The River of Doubt (20 page)

Finally, everything was in place, and, just after twelve noon on
February 27, 1914, Roosevelt carefully climbed inside his narrow dugout and found a seat on a bag that had been stuffed as tight as a sausage. As soon as the camaradas pushed off the banks, he immediately felt himself being swept up in the river’s rushing current. The last thing he heard before he was carried too far down the river for Miller’s voice to reach him, was a hearty “Good luck!”

“For several minutes we stood upon the fragile structure that bridged the unexplored river and stared at the dark forest that shut our erstwhile leader and his Brazilian companions from view,” Miller would later write. “And then, filled with misgivings as to whether or not we should ever see them again, we turned our thoughts to the task before us.”

C
ARRIED ALONG BY THE
swift water, the expedition’s seven dugouts snaked through the forest single-file. The jungle was thickest at the river’s edge, where the trees crowded along the banks in a timeless battle for sunlight. They were matted together with vines and epiphytes that trailed in the water like heavy curtains and completely obscured the muddy bank. From his position in the last and largest canoe, which had a carrying capacity of one and a quarter tons, Roosevelt, along with Cherrie, Dr. Cajazeira, and their three paddlers, could see the other six dugouts floating in a long, broken chain ahead of him. Directly in front of him were the two balsas, which carried eight camaradas and most of the expedition’s baggage, but were even more difficult to steer than the rest of the boats. Rondon, Lyra, and three paddlers rode in the second dugout, and Kermit and two camaradas sat in the smallest canoe at the head of the expedition.

“As we drifted and paddled down the swirling brown current, through the vivid rain-drenched green of the tropic forest, the trees leaned over the river from both banks,” Roosevelt wrote. “There were
many palms, both the burity with its stiff fronds like enormous fans, and a handsome species of bacaba, with very long, gracefully curving fronds. In places the palms stood close together, towering and slender, their stems a stately colonnade, their fronds an arched fretwork against the sky.”

Roosevelt reveled in the beauty and variety of the plant life and the “fragrant scents [that] were blown to us from flowers on the banks,” but he was puzzled by a distinct and eerie absence of sound. In the midst of all this lush life was a seemingly incongruent stillness. “Rarely we heard strange calls from the depths of the woods,” he wrote, but “for the most part the forest was silent.” Cherrie too was struck by how empty the jungle seemed. “Very little animal life was seen along the shore,” he scribbled in his diary.

While Roosevelt and Cherrie studied the rain forest, their paddlers kept their eyes on the river. Pulling the dugout through the water with their long wooden paddles, they searched for a telltale ripple, their only warning that a fallen tree lay just below the surface. The rainy-season downpours that had been such a source of misery to the men on their overland journey had caused the river to swell to such a height that most of the sunken trees and boulders were safely buried under several feet of water. Some, such as the water-loving boritana palms, continued to grow and thrive although they were fully submerged, the current shaking their broad crowns like a strong wind. Other fallen trees, however, still lay close to the surface, and, whenever they appeared, the current seemed invariably to drive the expedition’s canoes straight down on top of them. It was then, Roosevelt wrote, that “the muscles stood out on the backs and arms of the paddlers as stroke on stroke they urged us away from and past the obstacle.”

The strength and skill of the camaradas was evident as they maneuvered their craft down the river. Rondon had hired rugged young men in Tapirapoan to be their paddlers and porters. They were a “strapping set,” Roosevelt wrote admiringly. “They were expert river-men and men of the forest, skilled veterans in wilderness work. They
were lithe as panthers and brawny as bears. They swam like water-dogs. They were equally at home with pole and paddle, with axe and machete.”

Roosevelt realized, however, that great difficulty often brought out the worst in a man. Deep in the Amazon, the expedition was utterly isolated and far from help of any kind. The camaradas—who outnumbered the officers nearly three to one—could mutiny as easily as sailors at sea. They were all capable men, and most of them were brave, but they had lived a hard life. They looked, Roosevelt wrote, “like pirates in the pictures of Howard Pyle and Maxfield Parrish.” One glance at threvealed the almost unbridgeable difference between their hardscrabble world and Roosevelt’s refined and privileged one. For clothing, they had brought along nothing more than the thin shirts and ragged pants that they wore, and most of them were barefoot. Their feet and hands were as hard and gnarled as their rough-hewn paddles. Their faces, some bright and cheerful, others dark and glowering, were usually obscured by their slouching and soiled hats. It would take time for the officers, especially the Americans, to get to know their paddlers and to learn those on whom they could rely, even trusting them with their own lives, and those on whom they should never turn their backs.

Even Roosevelt’s own boatmen represented the extremes of good and bad among the camaradas. His steersman, a black man from Mato Grosso named Luiz Correia, and his paddler, Antonio Pareci, a member of the peaceful Pareci Indian tribe that the expedition had met in Utiarity, were two of the best men in the expedition. Over the course of the journey, both of them would earn Roosevelt’s respect by proving that they not only knew the rain forest but were willing to work hard for the success of the expedition. The third camarada in Roosevelt’s boat, however, was Julio de Lima, the broad-shouldered, hot-tempered Brazilian who had attacked another man with a knife during the overland journey. Apparently Amilcar had not shared his concerns about Julio with Rondon, because not only had the volatile
camarada been chosen among the select group of men who were to descend the River of Doubt, but he was now Roosevelt’s own bowman.

