All of this had happened below the sightline of the other principals. Rondon was first to encounter a saturated Kermit coming back upriver. “Well, you have had a splendid bath, eh?”
He no longer made light of the situation when the two canoeiros failed to appear. Kermit said both men had swum to safety. Rondon was not reassured, and went with Lyra to the foot of the second rapid. They found João recovering, and unable to say where Simplício might be. Anguished, they searched for the rest of the day, but in vain.
It was clear to the Brazilians that Kermit could, or should, be prosecuted for manslaughter. Roosevelt’s main emotion seemed to be relief at not having to communicate the loss of his son to Edith and Belle Willard. Rondon saw no point in a potentially ruinous recrimination. The expedition was too deep in the wilderness to go back, yet not so far advanced as to expect to encounter any outpost of civilization for several more weeks. There was nothing to be done but adjust to what had happened.
After a night of grief and foreboding, Rondon erected a cross by the falls inscribed,
AQUI PERECEU O INFELIZ SIMPLÍCIO
To him, it said “Here perished the unfortunate Simplício.” Roosevelt thought it translated as “In these rapids died poor Simplício.” Taking what comfort they could in the nuances of their languages, the two colonels set to work on another portage.
BY NOW THE LOST canoe was either miles down the Dúvida, or more likely sunk somewhere out of sight. Kermit went in search of it and found just one floating food tin and a paddle. He swam out to reclaim them, as the expedition was critically short of necessities. It had already consumed a third of its provisions, and game was as scarce as ever (although, tantalizingly, a tapir was seen surfing the rapids, moving too fast to shoot).
The portage began in blinding rain. While it was going on, Rondon reconnoitered the right bank with his own dog, Lobo. A strange howling, not quite animal, came from the jungle. Lobo ran to investigate, and was no sooner out of sight than Rondon heard him yelping with pain. Then the grotesque duet was cut off. Rondon guessed that the howling had come from Indians trying to lure prey, probably a coatá monkey. He fired a cautionary shot in the air, and went forward to find Lobo dead, perforated by two long arrows.
Rondon examined one protruding point. It was of a type new to him, indicating that the local Indians were not Nhambiquaras. They had probably never seen white men before. He left beads to signal peaceful intent, and returned to the portage even sadder than he had been earlier in the day.
Later that “dark and gloomy” morning, as Roosevelt described it, misfortune struck again. The lower rapids were deemed runnable by unloaded canoes, if they were steadied from the right bank with ropes. But the big new dugout proved so heavy that it broke away and sank in the turbulence, almost drowning Luiz and taking its tackle with it.
Roosevelt and Rondon assessed the state of the expedition. In eighteen days, they had registered one death and two near drownings. They had lost four canoes, dropped only sixty-four meters below the rise of the Dúvida, and had at least five times as much river still to explore before they could hope to see the Amazon. Lobo’s invisible killers must be counted as extremely dangerous. That alone precluded the carving of another canoe, which would take three or four days and use up more food. Yet the two pontoons remaining could not carry the stores that were left.
All hands not needed on the river were going to have to make way for cargo and hack along the bank. The sole exceptions were Roosevelt and Dr. Cajazeira, who were considered too old and unfit to trek far. (Rondon, at forty-eight, remained as tough and stringy as a liana vine.) Every dispensable possession had to be abandoned. The hope was that safer country lay ahead, where the expedition could regroup, cut as many new canoes as needed, and hunt for meat.
On 17 March it began its bifurcated journey downstream, leaving behind for the mystification of the Indians a detritus including tents, clothes and shoes, a box of topographical instruments, and the waterside cross.
WHAT WITH SURVEY stops and the inclination of the camaradas to march barefoot, or sandaled, through the fly-infested jungle (resulting in three invalids, who had to be taken aboard the canoes), the expedition proceeded more slowly than ever. Another set of rapids necessitated a four-hundred-meter portage. Roosevelt and Cajazeira had no sooner reembarked than they were drawn, like Kermit earlier, into a second fall. Their lead pontoon very nearly capsized as it crashed around some boulders hiding a serious stretch of broken water. The second pontoon came down more carefully, but now fear was added to Roosevelt’s sense of mounting frustration. “Our position is really a very serious one,” Cherrie wrote in his diary.
