The River of Doubt (36 page)

Increasingly, it appeared to all of the officers that their provisions would indeed run out. They had already eaten half their rations, and they had traveled little more than a hundred miles. Rondon’s meticulous charting—including the measurements Lyra had taken while Rondon purposely slowed the boat building—told them that they probably had three or four times that distance yet to go. They were traveling so slowly, and consuming their rations so quickly, that Cherrie estimated they did not have enough food left to last them more than twenty-five days.

*  *  *

O
N THE
day after the men’s wilderness “feast,” they had paddled less than two miles when they reached the steep hills that they had seen from afar several days earlier. The hills were “beautiful to look upon, clad as they were in dense, tall, tropical forest,” Roosevelt wrote, “but ominous of new rapids.” Those new rapids appeared just minutes later, and the men were forced once again to pull over in preparation for a long portage. They decided to carry their baggage and risk running the empty dugouts through the rapids, in an attempt to save time and avoid the onerous work of hauling the boats through the forest.

All of the cargo had been transferred to the foot of the rapids, and most of the dugouts had been successfully run through, when their tightly choreographed portage suddenly unraveled. Cherrie had wandered away from the rest of the men and was watching from the foot of the rapids as the three paddlers struggled with Roosevelt’s balsa, the expedition’s largest. They were trying to guide it through the same channel that they had used for the other dugouts, but the channel was too narrow for the large balsa, and it made a treacherously sharp turn right near the rocky shore. “In trying to make the turn,” Cherrie would later write in his diary, “the inside boat caught on the rocks and also against some bejucas [vines] and tree trunks. In the twinkling of an eye the current had wrenched the outer boat loose, driven it under the prow of the inside boat that was thrown on its side, both filled with water and sank.”

The two boats were pinned against a grouping of boulders, the racing current, and each other, and the three camaradas alone could never have moved them. The power of the current was such that it might eventually dislodge the canoes, but if that happened, they would be catapulted downstream, where they would be smashed to pieces on the jutting rocks. Cherrie heard the camaradas yelling for help and rushed to their side to lend his strength. He quickly realized, however, that they would need every member of the expedition if they
ever hoped to free the dugouts. Pulling himself out of the water, he ran to where the rest of the men were waiting, and sounded the alarm.

Terrified of losing two more canoes, the men all ran to help. Roosevelt was the first man in. “His rushing into the water to assist was entirely characteristic of him,” Cherrie would later write. “And he did this after many days of suffering from fever which had weakened his vitality. He could not stand idly watching others at a time when action was required.” Yet even Cherrie did not understand how great a risk Roosevelt was taking each time he dived into the roiling river.

For the past twelve years, Roosevelt had had only one strong leg—his right. After a trolley-car accident in 1902 had nearly crushed his left leg, he had been told that even the slightest injury to that leg could be dangerous, costing him part of the leg or, if left untreated, possibly even his life. Six years later, while he was riding his horse around Oyster Bay, a branch had hit him on the shin. Even that slight rap had caused an inflammation that, Roosevelt wrote, “had grown so serious . . . that Doctor Rixey had to hastily take it in hand.” For a while, the White House doctor had thought that he might have to operate on Roosevelt’s leg, but he had been able to check the inflammation before it advanced that far.

On the River of Doubt, Dr. Cajazeira did not have anything close to the medical resources that Dr. Rixey had had access to in the White House. If Roosevelt reinjured his left leg, Cajazeira might be forced to attempt an operation in the rain forest that Rixey had been loath to perform in one of the best hospitals in the United States. If Roosevelt hurt his right leg, he would find himself all but paralyzed on an expedition that demanded long hikes over difficult terrain and through dense forest. Both of his legs would be uniquely vulnerable to injury and infection in the steaming jungle.

Although the water level had fallen over the past few days, it was still deep enough to reach up to the men’s armpits as they strove to reach the swamped canoes, slipping over moss-wrapped rocks and
stumbling on the river’s sharply uneven bed. When they reached the balsa, they used axes to cut away the ropes that had bound it. Kermit and six other men stripped down to the skin and swam to an island in the small series of falls just above the trapped canoes, from where they lowered a rope. Roosevelt and the rest of the men used all the strength they had left to wrench the canoes free and secure them to the rope, so that Kermit and his team could drag them up to the island.