*  *  *

F
ROM THE
moment their boats were swept into the unknown, Rondon set his plan for the expedition into motion. The Brazilian colonel was interested not in adventure but in geographical precision, and he was determined to survey the river carefully and completely, from its headwaters to its mouth. Little more than a century earlier, Alexander von Humboldt, the world-renowned German naturalist and explorer, had conducted the first thorough cartographical survey of South America, producing hundreds of maps based on seven hundred observations. Filling in these maps with the detail necessary to make them truly useful was an ongoing project, one that had met with varying degrees of success over the ensuing century. By the early twentieth century, the existing maps of the Brazilian interior were largely, and notoriously, wrong, indicating mountains where none existed and rivers misplaced by hundreds of miles. A significant part of Rondon’s job over the past twenty-four years had been not only adding to the cartographic knowledge of his continent but correcting these mistakes.

There were no reference points in the vast jungle, so the men would have to rely on celestial navigation to tell them where they were. To determine latitude and longitude, they used the same instrument that Humboldt himself had used—a sextant, which measures the angle between the horizon and the sun, moon, or stars. To chart the river from point to point, Rondon instituted a fixed-station method of survey, one of the most accurate methods but also the most labor-intensive. Not only did it require repeated, detailed measurements, but it also demanded frequent stops, especially on a river that wound as tightly as the River of Doubt.

For the sake of accuracy, Rondon was more than willing to endure the tedium, grueling work, and danger that the fixed-station survey
demanded. However, as in many great undertakings, the expedition’s commander would not suffer alone. In the lead canoe, Kermit had accepted the unenviable job of placing the sighting rod that Lyra and Rondon would use to make their measurements. Kermit and his paddlers would find a spot that afforded the longest unimpeded view both upstream and downstream—usually at a bend in the river—land their boat, and, using a machete, cut away the thick branches and vines that covered the bank. Fighting off swarms of biting ants and angry wasps, Kermit would plant his sighting rod—a slim pole on which a red disk and a white disk had been positioned one meter apart—in the thin, black leaf litter under his feet. Lyra would then use a telemeter to establish the distance between his canoe and the sighting rod, and Rondon would consult his compass and record the river’s direction.

The river twisted and turned so capriciously—curving “literally toward every point of the compass,” Roosevelt remarked—that Kermit had to land, cut away the vegetation, and set up the sighting rod 114 times that first day alone. Roosevelt was not pleased with the fixed-station survey. Not only did it slow the expedition to a glacial pace—the boats traveled only six miles in five hours—but it placed his son in a particularly dangerous position. If there were sunken trees, hidden whirlpools, sudden waterfalls, or hostile Indians, Kermit would encounter them first. In spite of his concerns, however, Roosevelt refrained from asking Rondon to adopt a faster method of survey. This was Rondon’s country and Rondon’s expedition, more than his own, and Roosevelt was determined to respect his co-commander’s wishes as long as he could. He planned, he wrote, simply to keep an eye on the expedition, maintaining a “close supervision over everything that was done but being more than courteous and polite and friendly with my Brazilian companions.”

After only two hours on the river, Roosevelt, whose canoe had long since passed the two slow surveying boats, instructed his paddlers to pull over. Leaning over the sides of the dugout to grasp leafy branches that overhung the river, the camaradas pulled as close to the overgrown
shore as they could and then used a rope to tether the boat to a tree. The six men then settled in to wait for their companions, their boat rocking in the current, the rain and sun alternately drenching and drying them. Finally, after two more hours had passed with no sign of the surveying canoes, Roosevelt ordered the camaradas to make camp. It was only 4:00 p.m., but they could not go forward without the rest of the expedition, and they had no idea when they would all be reunited.

*  *  *

T
HE EXPEDITION’S
first camp on the River of Doubt was little more than a crude clearing on the river’s edge. After making their way through the dense bushes and trees that crowded every inch of the shoreline and leaned far out over the river itself, the men were able to find a dry, level patch of ground at the top of a steep, hundred-yard incline. But fighting back the jungle was no easy task. With axes and machetes, the camaradas slowly began to cut away small trees and heavy vines, all crawling with a wide array of stinging, biting insects. Eventually they were able to form a little open island in the sea of trees, and they began hauling up bags from the dugouts, setting up the officers’ two tents, and tying their own simple hammocks to sturdy trunks.

By the time Kermit, Rondon, Lyra, and their six paddlers appeared, filthy and exhausted, the sun was already setting, and Franca the cook had, as he had time and again for the past month, miraculously started a fire from sodden wood. As the men sat around the sputtering campfire, the rain tapered off, leaving a clear, star-scattered sky above them. Beyond their little circle of light, however, the jungle was so black that, had a sudden rain doused their fire, the men would not have been able to see their own hands, much less one another. Only six miles into their expedition, they could already feel their isolation. But as they sank into their hammocks that night, their first on the banks of the River of Doubt, little time was wasted on worry. Exhaustion descended, as heavy and inescapable as the tropical humidity, and the men quickly fell asleep.