The River of Doubt (16 page)

In the tender light of the early morning, the camaradas would saddle their mules so that they would be ready to ride as soon as the officers finished their breakfast. Roosevelt would usually try to duck away at this time, to get in some writing before the long day’s ride began. This was often his only opportunity to work on the series of articles he was writing for
Scribner’s
magazine: Once the men mounted their mules, they did not stop until late in the afternoon, and then usually had to wait four or five hours more for the mule train to arrive with their baggage.

Before they left camp each morning, Rondon would announce how many kilometers they would ride that day. There were eleven telegraph line poles per kilometer, and a consecutive number had been carved onto each pole, so, by watching the poles pass by, the men could easily estimate how far they had to go until they reached the next campsite. Even a short day, however, could seem unbearably long. Kermit had developed sores on his legs, and they became so inflamed that at one point he had to spend almost an entire day standing straight up in his stirrups. Early in the overland journey, Cherrie had driven a palm thorn into one of his legs, and the point remained buried a half-inch deep in the muscle, partially paralyzing his foot. They were all tormented by hordes of gnats, sand flies, horseflies, and
small, stingless bees that the Brazilians call
lambe-olho
, or “eye lickers.” These bees swarmed around their hands and faces, congregating at the corners of their eyes and buzzing about their lips with maddening persistence. Not even the most thundering swat would dissuade them. As described by H. M. Tomlinson, who had traveled through the Amazon in 1909 and 1910, and had suffered their ceaseless attentions, the stingless bees preferred “death to being dislodged from [their] enjoyment.”

The most difficult part of every day’s ride, however, was the rain, which had begun mildly enough at the beginning of their journey but was now falling, Kermit wrote his mother, “mournfully, dismally, and ceaselessly; in a sort of hopeless insistent way.” Their mules slipped and stumbled in the slick, thickening mud, and collecting specimens for the museum had become, Cherrie complained, “a practical impossibility.” One day, the Americans and the Brazilian officers were obliged to stand, without shelter of any kind, for hours in a heavy downpour while they waited for the mule train to arrive with their tents. “Everything became mouldy,” Roosevelt wrote, “except what became rusty.”

The weather only deepened Roosevelt’s concern about Kermit, whose malaria had continued to worsen, leaving him with a debilitating fever that now reached as high as 102 degrees. For Roosevelt, worry about his second son had become as familiar as the swelling pride he felt when he reflected on all that the young man had already accomplished.

As proud as Roosevelt was of his son’s physical stamina and vigorous work ethic, he feared that Kermit might one day push himself too far. In Africa, Roosevelt had watched with growing alarm as Kermit threw himself into increasingly dangerous situations. “It is hard to realize that the rather timid boy of four years ago has turned out a perfectly cool and daring fellow,” Roosevelt had written his oldest son, Ted Jr. “Indeed he is a little too reckless and keeps my heart in my throat, for I worry about him all the time; he is not a good shot, not even as good as I am, and Heaven knows I am poor enough; but he is
a bold rider, always cool and fearless, and eager to work all day long. He ran down and killed a Giraffe, alone, and a Hyena also, and the day before yesterday he stopped a charging Leopard within six yards of him, after it had mauled one of our porters.”

Now, in a remote corner of the Brazilian interior, Roosevelt worried less about Kermit’s aim than about his ability to fight off the deadly diseases of the Amazon or survive the River of Doubt. He could not bear the thought of facing Belle and Edith if anything happened to Kermit. Kermit had joined the expedition so that he could protect his father, but it was Roosevelt who now feared for his son.

*  *  *

O
N
F
EBRUARY 4
, Roosevelt, perhaps shaken by the provisions the expedition had already lost, the lonely telegraph workers’ graves he had seen, Margaret’s death, and his son’s illness, decided that it was imperative to the success of the expedition that he cut another man from his team. Unfortunately, that man was the member of the expedition who, with the possible exception of Father Zahm, had hung the greatest hopes on this journey into the Amazon.

After they made camp near the Burity—a swift, deep river that afforded them the luxury of a much-needed bath—Roosevelt called Anthony Fiala aside. With deep regret, he gave him the painful news that he would not be descending the River of Doubt with the rest of the expedition. 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.

Miller dismissed Fiala out of hand, writing to Chapman that their quartermaster was “quite incompetent to do a single thing,” and Cherrie readily agreed. “I have not written anything about the organization of our expedition, but now I’m going to record my opinion that a greater lack of organization seems hardly possible!” he had written in his diary on November 25, while he and Miller were still in Corumbá. “There is no head no chief of the expedition. Fiala in a way is the temporary head but utterly incompetent for the work he has to
do without previous experience in the tropics without any knowledge of the character of the people with whom he must treat and the almost insurmountable handicap of not having any knowledge of the language.”

Of the trio of adventurous Americans whom Roosevelt had nicknamed the “three Buccaneers”—Cherrie, Miller, and Fiala—only Cherrie would actually go on the expedition that they had all planned to take together. But, as he had for Miller, Roosevelt made an effort to find another river journey for Fiala so that he would have some compensation for the months he had already devoted to the expedition. His plan was for the photographer to descend the Papagaio River, much of which had yet to be explored, even though its source and mouth were relatively well known. Fiala accepted the offer, but his heart clearly wasn’t in it.