As the river roared darkly around him, making it almost impossible to keep his balance, Roosevelt suddenly slipped, striking his right shin against the sharp edge of a rock. Blood spun out of the wound like an unraveling spool of thread, mixing with the muddy water and disappearing downstream. Roosevelt immediately realized the gravity of this seemingly minor injury as he pulled himself out of the river and quietly limped back to camp, blood beginning to mat the hairs on his leg under his one remaining pair of pants.

For Roosevelt, in a dripping rain forest where every muddy step throbbed with bacteria, parasites, and disease-carrying insects, this injury was potentially fatal. “From that time on,” Cherrie wrote, “he was a very sick man.”

*  *  *

W
HEN THE
men had finally rescued the sunken dugouts and were ready to start back down the river, they were buffeted by a rainstorm. For the next three or four hours, the rain fell in such heavy sheets that the men could not even see across the river. It was 4:00 p.m. before it slowed enough for them to resume their journey. Just ten minutes later, however, they reached another sinister-looking series of rapids, and were left with no choice but to make camp in the rain. Trying to help a limping, quickly weakening Roosevelt, while fumbling with their waterlogged dugouts, rain-drenched bags, and the officers’ two slick tents, the men moved as fast as they could, but they could not protect themselves, or their injured commander, from the deluge. “Practically everything we had was soaked,” Cherrie wrote. “And our camp was a dreary one.”

On the morning of the 28th, the men left camp early, but they were on the river for less than a mile when they were stopped by the rapids that they had seen the day before. While Rondon, Lyra, Kermit, and Antonio Correia hiked ahead to find out just what awaited them downstream, Cherrie and Dr. Cajazeira watched over Roosevelt. But even their careful attention could not halt the consequences of his injury. Although only one night had passed since he had crushed his leg, an infection had already begun to bubble in the wound, and his temperature had spiked in a sudden attack of malaria. The result was a transformation as startling as it was ominous. After only a few hours away from camp, Kermit returned to find that his father’s condition had worsened dramatically, changing the ex-president from an injured but able man to an invalid scarcely able to rise from his cot.

As Roosevelt’s conditioned swiftly deteriorated, so did the expedition’s. After fighting their way along the river’s edge for about a mile of what Kermit termed “miserable going,” the men who were scouting ahead of the expedition came to a gorge that was so tall and steep that the sheer cliffs that bordered the river seemed to lunge toward each other, squeezing the water through a narrow passage. Within this gorge, which was more than a mile long, the men found a series of six waterfalls, each larger and more treacherous than the last. The final fall was more than thirty feet high.

It was immediately apparent that the expedition’s awkward dugout canoes could never survive these falls, even empty. The only way around them would be for the camaradas to build a corduroy road and portage everything, from cargo to canoes. When the four men studied the surrounding land, however, they discovered that it would be almost impossible to carry even their baggage around the falls, much less haul the massive dugouts. The gorge, Rondon realized, had been carved from hornfels, a hard, fine-grained, and slippery stone. There was no way, he told the men who were standing dejectedly at his side, that they could carry the canoes over the steep, jagged, and rocky pass.

When they returned to camp, Rondon assembled the weary and
frightened men in front of him and explained the situation in blunt, unemotional terms. Cherrie wrote that he would never forget the expression on Rondon’s face as he delivered the crushing news: “We shall have to abandon our canoes and every man fight for himself through the forest.” Cherrie was as incredulous as the camaradas. “To all of us his report was practically a sentence of death,” the naturalist wrote.

Unless they stayed close to the river’s steep and heavily forested edge, they would not be able to find their way out of the jungle. The thought of losing their way terrified even the most hardened and experienced men among them. In the mid-twentieth century, the Polish explorer and writer Arkady Fiedler wrote of the dangers of becoming lost in the Amazon. “Many cases have been known of travelers and explorers returning from its green labyrinth to become chronic patients of sanatoria, or even not returning at all,” he wrote. “They have simply disappeared in the forest like stones in water. The jungle is jealous and voracious. . .. Of all the possible deaths man can die in the jungle, the most dreaded is that which results from being lost.”

