On the River of Doubt

One of the many areas of agreement between me and my co-worker Jim is that there can never be too much written about Theodore Roosevelt. But whereas, with Abraham Lincoln, about whom I feel the same, the inextinguishable possibilities of history and biography lie more in the complexity of his psyche, Roosevelt’s richness as a subject is directly tied to his physical inexhaustibility. He crammed so much incident and interest into one life that Edmund Morris’s biography required two volumes just to get through the presidential years.

Nonetheless, I was surprised to find that I wasn't the only person who hadn't heard of the South American river journey that is the subject of Candice Millard’s River of Doubt: Theodore Roosevelt’s Darkest Journey. Another co-worker who’s a TR fan checked the H. W. Brands biography; the journey down the River of Doubt receives a scant four pages. Candice Millard spreads the story out over 400 pages, and it's worth it.

Roosevelt began the trip as a way to cope with his landslide loss to Woodrow Wilson in the 1912 election, wherein Roosevelt had broken with the Republicans and run as the candidate of the Progressive Party. Crushed by the defeat, Roosevelt was quick to sign on to an idea proposed by an old friend, Father Zahm of Notre Dame, that he spend a few months traveling the Amazon River. Roosevelt put Zahm in charge of the planning. Zahm, for whom Millard doesn't attempt to hide her contempt, was no fan of hard work, and he delegated the organizational responsibilities to a man whose only credential was leadership of a disastrously failed Arctic exploration. The planning, thus, was poor: deep in the jungle, the members of the expedition were exceedingly displeased to find tins of luxury mustards where they expected to find basic foodstuffs.

The journey was to be fairly unadventurous, compared to some of Roosevelt’s travels as a young man. But once in Brazil—already chafing at the thought of breaking no new ground with his trip—he was quickly convinced to attempt something more daring: a descent of the River of Doubt, an Amazon tributary never before navigated by non-natives. The Brazilian government gave him its full support, in the form of a large number of camaradas, or laborers, and Brazil’s greatest explorer, Colonel Candido Mariana da Silva Rondon, who would be co-leader of the expedition.

From the start of the trip, things went poorly, as even the long overland journey, through territory familiar to Colonel Rondon from earlier exploration, was slower and more difficult than expected. Pack animals dropped dead, food supplies ran low, and malaria began its relentless attack on the group. Father Zahm quickly wore out his welcome through laziness and racism, which irked both Rondon and Roosevelt. The final straw came when he suggested that he be borne in a litter by four camaradas, because, “The Indian is made to carry priests.” Roosevelt asked Father Zahm to step into his tent; when they emerged, the Father was on his way back to Sao Paulo. (A private browbeating by TR is something better imagined than experienced. Even thinking about it makes me want to do whatever he thinks I should do. Quickly.)

The picture Millard paints of Roosevelt is the one we’re accustomed to: strong in body and stronger in will, brave to the point of foolhardiness, indefatigable, and a bit bull-headed. But alongside him she places fully-realized portraits of his son, Kermit, and of Colonel Rondon, who to this day remains a hero in Brazil for his work on behalf of the Amazon’s native population. You don’t need to know much about Roosevelt to realize that he would have trouble with the rule Rondon drummed into his exploration corps: in contact with Indians, “die if you must, but never kill.” Roosevelt was a man who cherished the idea of selling one’s life dear. Yet the element of willpower in Rondon’s adherence to his philosophy of life was so clear—the life hewing so closely to the ideals—that Roosevelt respected Rondon even as the River of Doubt tested the men and their new friendship.

As the expedition makes its way down the river, beset by difficulties at every turn. Millard describes the life of the jungle and explains how centuries of adaptive pressures had fitted animals and plants into ever-tighter evolutionary niches. With the verve of a student of natural history, she tells of the dreaded candiru (which I knew of from Peter Fleming’s excellent Brazilian Adventure), the monkey fish, which can leap high enough out of the water to snag monkeys from low branches, and the more familiar—but no less scary—piranha and caiman.

The men suffered from disease, hunger, and deadly rapids. The jungle itself, in its monotony as much as its dangers, preyed on their minds. Millard quotes from my favorite Brazilian travel book, H. R. Tomlinson’s 1912 The Sea and the Jungle

The forest of the Amazons is not merely trees and shrubs. It is not land. It is another element. Its inhabitants are arborean; they have been fashioned for life in that medium as fishes to the seas and birds to the air. Its green apparition is persistent, as the sky is and the ocean. In months of travel it is the horizon which the traveler cannot reach.

Millard conveys that tedium, and the danger, hunger, and weariness of the expedition, as well as the best travel writers—everyone from Apsley Cherry-Garrard to Bill Bryson—to the point where I found myself admiring the men just for getting up from their bedrolls in the morning.

