“The River of Doubt: Theodore Roosevelt's Darkest Journey” by Candice Millard
Paperback, 416 pages
Published 2006 by Anchor Books / Random House
ISBN-10 : 9780767913737 | ISBN-13 : 978-0767913737
Date Finished: Jun 09, 2021
How strongly I recommend it: 9/10
Find it at BookShop.org or Amazon
This book was such a fantastic surprise. Picked by the other members of my bookclub I simply got a copy without any preconceived notion of it whatsoever. Interwoven within were not just history lessons, but also geography, issues of race, and class, and ultimately a fascinating look at a powerful, yet fading America president.
My Notes:
Hundreds of miles from help or even any outside awareness of his ordeal, Roosevelt hovered agonizingly on the brink of death. Suffering from disease and near-starvation, and shuddering uncontrollably from fever, the man who had been the youngest and most energetic president in his nation's history drifted in and out of delirium, too weak to sit up or even to lift his head.
Deeply frustrated by the bitterness and betrayals of the election contest, he had sought to purge his disappointment by throwing himself headlong against the cruelest trials that nature could offer him.
In a lifetime of remarkable achievement, Roosevelt had shaped his own character—and that of his country—through sheer force of will, relentlessly choosing action over inaction, and championing what he famously termed "the strenuous life." From his earliest childhood, that energetic credo had served as his compass and salvation, propelling him to the forefront of public life, and lifting him above a succession of personal tragedies and disappointments.
Incredibly, Roosevelt's heavy army overcoat and the folded fifty-page manuscript and steel spectacle-case he carried in his right breast pocket had saved his life, but the bullet had plunged some five inches deep, lodging near his rib cage. pg 10 [assassination attempt]
To the people in the hall, and to millions of Americans, Roosevelt was a hero, a leader, an icon. But even as he stood on the stage at Madison Square Garden, he knew that in six days he would lose not only the election but also this bright, unblinking spotlight. He would be reviled by many and then ignored by all, and that would be the worst death he could imagine.
"They have a way of erecting a triumphal arch, and after the Conquering Hero has passed beneath it he may expect to receive a shower of bricks on his back at any moment." Roosevelt, 1910.
When backed by a united Republican Party in his earlier election bids, Roosevelt had swept easily to victory over the Democrats. By turning his enormous popularity against his former party, however, he merely split the Republican vote and handed the election to Wilson—a widely predicted result that, when it came to pass, provoked bitter criticism of his tactics.
"The telephone, which had rung like sleigh-bells all day and half the niche, was silent," wrote Roosevelt's young literary friend and eventual biographer Hermann Hagedorn.
—the ex-president's habit of seeking solace from heartbreak and frustration by striking out on even more difficult and unfamiliar terrain, and finding redemption by pushing himself to his outermost limits. When confronted with sadness or setbacks that were beyond his power to overcome, Roosevelt instinctively sought out still greater tests, losing himself in punishing physical hardship and danger—experiences that came to shape his personality and inform his most impressive achievements.
The impulse to defy hardship became a fundamental part of Roosevelt's character, honed from earliest childhood. Frail and sickly as a child, and plagued by life-threatening asthma, Roosevelt forced himself into a regimen of harsh physical exercise in an effort to conquer his weakness. ..."fragile, patient sufferer... struggling with the efforts to breathe" in their nursery on East Twentieth Street in New York City.
At Harvard Roosevelt grew steadily stronger and more vigorous and finally outpaced his asthma. He even began boxing, starting with lessons and working his way up to matches.
He was filled with vigor and perspective after mastering an entirely unfamiliar world of danger on the American frontier—and defeating, by sheer energy and physical exertion, the grief that had threatened to overwhelm him.
"If there is not the war, you don't get the great general; if there is not the great occasion, you don't get the great statesman; if Lincoln had lived in times of peace, no one would know his name now." ~Roosevelt
Edith was a private persons, and her quiet life at Sagamore Hill was precious to her. But she knew that it was not enough for Theodore. He would not reset until he found some physically punishing adventure that would take him far from home and, Edith feared, place him in grave danger.
Although Frers could not have known it, the question of money was very much on Roosevelt's mind. He had inherited a substantial fortune from his father, a fortune that had enabled him to go into politics without worrying about supporting his family. After a long, successful political career, however, he could hope to leave little but a famous name to his own children.
In face, at that time less was known about the interior of South America than about any other inhabited continent.
