The River of Doubt (40 page)

By that time, the other officers had reached the scene of the murder. After Roosevelt left, Kermit and Cherrie had waited at the intermediate station until they found two camaradas who could be trusted to guard the canoes and supplies. It had taken Lyra and Rondon
nearly half an hour just to get word of Paishon’s death and to make their way back to the muddy stretch of trail between the station and the last camp. Lyra, who was still struggling to lower the canoes over the falls, had heard about the tragedy first and had sent a camarada to tell Rondon. After instructing his men to continue their work cutting a path along the cliff face, the Brazilian commander had left immediately. The four men finally met on the forest trail, gathering around Paishon’s body.

Rondon had seen many dead men during the quarter-century that he had spent in the Amazon. He had watched them in their death throes, unable to help as they writhed in agony with a poisoned arrow in their chest, burned with fever until they fell into a disease-induced coma, or withered away from starvation. But he had never before seen one of his own men kill another out of pure hatred. When he looked down at Paishon, he saw senseless death, a wasted life, a sacrifice that had gained nothing for the telegraph commission’s greater mission, or even for this single expedition. The murder sparked a deep-seated outrage in Rondon. Despite his great discipline, the Brazilian colonel was, Kermit would later write in his diary, “in a blind rage to kill” Julio.

As Rondon would later describe the strange events of that day, however, it was his hot-blooded American co-commander, not he, who demanded an eye for an eye. After finding Paishon, the four officers walked back to camp looking for Roosevelt. “When I met him,” Rondon later recalled, “he was very pent up.” “Julio has to be tracked, arrested and killed,” Roosevelt barked when he saw Rondon. “In Brazil, that is impossible,” Rondon answered. “When someone commits a crime, he is tried, not murdered.” Roosevelt was not convinced. “He who kills must die,” he said. “That’s the way it is in my country.”

If they found Julio, Rondon argued, they should apply the laws of the Brazilian government, not wilderness justice. Rondon believed, his faithful friend and soldier Amilcar would later explain, “that the evil doer should be taken in and fed, demanding that he would work in return for the food he was entitled to, although he would still be a prisoner
awaiting contact with the civilized world in order to eventually be duly tried.” Ever the pragmatist, however, Roosevelt thought that it would be folly to subject themselves to a dangerous man and to ask their camaradas to share their scarce rations with a thief and murderer.

As they argued, Roosevelt and Rondon were literally handed a quick if temporary resolution to their situation—in the form of the .44-caliber Winchester rifle that Julio had used to kill Paishon. Although Rondon had doubted that Julio could be found in the tangle of trees and vines that flanked the trail, he had sent two men, Antonio Correia and Antonio Pareci, to search for him. The two camaradas found the spot at which Julio had fled into the jungle, and quickly disappeared from sight. Moments later, the officers heard a cry of surprise, and Antonio Correia stepped back onto the trail holding the murder weapon in his dirt-streaked hands.

Julio, they realized with great relief, had lost his rifle as he fought his way through the thick vegetation. “Perhaps hearing someone coming along the path, he fled in panic terror into the wilderness,” Roosevelt speculated. “A tree had knocked the carbine from his hand.” Broken branches and matted leaves told them that Julio had doubled back to retrieve the rifle but then must have been frightened away by the voices of the other men as they discovered Paishon’s body. “His murderous hatred had once again given way to his innate cowardice,” Roosevelt wrote with contempt.

Now that they knew Julio was unarmed, Roosevelt and Rondon’s desperation to find him—whether to kill him or to imprison him—was defused, at least for the moment, and they could finally turn their thoughts to Paishon. Someone had laid a handkerchief over the dead camarada’s face, but it was still hard for them to believe that, as Roosevelt wrote, “the poor body which but half an hour before had been so full of vigorous life” would never move again. When they had lost Simplicio more than two weeks earlier, the men had been deeply saddened, but Paishon’s death was an even greater blow. They had never found Simplicio’s body, and somehow that had made his death
seem less real, less immediate. The sight of Paishon’s broken body, however, would stay with them, a painful reminder of the violence and tragedy that they had witnessed that day.

All that the men could do for Paishon now was give him as dignified a burial as they could manage. Rondon announced that he would name the falls and the mountains that surrounded them Paishon, as they had had “the bad destiny of being [the] indirect cause and theater” of the young man’s murder. He decided to bury his camarada where he had died, “with his head towards the mountain and his feet towards the river.”