Cherrie and Kermit’s greatest concern, however, was for Roosevelt. As devastating as it was for the other men, the idea of abandoning the canoes meant certain death for Roosevelt, and he knew it. Cherrie wrote that, although Roosevelt did not “utter a word of complaint” when he heard Rondon’s decision, “the effect of Rondon’s report on him, with his feeling of keen responsibility to us all,” immediately caused Cherrie to fear what the ex-president might do in response.

*  *  *

O
NE OF
Roosevelt’s most entrenched beliefs, as a cowboy, a hunter, a soldier, and an explorer, was that the health of one man should never endanger the lives of the rest of the men in his expedition. Roosevelt had unflinchingly cast off even good friends like Father Zahm when it became clear that they could no longer pull their own weight or were simply not healthy enough to endure the physical demands of the
journey. “No man has any business to go on such a trip as ours unless he will refuse to jeopardize the welfare of his associates by any delay caused by a weakness or ailment of his,” he wrote. “It is his duty to go forward, if necessary on all fours, until he drops.”

Roosevelt had always applied this wilderness law more strictly to himself than to anyone else. When he was a rancher in the Dakota Territories, he had had several painful accidents, once smashing his rib on a stone when he was bucked off his horse, and another time cracking the point of his shoulder when a “big, sulky” horse named Ben Butler flipped over backward while Roosevelt was still riding him. Every time he had been hurt, Roosevelt had forced himself to go on. “We were hundreds of miles from a doctor, and each time, as I was on the round-up, I had to get through my work for the next few weeks as best I could, until the injury healed of itself,” he had written.

Roosevelt had even held himself to these unyielding standards after Schrank, the would-be assassin, shot him in Milwaukee. Few men would have even considered giving a speech with a bullet in their chest. Roosevelt had insisted on it. This was an approach to life, and death, that he had developed many years earlier, when living with cowboys and soldiers. “Both the men of my regiment and the friends I had made in the old days in the West were themselves a little puzzled at the interest shown in my making my speech after being shot,” he wrote. “This was what they expected, what they accepted as the right thing for a man to do under the circumstances, a thing the nonperformance of which would have been discreditable rather than the performance being creditable.”

Roosevelt had never allowed himself to fear death, famously writing, “Only those are fit to live who do not fear to die.” From a very young age, he had been prepared to die in order to live the life he wanted. When a doctor at Harvard told him that his heart was weak and would not hold out for more than a few years unless he lived quietly, he had replied that he preferred an early death to a sedentary life. After the Spanish-American War, he had written his friend Henry
Cabot Lodge that, although he was then only thirty-nine years old, he was “quite content to go now. . .. I am more than satisfied even though I die of yellow fever tomorrow.”

Driven in part by his father’s decision to pay another man to fight for him in the Civil War, Roosevelt had a passion for military combat that, to a large degree, had shaped his adult life. “I had always felt that if there were a serious war I wished to be in a position to explain to my children why I did take part in it, and not why I did not take part in it,” he had written in his autobiography just months before heading to South America. Many of Roosevelt’s friends, however, suspected that he wanted not only to fight in a war, but to die in one. “The truth is, he believes in war and wishes to be a Napoleon and to die on the battle field,” former President William Howard Taft had written of his estranged friend. “He has the spirit of the old berserkers.”

There was no question that Roosevelt considered the descent of the River of Doubt to be a great cause—a cause that was, like war, worth dying for. To John Barrett, the former director general of the Pan-American Union, he wrote, “If I had to die anywhere, why not die in helping to open up to the knowledge of the world a great unknown land and so aid humanity in general and the people of Brazil in particular?” Roosevelt had also terrorized Henry Fairfield Osborn, the president of the American Museum of Natural History, under whose auspices he was traveling, with his assurances that, if necessary, he was “quite ready” to leave his bones in South America.