The River of Doubt (39 page)

It took four days, but the expedition’s men, baggage, and canoes finally emerged from the northern end of the canyon on April 1. Although this extraordinary achievement had likely saved their lives, there were no celebrations in the camp that night. The men were too exhausted and sick, and they had not escaped from the canyon unscathed. On the third day of the portage, Kermit and Lyra, in spite of
all that they had done to protect their precious cargo, had watched helplessly as one of their dugouts had slipped from its rope and was smashed among the rocks on the river’s bottom.

To add to the men’s unhappiness on their first night beyond the gorge, the heavens opened, and they were swept up in a rainstorm that was so punishing that even Rondon referred to it as “tempestuous.” It rained so hard that the canvas awnings that the men had rigged up collapsed under the weight of the water, and they feared that their remaining five canoes would be swamped. The storm even drove rain under the officers’ tent, drenching Roosevelt as he lay on his cot, his fever raging.

The men began the next day, April 2, more exhausted than they had ever been, following four days of a perilous portage and a terrible night’s sleep. Although they looked forward to their return to the river, it brought with it little opportunity for rest. With only five canoes, everyone but Roosevelt and the paddlers had to walk. After less than two miles, moreover, the expedition reached yet another steep-sided canyon. “Instead of getting out of the hills at once as we hoped to do,” Cherrie despaired, “we are deeper in among them!”

By that point, the men had been fighting rapids for a month straight since they had heard the river’s first roar on March 2. During that month, they had made only sixty-eight miles and descended nearly five hundred feet. Worse than this portage, or even the last, was the probability that countless more awaited them downstream. “No one can tell how many times the task will have to be repeated, or when it will end, or whether the food will hold out,” Roosevelt wrote. “Every hour of work in the rapids is fraught with the possibility of the gravest disaster, and yet it is imperatively necessary to attempt it; . . . failure to get through means death by disease or starvation.”

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T
HE BRUTAL
job of getting through and around the rapids had begun to destroy what remained not only of the camaradas’ health but also of their hope. Each new series of rapids reminded them of their
drowned companion, Simplicio, and each portage held the threat of snake or Indian attack and the promise of heartbreaking toil. So dejected were the camaradas that they began asking the officers if they really believed that they would ever get out of the jungle alive. The officers were as frightened and unsure as their men, but felt obliged to put on a brave face. “We had to cheer them up as best we could,” Roosevelt wrote.

From the beginning of the expedition, Roosevelt had worried about the camaradas, and done what he could to bolster their spirits. “In the weeks of trying hardships when the fates seemed all against us, despite the fever and dysentery that were sapping his strength, he never failed, day after day, to make inquiry about his camp companions including the canoemen and camp helpers,” Cherrie wrote of Roosevelt. Early on, Roosevelt had begun giving the camaradas chocolate bars at noon from his meager supply. The men treasured this treat so much that, instead of immediately devouring it, they would hoard it until 3:00 p.m., when they would make it into a mid-afternoon meal. “It was a strange form of food for the Brazilian interior, and was especially enjoyed by the laborers,” Rondon wrote. “Those little daily acts of thoughtfulness were much appreciated and the men soon loved him.”

Now that their food supplies were so low and their chances for survival worsening, the ailing Roosevelt did more than give the camaradas chocolate. He began to give them his own share of rations. When Kermit and Cherrie realized what he was doing and protested, Roosevelt simply replied, “I can’t do anything to help and they need the food.” “We had to watch him constantly,” Cherrie wrote. It “reached the point where if he didn’t eat all of his share either Kermit or I would take what was left and guard it until a later meal. We had so very little that every mouthful counted.”

By this point in the expedition, many of the camaradas had become visibly depressed, and the officers worried about their sullen attitudes and deteriorating morale. “A sense of gloom pervaded the camp,” Cherrie wrote. On March 30, Kermit had written in his diary
that the men were “very disheartened.” Rondon insisted that they were still in good spirits, but even he had to admit that the rapids were causing “considerable suffering to our men” and that, with very few exceptions, they had “broken down.”