The principal obstacle to Rondon’s plan was that, having already abandoned most of their tools, the men did not have any shovels with which to dig a grave. While the officers stood watching, their hats removed, the camaradas used knives, axes, and their own hands to claw back the wet earth. When they finished, Roosevelt and Rondon “reverently and carefully” picked up Paishon’s shoulders while Lyra, Kermit, Cherrie, and Dr. Cajazeira supported his back and legs. Together they laid the blood-soaked body in its shallow grave, heaped a low mound over it, placed a rude cross at the head, and fired a volley in Paishon’s honor. “Then we left him forever,” Roosevelt wrote, “under the great trees beside the lonely river.”

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A
LTHOUGH FINDING
Julio’s gun had eased their minds, it did not ensure their safety. With nowhere to go and nothing to lose, Julio would likely try to steal another gun or, at the very least, provisions from the expedition. If he was still feeling angry and vindictive, he could damage their dugout canoes or even try to kill them by pushing boulders over the cliff’s edge while they were working on or near the river. Until they passed these rapids, moreover, the men would still be scattered across the gorge. In an effort to protect themselves and their cargo and canoes, they posted guards wherever they could. One man was stationed at each of the two camps, and another was assigned to follow the camaradas as they completed the baggage carry. Cherrie
himself guarded Lyra, Kermit, and their men as they lowered the rest of the canoes over the falls.

Despite a determined struggle, the men were able to move only part of their baggage and two of their four canoes to the bottom of the falls before darkness fell. Since they could not risk losing any of their dugouts or even the smallest box of provisions, they would have to divide the party overnight, the first time they had had to do so since their expedition had begun. Some of the men slept at the head of the rapids that night, while the rest swung their hammocks between a clutch of trees that had somehow grown up among the boulders that littered a narrow strip of land at the bottom of the cliff.

That night, as they helped Roosevelt struggle to reach the new camp, the men were struck anew by how sick he was. With the excitement and outrage of the murder circulating in his veins, the former president’s urgent determination to take action had temporarily prevailed over the effects of his illness. As his chest heaved with each step up the steep side of the gorge to the new camp, however, it was painfully apparent to them all that he had lost the vitality that had awed them at the outset of their overland journey not even three months earlier. “At 5:30 p.m. Mr. Roosevelt arrived breathless with the great effort which he had made to climb up the slopes of the rocky mountain,” Rondon noted. “That violent exercise was too excessive for his state of health and made him suffer very much.”

Roosevelt’s heart worried them now as much as his infected leg. For the past few days, the man who had torn through every backwoods he could find, from Oyster Bay to Maine to Washington, D.C.’s wild Rock Creek Park, could hobble only a few steps before becoming utterly exhausted. A few days earlier, on a downhill walk with Roosevelt from one camp to the next, Cherrie had been shocked by his friend’s rapid and severe decline. “As he and I went down the trail to our camp at the foot of the rapids, his heart was so affected that frequently he had to sit down and rest,” Cherrie wrote. “He was evidently in great pain because three or four times he threw himself on the ground and begged me to go on.”

Kermit was acutely aware of his father’s serious condition, writing in his diary the day before the murder that he “worried a lot about F’s [Father’s] heart.” His concern was rivaled by Cherrie’s. The respect that the American naturalist had long held for Roosevelt had deepened over the past few months into a brotherly affection, and he was as determined to bring him out of the Amazon alive as he was to get himself out. With each passing day, however, that goal seemed increasingly unreachable. “There were a good many days, a good many mornings when I looked at Colonel Roosevelt and said to myself, he won’t be with us tonight,” Cherrie wrote. “And I would say the same thing in the evening, he can’t possibly live until morning.”

It was Roosevelt’s earlier, although aborted, decision to take his own life as much as his rapidly deteriorating health that kept Cherrie awake at night. Cherrie had already lived through a friend’s suicide, and he would never forget it, or his role in it. While on an earlier expedition, one of his campmates had approached him looking pale and drawn but, the naturalist recalled, “with the fire of decision burning in his eyes.” “Cherrie, lend me your revolver,” the man had said. “What are you going to do with it?” Cherrie had asked. The answer had been quick and blunt: “Shoot myself.” “I thought: is he desperate?” Cherrie later wrote. “Hysterical? Ill? Temporarily demented? I talked with him for a few moments; not going into details, but probing the soundness of his state of mind. Then I took the gun from its holster and handed it over. He killed himself that day.”

