The River of Doubt (27 page)

In an effort to find out just how dire their circumstances had become, the expedition’s officers gathered together to take stock of their rations. When splitting the provisions with Miller and Amilcar before they launched their boats, the River of Doubt party had taken fifty of the ninety food tins that Fiala had packed, as well as the seventy-five United States Army emergency rations he had purchased as a precaution. Each tin box was meant to hold enough food for five men for one day. Concerned that the former president have not just gourmet condiments but also a variety of foods during what was supposed to be an uneventful journey, Fiala had planned seven different meals—one for
each day of the week—and had numbered each box, from one to seven, so that Roosevelt would never have to have the same meal twice in a row. The Friday meal, for example, consisted of rice, bread, gingersnaps, dehydrated potatoes and onions, Erbswurst (a type of sausage), condensed milk, bacon, curry and chicken, dates, sugar, coffee, tea, and salt. The Saturday meal was similar, but Fiala had made some strategic changes, such as replacing rice with oatmeal, and potatoes with baked beans. Each tin, which had been lacquered to protect it from rust, also held a yard of muslin, two boxes of matches, and a single cake of soap.

What the officers discovered when they took stock of these provisions now, however, alarmed even Cherrie. “There were sufficient rations for the men to last about thirty-five days,” he wrote. “While the rations that had been arranged for the officials of the party would perhaps last fifty days.” With grim certainty, the officers calculated that, if the expedition continued to advance at this slow rate, they would be without food of any kind, beyond what they could catch or forage, for the last month of their journey.

As well as worrying about their quickly dwindling rations, the men were reluctant to stay in one spot for too long for another reason: They were not alone. The jungle was, they now knew, inhabited by a group of Indians that had had no contact with the outside world. Rondon believed that the expedition was probably still traveling through Nhambiquara territory, but that was just a hunch. He could not be any more sure of what tribe of Indians they might face than he was of where the river was taking them. No other nonnative had ever been down the River of Doubt, and even the Nhambiquara who lived near its headwaters had not been able to tell Rondon what he might expect from the Indians who lived on its banks.

Although the members of the expedition had yet to see a single human being since they had launched their boats nearly two weeks earlier, they had seen several signs of human life. Not only had they passed an abandoned village and the remains of a broken bridge, but, while crossing an Indian trail, Kermit had stumbled upon a pateran,
an arrangement of branches and leaves designed to convey a message. What concerned the men about this pateran was that, unlike the rotting huts and overgrown fields, it was not a remnant of a deserted village. It had clearly been constructed very recently, and, as Roosevelt wrote, “it had some special significance.” It might have been simply an Indian path marker, giving directions to a camp or a prime fishing spot, but it just as easily might have been a warning to the members of the expedition. Either way, they were not willing to take any chances. “No one of us ever went ten yards from camp without his rifle,” Roosevelt wrote.

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H
AVING SPENT
the past week fighting their way through a relentless series of rapids, the men would have little opportunity to rest during their forced delay. Construction of the new dugout had to begin immediately. As the rain fell, soaking everything and everyone, the camaradas trudged through the jungle, fanning out in different directions in an intensive search for trees that would be suitable for a canoe. They finally found three that they thought might work, chopped them down, and dragged them back to camp. Roosevelt judged them all to be “splendid looking trees,” but Rondon decided to use only one of them. It was a species of Euphorbiacaea, a Para rubber tree, which can grow to be 120 feet tall in its natural habitat. This one was five feet in diameter, and its timber, which the Brazilians called Tatajuba, was yellowish in color.

Under Rondon’s direction, the camaradas fell to work. They only had time to build one canoe to replace the two that had been lost, so, if it had any hope of carrying the expedition’s cargo, it had to be big. The men measured off twenty-six feet from the tree’s base and then began the backbreaking work of hewing it out. Typically in building a dugout canoe, an ax is used to cut a flat plank from the bark and hollow out the trunk until the interior space is a couple of feet deep. The canoe is then filled with leaves and turned upside down, so that a small fire can be lit inside to help waterproof it and smooth out its
rough edges. Next, the builders flip the canoe back over and, while the wood is still warm, scrape the interior walls and floor with the curved blade of an adze. Finally, they place crosspieces from wall to wall in the interior to help stretch the canoe.

