The River of Doubt (43 page)

Kermit too found in his few remaining books some measure of escape from the monotony of the rain forest, but not from its dangers. On April 11, he finished reading
A Retirada da Laguna
by the Brazilian novelist Visconde de Taunay. The book revolved around Taunay’s impressions of the War of the Triple Alliance, the five-year conflict that had devastated Paraguay and orphaned Rondon. Every time Kermit picked up the book, rather than being spirited away to some other world, he was reminded, in vivid, nightmarish detail, of the ravages of starvation and the consequences of stumbling into the unknown. The book was, he wrote in his diary that night, “a wonderful account but not cheering to read with our own provisions so low, and no knowledge of what’s ahead of us.”

More effective than books for Kermit, although in even shorter supply, was a bottle of Scotch that he and Cherrie shared when, in Cherrie’s words, they “felt the need of spiritual help.” The two men
had actually started out with three bottles, but since they had taken “quite generous drinks,” the first bottle had quickly disappeared. They were more conservative with the second bottle, but soon it too was gone. With only one bottle left and a seemingly endless river before them, Kermit and Cherrie treated the whiskey they had left with great care. “When we got the third bottle out on the first night,” Cherrie would later recall, “we held it up and took a pencil and marked off: this is the 10th, the 11th, the 12th, 13th, 14th, 15th,—marked off the amount we could take from that. . .. You can imagine the marks were close together on the bottle.”

*  *  *

L
IKE
K
ERMIT
with his books, Cherrie enjoyed his whiskey but found little relaxation in it. With each passing day, the naturalist grew increasingly worried about the expedition, and he bristled at every decision that seemed to him to endanger it further. He continued to blame Rondon for most of the expedition’s woes, venting his fury in the pages of his journal at night. But even Cherrie’s friends were not exempt from his criticism. On April 11, the day after Trigueiro had leapt from Kermit’s canoe and disappeared into the jungle, Cherrie was appalled to learn that the expedition was stopping so that they could send two men back up the river to search for Kermit’s dog. “Personally I feel this was a great mistake on Col. Roosevelt’s and Kermit’s part, when we are so anxious to get ahead,” Cherrie wrote. His disapproval only deepened as the day wore on and the men did not return. Finally, at almost 5:00 p.m., the camaradas stepped into camp with Trigueiro at their side.

An entire day had been lost to searching for Kermit’s pet. The camaradas must have wondered what kind of people go to such lengths to rescue a dog but intentionally abandon a man to certain death in the wilderness. Cherrie simply thought that it was a waste of precious time and, more important, that it sent the wrong message to Rondon about their willingness to linger in the rain forest. “A precedence is established of which our companions will doubtless avail themselves
when again they may wish to stop for a day or part of a day!” he complained in his diary.

By the end of the day, however, the delay had also yielded a piece of exceptionally good news. While waiting for the two searchers to return with Trigueiro, Luiz Correia had taken one of the dugout canoes and gone fishing along the opposite side of the river from the expedition’s campsite. “As he worked his way along the shore,” Cherrie wrote excitedly, “[he] found a place where a bejuca had been cut off with a knife or an ax!”

Not only did the use of a metal tool indicate that a rubber-tapper rather than an Indian had cut the vine, but it was obvious to Correia that whoever had done the cutting had been sitting or standing in a canoe rather than on the riverbank. Having gone this long without seeing anyone else on the river, the members of the expedition knew that the Indians who lived along its banks were not, as Cherrie put it, “canoe Indians”—making it all but certain that rubber-tappers had reached this far up the river in boats.

This was the first mark of the outside world that the men had seen since they had launched their dugouts on the River of Doubt a month and a half earlier. It was a sign of hope—a sign that salvation lay within reach.

I
F
THE DISCOVERY OF
a knife-cut vine offered the men the first tangible sign that they might yet emerge from the rain forest alive, it did not provide any immediate relief. On the contrary, it raised the possibility of a new danger associated with the region that they were approaching—a no-man’s-land between unmapped jungle and the Amazon’s rough pioneer civilization.

The penetration of outside pioneers into the Amazon had been far from organized or peaceful, centering on rough, impoverished rubber-tappers, or
seringueiros.
Those tappers who had reached this far up the River of Doubt were likely alone, afraid, and in dangerous straits themselves. In approaching their huts from upriver, moreover, the members of the expedition were crossing the frontier from the wrong direction. The only humans the settlers expected to see coming from the river’s headwaters were hostile Indians, and they would do whatever they felt was necessary to defend themselves.

Seringueiros
were, by default, the true settlers of Brazil’s interior. When Henry Ford had introduced the Model T in 1908, the Amazon had been the world’s sole source of rubber. The wild popularity of
these automobiles, and the seemingly insatiable demand for rubber that accompanied them, had ignited a frenzy in South America that rivaled the California gold rush. In
The Sea and the Jungle
, H. M. Tomlinson complained that the only thing Brazilians saw in their rich rain forests in 1910 was rubber. “It is blasphemous that in such a potentially opulent land the juice of one of its wild trees should be dwelt upon . . . as though it were the sole act of Providence,” he wrote. “The passengers on the river boats are rubber men, and the cargoes are rubber. All the talk is of rubber.” Two years before Roosevelt had set sail for South America, his friend the great American naturalist John Muir had been similarly astonished by the rubber lust that he had witnessed as he traveled through the Amazon. “Into this rubbery wilderness thousands of men, young and old, rush for fortunes,” he marveled, “half crazy, half merry, daring fevers, debilitating heat, and dangers of every sort.”

