The River of Doubt (46 page)

O
N THE AFTERNOON OF MAY 19, 1914
, just three weeks after his expedition’s emotional reunion with Lieutenant Pyrineus on the banks of the River of Doubt, Roosevelt triumphantly entered New York Harbor on the steamship
Aidan
, all flags flying. As he leaned over the deck railing, smiling his toothy smile, waving his big Panama hat, and, in a gesture for which he had become famous, vigorously shaking hands with himself, every watercraft in the harbor that had a whistle blew three long, joyful blasts.

Although Roosevelt’s homecoming was an occasion of great joy for everyone from his wife to his children to the journalists who had followed him for decades, the sight of the former president, thin, drawn, and leaning on a cane—which he jokingly referred to as his “big stick”—came as a shock. He was, one reporter wrote, “brown as the saddle that formed part of his luggage,” but his dark, tropical tan covered a face that had lost its youthful fullness and gained a network of new, deeply etched lines.

Physically at least, Theodore Roosevelt was not the same man he had been when he left New York nearly eight months earlier. Even Leo
Miller, who had endured dangers and deprivations of his own during his descent of the Gy-Paraná, had been horrified when he saw Roosevelt in Manáos, writing that his commander had “wasted to a mere shadow of his former self.” For his trip from Manáos to Pará, Brazil, Roosevelt had been transported to his steamship in an ambulance and carried on board on a stretcher. He had stayed in his cabin for most of the journey, unable to talk above a whisper, and eating very little. It was not until the fourth day out that he was finally able to take a short walk on deck, but he had still needed help climbing down the ship’s ladder when it reached Pará.

Once he was on board the
Aidan
, his appetite had improved tremendously—for books as well as for food. Not only did he regain twenty-five of the fifty-five pounds he had lost in the Amazon, but, in the one week that it had taken the steamship to travel from Bridgetown, Barbados, to New York, he read dozens of books. In New York Harbor, however, it was clear to everyone who had turned out to welcome him home that, while Roosevelt still had the same fighting spirit, he had lost his legendary vigor. When his oldest son, Theodore Jr., offered his father his arm to help him negotiate a gangway, Roosevelt rebuffed him, snapping, “I am all right. I can take care of myself.” Every man present had been ready to offer the same aid, had Roosevelt been willing to accept it. “As he limped down the companionway … the impression was strong that the Colonel had endured the greatest hardships of his life,” a reporter for the
New York Sun
wrote. “That was borne out when one of his friends remarked: ‘I guess the Colonel will never take a trip like that again.’”

*  *  *

A
FTER RECOVERING
from the gravest and most immediate effects of his illness, Roosevelt had been eager to tell the story of his expedition’s journey, but the scale of that achievement was so extraordinary that, to his surprise and outrage, he was met not with praise, but with skepticism and disbelief. Even before he had left his hospital bed in Manáos, some of the world’s most prominent and respected geographers
had stepped forward to question his accomplishment. Among the first to plant a seed of doubt was Sir Clements Markham, a former president of England’s famed Royal Geographical Society and the man who had sent Robert Scott to the South Pole. Markham, whose area of specialty was South America, and who had traveled extensively through the continent, scoffed that Roosevelt’s expedition “certainly is a very remarkable story.” “I feel somewhat incredulous as to Col. Roosevelt having actually discovered a new river nearly a thousand miles long,” he told a correspondent for the
New York World.

A less eminent but arguably even more famous explorer, Henry Savage Landor, also attacked Roosevelt, even more directly and viciously. Landor, who had himself boasted of fighting his way through hundreds of miles of uncharted Brazilian wilderness—a feat that Rondon disputed—now called Roosevelt a “charlatan” and charged that his trip suspiciously mirrored Landor’s own. “It seems to me he only copied the principal incidents of my voyage,” he sneered. “I see he even has had the very same sickness as I experienced, and, what is more extraordinary, in the very same leg I had trouble with. These things happen very often to big explorers who carefully read the books of some of the humble travellers who preceded them. I do not want to make any comment as to so-called scientific work of Col. Roosevelt, but as far as I am concerned he makes me laugh very heartily, and I believe all those who have a little common sense will laugh just as much as I.”