The members of the expedition allowed themselves only four days to complete the canoe. They worked in shifts, and Rondon never left their side, tirelessly directing the construction and ensuring that every man pulled his weight. The toll on the camaradas was heavy. Their backs ached, their arms quivered with fatigue, and, under constant attack from insects, their hands, faces, and feet became raw and inflamed. Under Rondon’s unwavering gaze, however, they never let up or even slowed down. Even after the sun set, Roosevelt watched the camaradas toil by candlelight, stripped to the waist in the hot, still air, some standing inside the canoe, others bent over its thick hull. “The flicker of the lights showed the tropic forest rising in the darkness round about,” he wrote. “Olive and copper and ebony, their skins glistened as if oiled, and rippled with the ceaseless play of the thews beneath.”

Since witnessing their heroic struggle to bring the expedition’s dugout canoes through the rapids, Roosevelt had developed a deep admiration for his team of camaradas. “Looking at the way the work was done, at the good-will, the endurance, and the bull-like strength of the camaradas, and at the intelligence and the unwearied efforts of their commanders,” he wrote, “one could not but wonder at the ignorance of those who do not realize the energy and the power that are so often possessed by, and that may be so readily developed in, the men of the tropics.”

Only one camarada had turned out to be, in Roosevelt’s words, “utterly worthless.” Julio de Lima had proved himself to be so lazy and untrustworthy that if Rondon could have sent him back he would have. “When we were able to discover his bad qualities, his cowardice and complete incapacity to follow up the continuous efforts of his fellow companions, we were so far advanced in the river that it was impossible
for us to rid ourselves of his presence,” Rondon wrote. When they were hiring camaradas in Tapirapoan, Julio had caught their eye because of his strapping physique, good health, and professed enthusiasm for the work. That enthusiasm, however, had evaporated as soon as they reached their first set of rapids, and his strength was useless to them because he would never use it for the good of the expedition unless threatened with punishment or even abandonment. “In the Expedition no one relied upon the assistance of his strength, and least of all, of his will,” Rondon wrote. Roosevelt had absolutely no use for Julio, calling him an “inborn, lazy shirk with the heart of a ferocious cur in the body of a bullock.” But Rondon was determined to make him work.

Rondon did not tolerate laziness or disobedience from anyone in his regiment. When it came to his soldiers, he had earned a reputation for being implacable. In the wilderness, where his men had to fight daily just to survive, he had no alternative but to guide his regiment with a firm hand. He had, however, learned through painful personal experience the importance of tempering the anger that flared inside of him at the first sign of rebellion.

Twenty years earlier, Rondon had ordered a group of men who had rebelled against his officers to be flogged with bamboo sticks for more than an hour. Such punishment was against the law in Brazil at that time, but it was widely known to be common practice in Mato Grosso. This time, however, it had disastrous results. Under the force of a blow, a bamboo stick had snapped and punctured the lung of one of the soldiers. Horrified, Rondon had quickly ordered an end to the flogging, but there had been nothing that he could do for the wounded man, who eventually died from peritonitis.

Although Rondon deeply regretted the man’s death and vowed never again to resort to violence, he did not, and could not, dispense with all forms of punishment. Nor did he rely on the weight of the Brazilian military to enforce his rules or keep his men in check. Even with his thin, five-foot-three-inch frame, he could intimidate the most
unruly mob of young men. Six years earlier, while at work extending the telegraph line, Rondon’s soldiers had wreaked havoc on a small town, reeling drunkenly in the streets, breaking windows, and starting fights. After receiving only a lackluster response to his order to leave the saloons and assemble before him in the street, Rondon had turned toward the largest tavern in town, dug his spurs into his horse’s sides, and charged at full speed through the front doors. As men scrambled to get out of his way, he vaulted a table and bounded out the back door. One of his officers then solemnly announced that Rondon would smash every bottle in town if the saloons did not close. Moments later, the soldiers staggered into the street, swept along by anxious barkeepers.