The officers knew that frightened and unhappy men were not only hard to motivate but potentially dangerous. Outnumbering the officers by more than two to one, and with no possibility of outside interference, the camaradas could easily wrest control of the expedition from their commanders. Rondon had fought against mutiny and its precursors—fear and frustration—his entire career. He knew its signs, and he knew that this expedition had all the right ingredients for it.

Cherrie too had had enough experience with disgruntled camaradas to be wary of them. During an earlier expedition, a man he had dismissed from his team of guides had tried to kill him. In an exchange of gunfire, Cherrie had ended up killing the man instead, but not before being seriously wounded. He had nearly bled to death trying to get to help, and he would never again have complete use of one of his arms.

The officers on the River of Doubt were fortunate. With very few exceptions, their camaradas were good, decent, and trustworthy men. As the weeks had passed, however, and their situation had steadily worsened, they had grown increasingly desperate. “Under such conditions,” Roosevelt wrote, “whatever is evil in men’s natures comes to the front.”

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T
HE MEN
awoke on the morning of April 3 with little hope for an easy or successful day. Their plan for getting the dugouts through the second gorge consisted of three distinct, and progressively more grueling, stages. The first stage involved running the empty boats down the river as far as they could safely take them. When the river became too rough, they would lower the canoes over the rapids by ropes. Then, at the point at which the ground began to level, they would
slash a trail through the forest, chop down trees for a corduroy road, and haul the dugouts along the bank to the mouth of the gorge.

Disaster struck almost immediately, during the first and easiest stage of the plan. While Antonio Correia and another camarada were steering one of the canoes down the river, they suddenly lost control and found themselves being swept toward the rapids. They desperately grasped at the branches and vines that looped over the bank, but the current was too strong, and the branches simply snapped in their hands. Realizing that they were about to be hurled into the rapids, the two men finally dived into the rushing river and watched as the dugout was, in Cherrie’s words, “whirled out of their hands to be crushed to splinters in the whirlpools and rapids below.” Their expedition was left once again with only four dugouts, two of which they had built themselves.

Adding to the men’s already overwhelming feeling of isolation and vulnerability, the work of pushing past the rapids obliged them to be scattered from one end of the canyon to the other. While Lyra and his men were at the river’s edge, cutting away undergrowth so that the canoes could be let down the falls, Rondon had assembled a team to carve a trail along the face of the cliff to the foot of the rapids. The rest of the camaradas, under Paishon’s direction, were carrying the baggage to an intermediate station above the falls, where Kermit and Cherrie were waiting to assemble the supplies.

Only one man, a trusted and valued camarada named Pedrinho, remained behind at the previous night’s camp in order to guard the cargo as it was slowly carted off. Early that morning, as the camaradas filed by in their dirty, tattered clothes, picking up boxes and hefting them onto their tired shoulders, Pedrinho noticed some suspicious activity. Stepping forward, he surprised Julio de Lima as the muscular camarada was once again slipping some food out of one of the ration tins. This time, he was taking dried meat, a particularly rare and treasured commodity, and Pedrinho immediately reported the theft to Paishon.

Paishon was enraged to hear that the camarada had been caught
stealing food once again. As serious as the theft was, however, there were few available options for punishment beyond a harsh rebuke. They had too much work to do to sacrifice one of the expedition’s healthiest men to any sort of imprisonment. Soon after the theft, both Paishon and Julio returned to their places in the line of baggage carriers, and Pedrinho resumed his duties as camp guard.