Roosevelt first learned of the attacks on his expedition when he was in Barbados. By the time he reached New York, he was incensed and determined to confront his detractors head-on. Several American geographers and newspapermen had leapt to his defense, including an editorial in the
New York World
that growled, “If the Colonel says the river is a thousand miles long, it’s a thousand miles long. We wouldn’t knock off an inch to avoid a war.” Roosevelt, however, was the kind of man who fought his own battles. As for Markham, Roosevelt told the
New York Times
, the British geographer had “unconsciously paid the greatest possible tribute to what he had done.” If
his expedition had not been one of great importance, Markham would not have bothered to attack it. Landor, on the other hand, he dismissed as “a pure fake, to whom no attention should be paid.”

These attacks on not just Roosevelt’s expedition but his character only heightened the excitement surrounding the speech he agreed to give at the National Geographic Society on May 26. The society, which had fought hard—and, in Henry Fairfield Osborn’s estimation, unfairly—for Roosevelt’s first speech on the River of Doubt, had rented out Convention Hall, then the largest hall in Washington, D.C., for the event. Following a dinner at the New Willard Hotel, owned by Belle’s father, Roosevelt rode to the lecture in a limousine—with Commander Robert Peary, the man credited with being the first to reach the North Pole, standing on the running board and leaning into an open window so that he could continue his conversation with the colonel.

As Roosevelt entered Convention Hall at 8:30 p.m., ten minutes late, an usher at the front of the auditorium caught sight of him and signaled his arrival by waving a white handkerchief. The audience leapt to its feet and erupted in thunderous cheers and applause. This was the only hall in Washington large enough to hold the society’s five thousand invited guests, but it was far from luxurious. One reporter called it “dingy” and complained that it was “ill ventilated and situated on top of a huge retail market.” It was also stiflingly hot on this, one of the hottest days of a notably steamy summer for Washington. As Roosevelt’s venerable audience, which included everyone from ambassadors to Supreme Court justices to members of President Wilson’s own Cabinet, awaited his lecture, the stench of rotting meat and vegetables thickened the air around them.

Also among the crowd seated in the auditorium were George Cherrie, Leo Miller, Anthony Fiala, and Father Zahm. Since their journey had ended, Roosevelt had done what he could for each of the men of the expedition. He had invited the camaradas into his cabin on the
Aidan
, saluting them as heroes and giving them each two gold coins as a parting gift. He had sung Colonel Rondon’s praises everywhere
he could be heard, ranking him as one of the four most accomplished explorers of his day. He had given Miller and Cherrie each a thousand dollars for their next expedition and had pledged to raise more. And, in an effort to soothe his friend Father Zahm’s bruised ego, he had asked Gilbert Grosvenor, the chairman of the National Geographic Society, to give the priest a special seat on the platform next to him during the speech.

From the moment Roosevelt entered the hall, it was immediately apparent to his audience that he had yet to recover from the trials of his expedition. “The striking thing about Mr. Roosevelt tonight,” one reporter wrote, “was that he looked tired, that his hands were cold and covered with perspiration and his voice weak…. His smile appeared to be forced and he gave the impression of a man who was being sustained by will power rather than by physical strength.” Roosevelt, however, was also sustained by righteous anger. He was determined to set the record straight, no matter what the cost to his health. Asking the journalists in the audience to take careful notes, he snapped, “I want to call your attention to the fact that I am using my term to scientific precision, and when I say ‘put it on the map,’ I mean what I say. I mean that … [the River of Doubt] is not on any map, and that we have put it on the map.”

The speech left Roosevelt’s detractors mute. Despite the miserable conditions and the fact that Roosevelt was so weak that few of the men in the audience could hear a word he was saying—“I sat in the front row and could barely hear him,” Grosvenor would later tell his son; “I don’t think 30 people could make out his words”—not a single member of the audience left the hall during the entire hour-and-a-half lecture. After this speech, the
New York Evening Journal
reported the following day, “any doubts that still linger about the River of Doubt hardly are justified…. With a little piece of chalk Colonel Roosevelt has put the River of Doubt upon the map of South America.”

