The River of Doubt (10 page)

Also, the provisions that Fiala had so carefully chosen and packed were more of a burden than a blessing in the eyes of the other men on the expedition. When Roosevelt’s party reached Buenos Aires, the sheer volume of baggage that was unloaded from the
Vandyck
drew a crowd of curious onlookers. There were mountains of crates: guns and ammunition, chairs and tables, tents and cots, equipment for collecting and preserving specimens, surveying the river and cooking meals. After one of the baggage handlers, soaked in sweat, carried the final item from the steamer to the dock, a customs officer asked him if everything was now accounted for. Mopping his brow, the stevedore replied, “Nothing lacking but the piano!” and the crowd erupted in laughter. Even worse for Fiala and Sigg, soon after they disembarked, the two men found themselves the lone custodians of this mountain of bags, boxes, and crates. Leo Miller and Cherrie promptly excused themselves, explaining that they needed to start doing some collecting, and fled to Asunción, Paraguay, leaving their companions to struggle with what Miller referred to as the expedition’s “appalling amount of luggage

*  *  *

R
OOSEVELT, FOR
his part, would have no opportunity to help get his expedition on track. From the moment he set foot in South America, he was plunged into a nonstop whirlwind of political commitments and controversies. His speaking tour through Brazil,
Uruguay (a last-minute addition), and Argentina would follow a fishhook-shaped course down the Atlantic coast and then westward to Chile, before returning to Brazil and the Amazon.

Frankly, Roosevelt was not looking forward to any of it. “I loathe state-traveling and speechmaking! Ugh!,” he wrote to his daughter Ethel in early December. He knew that his expedition through the Amazon would be difficult, but he suspected that it would be “less unhealthy than a steady succession of dreary ‘banquets,’ and of buckets of sweet tepid champagne.” Zahm, on the other hand, delighted in the endless parade of banquets and dinners and basked in the glow of Roosevelt’s reflected fame. “As you will see from the papers sent you, I have covered much ground since I wrote you and have been lionized everywhere, notwithstanding the fact that there has been a very big lion with me,” he wrote his brother. “If I were young enough to be spoiled, I should now be beyond redemption.”

The excitement with which Roosevelt was met in nearly every city he visited—in countries whose governments and citizens supposedly feared and hated him—was testimony to the Rough Rider’s legendary charm. Not everyone in South America admired Theodore Roosevelt, however, and he soon found that his detractors were as loud and passionate in their derision as his supporters were in their praise. Although Father Zahm would later refer to the tour as one “continuous ovation,” Chile was a notable exception. Students at the university in Santiago disagreed with Roosevelt on several serious issues, not the least of which was the Panama Canal.

Roosevelt considered the Panama Canal to be one of the greatest achievements of his presidency, and he believed that the canal’s architectural genius and the indelible mark that it—and, through it, he—would leave on the world more than justified the small South American revolution he had had to foment in order to make it a reality. In 1903, Roosevelt’s third year in the White House, the United States government decided, after much heated debate, that Panama rather than Nicaragua would be the best location for a canal that would connect the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. At that time, Panama
was a state within Colombia, and so Roosevelt had offered Colombia twelve million dollars for the right to build the canal. When the Colombian Senate countered with restrictive treaty language and a demand for more money, Roosevelt’s response was impatience and contempt. He wrote to his secretary of state, John Hay, that the United States should not allow the “lot of jackrabbits” in Colombia “to bar one of the future highways of civilization,” and he proceeded quietly to encourage and support a Panamanian revolution that had been bubbling under the surface for years.

On November 3, 1903, with U.S. Navy ships lined up in nearby waters, Panama declared its independence. Fifteen days later, John Hay and Philippe Bunau-Varilla, a Frenchman who had been the canal’s chief engineer, signed the Hay-Bunau-Varilla Treaty, which gave the United States control of the Canal Zone, a five-mile-wide swath of land on either side of the waterway. A decade later, the Colombians were still fuming. When asked by a Brazilian official why he had left Colombia off of his South American itinerary, Roosevelt had replied, “Don’t you know, my dear friend, that I am not a ‘persona grata’ in Colombia?”

Although Roosevelt had steered clear of Colombia, he would not be able to avoid a hostile encounter in Chile, where Colombian students had organized protests against him. When his train pulled into Chile’s capital, Santiago, in late November, 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 assault 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 Martínez, a former Chilean ambassador to the United States, about the continued relevance of the Monroe Doctrine. Days later, in an electrifying speech, he gave an impassioned, utterly unapologetic defense of the Panama Canal.

The speech was Roosevelt’s last in Chile, and it left the country, if not convinced of Roosevelt’s righteousness, at least impressed by his conviction. “As soon as he began to advert to the subject everyone was attention, and the silence that prevailed was almost painful,” Zahm later recalled. “The large auditorium in which he spoke seemed to be surcharged with electricity and everyone seemed to be prepared for a shock or an explosion. Everything—the environment, the speaker, the subject, the great historical event under review—was dramatic in the extreme, and everyone felt that it was dramatic.”

Drama was Roosevelt’s forte, and few subjects stirred him to greater emotion than did the Panama Canal. Whatever animosities may have been harbored against him when he began speaking, he had his audience in his pocket by the time he walked out the door. “I love peace, but it is because I love justice and not because I am afraid of war,” Roosevelt told the spellbound crowd. “I took the action I did in Panama because to have acted otherwise would have been both weak and wicked. I would have taken that action no matter what power had stood in the way. What I did was in the interest of all the world, and was particularly in the interests of Chile and of certain other South American countries. I was in accordance with the highest and strictest dictates of justice. If it were a matter to do over again, I would act precisely and exactly as I in very fact did act.” As these words rang through the hall, the audience leapt to its feet, cheering and applauding the Yankee imperialist.

