If there’s any doubt how dangerous this expedition was, consider that it would be another thirteen years before anyone successfully made the same trip. The first follow up expedition had to turn back because of the Indians. The one after that simply disappeared without a trace, presumably killed by the Indians. Roosevelt, being Roosevelt, somehow survived…
Imagine, if you can, a former President and the most famous man in the world going missing for two months in an uncharted region of the Amazon rainforest, beyond the reach of any communication technology available at the time, the equivalent of the old adage about dropping off the face of the Earth. The region itself is notoriously hostile, populated by remote Indian tribes who celebrate their victory over rivals by eating their flesh in a cannibalistic ritual and who have never seen a Westerner before. The tribes occupying the region proved so fierce and recalcitrant that it would be another half century before they reconciled with the Brazilian government after decades of bloody battles and recriminations. The river the President and his expeditionary team – which incredibly included his son, Kermit – are traveling on is completely unknown, not represented in any fashion on most of the maps available at the time. Estimates based on the surrounding area suggest it runs for some thousand miles, but what comprises those miles – falls, rapids, gorges, etc. is impossible to say. The only thing known for sure is that the rainforest surrounding the river is exceedingly dangerous in and of itself. There are no trails, only dense vegetation that requires a machete to navigate, requiring massive amounts of effort simply to go a short distance. It is swarming with biting insects, some carrying yellow fever and malaria, crawling with poisonous reptiles and amphibians, including ferocious piranha and alligators, and yet to those unfamiliar with the ecology, oddly empty, almost devoid of life beyond the over abundant foliage. This is because almost every animal that can survive under these conditions has evolved under intense pressure for advanced camouflage, making it incredibly difficult to hunt or find food even for a true marksman and skilled hunter. If the President and his team didn’t carry enough provisions in with them, they might well starve, and by carrying in, we mean trekking across hundreds of miles of sparsely populated wilderness, barely charted in its own right, for almost two months before they even reached the start of the expedition. Once at the head of the river they were to explore, forebodingly named the River of Doubt by the Brazilian co-commander of the expedition, the President didn’t even have any boats to begin their descent. The great majority of their provisions were left behind on the grueling journey there, and they were forced to purchase primitive “dug out” canoes from the local Indian population, those are canoes that are constructed simply by digging out the wood of a large tree trunk, not treated with any water resistance or other mechanism to help keep them afloat for what might be a journey of a thousand miles.
Needless to say, this wasn’t an auspicious start to the expedition, especially when you consider that the expedition wasn’t supposed to happen this way in the first place. Even in 1913 and even if the former Commander in Chief was legendary adventurer and outdoorsman Teddy Roosevelt himself, a man who was nicknamed the unstoppable force, we were not so careless with our ex Presidents as to expose them to unprecedented dangers, well beyond the reach of any help or assistance. The journey had been originally planned as something far more for show than real substance. Roosevelt suffered a devastating defeat as a third party candidate in 1912 and found himself isolated politically for the first time in more than a decade, going from the height of power to an outcast in less than five years. As he had in the past, he sought an escape and an expedition to South America offered Roosevelt the opportunity to travel to countries he hadn’t yet explored, putting much needed distance between him and the United States, and have a little adventure, collecting specimens, making maps, and hunting. He had undertaken a similar expedition to Africa after leaving the Presidency in 1909, one which proved to be a smashing success, what the President of the Museum of Natural History, Henry Fairfield Osborn, described as “by far the most successful expedition that has ever penetrated Africa.” Why not repeat the formula on another continent? Thus, the Museum of Natural History agreed to sponsor the expedition and the original route was designed as what Roosevelt himself described as a “delightful holiday” with “just the right amount of adventure.” While the former President, who turned 54 years old in October 1913, didn’t mind taking small risks, “I wanted to be sure that I am not doing something for which I will find my physical strength unequal.” To that end, they were to begin in Buenos Aires, travel northward toward the Amazon through well-charted rivers, then to the Rio Negro and the Orinoco, crossing into Venezuela and ultimately the Atlantic Ocean. The only problem with this more cautious approach proved to be Roosevelt himself. He’d been enamored of explorers, those who go where no one has gone before since he was a child, and having already accomplished almost every other goal imaginable, from being President to a respected naturalist to a philosophical historian, traveling somewhere truly new remained one of the few things he hadn’t done. He also had a deep disdain for the luxury traveler, saying “The ordinary traveler, who never goes off the beaten route and who is on the beaten route is carried by others, without himself doing anything and risking anything, does not need to show much more initiative and intelligence than does an express package.” When Roosevelt arrived in South America on October 18, 1913, he met with Lauro Muller, Brazil’s Minister of Foreign Affairs, who would make the former President an offer he couldn’t refuse. “Colonel Roosevelt, why don’t you go down an unknown river?”
