“I have already lived and enjoyed as much of life as any nine other men I know,” the 55-year-old Theodore Roosevelt wrote to a friend in 1913 as he was about to embark on the astonishing journey chronicled in this marvelous book. “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.”
He very nearly did.
In the fall of 1913 Roosevelt was a Republican ex-president, chafing under his failure the year before to win a third term on the third-party Progressive ticket. Restless as always, he was looking for some means of salvation through exertion, his lifelong weapon against depression and despair.
When the opportunity for a speaking tour of South America, topped by a trek through the Amazon jungle, came up, Roosevelt grabbed it. It was supposed to be “limited to well-charted rivers that could be expected to offer adventure without risk.”
If Candice Millard’s “The River of Doubt” does anything, it shows that Roosevelt was incapable of settling for anything tame. Within days of arriving in Brazil on Oct. 18, he abandoned the planned itinerary for something that proved “exponentially more dangerous.”
He plumped instead for a trek to and the first descent of an entirely unmapped river, a tributary – or perhaps a tributary of a tributary – of the mighty Amazon. Its very name evoked its remoteness and mystery: Rio da Duvida, the River of Doubt.
Only a handful of men had attempted to travel the river. One of them was the Brazilian colonel, Candido Randon, who, with Roosevelt, would be nominally co-commander of the expedition and in actuality its leader.
Roosevelt’s son Kermit, working as an engineer in Brazil, reluctantly joined the expedition at the insistence of his mother, Edith, who worried about her husband and urged her son to accompany him. It probably saved his father’s life.
Ominous beginning
They pushed off into the jungle on Christmas Day. It was all downhill from there. They were plagued by gnats, flies, mosquitoes and every other kind of insect, ceaseless rain (and resultant mud), wounds and other maladies, the death of oxen and mules.
“Everything became mouldy,” Roosevelt noted, “except what became rusty.”
And all this was before the truly wretched part, the trip downriver, which began Feb. 27, 1914. Incredibly, they had brought not a single boat. They had to make do with heavy, clumsy dugouts they bought from Indians.
Now they faced 15-foot-long caimans, piranhas, poisonous frogs, jaguars, pit vipers, coral snakes, oppressive humidity, isolation, uncertainty, the forest’s “stifling monotony.” Not to mention the horrible candiru, a tiny, almost transparent parasitic catfish that survives on blood.
Indians kept them under constant surveillance. What they didn’t know was the Indians were the Cinta Larga, a tribe said to practice ritualistic cannibalism.
It was an unbelievably hard slog, requiring arduous portages around uncountable rapids. In one month they made only 68 miles downriver. The slow progress reduced their food supply to near starvation levels.
A wound to his right leg rendered Roosevelt increasingly ill. In order not to endanger the others, Roosevelt at one point decided not to go on. But Kermit would not abandon him, and Roosevelt realized that to save Kermit, he must endeavor to save himself.
Survival of fittest
All of this is gripping – Millard’s account of the trip no more than her depiction of the awesome diversity of jungle flora and fauna as a battleground for species’ survival, “an unceasing evolutionary combat.”
Just as absorbing is the contrast between Roosevelt and Randon’s approaches. Each respected the other immensely, but Roosevelt wanted to get through the trip as quickly as possible. Randon, a dedicated Brazilian official, wanted to carry out time-consuming cartographic work and other tasks.
The author does not explicitly say so, but both men may have been equally foolhardy. Randon’s maddening delays in the face of their rapidly disappearing food seems to have put them in as much risk as Roosevelt’s “own casual approach to the expedition and its route.”
Millard, a former National Geographic staff writer, appears to have researched scrupulously (to the extent of retracing Roosevelt’s journey). Her writing is brisk, and short chapters help move the story along, though it is so captivating it scarcely needs any help.
The party got out, but Roosevelt’s health was severely impaired, and he died less than five years later. The river he helped explore is now known as Rio Roosevelt.
Roger K. Miller, a former newspaper book review editor, is a freelance writer, reviewer and editor.
The River of Doubt
By Candice Millard
Doubleday, 365 pages, $26