*  *  *

W
HILE
R
OOSEVELT
was distracted from his pending expedition by a thousand different commitments, his son and young cousin had only one thing on their minds: love. While in Buenos Aires, Margaret Roosevelt had received bunches of white roses every day from Henry Hunt, her admirer from the
Vandyck.

Kermit, for his part, was still waiting miserably for a reply to the marriage proposal he had sent Belle a month earlier. He was a confident young man, but Belle had always seemed elusive, and Kermit was far from certain that she would agree to marry him. Not only was he thousands of miles away from her, but he had been so for more than a year. He also was not living in the kind of place that would necessarily appeal to a girl like Belle. While working on the railroad, Kermit had lived in a retired day coach that could barely accommodate him and his few belongings. Perhaps worst of all, in the rural areas where he worked, there was a nearly constant threat of disease.

Kermit had had so many recurring bouts of malaria since he had moved to Brazil that the disease had become almost commonplace for him. It would not, however, seem commonplace to Belle, nor did it to Kermit’s parents. When Roosevelt had first seen his son in Bahia, he had written to his sister Bamie that Kermit was not “in quite as good health as I should like to see him.” On the other hand, Roosevelt wrote, “He has matured very much. He earns $2,500 a year [the equivalent of about forty-five thousand dollars today], is deeply interested in his work, and it looks as if he has a future.”

Kermit hoped that that future would be solid enough to impress Belle, but he could not be sure. She was a beautiful, wealthy girl who was surrounded by America’s and Europe’s most eligible young bachelors. He knew that she could have any man she wanted. What he did not know was whether she wanted him. On November 14, he finally got his answer:

When Kermit read Belle’s reply, all of his worrying, all of the excruciating weeks of waiting, were forgotten. He was obliged to attend a formal luncheon and an elaborate dinner that day, but he floated through both events in a joyous fog. “I don’t remember a word I said tho’ I remember all I thought for I was with you the whole time,” he wrote her. “It just seems like a dream, dearest, and I get so afraid that I may wake, for if it’s a dream I want to stay asleep forever.”

Roosevelt was thrilled for his son. “Kermit is as much in love as any one could desire,” he wrote his daughter-in-law Eleanor. “And I am pleased beyond measure that he should be about to marry. Belle is a dear girl.” Edith, however, seemed less enthusiastic about the match. She remembered Belle from the summer before Kermit left for Brazil, and now that her quiet, serious son was engaged to the young socialite, a girl Edith had nicknamed “the Fair One with Golden Locks,” she wrote Ethel that she felt “a trifle down.”

Although his mother seemed to have reservations about his impending marriage, Kermit himself had none. He wanted nothing more than to board the next boat to Europe and, at long last, be reunited with his fiancée. While they were still in Bahia, however, Edith had pulled her son aside at the first opportunity and urged him to take a leave of absence from work so that he could look after his father in the Amazon. Kermit had no interest in joining the expedition, but he felt that he had little choice in the matter. He could see that his mother was worried, and he had to admit that he too was concerned about his father’s health and safety.

Roosevelt had always seemed invincible to his children, as though the great heart in his barrel chest would never stop beating. But the assassination attempt in 1912 had, with a shocking suddenness, changed all of that. Kermit, already living and working in Brazil at that time, had been hit perhaps hardest of all by the reality of his father’s mortality. “It was a bad time to be far away,” he admitted to Belle. “And the way in which I was told didn’t help matters. I guess the man must have been worrying how to tell me, and got mixed up. He’s a big up-from-the-soil sort of foreman; and looked rather embarrassed, and then said, ‘Well I guess that they’ve shot Roosevelt all right.’ . . . It was almost impossible to get anything more out of him. It was exactly like one of those ‘breaking the news’ anecdotes; but it doesn’t amuse you very much when it happens to you.”

Roosevelt had at first welcomed the addition of his son to his expedition, but the news of Kermit’s engagement made him hesitate. He did not want Kermit to accompany him on an unavoidably dangerous journey when he had a fiancée who was anxiously awaiting his return. “I did not like Kermit to come on this trip with me,” Roosevelt wrote his daughter-in-law Eleanor, “but he did not wish to be married in my absence, and moreover felt that this semi-exploration business was exactly in his line.” However, in a letter to Belle, Kermit confessed that he was determined to go on this expedition not for his own sake but for his father’s, and he would count the days until the journey’s end. “It just doesn’t seem as if I could live so long without seeing you, but I feel so very sure that I am doing what you would want me to do,” he wrote her. “Yesterday mother gave me another long talk about father, and about some other ways I must look after him. She’s dreadfully worried about him, and there’s nothing for me to do but go.”

Kermit’s commitment to his father’s expedition was painfully tested on November 26, when he watched his mother and cousin set sail for the Panama Canal from Valparaiso, on Chile’s Pacific coast. The thought of the months ahead of him without Belle made Kermit
miserable. Yet he stood resolutely by his father’s side as the ship carrying Edith and Margaret disappeared in the distance.

“We would have both felt that I must go with father,” he wrote to Belle that night. “If I weren’t going I should always feel that when my chance had come to help, I had proved wanting, and all my life I would feel it.”