The River of Doubt (32 page)

The most important rule of cannibalism within the tribe was that one Cinta Larga could not eat another. The tribe drew a clear distinction between its own members and the rest of mankind, which they considered to be “other”—and, thus, edible. An enemy killed during war, therefore, was ritually dismembered and eaten. While still on the battlefield, either in the enemy’s village or in the forest, the Cinta Larga would carve up the body just as they would a monkey that they
had shot down from the canopy. First they would cut off and discard the man’s head and heart. Then they would section off the edible portions: the arms, legs, and a round of flesh over the stomach. They grilled this meat over an open fire and brought it home to their village for their wives to slice and cook with water in a ceramic pan.

If Indians from other tribes were considered “other,” then the men of the expedition, who did not even look human to the Cinta Larga, certainly fell into that category. Moreover, should the Indians attack the expedition, Roosevelt would likely be one of their first targets. After watching the expedition for several weeks, the Cinta Larga had surely figured out by now that Roosevelt and Rondon were its commanders. Not only did they give orders and do less physical work than the other men, but the camaradas and even the other officers clearly treated them with deference. Even if the Indians had only recently stumbled upon the expedition, they probably would have aimed for Roosevelt first—simply because of his substantial girth. The Cinta Larga often tossed pieces of a slain enemy into the jungle if they thought that he was too lean. Although Roosevelt had already begun to lose much of his 220 pounds to illness and the intense physical work and meager diet of the past few months, he was still by far the heaviest man in the expedition. If the men were massacred, the former president would make the best ceremonial meal.

A
FTER A MISERABLE NIGHT OF WORRY
and fear, the men of the Roosevelt-Rondon Scientific Expedition awoke on the morning of March 17 to the dire reality of their situation. They could not get back on the river, but neither could they stay where they were. The loss of the new dugout the day before had left them with only four canoes—three fewer than they had started out with, and far too few to carry twenty-one men and all of their food and equipment. There were no trees suitable for boatbuilding anywhere near their camp. They were quickly running out of rations, and they were surrounded by hostile Indians.

Whatever the cost, they had to keep moving, and most of the men would have to walk. By this point in the expedition, none of them had any illusions about what it meant to walk along the banks of the River of Doubt. So dense was the vegetation along the river’s sun-washed shoreline that they would have to laboriously carve a path for each step with a machete. Although the dark interior of the rain forest offered a potentially easier route than the overgrown riverbank,
that advantage was outweighed by the risks of dividing the expedition, and would have exposed those on foot to even greater risk of attack.

Moving forward with only four canoes also meant that the men would have to leave behind almost anything that was not essential to their survival. “We left all the baggage we could,” Roosevelt wrote. “We were already down as far as comfort would permit; but we now struck off much of the comfort.” However, after months of similar cutbacks and the loss of much of their clothing to oxen, ants, and termites, they had so few personal items left that, as Roosevelt put it, “The only way to make a serious diminution was to restrict ourselves to the clothes on our backs.”

Early that morning, the expedition set off down the river once again—eight men riding in the canoes and thirteen men walking. For better stability, the four dugouts had been tied together to form two balsas, and the expedition’s three best paddlers had been assigned to navigate them. Roosevelt, who had been battling fever, rode in one balsa, and Dr. Cajazeira rode in another, so that he could look after three camaradas whose feet were so swollen with bruises, gashes, and insect bites that they could no longer walk. The remaining nine camaradas, along with Rondon, Lyra, Cherrie, and Kermit, hacked their way with knives and machetes through the underbrush that crowded the banks. Their misery growing with every step, several camaradas wrapped their legs and feet in strips of canvas, but even this measure provided little protection from the sharp branches that sliced open their skin and ripped and unraveled their makeshift shoes.

For the camaradas, the exhausting and painful trek along the river-bank had one benefit: It gave them an opportunity to search for food in the forest. Hunger, and the possibility of starvation, now tormented and frightened the men as much as any other danger they faced. They had already consumed more than a third of their provisions, and they had not traveled even ninety miles down the river. They feared that they had at least five times that distance still to go.
Game was still nearly nonexistent, and they had been unable to catch even a single fish. Because it was the rainy season and the river had flooded its banks, the fish were dispersed over a larger area.

Despite their constant hunger and the expedition’s relentless physical demands, the men had no choice but to eat less to conserve their provisions. They limited themselves to only two meals a day. The officers also spread one day’s rations out over two days, and felt compelled to share some of what was left with the camaradas, who were in even worse shape than they.

The camaradas had begun to rely more and more heavily on whatever they could scavenge from the rain forest. As they walked along the riverbank, they scanned the jungle for beehives or even milk trees, a relative of the breadfruit tree that, when nicked with an ax, oozes a thick, milky latex that tastes something like cow’s milk. Roosevelt had tried the liquid but had complained that, while the “taste was not unpleasant . . . it left a sticky feeling in the mouth”—a fact that reflected the liquid’s evolutionary purpose as a chemical defense compound aimed at plant-eating insects. The camaradas eagerly lapped up as much of it as they could find, but the principal item in their diet had become
palmito
, or hearts of palm, the inner core of small palm trees. Although raw
palmito
was bland—Cherrie described it as tasting like celery—and had few nutrients, it filled their stomachs and eased their gnawing hunger.

