship that was supposed to relieve the expedition never appeared, and if it had not been for seal blubber, an unlucky polarbear, and the frozen caches of food left behind by earlier expeditions, he and his men would have starved.

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.

*  *  *

O
N
J
ANUARY 25
, some good news arrived for Roosevelt and his men in the almost surreal form of three huge all-terrain trucks. The “auto vans,” as Zahm called them, rattled into camp that night on their way to the Utiarity telegraph station, the expedition’s next stop, and the point at which it would turn west and head directly toward the River of Doubt. 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.”

No member of the expedition appreciated
de luxe
travel more than Father Zahm. The next morning, he secured two seats on one of the trucks for himself and the Swiss handyman Jacob Sigg, whom he had long since appropriated as his personal assistant. Cherrie and Miller also decided to ride in one of the trucks so that they would have a chance to do some collecting before the rest of the expedition caught up with them.

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.

In Brazil, Zahm wrote, “Whites, Indians, and Negroes associate together in a way which would be quite impossible with us, and which an old Virginian planter would condemn as an abomination unutterable.” Father Zahm, on the other hand, had no problem voicing his complaints about the “ignorant and careless negro” who, as a favor to Rondon, had driven him to Utiarity. And he thereafter, Rondon wrote, referred to that truck ride as a “measure of how much he had suffered during the expedition.”

It would have been difficult for Father Zahm to find a better or faster way to alienate Rondon than to make a racist comment about one of his men. Not only was Rondon proud of his soldiers, but he was a humanist and a champion of minority rights. He had also been a victim of racism himself, and would continue to be for most of his life, in spite of all that he had achieved. “The colonel possesses the temperament of the savage,” a Brazilian journalist would write four years later. “In the centers of civilization he feels out of place. . .. [He] is a lost cause . . . because he has a high percentage of Indian blood mixed with the worst habits the centers of civilization have to offer.”

Father Zahm was also openly scornful of Rondon’s philosophical beliefs and the deferential treatment he accorded Brazil’s indigenous peoples. In the introduction to his book
Evolution and Dogma
, Zahm had made it clear that he considered Positivism to be dangerous and subversive. “Our great, or more truthfully our greatest enemy, in the
intellectual world to-day,” he wrote, “is Naturalism—variously known as Agnosticism, Positivism, Empiricism—which, as [the British statesman] Mr. [Arthur J.] Balfour well observes, ‘is in reality the only system which ultimately profits by any defeats which theology may sustain, or which may be counted on to flood the spaces from which the tide of religion has receded.”

The priest made a point of baptizing both Brazilian settlers and Indians at several stops along the way on both their river journey up the Paraguay and Sepotuba Rivers and their mule ride through the highlands. While he bristled at the implication that Zahm was saving savage souls, Rondon never tried to stop him. “Although the Indian Service would not catechize, respecting the spiritual freedom and the way of life of the Indians under its protection,” he wrote, “it would not prevent others from trying to convert them to their beliefs, provided that they didn’t force them.”

*  *  *

C
OMPOUNDING THE
growing frictions caused by harsh terrain, meager rations, and personality clashes was the ever-present risk of accident and illness. In early January, when the men had reached Saõ Luis de Cáceres, a small town on the Paraguay River, Rondon had learned that four of the soldiers that he had posted there were now dead. Three had drowned while trying to ascend the Gy-Paraná, a five-hundred-mile-long river in western Mato Grosso, and another man, Captain Cardoso, had succumbed to beriberi—a disease brought on by a thiamine deficiency—along the same route that Roosevelt’s expedition was traveling.

A few weeks later, in Tapirapoan, illness had cost Roosevelt the assistance of his right-hand man, Frank Harper. As Roosevelt’s personal representative during the planning and equipping of the expedition, Harper had worked to protect the ex-president’s interests and was the only member of the expedition other than Zahm and Fiala with knowledge about the specific content of the crates and boxes that the baggage train was now laboring to deliver to the River of Doubt.
Harper had contracted malaria early in the journey, and had been miserable ever since. He was not the only man on the expedition to suffer from the mosquito-borne infection, but he had gotten a vivid preview of the miseries that awaited him on the River of Doubt, and he wanted out. On January 18, three days before the other men left on their overland journey, Harper announced that he had had enough and had decided to return home.