By the time Roosevelt reached the Amazon, the dangers were still there but the promise of riches had all but disappeared. The bottom had dropped out of the South American rubber boom in 1912, when the Amazon lost its lock on the market. Thirty-six years earlier, an Englishman named Henry Wickham had smuggled
Hevea brasiliensis
seeds, the most popular species of Amazonian rubber tree, out of Brazil. Those seeds had then been cultivated at Kew Gardens, and the British had eventually planted their predecessors in tropical Malaysia. There, far from their natural enemies, the trees could be planted in neat rows with no fear that a blight would destroy the entire crop, as it likely would have done in South America. Labor in Malaysia was also not only cheap but readily available, and much more easily controlled. So successful had been the transfer of rubber trees to the Far East that by 1913 Malaya and Ceylon were producing as much rubber as the Amazon.

Because of the cost in time-consuming experimentation and the difficulty of finding reliable labor, very little effort had been made even to try to cultivate rubber trees in South America. Brazilian tappers, therefore, had to live where the trees did. In order to find untapped
trees and claim a small slice of land as their own, they had to keep moving deeper into unexplored territory. By the time Roosevelt’s expedition descended the River of Doubt, the
seringueiros
had become the point of intersection between the Amazonian wilderness and the outside world.

Settling the Amazon, however, was even more perilous than settling the American West. Not only was it a difficult, lonely life, but it was an almost impossible job. A man could do little more than clear a pocket of land just large enough to hold his own small hut and a subsistence garden. The death rate was dismally high. Many of the dangers that the members of the expedition had faced since setting off on their river journey were a part of the
seringueiros’
daily existence. Not surprisingly, the life of the
seringueiro
appealed to only the most desperate of men. “Such a man,” Roosevelt wrote, “the real pioneer, must have no strong desire for social life and no need, probably no knowledge, of any luxury, or of any social comfort save of the most elementary kind.” He must also be willing to spend most of every day alone in the jungle.

The
seringueiro
’s day started before the sun rose, when he stumbled through the black forest carrying a curved knife and wearing the kind of headlamp that miners rely on as they descend into the bowels of the earth. As the tapper pushed through the dense vegetation, he could see only a few feet in front of him. Everything beyond, beside, or behind the arc of his headlamp was cloaked in absolute darkness. Even in the full light of day, the trails that he had blazed to his rubber trees were difficult to discern. In the predawn hours, with nothing but the thin, trembling light of his headlamp to illuminate the forest, they were all but invisible—as were the dangers that waited on branches, under fallen logs, and in the very air.

By 10:00 a.m., a typical tapper had visited between 150 and 180 trees, attaching small zinc bowls to the trees to capture the latex as it oozed out of the incision. He then had to retrace his steps in the afternoon, making his way through the steaming jungle to each tree so that he could collect the latex. When he returned home in the evening,
more hot, miserable work awaited him. Hunched over a heavy, oily smoke that rolled from a palm-nut fire, he poured the latex onto a rough wooden spit that he turned over and over until it slowly coagulated in thin, even layers. It could take weeks of this relentless work to produce a single ball of rubber that was heavy enough—between 60 and 150 pounds—to be sold.

As difficult for the
seringueiros
as their hardscrabble existence was the knowledge that what little they had managed to build could be taken away from them at a moment’s notice. They did not have anything other than squatter’s rights to the land on which they lived and worked, and so were constantly vulnerable to the threat of a wealthier, savvier man sweeping into their territory brandishing a title to all that they had thought they owned. The
seringueiros
themselves, of course, thought nothing of taking land from the Indians who had lived on it for millennia. Besides Rondon, few Brazilians at that time believed that the Amazonian Indians had any rights at all, certainly not to something as valuable as land.

*  *  *

T
HE MEN
’s jubilation at discovering the cut vine on April 11 turned into tense anticipation as days passed with no other signs of the
seringueiros
, and the expedition encountered one series of rapids after another—the kind of rapids that they had dared to hope were behind them. Then, on April 15, good fortune returned in what was, in Roosevelt’s words, a “red-letter day.” After launching their boats that morning and traveling for two and a half hours, the men spotted a rough plank affixed to a stake on the left bank of the river. Dizzy with excitement, they quickly pulled their dugouts over to investigate. They soon discovered that there were actually two markers, one on each side of the river, and burned into them both were the initials “J.A.”

An hour later, they saw a house. It was a very simple house, made of palm thatch with a smaller hut next to it for rubber smoking, but there was no confusing it with the Indian huts that they had seen up-river.
It was, in the eyes of the men, a herald of the outside world. “Shouts of exaltation went up from our canoes as this frail outpost of civilization met our eyes,” Cherrie wrote.

The house belonged to a
seringueiro
named Joaquim Antonio, the tapper whose markers they had seen on the riverbank, and the belongings inside indicated that he had a wife and child. Much to the dismay of the members of the expedition, however, the house was deserted. Not only were the men eager to meet a rubber-tapper, but the sight of food stored inside was excruciating, because, without Antonio’s permission, Rondon would not let them take even a single yam. “So none of the provisions were touched,” Cherrie wrote, “although we were sadly in need of some things for our camaradas.”