The River of Doubt (18 page)

Conversely, to show their good intentions when they visited the expedition, the Indians would leave their weapons behind and call out to Roosevelt and his men from hiding places in the forest that surrounded the telegraph road. The members of the expedition would answer, inviting the Indians to visit their camp. The Indians would then shout again. The expedition would answer. Shout. Answer. Shout.
Answer. Until, finally, the Indians were certain that they were welcome, and the expedition was certain that they were coming as friends and not as attackers.

Once in the camp, the Nhambiquara would get as close as physically possible to the white men, whom they found curiously pale, tall, and hairy. While Roosevelt was trying to write, they would gather around him so tightly that he would have to gently push them away so that he could move his arms. The Nhambiquara were taller and darker than the Pareci, with longer heads and hair cut into distinctive bowl-like bangs. Around Rondon, they were smiling and relaxed. Kermit liked them. They are “a very pleasant set,” he wrote Belle, “and didn’t look at all as if they had given Rondon all the trouble they have. . .. They have small hands and feet, and really nice faces. It’s melancholy to think how they will change when civilization comes here.” Leo Miller, however, who, perhaps of all the members of the expedition, had the lowest opinion of Indians, was repelled by the quills and thin pieces of bamboo that the Nhambiquara men threaded through holes pierced into their upper lips and the septum of their noses—especially since the Indians clearly had no appreciation for the American concept of personal space. “They had the unpleasant habit of coming close up to one and jabbering at a furious rate of speed,” Miller wrote. “This caused the labrets to move uncomfortably near one’s eyes, and it was necessary at times to retreat a short distance in order to get out of range of the menacing ornaments.” Roosevelt marveled that these sticks, which were roughly six inches long, did not bother the Indians, even when they ate. “They laughed at the suggestion of removing them,” he wrote. “Evidently to have done so would have been rather bad manners—like using a knife as an aid in eating ice cream.”

The Nhambiquara intrigued Roosevelt, and he enjoyed their company, but he would not let his guard down around them. He had heard vivid tales of their brutality toward the Pareci in Utiarity, and he had spent a night watching them dance in Juruena, only to wake up and find that they had left in the wee hours, taking with them two of the
expedition’s dogs. These Indians were, he wrote, “light-hearted robbers and murderers.”

While he was on this expedition, Roosevelt felt obliged to follow Rondon’s lead. This was his country and his territory, and Roosevelt respected Rondon’s authority as a colonel in the Brazilian military. However, nothing he saw suggested that Rondon’s approach would produce anything but tragedy. His concerns were dramatically illustrated on February 11, when the men made camp near the remains of an abandoned Indian village. After dinner, a few of the men wandered over to see what was left. Not far from the sagging and crumbling palm-thatch huts, the men stumbled upon the graves of two Brazilian soldiers and an army officer who had been murdered by Nhambiquara and then buried vertically, with their heads and shoulders sticking out of the ground.

The most frightening aspect of these lonely graves was that the Indians who had killed these men were much further along the road of pacification, civilization, and friendship with the outside world than were the unknown Indians who lived on the banks of the River of Doubt. The Nhambiquara were violent and unpredictable, but at least they had forged a semblance of peace with Rondon. The Indians of the River of Doubt, in contrast, were utterly unknown even to Rondon, and there was no reason to think that they would welcome the expedition into their territory with any more tolerance or self-restraint than the Nhambiquara had shown when they had rained arrows down on Rondon at his first approach. Roosevelt and his men may have regarded themselves as explorers, but the Indians would know them only as invaders.

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W
ITH ALL
of these worries weighing on his mind, Roosevelt was struck one last heavy blow just as he reached the River of Doubt. Throughout the overland journey, Rondon had assured the ex-president that the expedition would have enough provisions for every man who was to descend the river. When they took stock of their supplies,
however, Rondon and Roosevelt together learned that the haphazard preparations for the journey, and the grueling month since leaving Tapirapoan, had taken a far greater toll than anyone had fully realized.

Even in the best of circumstances, the remaining rations would not come close to feeding the sixteen camaradas who were to do the hardest work of paddling the expedition’s boats and portaging its equipment. At the very outset of their descent of an unmapped river, Roosevelt was forced to cut his own and the other officers’ rations in half so that the camaradas on whom they depended could have any chance of surviving the journey. The expedition had now turned into a race against time. The survival of every man would depend on their collective ability to master the churning river, evade its ever-present dangers, and discover a route out of the deepest rain forest before their supplies ran out.

I
F
R
OOSEVELT AND HIS
men could have soared over the rain forest like the hawks that wheeled above them, the River of Doubt would have looked like a black piece of ribbon candy nestled in an endless expanse of green. Here, at the start of its tortuous journey northward, the river was so tightly coiled that at times it doubled back on itself, and in every direction the jungle stretched—dense, impenetrable, and untouched—to the horizon. The expedition was finally preparing to descend into the Amazon Basin from the highland plateau that it had just crossed. Even from the air, however, the river’s path into the jungle lowlands was so capricious, and the terrain so uneven, that it frequently disappeared entirely beneath the dense green canopy, making it nearly impossible to follow.

