The River of Doubt (34 page)

The tension between the Brazilian and American commanders only heightened after the men finally launched their six canoes at 8:30 a.m. the following day. After traveling only six miles, the men reached a series of rapids. Everyone wearily disembarked, pulled all the provisions out of the canoes, and watched as the expedition’s three best paddlers successfully ran them through the falls. It took them only an hour to get around these rapids, but the next set they hit was so long and steep that they spent six hours carrying their baggage around them and lowering their empty canoes down by ropes. The day was lost again to the river.

After the men had set up camp at the foot of these falls, Roosevelt asked Rondon to step into his tent. Having taken a subsidiary role in the commanding of the expedition up until this point, Roosevelt decided that he could no longer simply watch over Rondon’s shoulder while the expedition slowly stumbled through the rain forest. His son’s life was at stake. With the theft of the emergency rations, the men were in even greater danger of starvation, and, as they had discovered during their six-hour portage that afternoon, they were still in Indian territory. They had found another empty village, and, the night before, Kermit had noted in his journal that he had seen several “bark stripped trees”—likely couratari trees, the type of trees that, unknown to anyone in the expedition, the Cinta Larga stripped in order to make their distinctive wide belts.

“Mr. Roosevelt asked me for a chat as he wished to give me his opinion as to how we should conduct the work of the Expedition,”
Rondon would later write of his private discussion with his co-commander. “His view was that the chiefs of undertakings of certain importance, should not occupy themselves with the details of the work to be carried out.” Roosevelt explained to Rondon that he believed that their duty lay in recording the most basic information about the river, such as its longitude, and then simply surviving the journey so that they could share with the world what they had found. After that, they should step aside and let those who would follow in their footsteps worry about the minutiae.

The point of Roosevelt’s talk with Rondon was that he wanted the Brazilian colonel to abandon the fixed-station survey for good. The principal motive behind his request, he admitted, was his son’s safety. “Kermit was extraordinarily lucky to escape alive from the accident in which Simplicio perished,” he told Rondon. “I cannot accept seeing my son’s life threatened at every moment by the presence of Indians, more than that of any other member since his canoe goes at the head of the expedition.”

Rondon had no choice but to acquiesce. “Mr. Kermit will not go farther ahead,” he told Roosevelt, and he agreed to revert to the faster method of survey. He was not happy about it, however. “The topographical survey proceeded without our being able to obtain all the benefit of the technical resources which we had at our disposal,” he later wrote. Roosevelt’s demands would prevent him from carrying out “a sufficiently exact and correct work.” Rondon would do what it took to please Roosevelt this time, but he would not—and felt that he could not—abandon his mission. He would not sacrifice his expedition even to save lives.

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, the men carefully climbed into their dugouts under the cloak of a white mist. “The day was overcast and the air was heavy with vapor,” Roosevelt would recall. “Ahead of us the shrouded river stretched between dim walls of forest, half-seen in the mist.” The landscape ahead, behind, and on either side of them was so obscured that it must have seemed as if anything could rise out of that fog, from a band of Indians to a brutal series of rapids. As the sun rose, it slowly began to burn off the vapor, “and loomed through it in a red splendor that changed first to gold and then to molten white,” Roosevelt wrote. “In the dazzling light, under the brilliant blue of the sky, every detail of the magnificent forest was vivid to the eye: the great trees, the network of bush ropes, the caverns of greenery, where thick-leaved vines covered all things else.”

As the air cleared, a dispiriting sight materialized in front of the men: a quartzite canyon that spanned the river from bank to bank and squeezed the water once again into a foaming torrent. “On all sides could be seen huge boulders hurled one over the other by the tearing
force of the current,” Rondon wrote. After all that they had endured during more than three weeks on the river, none of the men even bothered to argue that they might be able to run these rapids. They simply stopped their canoes and unloaded them in preparation for what they knew would be a long portage. While the camaradas began carrying the expedition’s baggage to the foot of the falls, Rondon searched along the left bank for a channel through which they could pass the empty canoes.

The Brazilian colonel did not find a channel, but he did find Indian huts. Immediately alerting the rest of the expedition, he ordered everyone to move to the opposite side of the river. As well as keeping the width of the river between them and the huts, and possibly the Indians themselves, the move had the advantage of putting them in the path of a quiet canal that ran along the right bank. It was an uneventful portage, but not an easy one, and by the time they finished, it was already 4:00 p.m. Most days, the men would have stopped there for the night, but even at that late hour, they felt compelled to push on. They no longer had the luxury of traveling when they wanted to, or even when it was safest. “Our position,” Cherrie wrote in his diary that night, “everyday grows more serious.”

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A
S THEY
moved through the silent forest, the men’s only constant companions were the insects that thickened the air around them. Sweat bees tickled their mouths and eyes, piums hovered over them in thick clouds, and ants and termites regularly raided their camp and devoured their few belongings. Worse even than the insects that fed on their hammocks and undershirts were those that wanted to feed on the men themselves. The barefoot camaradas were vulnerable to intestinal worms, which usually enter the body through the soles of the feet, and all of the men had to watch out for grubs and botflies. As Rondon had learned during earlier expeditions, flies, with their long, sharp ovipositors, or egg-laying organs, could easily deposit grubs into human flesh, even through clothing.

Botflies were, if possible, even more loathsome than grubs. As big as a bumblebee, a botfly can snatch a mosquito out of the air as it is flying by and paste its eggs onto the mosquito’s abdomen. The mosquito then rubs the botfly’s eggs onto a human being as it extracts his blood. As soon as the eggs hatch on the warm, wet skin, the new maggots begin to burrow into their host. A botfly maggot can be removed either by smearing petroleum jelly over its breathing tube, which discreetly protrudes from the surface of the skin, and then squeezing the maggot out after it dies, or by taping a piece of meat over the wound and waiting for it to wriggle out into its new home.