As fate would have it, the Brazilian co-commander of the expedition, Colonel Candido Rondon, had just such a river in mind, a river he himself had named the Rio da Duvida, River of Doubt five years earlier. Rondon was a figure almost as remarkable as Roosevelt in his own right. Born destitute in a small village of Mato Grasso, he was orphaned at two years old, raised by grandparents who died when he was still young, then his uncle. At sixteen, he headed to Rio de Janeiro to attend military school, where he was too poor to purchase textbooks – or even feed himself adequately. During his first year at the academy, he became so weak from malnutrition that he collapsed on his way to math class. Somehow, however, he worked his way up to Colonel, conducted himself admirably during the War of the Triple Alliance, and was selected to lead the mammoth effort to connect Brazil by telegraph line when he was only 25 years old, what colloquially became the Rondon Commission. He stood all of five foot three, but possessed almost superhuman stamina, having spent most of his life in the uncharted jungle, surviving Indian attacks, disease, and near starvation. In fact, the team that originally discovered the River of Doubt barely made it out alive – without navigating a single mile. He was also at the forefront of improving treatment of the native population, who he rightfully believed had been poorly used and abused by the Brazilian government and to ensure that happened, he had a single, unbreakable rule in dealing with Indians: It was better to be killed by the Indians than to so much as fire upon them, “Die if you must, but never kill.” This was a philosophy he’d personally put to the test over and over again. A year before discovering the River of Doubt, Rondon made contact with a remote tribe, the Nhambiquaras, who would ultimately sell Roosevelt their canoes. Their first meeting, however, was less than successful. Rondon and three of his men approached a gathering of the Indians riding mules carrying gifts, but before they even made contact, Rondon himself was shot in the helmet and the chest with a poisoned arrow after one just missed hitting him right in the face. Rondon turned around that time, riding back to camp with a five foot long arrow sticking out of his chest, but would not relent and over time forged an uneasy alliance, enough to staff the last telegraph outpost and grant Roosevelt’s expedition access to the river.
