The River of Doubt (8 page)

Theodore also approved of Margaret and was prepared to let his young cousin and his wife have an adventure of their own. “Margaret has proved a delightful companion,” he wrote to Ethel. “I am now quite at ease about having Mother and her go up the West Coast from Chile together.” Margaret and Edith had planned to make a trip to Panama after Roosevelt set off for the Brazilian interior. Margaret was looking forward to it, but there were plenty of distractions on board the
Vandyck
to keep her amused until they reached South America, including the flattering attentions of a fellow passenger, a man named Henry Hunt.

The men of the Roosevelt South American Scientific Expedition—
newly christened during a last-minute meeting at the Harvard Club in New York City—spent most of their time thinking about and planning for the Amazon. Fiala could usually be found hunched over his sextant and theodolite, examining the surveying tools he had used ten years earlier in the Arctic. Cherrie busied himself with his collecting equipment, and Frank Harper studied his new Kodak camera—an invention that was fast becoming a national craze—which he had bought for the trip.

Six days out of New York, the
Vandyck
picked up the young naturalist Leo Miller in Barbados. It was too early to tell what kind of camp companion he would be, but Roosevelt liked what he saw in Miller, and in all of his men. “I am pleased with the entire personnel of the trip,” he wrote to Chapman. “Evidently Cherrie and Miller will more than justify your choice of them.” Roosevelt’s men were equally pleased with their commander. Most of them had known Roosevelt only as a remote and exalted president of the United States, but he soon put them at ease with his tales of hunting grizzlies and stalking lions and his sincere interest in their own lives. “The Colonel’s friendly interest in each member of the party and his almost boyish enthusiasm for the project in hand won our confidence and loyalty at the outset,” Cherrie wrote.

During the voyage to sun-soaked Bahia, the day-to-day routine of eating, reading, and sleeping gave way to more unusual activities. One particularly rowdy event was a pillow fight between two men straddling a spar laid across a tank of water. The match was a great spectator sport, but it rarely ended in a decisive victory. The combatants were not allowed to lock their feet beneath the pole, so both men usually ended up pitching headfirst into the tank. There was also a tug-of-war contest, in which, Cherrie reported, Roosevelt’s “two hundred and twenty pounds of avoir-dupois were the deciding factors,” and then, at night, there was dancing. One evening, after dinner, even the former president made his way onto the floor. Arms crossed and legs flying, he danced a rousing hornpipe “in true sailor fashion,” Cherrie recalled, and brought down the house.

*  *  *

W
HILE
R
OOSEVELT
set his cares aside and enjoyed himself for the first time in a long time on the
Vandyck
, his son Kermit sat alone, brooding in his cabin aboard the SS
Voltaire
, which was carrying him northward to Bahia. He was looking forward to seeing his parents again, but his mind was somewhere else entirely. The longer he had remained in Brazil, and the more lonely and isolated he had become, the more perfect Belle Willard had seemed. Finally, Kermit had come to the conclusion that he simply could not live without her. His heart bursting, he picked up a piece of the ship’s stationery and sat down to write the most important letter of his life.

I
T TOOK EIGHT DAYS
for the
Vandyck
, trailing a white ribbon of foam, to steam from Barbados to Bahia, Brazil, roughly a third of the way down South America’s Atlantic seaboard. It would have been a much shorter trip but for the continent’s enormous northeastern coastline, which juts into the ocean like a broad shoulder, forcing ships to travel hundreds of miles east before resuming their southward journey. Three days before reaching Bahia, the steamer crossed the equator, an event that the crew and passengers celebrated with practical jokes and deck games, in keeping with nautical tradition. But for Roosevelt and his men, crossing from the Northern to the Southern Hemisphere was especially significant, because it meant that they were passing the natural wonder that was to be the ultimate object of their journey: the Amazon River.

From the deck of the
Vandyck
, out of sight of shore as they steamed along the Brazilian coast, Roosevelt and his men could not see the Amazon. But even at sea there was no escaping the sheer size and power of the giant river, a nonstop deluge that by itself accounts for approximately 15 percent of all fresh water carried to sea by all of
the planet’s rivers put together. The river’s mouth is so vast that the island that rests in the middle of it, Marajó, is nearly the size of Switzerland, and the muddy plume that spills into the Atlantic reaches some hundred miles out into the open sea.

For Roosevelt, the prospect of exploring such a magnificent, unfamiliar phenomenon of nature was irresistible. The ex-president was no doubt also thrilled that the mighty Amazon was intimately related to another region he had explored and come to love so well—Africa. As reflected by the very route that the
Vandyck
was following around the bulging coastline of South America, the continent had once been connected to Africa, fitting neatly under the chin of West Africa, just below what is today the string of small countries that reaches from Liberia to Nigeria.

