Colonel Roosevelt

by Edmund Morris

  Roosevelt had reacted to Müller’s proposal with entire predictability. “I want to be the first to go down the unknown river.”

  The minister warned him that his personal safety could not be guaranteed in a part of the country where many explorers had died. This caution had no more effect than worried letters from Frank Chapman and Henry Fairfield Osborn, president of the American Museum.

  “I have already lived and enjoyed as much of life as any nine other men I know,” Roosevelt wrote Chapman. “I have had my full share, and if it is necessary for me to leave my remains in South America, I am quite ready to do so.”

  Caution required that he pass along Müller’s warning to his six colleagues: Father Zahm, George Cherrie, Leo Miller, Anthony Fiala, Frank Harper, and Kermit. Zahm was the least thrilled. He had no interest in terra incognita. All he had ever done in Brazil was follow pathways that the Conquistadors had trodden before him, in reasonable safety. He liked his comforts, and preferred not to have his progress slowed by poisoned darts, pium flies, and other hazards of jungle travel.

  Cherrie and Miller, in contrast, had reacted to the change of plan with the enthusiasm of naturalists offered a new field of study. Fiala’s only concern as director of supplies was how to get five tons of baggage down a river that might be nothing but rapids. Merely transporting the stuff beyond Utiariti would be a challenge. Harper was prepared to travel where needed in his capacity as the Colonel’s secretary, but he saw limited opportunities for stenography in the wilderness. Roosevelt had told all five men that they need accompany him no farther than José Bonifácio station, near the rise of the Dúvida. Anyone who then wanted to drop out could do so, return south via the Paraguay, and sail for home.

  Kermit, of course, needed little encouragement. Neither love for Belle Willard, nor the melancholy that had begun to affect him in adulthood (he was now twenty-four, and inclined to seek comfort in alcohol) could compete with the thrill of another venture into another continental interior, in company with his beloved father.

  AT DAYBREAK ROOSEVELT, Rondon, and Kermit stepped down from the Nioac onto marshy ground. It was raining heavily. Under the guidance of some camaradas with dogs, they headed vaguely south. They hacked their way through saturated thickets, sinking often into ponds, gasping the near-liquid air. Mosquitoes hummed on waterproof wings, insatiable for blood. But their bites were nothing to the pinching of fire ants, and potentially lethal stings from maribundi wasps. At length the rain gave way to a steamy sun that pulsated down without drying anything. The hunters salted their wounds with sweat, raising sores that soon festered. Palm-needle slashes were of more concern, because any flow of blood into deep water would arouse the surgical interest of piranha fish.

  Rondon was used to such torments. Born on the Mato Grosso forty-eight years before, the son of a Borôro mother and a half-Portuguese, half-Guaná father, yet capable of discussing fine points of theology and mathematics, he personified Roosevelt’s ideal of primitive force sheathed in civilized restraint. During their first meeting over tea, Rondon had casually described how he once lost a toe to a piranha. Roosevelt had listened with delight, memorizing every detail for publication:

  He was about to bathe and had chosen a shallow pool at the edge of the river, which he carefully inspected until he was sure that none of the man-eating fish were in it: yet as soon as he put his foot in the water one of them attacked him and bit off a toe. On another occasion while wading across a narrow stream one of his party was attacked; the fish bit him on the thighs and buttocks, and when he put down his hands tore them also; he was near the bank and by a rush reached it and swung himself out of the river by means of an overhanging limb of a tree; but he was terribly injured, and it took him six months before his wounds healed and he recovered. An extraordinary incident occurred on another trip. The party were without food and very hungry. On reaching a stream they dynamited it, and waded in to seize the stunned fish as they floated on the surface. One man, Lieutenant Pyrineus, having his hands full, tried to hold one fish by putting its head into his mouth; it was a piranha and seemingly stunned, but in a moment it recovered and bit a big section out of his tongue. Such a hemorrhage followed that his life was saved with the utmost difficulty.

  Rondon’s fellow officers also talked of aqueous anacondas big enough to constrict a cow. While not entirely believable, these stories did not encourage a meaty norte-americano to wade through Brazilian waters without trepidation. But Kermit and Rondon splashed on unafraid, so Roosevelt followed suit.

