The River of Doubt

The party that pushed off in February 1914 was smaller and stranger than the one that had left the coast. There was Roosevelt and his twenty-four-year-old son Kermit, who had come along partly to keep an eye on his father and was carrying his own private weight — he was engaged, desperate to get home and marry, and every delay tightened him further. There was Rondon and his Brazilian soldiers. There was George Cherrie, a seasoned American naturalist who had survived plenty of expeditions and privately doubted this one. And there was a doctor, José Antônio Cajazeira, whose skills would matter more than anyone wanted to admit.

At the bottom of the hierarchy were the camaradas — the Brazilian paddlers and porters who did the actual labor of moving heavy dugout canoes down an impossible river. Millard gives them the weight the original expedition largely denied them. They were the ones who hauled, dragged, and portaged, who went hungriest, and who would die in the largest numbers. Among them moved a man named Julio, whose growing desperation would become one of the darkest threads of the whole story.

The River of Doubt did not ease them in. It threw rapids at them almost from the start — long, violent stretches where the canoes had to be unloaded and dragged through the forest along the bank, a process that could cost days to advance a few miles. Each portage burned calories they did not have and exposed them to a jungle that Millard describes as a closed economy of predators, parasites, and poisons, all of it competing, all of it hungry. Piranha, candiru, ants, wasps, and disease-bearing insects turned every camp into a low, constant siege.

The canoes began to go. Some were smashed against rocks, some sank, and rebuilding them from felled trees consumed still more time and strength. Food ran to almost nothing. The men were reduced to fractions of what a body needs, and their strength drained visibly. Then the river started collecting lives. A camarada named Simplício drowned when his canoe was pulled into a rapid. Sickness spread. Cherrie and the doctor watched the whole party thin toward collapse.

Strip away the rapids and the fever, and what Millard has really written is a portrait of a temperament pushed to its absolute limit. Roosevelt had preached the strenuous life to a nation for decades — the conviction that comfort softens a man and only struggle proves him. The River of Doubt is where the doctrine met its bill. The same appetite for hardship that had made him a great and reckless public figure was exactly what nearly killed him and several men around him, and he knew it. The trip was, in a real sense, the belief tested against a river that did not care about beliefs.

What the ordeal exposed was less a hero than a man at the end of a particular kind of strength. The Roosevelt who begged to be left to die was not performing; he genuinely calculated that his body had become a threat to the others and offered to remove it. That he was overruled by his own son inverts the entire dynamic of his life. For once the great self-reliant man survived because someone refused to let him go — the strenuous ideal saved, at the last, by ordinary human loyalty.

The expedition emerged from the jungle in late April 1914, gaunt and depleted, and Roosevelt gave a triumphant account of it to skeptical geographers back home — the black-water river was real, roughly four hundred miles of it, and now it was on the map. But the man who stepped off the boat was not the man who had boarded it in New York. He had left pounds of himself in the Amazon, along with a chronic fever and an injury that never fully healed, and those losses trailed him for the rest of his shortened life.