The River of Doubt (17 page)

Miles away, on his journey to the River of Doubt, however, Roosevelt had no way to know that and could do nothing about it even if he had.

*  *  *

O
UTSIDE
of Juruena, moreover, the men’s concern about accidental mishaps, dying mules, and low supplies were compounded by a new fear: calculated attack. The hum of the telegraph wires, as familiar now as the weary clop-clop-clop of their mules’ hooves on the wet clay and sand soil, was the only sign of civilization in the broad scrub forest before them. They felt as isolated as if they were traveling across an uninhabited planet. They were not alone, however, and they
knew that there was rarely a moment of the day or night when they were not being watched.

They were now, Roosevelt wrote, “in a still wilder region, the land of the naked Nhambiquaras.” Rondon had made first contact with this tribe, one of the most isolated and primitive of the Amazon, only six years earlier. They had welcomed him with a fusillade of poison-tipped arrows. Hoping to make a clear gesture of friendship, Rondon and just three of his men, including Lyra, had ridden single-file toward a Nhambiquara camp, their mules heaped high with gifts. But before they had even reached the camp, Rondon had felt something fly past his face that was so light and fast that for a moment he thought it was a bird. In the millisecond it took him to realize that it was an arrow, a second one slammed into his helmet. The third arrow struck his chest and lodged in his thick leather bandolier. Ordering his men not to return fire, Rondon calmly turned his mule around and rode back to his own camp, sitting straight in his saddle with the arrow—five feet long with a ten-inch macaw feather, split in two, on one end and a serrated, curare-coated tip on the other—still sticking out of his chest.

For weeks, the Nhambiquara had terrorized Rondon’s men, disappearing during the day and attacking at night, when the soldiers were most vulnerable. The men were so frightened that they refused even to build a campfire after the sun went down, in the hope that the Nhambiquara would not be able to find them on the black plateau. 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. Through persistent kindness, compassion, and patience in the face of relentless and often deadly attacks, he had forged a simple peace, but it was tentative at best and had met with varying degrees of success within the tribes’ scattered and independent bands.

For the telegraph-station workers, the men whom Rondon left behind
to guard and repair the poles after the rest of the expedition had moved on, the Nhambiquara remained a constant threat. In general, long-term peace between the telegraph-station workers and the Indians was rare. Although the relationship usually started out on a friendly footing—Rondon having ordered the workers to be kind to the Indians, not meddle in their affairs, and give them plenty of gifts—it almost always devolved into resentment and distrust. The telegraph-station workers, moreover, were utterly alone, with no hope of help from any quarter, and with a store of coveted weapons and metal tools that made them enticing targets. In the late 1930s, the French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss traveled along Rondon’s telegraph line and heard many stories of telegraph workers who had died grisly deaths at the hands of the Nhambiquara. “Someone may recall,” Lévi-Strauss wrote in his seminal book
Tristes Tropiques
, “how a certain telegraph operator was found buried up to the waist, with his chest riddled with arrows and his morse-key on his head.”

Even missionaries, who were ostensibly there to help the Indians, body and soul, had difficulty staying alive in Nhambiquara territory. The seemingly simplest of misunderstandings could lead to the slaughter of an entire missionary community. Lévi-Strauss told the story of one such massacre that happened in the very region through which Roosevelt and his men were now traveling:

*  *  *

E
VEN WHERE
relationships appeared to be well established, there was still a good chance that things could go disastrously wrong. Rondon did his best to “civilize” the Indians who lived near his telegraph stations—a perhaps misguided effort for which he would be criticized in later years—but he did not control them, and he never would. In Utiarity, he taught the Pareci Indians, one of the region’s most sophisticated and peaceful tribes, how to build more substantial houses; he helped them grow potatoes, corn, and manioc; and he gave them clothing. He even hired some of them to work for the Rondon Commission, paying the average worker sixty-six cents a day, particularly valuable employees a dollar, and chiefs $1.66.

The Nhambiquara, however, had proved impervious to Rondon’s efforts. They were still largely nomadic hunter-gatherers, settling down only during the rainy season. For most of the year, they slept under the most temporary and fragile of shelters—a half- or quarter-circle of palm branches that they had driven into holes dug into the sand. They would set up these shelters in the direction from which they expected to receive the most sun, wind, or rain, but they would disassemble them every morning and build new ones the next night. Unlike neighboring tribes, the Nhambiquara also slept on the ground rather than in a hammock—a practice for which the Pareci despised them.

