The River of Doubt (11 page)

O
N THE MORNING OF
December 12, 1913, Colonel Cândido Rondon—five feet three inches tall, with dark skin, a shock of black, slightly graying hair and a ramrod-straight posture—was looking crisp and starched in his dress whites as he anxiously paced the deck of the
Nyoac
, a shallow-river steamer that was anchored at the juncture of the Paraguay and Apa Rivers on Brazil’s southern border. Peering into the distance, Rondon searched for a column of smoke, a tall steel mast, anything that would herald the arrival of the
Adolfo Riquielme
, the Paraguayan president’s gunboat-yacht that was carrying Theodore Roosevelt to meet him.

After almost two months in South America, Roosevelt had finally completed his official duties, and could now devote himself entirely to his long-anticipated expedition into the Amazon. So remote was the region he had agreed to explore, however, that even getting to the River of Doubt would require a journey of at least two more months—first by boat and then on muleback. Crossing into Brazil on the broad Paraguay River, Roosevelt and his men would continue upstream as far as possible, disembarking at a telegraph station and
frontier town called Tapirapoan. They would then make their way across four hundred miles of the Brazilian Highlands, passing through open plains, scrub forest, barren desert, and dense jungle to reach the river, and launch their boats down its black, fast-moving waters.

With every mile of this journey, the expedition would be moving farther from populated areas, and closer to the edge of the unknown. Although the initial leg of boat travel offered a last opportunity for relative comfort and safety, the grueling overland journey would take them well past the frontier of settled lands, and into dangerous wilderness regions where the first outposts of military and governmental authority had only recently been established, and where harsh terrain and fierce indigenous tribes still posed a grave threat to intruders.

Even for the most hardened, ambitious Brazilian frontiersmen, the territory that Roosevelt was preparing to cross was considered too difficult and dangerous to settle or explore. Indeed, except for indigenous tribesmen, only a handful of men in the history of Brazil had ever reached the headwaters of the River of Doubt and survived to tell the tale. Those men had been led by Cândido Rondon.

*  *  *

B
ORN IN
the remote western-Brazilian state of Mato Grosso, in a little town called Mimoso that was twenty miles south of the state’s capital, Cuiabá, Rondon had grown up in painful isolation from the rest of Brazil. His earliest memories were of war and irreparable loss. His father, Cândido Mariano da Silva, a
caboclo
, or man of mixed Indian and European descent, died from smallpox six months before his son was born. Just days later, the Paraguayan dictator Francisco Solano López invaded Mato Grosso in retaliation for Brazil’s military intervention in the Uruguayan civil war. Since there were no lines of communication at that time between Mato Grosso and the Brazilian capital, the remote, impoverished people of Mato Grosso could not look to the government for aid.

The War of the Triple Alliance, a bloody five-year war that pitted
Paraguay against an alliance of Brazil, Uruguay (run by a puppet government controlled by Brazil), and Argentina, officially began in 1865, the year that Rondon was born. Under constant siege, the people living in Mato Grosso’s far-flung towns fled to Cuiabá in search of protection. Rondon’s mother, who was one-quarter Terena Indian and one-quarter Borôro Indian, snatched up her infant son and ran. All she found in Cuiabá, however, was the same deadly disease that had killed her husband. In 1867, half the refugees in Cuiabá, roughly six thousand people, died from smallpox. In the midst of famine, widespread disease, and war, Rondon survived. His mother did not.

Survival against great odds was to become a hallmark of Rondon’s life, but so too were loneliness and isolation. Orphaned at the age of two, Rondon was cared for by his grandparents until they too died while he was still a boy. He was then sent to live with his mother’s brother, a man who adopted him, gave him his surname, and educated him until, at the age of sixteen, Rondon moved to Rio de Janeiro. The city must have seemed utterly alien to a young man who had grown up in the backwoods of Mato Grosso. It is no surprise that he gravitated toward the only semblance of a family that was available to him: the Escola Militar, Rio’s military school.

Rondon, however, was not like the other boys at the military school, and nearly a year passed before he began to feel comfortable there. Even as a teenager, Rondon was serious and driven; he was also poor beyond anyone’s understanding. He woke up at 4:00 a.m. every day to swim in the sea and was back in his dark room by 5:00 a.m., studying by the thin light of a whale-oil lamp while the other students, most of whom had been out late the night before, burrowed deeper into their beds, dreading the 6:00 a.m. reveille. Besides his extraordinary discipline, Rondon’s extreme poverty and rural background made him an outcast. Too poor even to afford textbooks, he never left campus with the other boys on the weekends, and he was nicknamed “the hairy brute” because he was so awkward in social situations. The earnest young man’s isolation was so complete that no
one around him noticed that he was starving. Living on a meager diet of rice and beans, and working night and day in an effort to complete a two-year degree in only one year, he became so malnourished that he finally collapsed while descending a flight of stairs on his way to a math class.

Rondon lost an entire year of school while he slowly recovered, but he spent the time tutoring other students and never gave up his ambitions for a military career. After returning to school, he earned a bachelor’s degree in mathematics and the physical and natural sciences, and, while still in his early twenties, was promoted to military engineer, a title that ensured him a lifelong professorship or a well-respected position as an intellectual at the military headquarters in Rio—positions that would have been the culmination of a dream for many men, especially a poor
caboclo
from remote Mato Grosso.