Even the officers had begun to take an interest in
palmito
, sending two men into the forest each day to search for the vegetable. What they really hoped to find, however, was Brazil nuts. For centuries, Amazon explorers had counted on these high-fat, high-protein nuts to get them through the rain forest. In fact, Brazil nuts had likely saved the lives of Rondon and his men during their 1909 expedition. The almondlike nuts grow in a hard, round, wood-walled shell that holds as many as twenty-four nuts and can reach seven inches in diameter and six pounds in weight. When ripe, these shells crash to the ground like small cannonballs from the branches of the 130-foot-tall Brazil nut
tree, sometimes striking gatherers below with stunning force. So hard that they resist the blow of a hammer, Brazil nuts have been known to knock men out cold, even kill them. Roosevelt and his men, however, were in no danger from falling Brazil nuts. Mysteriously, they had found virtually none at all.

As surprising as it was to Roosevelt and the other officers, the inability of the expedition to sustain itself on fruit or nuts from the lush forest around them was not merely a reflection of bad luck, or the time of year in which they made their journey. Like their inability to find game animals, the apparent lack of fruit was also a product of millions of years of evolutionary pressure, which had refined the reproductive methods of the jungle’s plants and trees to an extraordinary level of complexity and sophistication.

In temperate forests, with their large stands of similar trees, reproduction can frequently be accomplished in fairly indiscriminate fashion. Given the large number of nearby trees of the same species, pollen can be successfully transferred to other trees of the same species by a wide range of means, from insects to the wind alone, and the dispersal of seeds can be achieved through simple methods. A downy parachute of fluff carries the seed of the cottonwood randomly upon the breeze, and the apple doesn’t need to fall far from the tree in order to achieve its reproductive mission.

In the rain forest, by contrast, the requirements for successful reproduction are much more demanding. The wide separation of trees or plants of a single species means that pollinators must be attracted very selectively, and the intense competition for every available food source means that fruits and seeds must evolve highly refined strategies of dispersal if they are to avoid being consumed or destroyed long before they reach their intended destination.

Plants and trees in the rain forest must find ways not only to attract pollinators, but to attract only those that will reliably go on to seek out other members of the same species, even if they are some distance away. For this reason, many plants and trees have “co-evolved,” or developed
highly specialized relationships, with the insects, birds, or mammals that pollinate them, creating mutual dependencies aimed at providing access for those pollinators—and keeping all others away.

Because it touches nearly every aspect of life in the rain forest, the demands of this reproductive quest were responsible for many of the bright colors and distinctive features that Roosevelt and his men could see, feel, and smell around them. Flowers that attract hummingbirds, for example, are typically red or orange in color so that they can be seen easily in daylight, and have deep throats to make it difficult for other animals to reach their nectar. Flowers that have evolved to attract some beetles smell like urine or rotting meat. Flowers that attract bats tend to be green or cream-colored, because they need to be smelled rather than seen, bloom only at night, and are frequently located on the trunk, rather than the branches of a tree, so that bats may reach them more easily.

These specialized strategies may be combined with symphonic sophistication, as in the case of the giant Victoria
amazonica
or royal water lily, whose flowers bloom, turn white, emit a strong odor, and sharply increase their temperature to attract the scarab beetles that pollinate them. When they arrive, the flower chamber closes around the feeding beetles, imprisoning them so that they become covered with pollen. Approximately twenty-four hours later, the flower changes to a red color that does not attract beetles, cools off, and releases the beetles, which then fly on, carrying the pollen to newly heated, white, fragrant lily flowers farther down the line.

The complex defense mechanisms, timing sequences, and dispersal strategies that characterize pollination in the rain forest are compounded when it comes to the fruits, seeds, and nuts that the expedition had hoped to eat during its journey down the River of Doubt. Given the high cost of producing them, such precious offspring are protected with a striking array of defenses. To ensure that it is not eaten before it is ready for dispersal, most fruit is protected by distasteful or poisonous chemical defense compounds until it is mature—a phenomenon that, in its most basic form, is familiar to
every child who has eaten an unripe apple. Fruit that is dispersed when it is eaten, moreover, frequently remains visually inconspicuous—often green—until it has developed fully enough to accomplish its evolutionary purpose. Only then does it transform itself to attract the attention of its intended distributors by turning bright-colored, fragrant, and delicious.

Even when they are mature, fruits and seeds cannot be wasted on just any hungry passerby, and have evolved to narrowly target only specific dispersers. To avoid ground-based predators, and to give access to birds and other preferred dispersers, many fruits and seedpods are produced high in the canopy, where they were out of the expedition’s sight. To ensure that fruits are not simply eaten one by one and destroyed, many plants and trees have adapted by “masting,” or producing mass fruitings at irregular intervals—a strategy that defeats the development of unwanted predators by alternately starving and overwhelming them.

For Roosevelt and his men, the evolutionary sophistication of pollination and fruit production in the rain forest resulted in a frustrating and confusing inability to glean sustenance from the plants and trees around them. As well as hinging on rainfall or other weather conditions as the men supposed, for example, the abundance or scarcity of the Brazil nuts that they so hoped to find was also the result of a delicately balanced chain of apparently unrelated factors, all of which were necessary for their production, and any one of which could have served as the underlying cause of the men’s frustration.

As would-be cultivators of the Brazil nut would later discover to their dismay, the tree’s hooded flowers have evolved to require pollination by a small group of large-bodied bees which are strong enough to pry them open. Those bees, in turn, rely for their own reproduction on a certain type of rain forest orchid, whose absence or disruption is devastating to the production of nearby Brazil nut trees. Even when a mature fruit is successfully produced, moreover, the Brazil nut’s hard casing is so effective at deterring unwanted predators that it can only
be opened and dispersed by the agouti, a small rodent with chisel-like teeth, whose presence also becomes essential to the tree’s reproductive process.