Roosevelt’s chance to face down his European detractors, from Markham to Landor to every chuckling newspaperman on the continent,
came in mid-June, when he sailed to the continent to attend Kermit’s wedding and speak before the Royal Geographical Society. As it turned out, Londoners were as eager to listen to what Roosevelt had to say as he was to be heard. Outside the front door of Burlington Gardens, five hundred men and women clamored to get into a hall that already held a thousand people and was equipped to hold, at the most, only eight hundred. Lifelong members of the Royal Geographical Society—each of whom had been guaranteed a seat at the lecture—were furious at being excluded, some even vowing to resign. A zealous suffragette held tight to the coattails of a reporter in an effort to gain entry, and one man burst into tears of frustration. Even Lord Earl Grey, a member of the Council of the Society who was to be given a place of honor on the platform with Roosevelt, was forced—much like Corinne Roosevelt Robinson at Madison Square Garden—to scale a stone wall in order to get inside.

Within the hall, every seat was taken, and the aisles were filled with the members of the council and their wives, who were forced to stand throughout the lecture. “All the benches and gangways were filled, the gallery was packed to overflowing, people sat on the front of the platform, crowded round the entrances, and occupied every available inch in their eagerness to see and hear Mr. Roosevelt,” a reporter for the
Times
of London wrote.

In his opening remarks, Douglas Freshfield, the president of the Royal Geographical Society, concluded by quoting a “high testimony to Mr. Roosevelt and his companions,” from Roosevelt’s most notable critic, Sir Clements Markham. Markham himself had failed to appear, explaining that he was ill, but his note was a gracious, if indirect, admission of defeat. By the time Roosevelt had finished his speech—rich with tales of disease-carrying insects and man-eating fish and punctuated by his trademark high-pitched giggle, which sent his audience into roaring waves of laughter—nearly all of England had surrendered.

*  *  *

R
OOSEVELT HAD
won again. He had humiliated his enemies, defended his expedition, and restored his reputation. However, he still had one insidious foe: the fever and infection that had nearly claimed his life on the River of Doubt and which now refused to release its hold on his aging and overused body. When he docked in France, on his way to Spain for Kermit and Belle’s wedding, he had “stepped briskly” and declared that he had never felt better in his life. By the time he left Europe, however, his fever had returned, and he had to admit to his old friend Arthur Hamilton Lee that he was “not in good trim.”

Upon returning to the United States, Roosevelt got right back to work, writing dozens of letters and articles, attacking the Wilson administration, and giving speeches on behalf of the sinking Progressive Party. In May,
The Literary Digest
had written that he would have to “demonstrate his growing skill as an explorer and discoverer” if he hoped to find any remnants of the party that he had helped to found just a few years earlier. The Progressive Party loyalists, insisting that they had a bright future before them, had continued to resist the advances of the Republican Party. By 1916, however, the party had gasped its last, and most of its members quietly disappeared within the Republican fold.

The following year, Roosevelt’s driving ambition turned from politics back to the military, and he became obsessed with leading a regiment to war, as he had done a quarter-century earlier. This time his sights were set on Europe and World War I, but President Wilson—perhaps simply believing him unfit for such a position, or perhaps fearing that his old rival would return home a reminted war hero and an unbeatable adversary in 1920—refused to let him go. Roosevelt’s only consolation was that he had four young, healthy sons who could fight and, if necessary, die for their country. True to their father’s ambitions and teachings, each son fought to be the first to get to the front. Each conducted himself honorably and bravely on the battlefield. Three were wounded, and the fourth, Quentin, who would always be Edith’s baby, was killed.

The death of his beloved “Quenikins” devasted Roosevelt. Months after the news had reached him at Sagamore Hill, friends had glimpsed him alone in his barn one day, his arm around his horse’s neck, sobbing. Death in battle was the kind of ending that Roosevelt had always imagined for himself, not for his sons, and his role in urging them to fight and risk their lives weighed heavily on him. Instead of dying in combat or on a remote, unexplored river, the ex–Rough Rider himself was destined to die slowly, ingloriously, and, for those who loved and admired him, far too soon. Early in 1917, Roosevelt had begun what was to be his final physical decline. He spent the month of February at Roosevelt Hospital in Manhattan, writing to Kermit that his ailment stemmed from his “old Brazilian trouble. Both the fever and the abscesses recurred and I had to go under the knife.”