Well into the journey, Roosevelt develops a fever and wastes away before our eyes, from the hale man who just the year before delivered a speech in Milwaukee with five bullets in his chest from a would-be assassin, to skin-and-bones shell, unable to walk. At that point, it doesn't matter that we know he died in his bed years later. There are thirty days ahead on the River of Doubt, and we see no escape. Getting out was Roosevelt's last great adventure, and thanks to Candice Millard, we now know all about it.

Conversations and anecdotes

From River of Doubt: Theodore Roosevelt’s Darkest Journey, by Candice Millard (2005)

He was, [Colonel] Rondon wrote, “the life of the party.” In contrast to the reserved, taciturn Brazilian colonel, Roosevelt must have seemed peculiarly fun and lighthearted. Rondon himself was stunned by his loquacious co-commander. “And talk!” he wrote, “I never saw a man who talked so much. He would talk all of the time he was in swimming, all of the time during meals, traveling in the canoe and at night around the camp fire. He talked endlessly and on all conceivable subjects.”

From Tolstoy: A Biography, by A. N. Wilson (1988)

In society, shyness still tormented [the young Tolstoy] unless he was drunk. It is hard to think that the rules which he formulated for social behaviour necessarily made him the most charming of companions. “Rules for society. Choose difficult situations, always try to control a conversation, speak loudly, calmly and distinctly, try to being and end a conversation yourself. Seek the company of people higher in the world than yourself.”

From “The Evils of Spain,” by V. S. Pritchett , collected in Essential Stories (2005)

Caesar did not speak much. He gave his silent weight to the dinner, letting his head drop like someone falling asleep, and listening. To the noise we made his silence was a balance and he nodded all the time slowly, making everything true. Sometimes someone told some story about him and he listened to that, nodding and not disputing it.

From a review by Anthony Powell in the Daily Telegraph of John Skelton: Poet of Tudor England, by Maurice Pollett (1971). Collected in Some Poets, Artists, and ‘A Reference for Mellors’(2005).

Admitting that [John Skelton (c.1400-1529) had] a contemporary reputation for wit and eccentricity, we find also a mild anecdote about Skelton included during his own lifetime in one of those collections of jokes popular at the time, A Hundred Merry Tales. Shakespeare took some of his funny stories from this particular anthology.

So far so good, but hardly was Skelton in his coffin before further stories began to pour out about him, in which he was confused with a friend of Chaucer’s called Scoggin—also, as it happened, a poet and royal tutor—who had lived about a hundred years earlier.

That was bad enough, but worse was to come. Scoggin, as has been said, was an earlier personality, but one who, from his career, might be judged to possess a somewhat similar line of wit to Skelton’s. Unfortunately, on this already muddled situation descended an avalanche of chestnuts, many of a bawdy sort, told about another Scoggin, who almost certainly never existed, but was said to have been court fool to Henry VII.

Simply as regards confusion of identity, it was rather as if a story told about Evelyn Waugh was then said to refer to P. G. Wodehouse, and, as a result, not only were Waugh and Wodehouse anecdotes impossible to sort out, but they also could not be distinguished from those about Bertie Wooster, believed by many to be a real man.

Presidents and dissent

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

When [Roosevelt's] train pulled into Chile's capital, Santiago, in late November [1913], he was greeted by a crowd that at first seemed to mirror the friendly masses that had welcomed him to Brazil, Uruguay, and Argentina. But the moment he leapt from his Pullman to the train-station floor, with the triumphal strains of the American and Chilean national anthems echoing around him, his welcoming party suddenly transformed into an angry protest rally. "The human multitude, showing marked hostility, shouted with all their might vivas!--to Mexico and Colombia, and Down with the Yankee Imperialism!" a journalist for Lima's West Coast Leader excitedly reported.

The Chilean government went to great lengths to shield Roosevelt from the demonstrations, even buying and destroying newspapers that covered anti-Roosevelt rallies, but their guest had no desire to hide from any assult on himself or his country. On the contrary, he took every opportunity to face down his attackers, ready to explain in no uncertain terms why he was right and they were wrong. At a state reception welcoming him to Chile, he vigorously debated Marchial Martinez, a former Chilean ambassador to the United States, about the continuted relevance of the Monroe Doctrine. Days later, in an electrifiying speech, he gave an impassioned, utterly unapologetic defense of the Panama Canal.

And that was when Roosevelt was a private citizen, no longer president. Not quite the same as George Bush's scripted press conferences and talks before hand-picked, pre-screened audiences.

This passage also reminds us that not much has changed: an American president could today go to South America and hear that same chant, and he'd still deserve it.