If the idea of traveling to a South American city was unusual for most Americans in 1913, venturing into the dense jungles of the Amazon was simply out of the question. With the exception of a few large and widely spaced rivers, each more than eight hundred miles long, there was a blank, unexplored spot on the map of South America the size of Germany, and within it lay the vast, tangled expanse of the Amazon rain forest.
Book 2: With it's harsh extremes of climate and terrain, the continent offered the kind of unbounded, unfamiliar, frontier and harsh physical adventure that had attracted Roosevelt throughout his life.
Roosevelt's dream of becoming a naturalist burned brightly until he began his studies at Harvard. He entered college 'devoted to out-of-doors natural history," dreaming of following in the footsteps of men like the world-renowned ornithologist John James Audubon, but he quickly became disgusted with the university's curriculum for aspiring naturalists, which focused on laboratory experiments to the exclusion of, and disregard for, fieldwork.
... Father Zahm was a strange pastiche of seemingly incongruent interests and passions, which had placed him at the crossroads of religion, science, and politics.
But, paradoxically, Father Zahm, who had taught chemistry and physics at Notre Dame, was also a proponent of evolution, a theory that—although Charles Darwin had published On the Origin of Species more than half a century earlier—was still shunned by many Americans as sacrilege and derided by most Catholics as, in the words of one journalist, "the 'philosophy of mud' and the 'gospel of dirt.'"
But, given Zahm's enthusiasm about Fiala, Roosevelt, almost in passing, agreed to hire him—not merely as an extra hand, but as the man in charge of equipping the entire expedition.
If the United States did go to war with Mexico, Roosevelt was confident that his two eldest sons would be among the first to enlist. Theodore Jr. and Kermit had been raised by a father who was almost obsessed by war. Their grandfather, whom Roosevelt had idolized, had paid another man to fight for him during the Civil War, and Roosevelt had never gotten over it. It was relatively common at that time for wealthy men to pay poor men to take their places on the battlefield, and Roosevelt's father had taken this route not out of fear but out of respect for his wife, who was a Southerner and whose brothers were fighting in the Confederate Army. But Roosevelt could never understand what he saw as the one flaw in his father's otherwise irreproachable character. He would never miss a war, and neither would his sons. "I should regard it as an unspeakable disgrace if either of them failed to work hard at any honest occupation for his livelihood, while at the same time keeping himself in such trim that he would be able to perform a freeman's duty and fight as efficiently as anyone in if the need arose," Roosevelt had written to the British historian and statesman George Otto Trevelyan after a post-Africa tour of Europe with Kermit in 1910.
Da Gama had also offered to provide Roosevelt with a guide, but not just any guide. He had promised him Colonel Candido Matriano da Silva Rondon, the heroic commander of the Strategic Telegraph Commission. The forty-eight-year-old Rondon had spent half his life exploring the Amazon and had traversed roughly fourteen thousand miles of wilderness that was not only unmapped but largely unknown to anyone but the indigenous peoples who lived there.
... it was all but unknown to the outside world. In fact, the river was so remote and mysterious that its very name was a warning to would-be explorers: Rio da Duvida, the River of Doubt.
.. the disastrous collapse of his ambitions.
"in a word," the bird curator later wrote, "it may be said with confidence... that in all South America there is not a more difficult or dangerous journey than that down the [River of Doubt].
The journey that Roosevelt had lightheartedly described as his "last chance to be a boy" had suddenly turned into his first chance to be something that he had always dreamed of being: an explorer.
Just two years earlier, in late December 1911, Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen became the first man to reach the South Pole. Robert Scott, a renowned explorer and British hero, made it to the pole a month later, only to find the Norwegian colors flapping in the polar wind where he had planned to plant the British flag. Shocked and dispirited, Scott and his men froze to death on their long, bitter journey back to their ship. Sir Ernest Shackleton and his men, in a legendary attempt to cross Antarctica, narrowly escaped the same fate two years later, the same year that Roosevelt would set off down the River of Doubt.
In a letter to Chapman, Roosevelt wrote, "Tell Osborn I have already lived and enjoyed as much of life as any nine other men I know; I have had my full share, and if it is necessary for me to leave my bones in South America, I am quite ready to do so."
Rosevelt considered the Panama Canal to be one of the greatest achievements of his presidency, and he believed that the canal's architectural genius and the indelible mark that it—and, through it, he—would leave on the world more than justified the small South American revolution he had had to foment in order to make it a reality.
