The River of Doubt (5 page)

Father Zahm’s contradictions, however, went beyond science and religion. While he was a devoted priest and a serious scholar, he was hardly an ascetic, and had a deep appreciation and affinity for the good things in life. Now that he was at Holy Cross Academy in Washington, D.C., he had become a member of the exclusive Cosmos Club, a luxurious club that the American writer Wallace Stegner
would call “the closest thing to a social headquarters for Washington’s intellectual elite.” Zahm was also a skilled self-promoter—“keep yourself before the public always,” he advised his brother, Albert, “if you wish the public to remember you or do anything for you”—and he reveled in his friendship with Roosevelt, crowing to Albert that he and the former president were “the chummiest of chums.”

Father Zahm had fallen under the spell of South America in 1907, when he had traveled, with a guide, through the northern reaches of the continent. At the end of his trip, as he had sailed east on the Amazon River, toward the Atlantic Ocean and home, Zahm had promised himself that he would return, but the next time he wanted company. The problem was finding a suitable companion. “Where was I to find the kind of a companion desired—one who was not only a lover of wild nature but one who was also prepared to endure all the privations and hardships incident to travel in the uninhabited jungle?” Zahm wrote. “I had not, however, pondered the matter long before I bethought me of a man who would be an ideal traveling companion, if he could find the necessary leisure, and could be induced to visit the southern continent. This man was Theodore Roosevelt.”

With high hopes, Zahm had visited the Oval Office in 1908, during Roosevelt’s last year in the White House, to propose the trip to his friend. Roosevelt had been intrigued by the invitation, but since he had already planned his yearlong hunting trip to East Africa with his son Kermit, he had turned the priest down. Disappointed but not discouraged, Zahm had decided to wait for Roosevelt. He waited through Roosevelt’s trip to Africa, his controversial campaign, his electoral defeat, and his brooding isolation on Oyster Bay. He waited until, on the cusp of sixty-two and in failing health, he felt that he could not wait any longer.

Finally, in the summer of 1913—the same summer that Roosevelt accepted the invitation to speak at the Museo Social—Father Zahm, in his own words, reluctantly began to “cast about” for someone else to accompany him to the Amazon. In an extraordinary stroke of luck, Zahm decided to seek advice not just from the same institution that
Roosevelt had turned to for help, but from the exact same man—Frank Chapman, the bird curator at the American Museum of Natural History. In describing his long-dreamed-of trip to the Amazon, Zahm happened to mention to the curator that he was planning to visit Roosevelt at Oyster Bay. Zahm had “no hope,” he wrote, “that the Colonel would finally be able to go to South America,” but he felt certain that he would be interested in hearing about the journey that they had long discussed, and which would soon take place without him.

“You may save yourself the trip to Oyster Bay, if you have anything else to do,” Chapman replied. “For Colonel Roosevelt is going to take luncheon with me here tomorrow and I shall be glad to have you join us.” Surprised and delighted, Zahm immediately accepted, and Chapman added him to the guest list—apparently without warning Roosevelt.

*  *  *

“B
Y
G
EORGE
! You here!” Roosevelt cried when he blew into the museum’s dining room for his luncheon with Chapman and found Father Zahm in the midst of the scientists and staff who were to be his own expedition advisers. Zahm’s unexpected appearance caught Roosevelt off guard, but, with a veteran politician’s skill, he recovered nicely. “You are the very man I wish to see,” he boomed. “I was just about to write you to inform you that I think I shall, at last, be able to take that long-talked-of trip to South America.”

The abrupt reappearance of the priest and his dreams of South American adventure both accelerated the preparations for the ex-president’s own trip and gave it an energetic, full-time advocate and organizer in the person of Zahm. The elderly priest quickly assumed responsibility for planning the journey, and placed himself in charge of choosing a route, organizing transportation, and ordering provisions and equipment—details that Roosevelt was content to leave in the hands of others.