The real menace, however, came from a long-limbed, long-mouthed insect that is less than a quarter-inch long and weighs as little as a grape seed: the mosquito. By the time Roosevelt set sail for South America, it was well known that mosquitos transmit a variety of lethal diseases, including yellow fever, dengue, encephalitis, filariasis—which causes elephantiasis—and, perhaps most infamously, malaria.

Although the risk of contracting one of these diseases while in the Amazon was great, not every mosquito the men saw was a danger to them. Of the roughly twenty-five hundred different species of mosquito, very few actually feed on human blood, and of the species that do, only the females, who need the blood to help their eggs mature, practice what is known as “vampirism.” Different genera, moreover, specialize in different diseases. The genus
Aedes
carries yellow fever, dengue, and encephalitis.
Culex
is also a carrier of encephalitis but spreads filariasis as well. Only one genus, however
—Anopheles—
is known to transmit malaria.

When they were moving swiftly down the river, the men were notably unmolested by mosquitoes. In camp or in the forest during a portage, however, they not only saw mosquitoes, they could hear them. By beating their wings at a frequency of a thousand times per second, the females produce a distinctive high-pitched whine that attracts males for copulation. The best time for copulation is right before a blood meal.

Once she has found her victim, a female mosquito needs just ninety seconds to extract two or three times her weight in blood. She keeps the blood flowing by injecting a chemical that inhibits coagulation. Mosquitoes transmit this chemical through their saliva—along with any diseases that they are carrying. When the mosquito flies off, she is almost staggering under the weight of her meal, and is so slow that she is extremely vulnerable to being swatted. The man she has just injected with malaria-tainted saliva, however, is also in danger. He will certainly experience pain and discomfort; he may become too ill to walk; and if he is very unlucky or far from help, he could be dead within a month.

Malaria was the danger that Rondon’s telegraph line soldiers feared most. According to one estimate, at that time 80 to 90 percent of the people working in the Amazon had contracted malaria. Rondon was used to operating with only 75 percent of his soldiers—the other 25 percent being incapacitated by the disease. Just four years earlier, construction of the telegraph line had been forced to halt for an entire year because so many soldiers had been laid low by malaria. Even Rondon himself, who at times seemed almost immortal, had been stricken.

Having seen countless cases of malaria, Dr. Cajazeira did everything he could to protect Roosevelt, Rondon, and their men from the potentially deadly disease. He had only one effective drug in his medicine bag, however: quinine. Made from the bark of the flowering cinchona tree, quninine was introduced to Europe in the 1630s by Jesuit missionaries who had been working in South America. The alkaloid, which became known as “Jesuit powder,” was quickly adopted in the Old World, and nearly three hundred years later, when Cajazeira was administering it on the banks of the River of Doubt, it was still the best, and only, treatment for malaria.

The Brazilian doctor made sure that each of the men under his charge received half a gram of quinine each day and a double dose every third or fourth day, but neither the drug’s potency nor the doctor’s devotion to his patients was enough. The men kept getting sick.
To be truly effective as a prophylactic, quinine would have to be administered more frequently than the members of the expedition were taking it. Dr. Cajazeira could not increase the frequency, however, because of the drug’s toxic side effects, the most common being a maddening, and disabling, ringing of the ears. In extreme cases, quinine even caused deafness.

The first sign of malaria—a deep, spreading chill—begins to surface a week to two weeks after the disease takes hold. The chill quickly turns into a cold so penetrating that the body begins to shake violently and uncontrollably, in a desperate effort to warm itself. Careening from one extreme to the other, a malarial victim soon trades his chills for a raging fever that can reach 106 degrees. Instead of shaking, the patient now sweats so profusely that his clothing and bedsheets are constantly drenched. This sweat, the mirror twin of shaking, is the body’s attempt to cool itself.

Kermit was well acquainted with malaria’s most insidious quality: It returns to torment its victim, again, and again, for months and even years to come. Since contracting the disease as a child, Kermit had regularly suffered from recurrences of malaria that would drive his temperature up to 103 degrees and cause his teeth to chatter and his hands to tremble so violently that he felt he could not appear in public. Moving to South America might have been beneficial to his career, but it had been hard on his health. He had had several attacks while building railroads and bridges, and since setting off on this expedition with his father, he had fought off a near-constant fever.

Roosevelt too had fallen victim to malaria—as well as dysentery. Until the expedition reached the river, Dr. Cajazeira wrote, Roosevelt had “enjoyed the most perfect health.” After the men had launched their dugout canoes, however, the doctor had watched with deepening concern as the former president’s health began to decline.

The River of Doubt, moreover, was one of the worst places on earth to be sick. Unless they were too weak even to walk, the men had no choice but to work in order to keep the expedition moving. Shaking and sweating, they carried baggage, lowered canoes through
rapids, and cut away underbrush to set up camp. The alternating intense heat and pounding rains added to their misery, as did their festering wounds, which made them even more susceptible to disease. From the insects that fed from their bloodstreams to the parasites that teemed in their food, the rain forest was filled with creatures that had evolved to exploit every weakness or vulnerability that the men might suffer. “The very pathetic myth of ‘beneficent nature,’” Roosevelt wrote, “could not deceive even the least wise being if he once saw for himself the iron cruelty of life in the tropics.”