It was not long before Julio raised Paishon’s ire again. As the other men hauled their heavy loads up the steep hillside, Paishon reprimanded Julio for not pulling his weight. At the intermediate station, Kermit and Cherrie were waiting with the ailing Roosevelt, and all three men were attempting to distract themselves by reading, when Julio appeared, groaning under the weight of his load and muttering to himself as he shuffled forward. When he heard Julio approach, Cherrie looked up and joked to Roosevelt and Kermit, “One would know who that was by the groans.” The two Roosevelts both gave a short laugh of acknowledgment and returned to their books.

After Julio had set down his cargo, Cherrie happened to look up and see the camarada walk over to a group of rifles, which were leaning against a tree, and pick up a carbine. The camaradas often carried rifles with them in case they saw game, so Cherrie did not give much thought to Julio’s action, other than to remark to Kermit and Roosevelt that Julio must have seen a monkey or bird near the trail.

Only a few minutes after Julio had disappeared, the three Americans heard the unmistakable crack of the carbine going off. “I wonder what he has shot at?” Roosevelt said, rousing himself from his illness. He, Kermit, and Cherrie began to speculate, hoping that, if Julio’s shot had found its mark, whatever he hit would be fit for dinner. No sooner had they started savoring the prospect of a good meal, however, than they saw three camaradas running toward them up the trail.

The men’s voices reached them in a breathless panic.
“Julio mato Paishon!”
they shouted in Portuguese. “Julio has killed Paishon!”

A
S NEWS OF THE MURDER
spread across the stone canyon, the members of the expedition froze in fearful expectation, their ears primed to hear another rifle shot ring through the trees. No one believed that Paishon was Julio’s only target. They were certain that the volatile camarada had snapped under the pressures and hardships of the expedition and gone on a killing spree. “We all felt that Julio had run amuck and had probably determined to kill as many of us as he could,” Cherrie wrote. Several minutes passed, however, and the men heard nothing more. The forest’s heavy silence in the wake of the single shot was more sinister than a fusillade, threatening to break at any moment, and from any direction.

At the intermediate station, the Americans realized that the silence might mean that Julio was making his way back to the last camp, and his next victim: Pedrinho. The guard who had caught Julio stealing food earlier in the day was not only unaware of the murder, but also alone and unarmed. Roosevelt’s health had continued to deteriorate since his accident a week earlier, but, despite his physical frailty, the murder of one innocent man and the imminent threat to another triggered
in him a lifelong instinct for action. To Kermit and Cherrie’s dismay, Roosevelt suddenly pulled himself to his feet and lunged for the same group of rifles from which Julio had taken his murder weapon just minutes earlier. Ordering his son and the naturalist to guard the canoes and supplies, he set off to warn Pedrinho, a rifle clenched in his hand. “Before we could stop him he had started down the path where Julio had disappeared,” Cherrie wrote. “Without hesitation he himself chose to go back over a trail on which the murderer might be concealed.”

Roosevelt—followed closely by Dr. Cajazeira, who had raced after him with a revolver at his side—did not get very far before he found Paishon. The young man lay facedown near an abandoned pile of baggage, his lifeless body crumpled and still, a pool of blood slowly spreading beneath him. Julio had shot Paishon straight through the heart, and he had dropped dead on the spot, pitching forward until he slammed into the soft forest floor like a felled tree. “The murderer,” Roosevelt determined, “had stood to one side of the path and killed his victim, when a dozen paces off, with deliberate and malignant purpose.”

Now that he had seen with his own eyes what Julio was capable of, Roosevelt’s concern for Pedrinho and sense of urgency redoubled. Struggling on with his infected leg, he pushed past Paishon’s body and continued to make his way to the last camp, searching for any signs of Julio. When they finally reached the camp, Cajazeira swiftly and silently stepped in front of Roosevelt. “My eyes are better than yours, colonel,” he said. “If he is in sight I’ll point him out to you, as you have the rifle.” Julio, however, was nowhere to be seen. Pedrinho was unharmed, but the murderer had disappeared. They realized that he must be hiding somewhere in the forest, probably not far from where he had shot Paishon.