On November 3, 1903, with U.S. Navy ships lined up in nearby waters, Panama declared its independence. Fifteen days later, John Hay and Philippe Bunau-Varilla, a Frenchman who had been the canal's chief engineer, signed the Hay-Bunau-Varilla Treaty, which gave the United States control of the Canal Zone, a five-mile-wide swath of land on either side of the waterway.
After almost two months in South America, Roosevelt had finally completed his official duties, and could now devote himself entirely to his long-anticipated expedition into the Amazon. So remote was the region he had agreed to explore, however, that even getting to the River of Doubt would require a journey of at least two more months—first by boat and then on muleback.
As he splashed through the water below, eagerly gathering his spoils, he made the mistake of holding a piranha in his mouth while his hands were busy scooping up others. The fish had at first been stunned by the dynamite and so lay slack between his teeth, but as soon as it recovered, it attacked. Before Pyrineus had time to react, the piranha had taken a bite out of his tongue. He would have bled to death had the expedition's doctor not stanched the wound with moss.
When it was clear that Rondon would not relent, Zahm appealed to Roosevelt, a decision that proved to be his undoing. "Indians are meant to carry priests," he explained to his old friend, "and I have resorted to such transportation several times." Roosevelt, who was well aware that Rondon was an Indian and a Positivist and had witnessed firsthand the mistreatment of Indians in the Dakota Territories, chose his words carefully before replying to Father Zahm. "But you will not commit such an affront to my dear Colonel Rondon's principles," he said in measured tones.
In the 1930s, the French anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss traveled along Rondon's telegraph line and heard many stories of telegraph workers who had died grisly deaths at the hands of the Nhambiquara. "Someone may recall," Levi-Strauss wrote in his seminal book Tristes Tropiques, "how a certain telegraph operator was found buried up to the waist, with his chest riddled with arrows and his morse-key on his head."
As they had in the United States, Native Americans in Brazil had been exploited, enslaved, and slaughtered for centuries—since 1500, the year the Portuguese explorer Pedro Alvares Cabral is said to have discovered the region.
Once in the camp, the Nhambiquara would get as close as physically possible to the white men, whom they found curiously pale, tall, and hairy. While Roosevelt was trying to write, they would gather around him so tightly that he would have to gently push them away so that he could move his arms.
Now that the expedition had finally reached the River of Doubt, it found itself with twenty-two men, hundreds of pounds of supplies, and not a single boat.
With no experience in the rain forest, however, Fiala had no basis for his assumption that the expedition would be able to find enough game to sustain itself, and his expectations would prove to be wildly unrealistic.
Roosevelt realized, however, that great difficulty often brought out the worst in a man. Deep in the Amazon, the expedition was utterly isolated and far from help of any kind. The camaradas—who outnumbered the officers nearly three to one—could mutiny as easily as sailors at sea.
Little more than a century earlier, Alexander von Humboldt, the world-renowned German naturalist and explorer, had conducted the first thorough cartographical survey of South America, producing hundreds of maps based on seven hundred observations.
There were no reference points in the vast jungle, so the men would have to rely on celestial navigation to tell them where they were. To determine latitude and longitude, they used the same instrument that Humboldt himself had used—a sextant, which measures the angle between the horizon and the sun, moon, or stars. To chart the river from point to point, Rondon instituted a fixed-station method of survey, one of the most accurate methods but also the most labor-intensive.
Unlike the woods of New England, where Roosevelt had spent years exploring and learning about nature, the rain forest floor was not covered with thick leaf litter or plant life, but appeared largely empty, characterized only by a shallow layer of soil shot through with thin white threadlike fibers. Just as unusual, each tree in the Amazon rain forest appeared to be nearly unique.
A principal risk of the vine strategy is the danger that the host tree will sway and break the vine, so many vine species have adapted by developing slack in the form of elaborate loops, curls, and coils, lending the rain forest the distinctive draping character that Roosevelt could so easily see and admire.
Rondon himself was stunned by his loquacious co-commander. "And talk!" he wrote. "I never saw a man who talked so much. He would talk all of the time he was in swimming, all of the time during meals, traveling in the canoe and at night around the camp fire. He talked endlessly and on all conceivable subjects." pg 155
Aboard their crude, heavily loaded boats, they sat at most just six inches above the water, and courted danger whenever one of them dangled his foot overboard or trailed his fingers in the current.