  Hours went by with no sign of tapir. The humid heat became insufferable. All at once the dogs scented a jaguar. Kermit was off after them with a young man’s energy, and soon disappeared. Roosevelt tried to keep up with Rondon, but at 220 pounds he was almost twice as heavy as his spry partner. He felt himself flagging when they had to swim across a bahia with their rifles held overhead. Afterward his sodden clothes and squelching boots dragged with a weight that would not lighten. By midday, he was reduced to a slow walk. He went on all afternoon, but had to face the fact that he was beginning to be old.

  “PRIMITIVE FORCE SHEATHED IN CIVILIZED RESTRAINT.”

  Colonel Cândido Mariano da Silva Rondon. (photo credit i15.1)

  FOR THE NEXT FOUR DAYS Roosevelt let Rondon command the Nioac’s final ascent of the Paraguay to São Luís de Cáceres. He relaxed on deck with Father Zahm, talking literature under the shade of a canvas awning.

  The great river was now at its maximum flood, inundating the flat country so widely that they could have been crossing a motionless lake. Palm trees—the tallest he had ever seen—protruded incongruously. Some were rubied around the crown with orchids. Restless green parakeets added and subtracted emeralds. Lower down, apparently weightless Jesus Cristo birds walked on the water.

  Now that he saw with one eye only, he relied heavily on his hearing to identify species of avifauna—as he had in boyhood, before he got his first spectacles. The dense air was full of bird calls that he found more interesting than beautiful. If this was tropical song—the curu-curu of screamer storks, querulous wails of wood ibises and plover, macaws squawking ar-rah-h ar-rah-h and flycatchers sneezing kis-ka-dee—it amounted to discord compared to the choral symphony he was used to every spring at home. Howling monkeys and the amazing whistle of the locomotive cicada added to the din. There was no diminuendo at night, just an abrupt switch to the shrilling of crickets.

  He rejoiced all the same in the novelty of an America so unlike his own, it could have been attached to another continent. Brazil’s environment struck him as an illogical clash of extremes. The intensity of tropical coloration, whether in feathers or flowers, made no biological sense. Only a vulgarian could consider the toucan beautiful. Giant tamanduá anteaters lurched through papyrus groves on upside-down paws, as if crippled. The marsh fringes evaporated, in the fiery heat, at such a rate that stranded fish lay around dying. They shone silver at first, but later turned dull and began to stink. Then cloudbursts replenished the lagoons, and overfed vultures and caymans took their pick of the carrion.

  One evening this liquid landscape turned gold, and reflected a sunset of such prismatic beauty that Roosevelt exclaimed, “Wonderful, wonderful!” Off to port, the Serra Amolar loomed, its dark profile etched with rose, as if it was about to erupt. The immense curve of the sky, feathered with cirrus, was duplicated in the water. Priest and ex-president sat dwarfed and humbled in their deck chairs. They were unable to move until the radiance had burned itself out, and a crescent moon replaced the gold with silver. Both of them were storing up purple prose for publication. Zahm fancied that he heard, in the sound of the Paraguay churning astern, the “cadenced voice” of the mãe d’agua, or water-mother, that “beauteous siren of Brazilian fable,” whose mermaid-like body was enough to tempt a man to plunge into her element, and be lost forever.

  As far as Kermit was concerned, the sooner Zahm took a dive the better. He thought his father’s friend was vain, lazy, and manipulative, a faux intel
lectual whose remarks sounded as though they had been memorized in the library at Notre Dame. But Zahm’s erudition was genuine. His quotations from Shakespeare and Dante and other poets in Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese were accurate, if excessive. He was a master of historical geography, relating every squalid village or stone fort along the river to the annals of the Conquistadors.

  As such, and for as long as this placid passage up the river lasted, Zahm was an ideal travel guide. That did not persuade Kermit that he would be of any use, once the expedition proper began. Sooner rather than later, Roosevelt—who tended to like people too readily, and discount their liabilities—was going to have to realize that this sedentary old cleric was de trop.