Zahm’s grasp of the actual requirements of such a journey, however, was far from certain. Zahm had billed himself as something of
an expert on South America. In addition to his travels through the continent, he had also written several books on the subject. However, both
Up the Orinoco and Down the Magdalena
and
Along the Andes and Down the Amazon
—which Zahm had published under the pen name H. J. Mozans, Ph.D.—had generated skepticism within the country’s relatively small circle of South American travelers. “With a wide knowledge of the history of the regions traversed,” Frank Chapman would later write, “he seemed to have seen so little of the countries themselves that it was suggested he had never visited them.” If Roosevelt had concerns about his friend’s abilities, he did not express them, perhaps because he did not expect the trip—conceived initially as a simple speaking tour—to prove too taxing. Rather, in a rare reference to his own age and mortality, Roosevelt merely cautioned the priest to be mindful of the potential risks inherent in such travel, and avoid imprudent choices in his planning. “[I] would like to get a fairly good idea of . . . the amount of mischance to which we would be exposed,” he wrote Zahm. “I don’t in the least mind risk to my life, but I want to be sure that I am not doing something for which I will find my physical strength unequal.”

A
LTHOUGH
R
OOSEVELT REMAINED MILDLY
interested in his pending South American journey during the months before his departure, he viewed the expedition as little more than a “delightful holiday” that would provide “just the right amount of adventure.” In fact, he was so certain that the trip would be uneventful that he left the planning almost entirely to Father Zahm, whom he affectionately though condescendingly referred to as “a funny little Catholic priest.” In July, Roosevelt left New York for five weeks to go cougar hunting in Arizona with his two youngest sons, Archie and Quentin. The only instruction he offered Zahm before leaving was to say that, in regard to the expedition’s proposed route, he refused to be the “thousandth American to visit Cuzco.”

Having at last realized his long-standing ambition to return to South America, Father Zahm was now faced with the job of turning his dream into reality. Looking for assistance, he headed to the sporting-goods section of Rogers Peet & Company, the New York City department store, and fell into conversation with the head sporting-goods clerk, a man named Anthony Fiala. On the strength of
Fiala’s evident interest in exploration, Father Zahm wasted no time in inviting him to join the Roosevelt party, quickly delegating the logistical burdens of the trip by placing his new friend in charge of selecting and ordering the expedition’s provisions and equipment.

As convenient as it may have seemed to Zahm, however, the selection of Fiala as the expedition’s quartermaster was less than auspicious for the expedition as a whole. For while the forty-four-year-old clerk did indeed have a background in exploration, the details of that experience arguably made him the last person on earth to be entrusted with the planning or provisioning of a scientific expedition. Despite his current job as a department-store clerk, nearly every explorer at the turn of the twentieth century knew who Anthony Fiala was. Indeed, his story was a cautionary tale of what can happen when an expedition goes terribly wrong and its commander survives to face derision from his peers and exclusion from his profession.

Ten years earlier, Fiala—tall and thin, with a prominent nose and a small, angular face—had been in a high-stakes race with an elite group of men for one of history’s greatest geographical prizes: the North Pole. Fiala’s first trip to the Arctic had been as the photographer for the Baldwin-Ziegler Expedition in 1901. When that mission failed to reach the pole, its leader, Evelyn Baldwin, was fired, and Fiala was promoted from photographer to commander of a second expedition in 1903. The renamed Fiala-Ziegler Expedition never made it farther north than 82 degrees. Its ship, crushed in the Arctic ice, sank, and Fiala and his men, out of the reach of rescue ships, were stranded in the icy north for two excruciating years. On Fiala’s orders, the expedition’s provisions were bundled together for safekeeping on the ice, which gave way one night as Fiala and his thirty-eight men slept. They awakened in horror to find half of their food supply and all of their coal lost; only the discovery of supplies from another expedition kept the entire party from perishing. Back in New York, Fiala had had to face his fellow explorers’ brutal assessment of his leadership skills. They wasted no time on sympathy. On hearing details about the expedition, the renowned British naturalist and explorer
Henry Feilden excoriated it as “an ill conceived, badly managed, undisciplined venture,” and its commander as “utterly incompetent.” Fiala, Feilden wrote, “may be a fairly good cook but not a leader of men.” It was clear that no one would be sending Anthony Fiala on another expedition anytime soon.