Rondon, however, had other plans. He wanted to serve not just his country but its most disenfranchised and endangered inhabitants: the Indians. “I want to bring the civilization which I have acquired to my Mato Grosso and my Amazonia,” he said, “to the jungle and its tribes.” His determination to protect South American Indians and incorporate them into mainstream Brazilian society—a passion that would come to override all others in his life—grew less out of his ethnic background than his philosophical convictions. Rondon was a member of Brazil’s Positivist movement, which, founded by the French philosopher Auguste Comte in the mid-nineteenth century, had its foundations in the French Enlightenment and British Empiricism. Although Positivists claimed to be, as one historian put it, “the respectful heirs of Catholicism,” the country’s dominant faith, their beliefs were in direct contradiction to that religion. Largely a philosophy of humanity, Positivism chose scientific knowledge and observed facts over mysticism and blind faith, putting its trust in the inevitable pull of progress, a type of Darwinian evolution toward civilization.

Rondon was first exposed to the tenets of Positivism while he was a student at the military school. His math teacher, Benjamin Constant—a man known as a “mathematical sleepwalker” because he
could sit for hours in perfect silence, ruminating on the mysteries of math while the chaotic world went on around him—was a vocal member of the movement and did not hesitate to indoctrinate his students. Although he was a personal friend of Emperor Pedro II, Constant, through the military, played a pivotal role in the overthrow of the monarchy and the establishment of the Federal Republic of Brazil in November 1889. After the relatively bloodless coup—Pedro II, like countless fallen monarchs before and after him, sought exile in Paris—the leaders of the Republic created a new flag for Brazil, choosing a green background with a bright-blue globe resting on a gold diamond. On the globe they scattered twenty-seven five-pointed stars, one for each of Brazil’s states and for the Federal District, and stretched a white banner across its face that today still proudly bears the Positivist motto:
Ordem e Progresso
, Order and Progress—not just for Brazilians but also for the country’s native inhabitants.

Less than six months after the founding of the Republic, Rondon was given an unexpected opportunity to put his Positivist beliefs to work for the good of Amazonian Indians. He was chosen as the head of the Strategic Telegraph Commission—thereafter known as the Rondon Commission—a job that would put him in direct contact with the Amazon’s most isolated tribes. Rondon accepted the assignment and returned to Mato Grosso in April 1890 as a local hero. He was not yet twenty-five years old, but, just eight years after leaving Cuiabá, he was the commander of a small arm of the military, and he had been entrusted with arguably the Republic’s most difficult assignment.

The Rondon Commission’s expeditions into the Brazilian interior were infamous. At best, they were long, exhausting, lonely treks through unfamiliar territory. At worst, they were terrifying forced marches that subjected the soldiers to disease, starvation, and relentless Indian attacks. Rondon was supposed to have between 100 and 150 men for his expeditions, but he rarely had a full unit. In 1900, Rondon began an expedition with eighty-one men. By the end of the year, only thirty were left. Of the missing, seventeen had deserted, and
the rest were either hospitalized or dead. Time passed, and Rondon gained more experience, but the conditions under which his men labored did not improve. In 1903, only fifty-five men returned from an expedition that had begun with a hundred. Assignment to Rondon’s unit became a punishment, reserved for those enlisted men who had proved themselves to be lazy, violent, or, frequently, both. Many of his men were recruited directly from Rio de Janeiro’s prisons. Had they known what hardship they would face on one of Rondon’s expeditions, most of them would have likely begged to remain in jail.

The most harrowing trip that Rondon’s men had endured was in 1909, the year that their commander discovered the River of Doubt. He had started out in early June of that year from Tapirapoan—the same town that would serve as the launching point for Roosevelt’s overland journey—with forty-two men, including two Indian guides. A supply train of five hundred oxen and 160 mules was supposed to meet him at the next telegraph station, Juruena, but only forty animals survived the journey. A few days later the expedition’s geologist and its pharmacist, as well as several military recruits and civilian workers, had to be sent back because they were too sick to travel any farther. Rondon himself was so ill with malaria that the expedition’s doctor finally convinced him to ride on an ox. After riding just a quarter of a mile, however, he insisted on walking with his men, explaining later that, “with every step, my self-respect was reduced a little more.”

In early August, the men, struggling through a dense, tangled jungle that Rondon described as “monstrously fecund,” stumbled upon a strange, twisting stream. In some places the stream plunged underground. In others it spread out to nearly forty feet in width. It seemed to flow in a general north-northwest direction, but it twisted so wildly that it was impossible to be sure where it would lead. After following it briefly, the men, their provisions perilously low, gave up. They had neither the strength nor the time to solve the mystery of the river, prompting Rondon to christen it Rio da Dúvida—the River of Doubt.

As the men hacked their way through the deepening jungle, their
suffering began in full force. By late August, they had exhausted all their supplies and were surviving on Brazil nuts, hearts of palm, wild honey, and an occasional fish. The rivers teemed with piranha, but they sliced through the men’s fishing line and hooks with knife-blade teeth. So difficult were they to catch that, out of desperation, one lieutenant, a man named Pyrineus, finally threw dynamite into a pond above a waterfall. As he splashed through the water below, eagerly gathering his spoils, he made the mistake of holding a piranha in his mouth while his hands were busy scooping up others. The fish had at first been stunned by the dynamite and so lay slack between his teeth, but as soon as it recovered, it attacked. Before Pyrineus had time to react, the piranha had taken a bite out of his tongue. He would have bled to death had the expedition’s doctor not stanched the wound with moss.

By the time the expedition emerged from the jungle in late December 1909, the men who were still alive were so weak that many of them could hardly crawl. All of them had parasitic insects wriggling under their skin. Those who were not completely naked were wearing only rags, and all were on the brink of starvation. However, over the course of 237 days, they had covered six hundred miles of unmapped territory, and Rondon took great satisfaction in the tremendous leap forward that he and his men had made toward the understanding of Brazil’s mysterious interior. Then he set about planning his next expedition.