  KERMIT DID NOT know it, but on passing through Corumbá (loud cries of “Viva”; the hot, mimosa-fragrant little city on holiday; its sole hotel proclaiming welcome in brilliant lights), Roosevelt had updated his last will and testament. He had no plans to die in Brazil. However, he was fatalistic enough to understand that a river named Doubt might not deliver him safely to the Amazon—assuming it flowed that far. If not, or if it proved too much for him, it could turn out to be the Styx.

  On 5 January the Nioac reached São Luís de Cáceres, its last scheduled stop and the official point of departure for the expedition’s ascent to Mato Grosso. From now on, travel would be progressively more awkward: northward in boats up the Sepotuba, a rough affluent of the upper Paraguay, then, as hills and mesas crowded in, by mule and ox wagon westward across the sertão grasslands of the interior. Rondon estimated it would take them about seven weeks to reach the rise of the Dúvida, nearly five hundred kilometers from Cáceres as a crow flew. No man could guess how many more weeks they would need to trace the river’s full length, but they were unlikely to reach their final destination, Manáos, much before the beginning of April.

  Father Zahm was sorry not to continue cruising along the less arduous itinerary he had originally planned. It had involved a minimum of marching, and a powered descent of the Tapajoz in the steel motorboats he had commissioned in Pennsylvania, with gay pennants conjoining the initials R and Z. Roosevelt had abandoned these expensive purchases after hearing that they were too heavy to be hauled across the sertão. Fiala’s sleek Canadian canoes were light enough, but they lacked the seating and storage space for a long river trip. Rondon, accordingly, had requisitioned some extra Indian-style dugouts to be held ready near José Bonifácio.

  Roosevelt spent his last evening in civilization shopping and strolling around Cáceres. It was as Cubist a composition as anything he had seen at the Armory Show, with the added charm of being unpremeditated. The white-and-blue houses with their red tile roofs and latticed windows (through which an occasional pretty face could be seen, dark or pale), had probably not changed much since colonial days. They harked back architecturally even further, through Christian and Moorish Portugal to the thick-walled quadrangles of North Africa. On doorsteps and benches under the trees of the plaza, women spread skirts of red, blue, and green. Stringed instruments tinkled in the gathering darkness.

  A GASOLINE LAUNCH and two pranchas, or roofed cargo boats, were supposed to be available next morning to ferry the expedition up the Sepotuba. Then a message came that they were waiting at Porto Campo, a hundred kilometers north. So the Nioac had to be crammed to the gunwales with equipment amassed in Cáceres by Rondon’s local deputy, Lieutenant João Lyra. The size of the tents the Brazilians seemed to think necessary for survival on the uplands gave Roosevelt pause. With extra camaradas being recruited by the hour, he saw logistical problems looming. He had learned in Africa that the bigger a safari, the slower it moved, and the faster it depleted its resources.

  As things were, the Nioac sailed so late that it did not reach Porto Campo until just before dawn on 7 January. This was as far up the narrowing stream as its flat bottom would take it. A portion of its cargo was transferred to the pranchas for advance shipment upriver. It was lashed to the side of the launch, and it labored off late in the day, straining against the current. Meanwhile, the Expediçào Cíentífica Roosevelt-Rondon established itself in a cattle pasture. Bilateral proprieties were observed. The two commanders camped side by side, behind a pair of flagpoles flying their national colors. Kermit roomed with his father, and the tents of the other principals extended in a line left and right. About a dozen camaradas and kitchen staff bivouacked along a second row. Every sunrise and sunset a bugle sounded and the two flags rose and fell, while all personnel stood at attention.

  Despite this show of equivalence, the professional disparity between the Brazilian and American outfits was obvious. Rondon’s “commission,” as he called it, consisted of eleven superbly trained men. Lieutenant Lyra was an astronomer and surveyor; Captain Amílcar de Magalhães, a logistics expert; and Dr. José Cajazeira, an army physician. There was also a field detail comprising a geologist, a zoologist, an entomologist, a taxidermist, and a botanist—not to mention two general-duty officers and a cinematographer, equipped with miles of film.