"The only means of preventing it from reaching the bladder, where it causes inflammation and ultimately death, is to instantly amputate the penis," Boulenger told his no doubt horrified audience. [candiru]
So lethal is the bite of a coral snake that, in rural Brazil at the time of Roosevelt's expedition, local people did not even attempt to treat it. No antivenom existed, and the moment someone was bitten, he was given up for dead.
When Roosevelt's foot finally came thundering down, it missed its mark, crushing the snake's body rather than its lethal head. Rearing back, the snake attacked. Roosevelt, still wearing his heavy, hobnailed boots, watched as the snakes short fangs plunged into the tough leather and spilled its venom down the side of his boots. He had been spared an agonizing, certain death by a quarter-inch of leather.
Each of the Amazon's thousands of tributaries starts at a high point—either in the Andes, the Brazilian Highlands, or the Guiana Highlands—and then steadily loses elevation and picks up speed until it begins to approach the Amazon Basin.
The portage around the River of Doubt's first serious set of rapids lasted for two and a half days.
While on land, the members of the expedition could not sit, step, lean, or stand without entangling themselves in the predatory ambitions of some creature or, more often, hundreds of creatures of the Amazon.
Although the reasons for the abrupt and dramatic loss of life are not certain, many scientists believe that the impact of human migration was decisive. In contrast to Africa and parts of Asia, where animals evolved alongside early humans and learned to fear them, South America was the last continent to be populated by humans, who by that time had become sophisticated hunters. With no understanding of their new predator, the large animals of South America were prime prey for the arriving humans, and most of them were soon driven to extinction.
So important and ubiquitous are insects in the ecology of the Amazon that, notwithstanding their generally small size, ants alone make up more than 10 percent of the biomass of all the animals in the rain forest.
Now, not only could the members of the expedition not turn back, but they could not move forward. They were stranded on the tree-shrouded bans of the River of Doubt.
Not only did his glasses constantly fog over in the heavy humidity, it was almost impossible for him to see when it rained, which it did several times a day. [Roosevelt]
Roosevelt used these scrambles, as well as other, separate excursions, to attack his children's wilderness fears, which he referred to as buck fever—"a state of intense nervous excitement which may be entirely divorced from timidity." Even the most courageous man, he believed, when confronted by real danger in the wilderness—whether it be an angry lion or a roaring river—could suffer from buck fever. "What such a man needs is not courage but nerve control, cool-headedness," he explained. "This he can get only by actual practice."
Having faced his own mortality and having caused, albeit indirectly, another man's death, Kermit showed no signs of remorse or even any sense of responsibility when he scribbled a brief account of the day's events in his journal that night. He recorded the fact of Simplicio's death as tersely and unemotionally as he did his own near drowning.
"The river Duvida," he concluded, "was inhabited by a new tribe of Indians with regard to which we possessed no information."
By roughly two million years ago, humans had spread out of Africa and into Europe and Asia. Hundreds of thousands of years later, they migrated to Australia and New Guinea, which were then connected as a single continent. Because they did not yet have boats and could not endure the cruel cold of Siberia, tens of thousands of years more passed before they crossed the Bering Land Bridge and made their way into the Americas. When they finally began to populate North America, however, human beings quickly dispersed throughout the continent and, by crossing the Panamanian Land Bridge, soon reached South America. Some twelve thousand years ago, they entered the Amazon.
In the eyes of the rest of the world, the humans who reached the Amazon Basin virtually disappeared. For thousands of years, there was no further contact with the Amazonians. Whereas most regions of the world continued to change and interact, to form new peoples and nations by fusing races and cultures, the inhabitants of the Amazon remained insular and isolated.
After the Spanish explorer Orellana finally penetrated the Amazon Basin in 1542, he returned with startling tales of dense jungles, deadly poisons, and, most astonishing of all, a tribe of vicious woman warriors. The expedition's chronicler, the Dominican friar Gaspar de Carvajal, described the woman as going "about naked but with their privy parts covered, with their bows and arrows in their hands, doing as much fighting as ten Indian men." Orellana named these women the Amazon, after the famed women warriors warriors of Greek mythology, who were said to have removed their right breast so that they could more effectively shoot a bow and arrow. It is from the Greek word a-mazos, or "no breast," that the word "Amazon" is derived.
After the strange liquid, which the Indians called caoutachouc, had coagulated, it was used to make everything from boots to bottles. La Condamine saw potential in caoutchouc and brought a sample with him back in France. When the strange, pliable substances made its way across the channel, the British soon discovered that it worked extremely well as an eraser, and so began referring to it as "rubber."