On February 27, 1914, Roosevelt, Rondon, and the rest of the team climbed into their dugout canoes, so loaded with provisions that they sat barely an inch above the water, and began the descent down the river. In addition to the officers, Roosevelt’s son, Kermit, a field scientist, and a doctor, the expedition was staffed with Brazilian camaradas, some of Indian descent themselves. Physically, they were a “strapping set” according to Roosevelt, “expert rivermen and men of the forest, skilled veterans in wilderness work. They were lithe as panthers and brawny as bears. They swam like water dogs. They were equally at home with pole and paddle, with ax and machete.” They were also dirt poor, operating outside of a larger military structure for months, carrying too few provisions to feed them, and canoes far, far heavier than they should have been. Even worse, one of them, Julio de Lima, proved to be a thief and a murderer, shirking his duties and ultimately shooting another camarada with a stolen rifle. At the time of the murder, Roosevelt himself was suffering from a life threatening fever after re-aggravating an old injury while desperately trying to save a canoe from being destroyed in the rapids. He could barely sit up on his own, or walk without assistance. A couple of days earlier he’d revealed to his son that he carried a vial of morphine. In the event he could not continue without threatening the expedition, Roosevelt had planned to end his own life. There’s a reason he was known as the Bull Moose, however, and as soon as he learned of the murder, Roosevelt grabbed a rifle of his own and started marching to the source of the sound. “Before we could stop him he had started down the path where Julio disappeared,” explained George Cherrie, the field scientist who became Roosevelt’s close friend on the mission. “Without hesitation he himself chose to go back over the trail on which the murderer might be concealed.” Shortly thereafter, Roosevelt found one of the camarada, lying face down in a pool of his own blood. He’d been shot straight through the heart from a nearby hiding spot. As Roosevelt himself described it, “The murderer had stood to one side of the path and killed his victim, when a dozen paces off, with deliberate and malignant purpose.” The murderer himself, however, was nowhere to be found, having dropped his rifle and fled. They would see him once more, hanging from a tree branch over the river sometime later. Otherwise, no one knows what became of Julio de Lima.
He wasn’t the only man to die on the expedition, either. Even before he’d murdered one of his comrades, another of the camaradas, Simplicio, drowned on the river when a canoe he was in with Kermit capsized. His body was never found. The expedition’s animals were also at risk. Rondon’s favorite dog was killed by Indians, shot through with poisoned arrows. Kermit’s dog disappeared into the woods, never to be seen again. Even those that survived, suffered dysentery, malaria, infection, malnutrition, and more. Roosevelt himself began the expedition at 220 pounds. He returned at 170, after having been operated on without proper medical equipment or painkillers in the mud beside the river. At various points, every one of their canoes was destroyed and they had to construct new ones in the middle of the rainforest. Even when the canoes were operational, they couldn’t navigate the many rapids, much less waterfalls, that were common on parts of the river. The camaradas had to cut a trail through the woods and slide them on logs, requiring days to travel just a few hundred yards, days where they were surrounded by hostile Indians, passing through recently abandoned villages, discovering their tokens in the wood, even hearing them at night. No one knows why, but perhaps the only truly good luck they had was that the Indians didn’t attack in mass. Rondon was wise to leave them gifts when he could, but for whatever reason Roosevelt’s expedition was allowed – by their grace and their grace alone – to pass through.
If there’s any doubt how dangerous this expedition truly was, consider that it would be another thirteen years before anyone successfully made the same trip. The first follow up expedition had to turn back because of the Indians. The one after that simply disappeared without a trace, presumably killed by the Indians. Incredibly, there were those who doubted Roosevelt when he returned. Sir Clements Markham, a former President of the Royal Geographical Society in Britain, was skeptical, claiming it was a “remarkable story,” but “I feel somewhat incredulous as to Col. Roosevelt having discovered a new river nearly a thousand miles long.” The famous explorer Henry Savage Landor called Roosevelt a “charlatan,” suggesting that he had made the same trip. “It seems to me he only copied the principal incidents of my voyage. I see he even has had the very same sickness 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 travelers 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.” These attacks began before Roosevelt even left South America because – among other incredible feats on this journey – Roosevelt was busy writing articles every night, wrapped in gauze to shield him from the insects, much of which was rushed to print as soon as he returned. Roosevelt had the chance to respond, both in the United States and Europe, by presenting what he found to the scientific community later that year. The New York Evening Journal declared, “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.” Technically – in a final vindication – it had been renamed the Rio Roosevelt before then. It still bears his name to this day. Rondon received much vindication as well. He was honored by Roosevelt as one of the greatest explorers of his era. The Brazilians named a state after him, Rondonia, and he was the founding member of the Indian Protection Service. He lived until 1958, dying at the ripe old age of 92. He was also the only man who didn’t get sick on the journey.
Confessions of a Conservative Atheist 