TR's Darkest Journey

The River of Doubt: Theodore Roosevelt's Darkest Journey - Candice Millard 

In 1912, Theodore Roosevelt lost his run for a third term as president. Valuing a life lived strenuously, Roosevelt was always one to re-double his efforts after a setback. So he jumped at a unique chance to combine diplomacy and exploring. That is, after he finished a good-will tour of three South American countries, he would join a party of Brazilians whose mission was to map the River of Doubt, a river that twisted and turned in the remote Brazilian rainforest. The crew consisted of Roosevelt’s son Kermit, ornithologist and explorer George Cherrie, and 22 others.  Serving as TR’s co-commander, Colonel Candido Miriano da Silva Rondon has gone down in history as military hero who explored the western Amazon basin and defended the interests of indigenous peoples.

It was a snake-bitten, bad luck-ridden expedition from the get-go. They faced hard-going for two months by mule and boat over 400 miles of plain, desert, and jungle. When they finally arrived at the river, they had to use seven heavy, awkward and overloaded dugouts. The rapids and waterfalls required long, punishing portages that the reader can’t believe sheer human muscle power accomplished.

One member of the crew was a thief and slacker and in such a situation only one troublemaker can cause many problems. Hostile Indians were known to murder men outside their band and then cannibalize them. But the natural world offered its dangers too. Caiman alligators were fearsome predators that one might step on, mistaking them for rocks. Pit vipers and coral snakes were wary enough to move away when they sensed humans were around but woe to the man who surprised them. Schools of up to 600 piranha could chow down an ox or an explorer to bones in ten minutes. The explorer’s cook cut open a huge catfish called the piraiba to reveal the head of a monkey in the beast’s stomach.

The explorers were harassed by insects. Black flies called piums had a nasty bite. Mosquitoes carried malaria. As any loyal watcher of Monsters Inside Me knows, bot flies leave hideous grubs in the flesh. Readers of Redmon O’Hanlon’s In Trouble Again: A Journey Between the Orinoco and the Amazon back in the heyday of Eighties travel writing will be reminded of the candiru, the toothpick fish that can swim up a man's urethra when he pisses into the river, after which the only way to remove the beast is a penectomy.

Happily, nobody had to have his penis amputated, but three men died on the trip. Indian arrows killed Rondon’s dog Lobo. Six dugouts were lost, so the men had to carve out new ones from felled trees.  Their food had to be rationed – dinner near the end of the trip was a cup of soup and a saltine cracker - until it finally ran out. It rained constantly, the humidity make their clothes continually wet. They woke up to put on damp clothes – somehow this seems especially dispiriting. Roosevelt sustained a leg injury which required an abscess to be lanced, a procedure done with no pain-killers. Such were the privations, Roosevelt lost a quarter of his body weight – some 55 pounds – by the time he got out of the rainforest miraculously alive.

I recommend this book highly for readers looking for a remarkable travel narrative. A former writer and editor for National Geographic, Millard is a lucid writer. She provides outstanding digressions about science and history. She keeps the chapters short, which makes the story move fast. I bailed on her book about the assassination of Garfield (early on, errors of mechanics or fact, I don’t recall which), but if fate puts it on a table at a used book sale I would read the book about Winston Churchill, Hero of the Empire.