Before Rondon's Indian Protection Service was established in 1910, and even after, the Indians' best protector was the Amazon itself. So dense and dangerous was the rain forest that few white men were able to venture very far into it, even for the promise of rubber. Despite the intense search for Indians by the men who wanted their labor or their souls, several tribes had not yet had any contact with the outside world by the time Roosevelt reached South America in 1913.
Although they lived on both sides of the River of Doubt, fishing from it, drinking from it, bathing in it, and traveling long distances along its banks, the Cinta Larga had not yet conceived of boats, even those as simple as the expedition's dugout canoes.
They could eat another man only in celebration of a war victory, and that celebration had to take place in the early evening. The man who had done the killing could not grill the meat or distribute it, and children and adults with small children would not eat it. If they did, the Cinta Larga believed, they would go mad.
Once she has found her victim, a female mosquito needs just ninety seconds to extract two or three times her weight in blood. She keeps the blood flowing by injecting a chemical that inhibits coagulation. Mosquitoes transmit this chemical through their saliva—along with any diseases that they are carrying.
The first sign of malaria—a deep, spreading chill—begins to surface a week to two weeks after the disease takes hold. The chill quickly turns into a cold so penetrating that the body begins to shake violently and uncontrollably, in a desperate effort to warm itself.
Roosevelt too had fallen victim to malaria—as well as dysentery. Until the expedition reached the river, Dr. Cajazeira wrote, Roosevelt had "enjoyed the most perfect health." After the men had launched their dugout canoes, however, the doctor had watched with deepening concern as the former president's health began to decline.
The accumulation of disease, hunger, exhaustion, and fear had begun to wear the men down, and their true selves were starting to show through. “There is a universal saying to the effect that it is when men are off in the wilds that they show themselves as they really are,” Kermit wrote. “As in the case with the majority of proverbs there is much truth in it, for without the minor comforts of life to smooth things down, and with even the elemental necessities more or less problematical, the inner man has an unusual opportunity of showing himself—and he is not always attractive. A man may be a pleasant companion when you always meet him clad in dry clothes, and certain of substantial meals at regulated intervals, but the same cheery individual may seem a very different person when you are both on half rations, eaten cold, and been drenched for three days—sleeping from utter exhaustion, cramped and wet.”
Roosevelt had witnessed this low threshold for discomfort in some of his closest friends, and he believed that it showed a shallowness of character that he was determined never to see in his own children.
Had the expedition's American commander had his way, Julio would likely have been shot on the spot. "On such an expedition the theft of food comes next to murder as a crime." Roosevelt wrote bluntly, "and should by rights be punished as such."
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. [Roosevelt]
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 Roosevelts's friends, however, suspected that he wanted not only to fight in a wary, but to die in one.
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.
What they would not find, however, was a hospital, and fifteen days was a long time to keep alive a man as sick as Theodore Roosevelt.
In fact, none of the men—with the notable exception of the seemingly invincible Rondon—was healthy. Cherrie and Lyra had battled nearly constant dysentery. Kermit had fought repeated attacks of malaria. Half of the camaradas were so sick with fever that they could no longer work.
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.
At work on a new travel book, Father Zahm himself fell ill and died at age seventy in Germany, and his body was returned to the United States for burial at Notre Dame, where a campus hall now bears his name.
As the youngest American on the River of Doubt, Kermit Roosevelt might have been expected to carry his father's legacy far into the twentieth century. Yet somehow, for all his brilliance, courage, and youthful Rooseveltian energy, he was never able to live up to his promise, or even his own expectations.
Also like his ill-fated uncle, Kermit found himself turning more and more frequently to alcohol to take the edge off of real life.
Kermit lost Belle's substantial inheritance after investing it in a business opportunity that failed during the Depression of the 1930s, and the couple was eventually reduced to renting out their Oyster Bay home and selling family jewelry.
He returned to his quarters along and took out a revolver that he had carried with him during his days in the British Army. Nearly thirty years after he had used his extraordinary physical and mental strength to prevent his father from taking his own life on the banks of the River of Doubt, Kermit, sick, tired, sad, and alone, was now too weak to save himself from the same fate. Feeling the weight of the cold, heavy revolver in his swollen and lined hands, he placed it under his chin, and pulled the trigger.
.. others tried to duplicate his achievement. Soon after his homecoming, two expeditions set out to retrace his route. One was forced to turn back for fear of an Indian attack. The other disappeared as soon as it launched its canoes on the remote river, and its members were never seen again.