Rondon decided to issue a morale-boosting order the following morning. It was his habit to address the expedition at the start of every day, stern and rigid in military khaki, trying to impose discipline on the polyglot, often quarreling assembly. Despite his small size, he was a formidable figure, austere to the point of monkishness, never ill, never tired, taciturn and unsmiling. The men had little affection for him, yet it was he, not the American commander (genial, tolerant, regularly handing out candy) whom they respected most.
When Roosevelt and Kermit attended the general assembly, they found the Brazilians standing at attention by the river. In the background, a small but strong stream flowed in from the west. Rondon cited it as hydrological evidence that the Dúvida was not an affluent of the Gi-Paraná. No matter where the larger stream led, it had come to dominate its own basin, and therefore could no longer be called a “River of Doubt.”
On behalf of Minister Lauro Müller, Rondon announced, he was renaming the Dúvida “Rio Roosevelt.” Its tributary here would henceforth be known as “Rio Kermit.” He then called for cheers for the two honorees, and a general cheer for the United States.
Roosevelt was taken aback by this extravagant double gesture. The renaming struck him as premature. He liked the romantic concept of a river shrouded in mystery. But he could not help being touched, and relieved that Kermit had been forgiven. He dutifully led an American cheer for Brazil, followed by another for Rondon, Lyra, and Cajazeira, and one more for the camaradas. Lyra asked why nobody had yet cheered Cherrie. So the naturalist got the loudest roar of all, “and the meeting,” Roosevelt wrote later, “broke up in high good humor.”
There was little to cheer about in the days that followed. Kermit fell sick with fever. Indians were again heard in the forest, and smelled in small dark huts that showed signs of hasty flight. Rondon was so uneasy about them that he could not sleep past two in the morning. Two more dugouts were carved out of light, red araputanga wood, but they hardly sped progress as the number of portages proliferated. Nor, during spells afloat, did Rondon and Lyra moderate their incessant demands upon Kermit to paddle ahead with his sighting rod.
One morning, Roosevelt lost patience and drew Rondon aside.
“First of all, Kermit was extraordinarily lucky to have escaped with his life from that accident which killed Simplício. I’m not saying that with these Indians around, he’s in more danger now than other members of the expedition, just because he sits in the lead canoe. But it’s not right to continue mapping the Dúvida the way we have been. We must limit ourselves to a quick survey. Leaders of a big enterprise like this should just focus on establishing the principal points.”
“Personally, I can’t accept that,” Rondon replied.
They were speaking French, the language of diplomacy. Even as he objected, Rondon recalled that he was in the presence of a distinguished guest of the Brazilian government, and backed down.
“However, I stand ready to escort you on through this wilderness as you wish, reducing the length of the expedition to a minimum.”
“Important men,” Roosevelt said, “do not bother themselves with details.…”
Rondon deflected the pomposity. “I am not an important man, nor do I consider details bothersome. Some sort of survey of the river is essential. As far as I am concerned, the expedition will be entirel
y worthless without it.”
After discussion, they agreed on a less laborious method of procedure. But Roosevelt made one thing clear. “Senhor Kermit no longer rides up front.”
CLEARING SKIES AND baking heat. Rapids, rapids, rapids. Portages too numerous to count. Rare fish dinners, but still no meat. Evasive tapirs. Grilled parrots and toucans. Monkey stew. Palm cabbage. Wild pineapples. Fatty Brazil nuts. Disappearance of fifteen food tins. Three weeks of rations left. Oxford Book of French Verse. Mountains crowding in. Men hit with fever, dysentery. Malcontents multiply. Daily chapter-writing. How to describe the utterly worthless camarada, Julio de Lima? “An inborn, lazy shirk with the heart of a ferocious cur in the body of a bullock.”