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W
HILE
R
ONDON
and his camaradas built a new canoe for the expedition, Roosevelt and his son did their best to find food in the eerily quiet forest. Kermit shot an eight-foot-long water snake and a curassow, a large-crested game bird, and he just missed several red howler monkeys, which were frightened away by Rondon’s favorite dog, Lobo. Roosevelt, on the other hand, unfailingly returned to camp empty-handed. “I spent the day hunting in the woods, for the most part by the river,” he wrote of one such solo hunting trip, “but saw nothing.” Few among them would have been surprised by this revelation. Not only were the animals of the rain forest masters of disguise, but Roosevelt, the mighty hunter, was famously myopic. “He was always alone on these excursions,” Rondon would later recall, “and most frequently he returned without any game whatever, as being short sighted he did not always succeed in seeing the game from afar, and the latter, in its turn, was scared and fled when it heard his footsteps as he approached it.”

Roosevelt’s myopia had hampered his hunting and bird-watching ever since he was a small child. “Quite unknown to myself, I was, while a boy, under a hopeless disadvantage in studying nature,” he explained
in his autobiography. “I was very near-sighted, so that the only things that I could study were those I ran against or stumbled over.” Roosevelt got his first gun and his first pair of glasses at about the same time. Unfortunately, the gun came first. Roosevelt could not understand why his friends were consistently spotting and shooting game that he could not even see. It was not until he confessed his difficulties to his father that his myopia was finally diagnosed and he was fitted with a strong pair of lenses. Those glasses, he wrote, “literally opened an entirely new world to me. I had no idea how beautiful the world was until I got those spectacles.”

Roosevelt prized his spectacles; he carried eight or ten pairs with him, carefully distributed throughout his luggage, whenever he traveled. In the tropics, however, his nearsightedness proved to be a greater disadvantage than it had been elsewhere. Not only did his glasses constantly fog over in the heavy humidity, it was almost impossible for him to see when it rained, which it did several times a day. While this frustrating and potentially dangerous disability would have kept most men out of the rain forest, Roosevelt refused even to acknowledge that it was a problem. “It was a continual source of amazement to see how skillfully father had discounted this handicap in advance and appeared to be unhampered by it,” Kermit wrote.

On March 13, the camaradas worked until nearly midnight, and the next morning, in the middle of a torrential downpour, they finally completed the canoe. It took all twenty-two men to drag the twenty-six-foot-long dugout down the mud-slick bank, but by early afternoon it had begun its maiden voyage on the River of Doubt. The men were proud of their new, although hastily built, dugout, and they were thrilled to be moving again. But the river gave them little opportunity to celebrate. The farther the canoes traveled downstream, the faster the current became, steadily picking up speed as it cut its way down the northern face of the highlands. Worse, large, shifting whirlpools trailed their dugouts like sharks circling a lifeboat.

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I
T WAS
a measure of how desperate the men had become that, on their first day back on the river, they decided to run every set of rapids they encountered. They could not predict how their new canoe would hold up in the writhing river, and all of their dugouts were piled so high with heavy equipment and men that, in spite of the burity branches lashed to their sides, they sank to within three inches of the water’s surface. But the river’s myriad dangers paled in comparison with the threat of starving to death in the rain forest. “Of the two hazards,” Roosevelt wrote, “we felt it necessary to risk running the rapids.”

So strong was their sense of urgency that Rondon was persuaded to abandon the fixed-station survey and resort to a faster, although less accurate method of mapping the river. Instead of waiting for Kermit to land, cut away the vines on the bank, and plant the sighting rod, Rondon and Lyra had to make their measurements based on sightings of the lead canoe as it raced down the river. Not only was this method less dependable, it placed Kermit and his paddlers in even greater danger. They were now obliged to keep Rondon and Lyra in their sights, as well as keep a sharp eye out for rapids and whirlpools.