The Nhambiquara were also wholly uninterested in clothing. Some of the Pareci who worked for the telegraph stations had begun to wear shirts and even pants, but the Nhambiquara men still wore nothing more than a string around their waist with, at the most, a tuft of dried grass or a scrap of cloth that served no purpose beyond pure ornamentation. The Nhambiquara women did not even wear that much. This determined nakedness never ceased to worry Rondon, who did
not trust his soldiers around the Indian girls, and who knew that, if his men succumbed to this particular temptation, they would likely pay for it with their lives.

An even greater danger to the telegraph line soldiers—and to all the progress that Rondon had made in his relationship with the Indians—was tribal warfare. Rondon had strictly forbidden his men ever to take sides in a tribal battle, no matter how seemingly brutal or unjust. In Utiarity, however, one man had recently defied this order, with potentially disastrous results. Shortly before the expedition had arrived there, a group of Nhambiquara had descended on the Pareci’s village while their men were gone. Hearing the screams of their wives and mothers, the Pareci had rushed home, and a battle had broken out in full view of the telegraph station. The Nhambiquara were better, more experienced warriors than the Pareci, but the Pareci had a powerful ally: a telegraph line employee, the only man for nearly a hundred miles who had a gun. Having grown fond of the Pareci, and having watched the Nhambiquara prey on them time and again, the man had stepped into the melee, raised his gun, and fatally shot a Nhambiquara warrior, enraging Rondon and putting at risk the precarious peace he had worked so long to achieve.

Rondon’s injunction against violence directed toward an Indian—any Indian, for any reason—was categorical. In fact, he valued the lives of the Amazonian Indians above his own life—or the lives of his men. Surely there was not a soldier in the Rondon Commission who could not recite by heart his colonel’s now famous command: “Die if you must, but never kill.” Rondon’s success in the Amazon had depended on this dictum. It was the only reason the Indians had ever dared to trust him.

As they had in the United States, Native Americans in Brazil had been exploited, enslaved, and slaughtered for centuries—since 1500, the year the Portuguese explorer Pedro Álvares Cabral is said to have discovered the region. 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.”

Unwittingly, however, von Ihering had ignited the greatest advancement in the cause of Indian rights that Brazil had ever witnessed. 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’s brave and unyielding advocacy of the Amazonian Indian was to become his most important legacy—outshining even his achievements as an explorer. Whatever the merits of his philosophy, however, his approach was cold comfort to the soldiers he forced to practice it. In fact, so infamous were Rondon’s expeditions into the interior that he had to pay his men seven times what they made anywhere else. Even the cook aboard the
Nyoac
had known Rondon’s reputation for losing his men’s lives as he forged a path through Indian territory. When the Brazilian colonel invited him to join the descent of the River of Doubt, the cook had replied in horror, “Sir! I have done nothing to deserve such punishment!”

Rondon refused even to let his men retaliate when they had been attacked. It was not unusual for his soldiers to have to watch helplessly while their friends died brutal deaths at the hands of Indians, and then have no ability to avenge their loss, no recourse but tears. “Let us weep,” Rondon would tell them, “for I loved this man who has perished for my sake. But I command you to do as he did. Never shoot.”
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.

*  *  *

R
OOSEVELT FOR
his part, was not planning on sacrificing his expedition or the lives of any of his men on the altar of Rondon’s ideals. 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.” However, the man he appointed as commissioner of Indian Affairs, Francis Leupp, made no effort to hide his belief that Indians would never be seamlessly integrated into the world of the white man. In fact, he argued that Indians should not be made United States citizens. “They are not fitted for [citizenship’s] duties,” he declared, “or able to take advantage of its benefits.”

Roosevelt would never completely shake off the model of the American Western frontier with which he had grown up. When he was in Dakota, the battles between the Indians and the pioneers were only just ending. “There were still sporadic outbreaks here and there, and occasionally bands of marauding young braves were a menace to outlying and lonely settlements,” he recalled, but “many of the white men were themselves lawless and brutal, and prone to commit outrages on the Indians.” Though Roosevelt had sympathy for the Indians and understood the injustices and cruelties that they had endured, in South America as well as in North America, Rondon’s passive, pacifist approach was alien to his entire way of thinking. He was much more inclined to conquer than to be slaughtered.

The stakes were rising, moreover, because, with each passing day, the expedition was intruding deeper into Nhambiquara territory, and
the Indians were becoming increasingly bold with Roosevelt and his men. Their gestures were friendly, as they clearly knew and liked Rondon, but the expedition members understood that the slightest insult or injury, whether real or simply perceived, could turn the Indians against them before they even realized what had happened.

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.” During war, the Nhambiquara had perfected the art of the surprise attack. “When preparing for a war the chief of the band takes the men into the woods and tells them that there are bad people to the north which they must kill,” observed Kalvero Oberg, a Smithsonian anthropologist who studied the tribe in the mid-1940s.