On 27 March, Roosevelt was standing with some other principals below an especially violent rapid. One of the pontoons came down empty, guided by two paddlers, ran into a curl, and overturned. Then the current hurled it into deep water and jammed it against some boulders. He was the first to jump into the river and try to help the paddlers save it. Cherrie and other expedition members followed. They slipped and stumbled as they hacked at the lashings of the pontoon, with waves seething round their chests. Six or seven naked, screaming men, including Kermit, clambered onto an island and threw down a rope to secure the separated canoes. Eventually both vessels were dragged free and moored. But in the struggle, Roosevelt cut his right leg on a rock.
Twelve years before, as President, he had been riding in a barouche that collided with a speeding trolley car. He had been thrown to the side of the road, unhurt except for an ugly bruise on the left shin. It had developed into an abscess serious enough to mandate two operations and several weeks in a wheelchair. The surgery, involving a syringe probe and scraping of the periosteum, had left him with a permanent feeling of fragility in that leg. During his second term, he had rapped it while riding, causing such an inflammation that the White House physician had considered another operation, to remove atrophied bone. And in the summer of 1910, there had been a recurrence of osteoperiostitis, oddly accompanied by Cuban fever.
This insult to Roosevelt’s other leg caused an ache that would not go away. He began to limp and his color reddened overnight. Next morning, three black vultures sailed over the camp. Then Rondon came back from a reconnaissance trip downriver. Cherrie could tell from his expression that he had terrible news.
There was a three-kilometer gorge ahead, Rondon said, full of rapids and falls, and so precipitous (it dropped more than thirty meters) that none of the canoes could be roped through. Nor, in his opinion, could they be portaged. The forested banks were too dense and too steep. All six vessels would have to be abandoned. Every man except Roosevelt must transport as heavy a load of necessities as he could carry along the rim of the gorge until it came to an end and more canoes could be cut.
The Americans overruled him. They insisted that time and supplies were too short to permit the construction of a new flotilla. Kermit was sure he and Lyra could coax the canoes at least some of the way by water and the rest by land, winching them up one side of the gorge if necessary.
Rondon agreed to let them try. But his pessimism was contagious, worsening the expedition’s morale. Each principal had to pare personal baggage down to the lightest minimum. Roosevelt kept only the helmet, clothes, and shoes he stood in, plus a change of underwear and one set of pajamas. He clung to his black manuscript box and rifle, as well as a few other essentials: “my wash-kit, a pocket medicine case, and a little bag containing my spare spectacles, gun grease, some adhesive plaster, some needles and thread, the ‘fly dope,’ and my purse and letter of credit, to be used at Manáos.” He made a single bundle of his folding cot, blanket, and mosquito net, and crammed the veil and gantlets he needed for writing into his cartridge case.
Cherrie accompanied him on the high trek on 30 March. Roosevelt began to show signs of coronary stress. He kept sitting down and begging Cherrie to climb on ahead of him. But the naturalist was afraid to leave him unattended. Together at the crest, they looked north at a range of mountains unmarked on any map. The Dúvida (nobody had gotten used to calling it the “Roosevelt”) shone here and there amid the dark trees like an arrow of light. The way it vanished into the distance filled them both with foreboding.
When they descended to the camp that Kermit had hopefully established as a “port” overlooking the gorge’s worst rapids, Roosevelt had no strength left. He lay flat on the damp ground, trying to still the tumult in his chest. He could not begin to help his son with the canoes, nor Rondon in cutting a corduroy road beyond the last cataract. The most he could do, when he recovered, was wash Cherrie’s shirt for him.
As if in some vast conspiracy of fate, mountains, river, and weather combined to subject the expedition to its worst punishment yet. Rain drilled down as the men started work on the skidway. Kermit and Lyra stumbled around upstream in rotting shoes, roping the dugouts down meter by meter. One boat smashed, but the other five got safely to port. Then began the Sisyphusian labor of hauling them, and the rainwater they received, up Rondon’s muddy road.