Beyond the additional logistical burdens it imposed on Roosevelt, Harper’s departure pointed up the acute vulnerability, in medical terms, that the expedition could expect to face for the duration of the journey. For, despite the gravity of his illness, Harper had nevertheless had the option of returning with relative speed and safety to well-equipped medical facilities and, ultimately, the comfort of his own home. Once embarked upon their overland journey, however, Roosevelt and his men no longer had that safety net, and even otherwise minor illnesses acquired in the wilderness or on the river itself could have fatal consequences.

The expedition did have a doctor—a tough, serious, and highly competent man named José Cajazeira, whom Rondon had hired in Corumbá—but, as Roosevelt knew, Dr. Cajazeira was only a thin line of defense against the dangers of the Amazon. “A good doctor is an absolute necessity on an exploring expedition in such a country as that we were in, under penalty of a frightful mortality among the members,” Roosevelt wrote. “The necessary risks and hazards are so great, the chances of disaster so large, that there is no warrant for increasing them by the failure to take all feasible precautions.”

Unbeknownst to anyone in the expedition but Kermit and Roosevelt himself, having a doctor on hand for the former president was more than an ordinary precaution. 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. The accident had left Roosevelt with loosened teeth, a swollen and bruised cheek, a black eye, and a severe injury to his left leg. The
infection that followed had nearly led to blood poisoning, a disease that, in a time before antibiotics, often proved deadly. 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. “You see he has never quite recovered from the accident he had when the wagon he was driving in got run over by a trolley,” he had explained to Belle. “One of his legs is still pretty bad and needs a lot of care.”

Right now, however, it was Kermit rather than his father who needed a lot of care. To Roosevelt’s deep dismay, even before Harper prepared to return home, Kermit also fell ill with malaria. As his father looked on, “utterly miserable with worry,” the younger Roosevelt became so ill with fever and chills that he could not manage to rise from his hammock. Arguing that he had long since become accustomed to the rigors of the tropics, Kermit refused to yield to his illness or to consider returning in Harper’s footsteps. But the specter of his son’s suffering made a powerful impression on the elder Roosevelt, who was left to ponder, amid the rapidly mounting difficulties the expedition was facing, how heavy a toll he might ultimately be forced to pay for his decision to descend the River of Doubt.

*  *  *

I
N 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.

Waiting for Roosevelt at the lonely telegraph office was a short, devastating message informing him that Margaret had died three weeks before, from typhoid fever contracted on her journey to South America. It was the same infectious disease that had killed his mother thirty years earlier. The young woman had first begun to show signs of illness in early December, a few days after she and her aunt left Panama. Edith was baffled. “Margaret drank only bottled water and ate no salad,” she had written despondently in her diary after Margaret’s death. “Can’t imagine how she got the typhoid.” 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.

A hemisphere away from New York, in the remote wilderness of Brazil, the delayed news of Margaret’s death had an unusually powerful and unsettling impact, casting a pall over the entire expedition that had started in her youthful, vibrant company nearly four months before. Having looked forward to their arrival in Utiarity as one of their last contacts with civilization, and a reason for festivities, Roosevelt’s men found even that small pleasure stolen from them, and quickly forgot any thought of celebration. The men of the Roosevelt-Rondon Scientific Expedition somberly returned their thoughts to the trip before them, and to very real concerns about their own mortality in the months to come.

H
EAVY SHEETS OF RAIN
swept over Utiarity the day after Roosevelt reached it, drenching the muddy little village and its population—which was more than doubled by the arrival of the mule train. Even in such a squall, however, the town offered a welcome respite for Roosevelt and his men.

Little more than a clearing in the rough, scrubby forest that surrounded it, Utiarity was divided into two parts. One section was composed of the buildings of the Rondon Commission, and the other, where the Pareci Indians lived, was a set of twelve rectangular huts with steeply pitched palm-thatch roofs held up by roughly hewn wooden poles. In a sense, the village was a triumph of man over nature, having been carved out of the wilderness just a few years earlier by a handful of telegraph line soldiers. But it was a temporary victory at best. 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.