When Father Zahm happened into Rogers Peet a decade later looking for supplies for his trip with Roosevelt, his story of an impending journey into the Amazonian jungle tapped a wellspring of hope in Fiala. “I would give anything in the world to go with you,” he told Zahm. Had Roosevelt been concerned about the trip he was about to take, he certainly would have hesitated to hire a man whose sole exploring experience had been in the Arctic—a region that had almost nothing in common with the Amazon—and who, while there, had led his men to a disaster of legendary proportions. But, given Zahm’s enthusiasm about Fiala, Roosevelt, almost in passing, agreed to hire him—not merely as an extra hand, but as the man in charge of equipping the entire expedition.

*  *  *

Z
AHM WAS
thrilled. With Fiala now in the picture, the priest could simply delegate and pontificate, both of which he happily did. “A better man . . . could hardly have been found for our purposes,” he wrote. “Thenceforward I had little more to do with the outfitting of the expedition than to tell Fiala what my experiences in the tropics had taught me was necessary for our undertaking, and everything was attended to with rare intelligence and dispatch.”

The expedition’s tentative plan was to start in Buenos Aires, Argentina, and then travel by boat northward up the length of the continent along well-known navigable rivers to the Amazon, giving Roosevelt a chance to observe a wide range of landscapes and animal life in relative comfort. After reaching the Amazon River, Roosevelt was considering traveling up the Rio Negro, whose black waters famously mix with the café-au-lait–colored Amazon at the junction of the two great rivers in north-central Brazil, then down the broad
Orinoco River, crossing Venezuela to the Atlantic Ocean. While such an itinerary would take the expedition into sparsely populated areas, and promised a fascinating tour of the continent’s wilderness and wildlife, it would not be particularly taxing or dangerous, and was limited to well-charted rivers that could be expected to offer adventure without risk.

One of the earliest disagreements of the fledgling expedition was a dispute over the selection of boats to carry Roosevelt and his men along the rivers of South America. Despite the central role of river travel in the planned route, the specific requirements of that travel were largely a matter of mystery to those charged with outfitting the expedition. Apart from Father Zahm, whose time in South America had been primarily limited to sightseeing, none of the men involved in planning the trip had ever been to South America, or had any knowledge whatsoever of its rivers. Despite, or perhaps because of, that inexperience, each man developed a different idea about the type and characteristics of boat the expedition would need to complete its journey.

Fiala was looking forward to using the expedition to test a pet theory he had developed about canoes, and took the initiative to order two craft similar to those traditionally built by the native peoples of North America. He was convinced that the lightweight Northern canoes were much better suited for the Amazonian tributaries than the inflexible, heavy dugouts that they would find in South America. The canoes he ordered were nineteen feet long, built with a cedar frame, and covered in canvas. Where the rivers were navigable, each one could carry a ton of cargo and three to four men. Even better, they weighed only 160 pounds each, so four men—two if necessary—could pick them up and easily haul them for miles if the rivers became impassable.

Frank Harper, Roosevelt’s British-born private secretary, concerned about Roosevelt’s safety but otherwise lacking a clear professional basis for his opinion, favored instead a variety of stamped-steel boats manufactured by the W. H. Mullins Company of Salem, Ohio. Father
Zahm, meanwhile, had sent a check to the Rift Climbing Boat Company in Athens, Pennsylvania, in payment for a matching pair of eight-hundred-pound steel-hulled motorboats. Characteristically, Zahm also managed to prevail upon the company to make some improvements to the boats at the company’s own expense, for the “glory” of it. He also ordered two custom pennants to announce the expedition with appropriate pomp and ceremony: one with an “R” for Roosevelt and the other with a “Z”—for Zahm.