  Roosevelt’s team of seven was, with the exception of Cherrie and Miller, amateurish. Fiala had spent four years in the Arctic, but the skills he acquired there were unlikely to be of much use in the Amazonian jungle. Kermit had some, but not much, experience of the Brazilian wilderness, and was fluent in Portuguese. Harper was out of his element and looking for an excuse to go home. Zahm contributed nothing, although his Swiss servant, Jacob Sigg, had a capable pair of hands.

  The absence of the launch gave Roosevelt an opportunity to hunt for the tapir he had promised his naturalists. He soon secured a big specimen, drilling it through the brain as it swam. On 10 January, going out after peccaries, he outscored Rondon three to one. “I have gotten specimens of all the mammals I was most eager to have,” he told Zahm, “and am now perfectly satisfied if I do not get a shot at another animal.”

  After dinner that night, he and the priest had another of their moonlight colloquies. Promenading like the Walrus and the Carpenter under silver-edged storm clouds, they talked, in Roosevelt’s words, “of many things, from Dante, and our own plans for the future, to the deeds and the wanderings of the old-time Spanish conquistadores in their search for the gilded King, and of the Portuguese adventurers who then divided with them the mastery of the oceans and of the unknown continents beyond.”

  Map of the Roosevelt-Rondon Expedition, 1914. (photo credit i15.2)

  IT TOOK ANOTHER six days for the entire expedition to be shuttled to Tapírapoan, the main telegraph station in Mato Grosso. From here, Rondon’s still-raw wires ran north to Utiariti, then east to José Bonifácio, delineating the route the two colonels would now have to pursue. But first they had to organize, discipline, and mount a caravan much more cumbersome than Roosevelt’s African safari.

  At first sight on 16 January, Tapírapoan looked like a stock fairground, jostling with beef cattle, milch cows, oxen, and mules. Barefooted cowboys in fringed leather aprons were attempting to tame some of the pack animals, who gave no sign of having ever carried anything. The noise of bleats and brays and snapping lassos, intermixed with curses in several languages, was discordant. Flags of all the American republics flapped around the plaza. Dozens of wagons were standing by ready to load. But they remained empty while various factions of the expedition squabbled over stowage space.

  It did not look as if there could be any general departure for days. Fiala and Sigg pitched in to help. Harper seized on the astonishing quantity of specimens already bagged by Cherrie and Miller—totaling about a thousand birds and 250 mammals—to volunteer to take them to New York for delivery to the American Museum. He left two days later in the launch, laden with skulls, skins, and alcohol jars. This lightened at least some of the baggage Fiala was responsible for. But a vast amount of extra equipment still crammed Tapírapoan’s storerooms. The Brazilians insisted every item was necessary. They had even shipped a giant land turtle, either as potential soup or as a spare, if unreliable, bench.

  Roosevelt had be
gun to notice a Latin need for “splendor” among Rondon and his officers, and seating seemed to be an important part of it. He was embarrassed by the gift of a silver-mounted saddle and bridle that would have looked pretentious on his best horse at Sagamore Hill, but was especially so on a mule. Courtesy required that it be accepted with appropriate obrigados. But when he saw that the enormously heavy tents Lauro Müller had provided were going to displace vital provisions, he insisted half of them be left behind. He still thought the expedition was burdened with a ridiculous amount of canvas.

  Rondon and Lyra, in turn, looked askance at the American food store. Both of them were small, wiry men, trained to march for months on minimal sustenance. They saw the value of a hundred tins of emergency rations that Fiala had brought from New York. Such luxuries, however, as pancake mix, malted milk, chocolate bars, two varieties of marmalade, and a spice chest full of paprika, cinnamon, chutney, and other exotic seasonings did not seem necessary for survival in the wilderness. Rondon felt it would be undiplomatic to protest, and asked his colleagues to pack and eat less, so the norte-americanos could “enjoy the abundance to which they were accustomed.”

  This was too much for the Brazilian field detail, four of whom threatened to resign. They believed themselves to be better qualified to explore and report on their own country than a gang of foreigners. Rondon was sympathetic, but had to remember the constraints placed on him by Minister Müller. He reasoned that Roosevelt was an amateur naturalist only by default. Cherrie had been on twenty-five South American expeditions, and young Miller was a born collector, alive even to the near-inaudible squeaking of bats in a rotten log. The unhappy scientists were dismissed.