Floating upon the planet’s underlying core of molten rock, the plates that make up the earth’s outer shell have shifted slowly but continuously throughout the planet’s history—a process known as plate tectonics. Hundreds of millions of years ago, the South American continent was part of a single primal “protocontinent” known as Pangaea, which covered half the earth. During the Triassic period, Pangaea began to separate into two independent continents—a northern continent, known as Laurasia, and a southern continent, Gondwanaland.

Approximately ninety million years ago, Gondwanaland, which encompassed Africa, Australia, Antarctica, peninsular India, and South America, also broke apart. The South American landmass drifted westward until it collided with the Nazca Plate, which underlies much of the Pacific Ocean. When the two enormous plates met, the momentum of the impact thrust the western edge of South America over the edge of the Nazca Plate. The result was a continent-long spine of rock and stone that formed what are known today as the Andes Mountains.

The creation of the Andes dramatically altered South America’s rainfall patterns and river system. Prior to the rise of the Andes, the Amazon River had flowed in the opposite direction from its present course, descending northwestward and separated from the Atlantic
Ocean to the east by a high stone ridge. The rise of the Andes blocked that westward route to the Pacific, leaving the continent’s rivers and streams no outlet to the sea on east or west. Cut off by the narrow cordon of mountains, rain that fell as little as a hundred miles from the Pacific Ocean could no longer reach it, and instead flowed back eastward, flooding the center of the landmass.

Beyond merely redirecting the drainage of rain that fell upon the continent, the towering mountains also changed the location of the rainfall itself. By creating a barrier that reaches as high as twenty thousand feet, the Andes serve as a trap for moisture-laden winds from the interior, forcing clouds high into the atmosphere, where they condense and bathe the Andes’ eastern slopes and the basin’s lowland forests in nearly constant precipitation.

For millions of years, the Amazon River was a vast inland sea that covered the central part of the continent. Finally, during the Pleistocene epoch, which began approximately 1.6 million years ago, the rising waters broke through the continent’s eastern escarpment and poured into the Atlantic Ocean. In their wake, they left behind the world’s greatest river system and the former inland seabed—a vast basin of rich sediments and fertile lowlands perfectly suited to support an array of plant and animal life almost without parallel on the face of the earth.

For all its exotic allure and potential riches, the great Amazon River Basin in 1913 remained a vast and remarkably mysterious place, untouched by modernity and repelling all but the most determined attempts to explore its hidden secrets. Although more than two-thirds of the Amazon Basin rests within Brazilian borders, the vast majority of Brazilians in the early twentieth century, crowded along the sun-soaked eastern coast, had little interest in knowing what lay within the basin and no way to find out even if they had.

Communication between the coastal cities and the country’s largely unexplored interior was difficult, and travel was nearly impossible for the average person. The country’s sheer size was one impediment;
its dense forests and rapids-choked rivers were another. The world’s fifth-largest nation, Brazil encompasses 3.3 million square miles, making it more than two hundred and fifty thousand square miles larger than the contiguous United States. The approximately four-thousand-mile-long Amazon River slices through the northern section of the country and is navigable for almost three-quarters of its length—roughly the distance from Bangor, Maine, to San Francisco, California—but its thousands of tributaries, which reach like tentacles into every corner of Brazil, are fast, twisting, and wild. Until very late in the nineteenth century, the only alternative for entering the interior was by mule, over rutted dirt roads and through heavy jungle and wide, barren highlands.

The potential political consequences of such a vast, unknown territory in the heart of their country had been brought home to Brazilian leaders in 1865, when Paraguay invaded Brazil along its southern boundary and more than a month passed before the emperor, Pedro II, knew anything about it. Before he abdicated the throne twenty-five years later, Pedro II, who had reigned over Brazil since he was five years old, committed part of his military to the monumental task of linking Brazil’s coast with its interior by telegraph line. Stringing the line through the jungle had since cost the Strategic Telegraph Commission the lives of countless men, but the battalion had explored thousands of miles of wilderness and was slowly mapping large swaths of the northern and southern highlands and the wide Amazon Basin.

Despite the progress the telegraph commission had made, however, vast stretches of Brazil remained unknown and unmapped, and its promise of adventure and discovery would soon prove too strong for Roosevelt to resist. The route that Father Zahm had drawn up entailed travel along five of the best-known rivers on the continent: the Paraná, the Paraguay, the Tapajos, the Negro, and the Orinoco, each of which appeared on even the most rudimentary maps of South America. Within days of his arrival in Brazil, however, Roosevelt
would abandon Zahm’s tame itinerary and commit himself to an expedition that was much more interesting—and exponentially more dangerous.

*  *  *

O
N
O
CTOBER
18, 1913, the
Vandyck
landed in Bahia, Brazil, where Kermit Roosevelt was waiting for his parents on a flag-draped launch that the city’s governor had sent into the harbor to welcome the former president of the United States to South America. It was a flawless day, and the passengers of the
Vandyck
were all gathered on the deck for their first glimpse of Bahia, one of the country’s oldest and most beautiful cities.