Kermit and Cherrie were not the only members of the expedition to worry about Roosevelt. Dr. Cajazeira, although he had his hands full administering prophylactics and treating all of the expedition’s nineteen men (including himself) for a wide variety of ailments, had begun to spend most of his days and nights hovering over his American commander. So closely did he watch Roosevelt that, in his official report, he dedicated an entire chapter to “Colonel Roosevelt’s Health Status.” On the afternoon of April 4, as the rest of the men tried to finish bringing down the last two canoes and the remainder of the provisions, Cajazeira and Roosevelt stayed behind at the camp. At
about 2:30 p.m., while the two men were talking quietly, the doctor suddenly noticed that all of the color had drained from his patient’s face and that he had begun to shiver uncontrollably. Cajazeira took Roosevelt’s temperature and found that it was rising rapidly. Covering him as well as he could, he gave him another half-gram of quinine to swallow, “since by that time we were already deprived of almost everything including medications,” he wrote in frustration.

Cajazeira wanted to move Roosevelt to a better camp than the makeshift one that they had set up amid the boulders the night before. He waited impatiently until the men finally finished the portage and, at 5:00 p.m., reloaded the canoes—with Roosevelt, Rondon, and Cajazeira riding in the largest—and were ready to set off downriver in search of a new campsite for the night.

As an added precaution, in case Julio was still lurking about, the men decided to cross the river to the right bank. They had no sooner launched their four dugouts, however, than it began to rain. The downpour was the hardest they had had in several days, and it flooded forest and river, “drenching most of us to the skin,” Cherrie wrote in his diary that night. Cajazeira wrapped Roosevelt in his waterproof poncho, but the men had no way to fit their rough canoes with awnings. By the time they crossed the river and found another campsite, half an hour later, Roosevelt’s temperature had skyrocketed to 103 degrees, and he was, in Cajazeira’s words, “restless and delirious.”

Roosevelt’s condition continued to deteriorate at such a fast rate that Cajazeira began to inject quinine directly into his abdomen. Every six hours, the doctor would open his wooden medical box, which was covered with a spotted animal skin and swung on a heavy hinge, pull out his silver syringe, and give his patient another half-gram injection. Despite all his efforts, however, Roosevelt’s fever stubbornly refused to abate, his temperature falling by “only a few fractions of a degree,” Cajazeira noted with dismay.

That night, while the camaradas lay wound up in their cocoonlike
hammocks under dripping palm leaves and a black sky, the officers took turns watching over Roosevelt in their tiny, thin-walled tent. As his temperature once again began to rise sharply, Roosevelt fell into a trancelike state, and he began to recite over and over the opening lines to Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s rhythmic poem “Kubla Khan”: “In Xanadu did Kubla Khan a stately pleasure-dome decree. In Xanadu did Kubla Khan a stately pleasure-dome decree. In Xanadu . . .”

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S THE
night wore on, Roosevelt slipped in and out of consciousness. One moment he was looking directly at Kermit and asking him if he thought that Cherrie had eaten enough to keep going, and the next he had forgotten his son’s presence entirely and was feverishly murmuring to himself, “I can’t work now, so I don’t need much food, but he and Cherrie have worked all day with the canoes, they must have part of mine.” While Kermit tried to calm and reassure his father, he felt a soft tap on his shoulder and turned to find Cajazeira, who had pulled himself out of a deep sleep to relieve the young man.

At about 2:00 a.m., Rondon, in turn, relieved Cajazeira, taking his place next to Roosevelt’s sagging cot. Although still determined to fight to the last for Kermit’s sake, Roosevelt, in his few lucid moments that night, realized that he was so sick he might not be able to keep the promise he had made to himself and his son. He wanted one thing from Rondon now: reassurance that, if he fell into a coma, his co-commander would do the right thing and keep going. Glassy-eyed and bathed in sweat, Roosevelt turned to Rondon and said, “The expedition must not stop. . .. Go, and leave me here.”