Although the men had had little sympathy for Father Zahm, they could not help pitying Fiala, whose cherished opportunity to redeem himself as an explorer was now lost. “Fiala left us and started back toward Utiarity at 10 p.m.,” Cherrie wrote in his diary that night. “I think his going had a saddening effect on all of us; and Fiala himself was almost in tears.”

“T
HE OXEN HAVE GIVEN
out,” Kermit recorded in the cream-colored pages of his bound Letts of Lond on journal on February 6, 1914. As drastic as Roosevelt’s cutbacks in men and equipment had been, it had quickly become apparent that they were not enough. The expedition was faltering again. Not only were the oxen collapsing, the mules were dying at an alarming rate. Since Tapirapoan, the expedition had lost more than half of its ninety-eight mules and of those that remained, ten could barely walk. If the men hoped to reach the banks of the River of Doubt, their only option was to make more sacrifices—gambling that the provisions and equipment that they abandoned now would not be desperately needed later on.

Before the overland journey had even begun, Roosevelt had insisted that they leave behind half of the tents that the Brazilian government had given them as gifts in Tapirapoan, and which, he later confided to the Royal Geographical Society’s John Scott Keltie, were “enormously heavy” and “utterly unsuited for the work.” He now urged Rondon to get rid of half of the tents that remained. “I had to exercise real tact,”
he wrote Keltie, “because it almost broke the heart of good Colonel Rondon. . .. Our companions cared immensely for what they regarded as splendor.” Two oxcarts, groaning with the weight of their cargo, were abandoned, as were two trunks of specimens that Miller and Cherrie had collected and preserved for the museum. The naturalists were even forced to part with most of their collecting equipment.

Each man then cut his personal baggage in half, keeping, Roosevelt wrote, only “the sheer necessities.” Kermit faithfully did his part to throw out what he did not absolutely need. He counted as necessities, however, his packet of letters from Belle—including a small picture of her that he always carried in his shirt pocket, and which he feared she would not recognize, “what with [it] being wet through so many times”—and his books, which were heavy, but essential. “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.

As crucial as it was for the expedition to lighten the pack animals’ loads, however, much of what they were carrying was not expendable. Before they began jettisoning crates of food and other critical supplies, Roosevelt, using all of his diplomatic skills so as not to offend his co-commander, questioned Rondon about the expedition’s preparedness for the River of Doubt. If there was any possibility that they might not have all that they needed to make a safe descent, he told Rondon, they should walk, reserving every able-bodied animal for carrying provisions rather than passengers. 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.” He assured Roosevelt that there was no need to take such
a drastic step. Everyone in the expedition would be well provided for on the River of Doubt.

On February 8, the American and Brazilian officers finally reached the Juruena River, the site of another of Rondon’s remote and isolated telegraph stations. Pausing on a hilltop, the men looked back over the miles of rolling landscape that they had crossed, shrouded in low, thick forest. Farther north, the six-hundred-mile-long Juruena widens significantly, but even here, in its relatively narrow southern reaches, it was broad and deep enough to force the mules to cross it on a rickety raft composed of a wooden platform lashed onto three dugout canoes. When they reached the other side, pulling themselves across the rushing current with a wire trolley, the men were, as always, relieved to stop at a telegraph station. Their accommodations would again be a simple wattle-and-daub hut with a thatched roof and plenty of cracks and chinks for the sand flies to find their way inside and torment them throughout the night, but it was better than spending another miserable night in rain-soaked tents.

As it had in Utiarity, however, bad news awaited the expedition in Juruena. This time, it was about Fiala. From a telegram that was handed to Roosevelt, the men learned that the first day of their friend’s descent of the Papagaio River had nearly been his last. Fiala’s expedition, which had begun just the day before without any of the provisions he had packed for Roosevelt’s journey, had met with immediate and almost complete disaster. Not long after they had launched their three dugout canoes, two of them, including the one in which Fiala was riding, were sucked into a churning pocket of the river known as the Rapids of the Devil. Most of the nine men had managed to fight their way back to the bank, but Fiala, along with half of the expedition’s food and most of its equipment, was swept helplessly down the river.

“I just saved myself by snatching hold of a tree-bough that overhung the stream about thirty feet from the bank, and then pulling myself in,” Fiala told a reporter for the
New York Times
after returning home. 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.

Even if Fiala had once again led his men into a disaster, with new doubts about his own actions, the ill-starred explorer had at least been proved right on one count: his insistence that North American canoes were the proper means for descending the Amazon’s dangerous tributaries. Fiala blamed his near-death in the Papagaio rapids on the heavy, clumsy South American dugouts. After his first disastrous day on the Papagaio, Fiala refused to trust the dugouts a second time. He returned to Utiarity and retrieved the Canadian canoes that he himself had handpicked, and which Roosevelt’s expedition had left behind because they could not afford the additional weight.

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.