By the time this operation was complete, April had begun, and all but three of the camaradas were broken in body or spirit. The expedition encamped halfway down the rapids. The deluge that night amounted to solid water. Its weight collapsed the only two shelters available to the principals—the little medical tent in which Roosevelt now slept alone, and the balloon-silk fly shared by his five colleagues. Wrapped in a damp blanket, he managed to get some sleep, but fears about him increased.
The following day’s advance amounted to less than three meters of aneroid “drop,” and subjected him to another portage. His cot was set up in a gorge even narrower than the one he had just quit.
“Worried a lot about father’s heart,” Kermit wrote in his diary.
THE NEXT MORNING Roosevelt had reason to believe he was in the valley of the shadow of death. The jawbone of a Pachydermata brasiliensis protruded from the sand. Rock walls that could have been sliced by civil engineers blocked the sky. Kermit and Lyra lost yet another canoe, reducing the flotilla once more to just two pontoons. A reconnaissance party came back with news of rapids continuing as far as the eye could see. Or the ear to hear: for four weeks now, the roar of broken water had sounded almost uninterruptedly ahead of them, like a pedal note denying any hope of final resolution.
Rondon took some men ahead to hack vines, while others, supervised by a huge black sergeant named Paixão, got the stores ready for transportation. Roosevelt was resting by the river when he noticed Julio de Lima, the pure Portuguese he had long recognized as a spoiler, drop his load, pick up a carbine, and walk off muttering. It was not unusual to see a camarada hunt, since everybody was half-starved. Julio alone remained fleshy and healthy-looking. He was a known food thief: Paixão had several times caught him in the act and beaten him. But his muttering today was peculiar.
Several minutes later, there was a shot outside the camp. Brazilians ran back shouting, “Julio mato Paixão!” Julio had killed Paixão. Roosevelt, careless of his leg, hurried to the scene of the crime with Cherrie and Dr. Cajazeira. They found the sergeant dead in a pool of blood. Julio had shot him through the heart at point-blank range. A scurry of foot marks ran into the jungle, frantically circled, then disappeared down the gorge.
Roosevelt sent for Rondon and insisted on frontier justice. “We must go after Julio, arrest him, and execute him!”
Rondon saw that he was highly excited, and tried to calm him. “That’s against Brazilian law. Criminals are jailed, not put to death.”
“In my country, whoever kills has to die.”
“It’s useless to pursue Julio,” Rondon said. “A man vanishing into the forest like that.… You’ve a better chance finding a needle in a haystack. Meanwhile, he deserves his fate.”
Roosevelt’s concern was that Julio, having gone berserk, might return under cover of darkness and steal food or kill someone else. But when the murder weapon was found further on, he accepted
that the second alternative was unlikely.
França, the cook, was confident that Paixão’s ghost would seek revenge. He darkly observed that the sergeant had died falling forward. That meant the killer was doomed. “Paixão is following Julio now, and will follow him till he dies.”
Roosevelt quoted this remark in his account of what had happened. The writer in him responded to the expedition’s second funeral ceremony.
The murdered man lay with a handkerchief over his face. We buried him beside the place where he fell. With axes and knives the camaradas dug a shallow grave while we stood by with bared heads. Then reverently and carefully we lifted the poor body which but half an hour before had been so full of vigorous life. Colonel Rondon and I bore the head and shoulders. We laid him in the grave, and heaped a mound over him, and put a rude cross over his head. We fired a volley for a brave and loyal soldier who had died doing his duty. Then we left him forever, under the great trees beside the lonely river.
LATE THE FOLLOWING afternoon, Roosevelt felt the first, unmistakable symptoms of Cuban fever. He had to endure a hailstorm, and further heart tremors, as he limped a few hundred yards down the boulder-strewn gorge to a new camp at the foot of the rapids. His colleagues saw that he was very ill and pitched his tent in the driest spot possible, a stony slope that shed at least some rain. Roosevelt was unconscious of the tilt as he took to his cot and the malaria hit him with full force. His temperature rose to around 104°F. He became delirious, reciting some lines of Coleridge over and over again:
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