Rondon believed that the River of Doubt ultimately poured into the Madeira, the principal tributary of the Amazon River. On the basis of that educated guess, he had, before departing, sent a detachment of men to travel up the Madeira to the point where he calculated that he and Roosevelt would eventually emerge. The detachment, led by Lieutenant Antonio Pyrineus—the man who had nearly lost his
tongue and his life to a piranha during Rondon’s harrowing 1909 telegraph expedition—was ordered to set up camp at the confluence of the two southern branches of a tributary of the Madeira called the Aripuanã. The Madeira, which is so large that its basin is more than twice the size of France, winds for more than two thousand miles through western Brazil and has more than a dozen tributaries. As the Madeira’s largest tributary, the Aripuanã was well known in its final, lower reaches, but rapids and Indians had prevented even the most intrepid and ambitious rubber-tappers from traveling more than a few hundred miles up its course. Rondon had instructed Pyrineus to take a steamer up the Aripuanã as far as he could, and then to go by canoe to the point at which the river was known to split into two long arms. He was to wait at this fork in the river in the hope that, two or even three months after starting down the River of Doubt, the Roosevelt-Rondon Scientific Expedition would appear on the horizon.

If Rondon was right, and the expedition eventually reunited with Pyrineus on the Aripuanã, it would mean two things: First, it would mean that Roosevelt had placed on the map of South America a river that was nearly a thousand miles long—as long as the Ohio or the Rhine. There would then be no question but that the River of Doubt was, in Rondon’s words, a “river whose importance would justify the idea of giving it [Roosevelt’s] name.” The scale of that achievement, however, would be directly proportional to the sacrifices it would require. If the expedition emerged where Rondon predicted, it also would mean that Roosevelt, Rondon, and their men had survived a journey as perilous as any in the history of Amazon exploration.

In contrast to the broad, sweeping grandeur of the Amazon River itself, the thousands of tributaries that stream into it are wild and capricious. They tear through the jungle like wounded animals, thrashing their banks and spitting white foam into the branches of overhanging trees. The rivers’ ferocity is caused not solely by the great volume of water they carry (taken by itself, the Madeira is equal in volume to the powerful Congo—the world’s second-largest river by volume after the Amazon itself), or even by their plunge from highland
plateau to lowland basin. Instead, the principal reason these rivers are nearly impossible to navigate is that they are studded with rapids that are produced as water flows over rock formations of contrasting degrees of hardness. The softer the rock, the more easily it erodes, exposing bars of hard bedrock that form ever-steeper steps in the riverbed, making the water roil and churn as if a fire were blazing beneath it. The Madeira, which starts its journey near the Bolivia-Brazil border in the Brazilian Highlands, has at least thirty major waterfalls and rapids, with sixteen powerful cataracts in one 225-mile stretch alone.

Everyone in the expedition understood that the River of Doubt, if it followed the path Rondon suspected, would be just as rapids-choked as the Madeira, if not more so. The difference between Roosevelt’s expedition and those of the countless rubber-tappers who had tried unsuccessfully to negotiate the Amazon’s wild tributaries was that Roosevelt was going to descend the River of Doubt, not attempt to fight his way up it. This strategy would allow him to harness the river’s great strength rather than oppose it. But it represented a gamble of life-or-death proportions, because, from the moment the men of the expedition launched their boats, they would no longer be able to turn around. The river would carry them ever deeper into the rain forest, with whatever dangers that might entail. When they reached a series of rapids, they would have to portage around them—or mumble a prayer and plunge ahead. In either case, the option of returning the way they came was no longer available to them. They would find a way through, or they would perish in the attempt.

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O
N THE
spot where Rondon had abandoned his exploration of the River of Doubt five years earlier, the Rondon Commission had built a simple wooden bridge to straddle the river’s roughly sixty-five-foot expanse. As Roosevelt at last stood on that bridge, listening to the swift, muddy water slap against the warped planks beneath his feet, he peered into the dark stretch of jungle ahead of him. This world,
which he was about to enter for better or worse, was strange and utterly unfamiliar, and while his first glimpse into it was exciting, it was also deeply sobering. No one, not even the inscrutable Rondon, could predict what was around the next bend. Roosevelt was about to become an explorer in the truest, and most unforgiving, sense of the word. It was an opportunity he had dreamed of from his earliest childhood. Now, however, he realized that he would be called on to pay the full cost of his ambitions—and he found himself gravely unprepared for what might lie ahead.

After months of inattention, Roosevelt had now come face to face with the acute logistical shortcomings and rapidly escalating risks that his own casual approach to the expedition and its route had produced. Roosevelt, Rondon, and their men were about to begin the most difficult leg of their journey, but they were already at the limits of their endurance. After spending more than a month slogging through the muddy highlands, with long days on muleback, nearly constant downpours, illness, worry, death, and sorrow, the men were exhausted, homesick, and wary—not just of the river they were about to descend but also of one another. To the Americans, the overland journey had appeared chaotic and shockingly disorganized. To the Brazilians, on the other hand, the Americans must have seemed selfish and demanding. Father Zahm had certainly been the worst offender, but the comfort of all the Americans had always come first—even before the Brazilians’ basic needs. Unknown to Roosevelt, Rondon had not only ordered his men to eat less so that the Americans could eat more, but had intentionally overloaded the pack oxen and abandoned entire crates of the camaradas’ provisions in the hope that he would not have to ask the Americans to leave behind any of their ponderous baggage.