Colonel Roosevelt (74 page)

“
WE WERE QUITE UNCERTAIN,”
Roosevelt wrote at the top of his next batch of manuscript, “whether after a week we should find ourselves in the Gi-Paraná, or after six weeks in the Madeira, or after three months we knew not where.”

He noted the date, 27 February 1914, and their position at embarkation: twelve degrees one minute of latitude south, sixty degrees fifteen minutes of longitude west. One thing his travels down the Brazilian coastline, up the Paraguay, and across the
sertão
had given him was a physical sense of Brazil’s size, greater than that of the contiguous United States. It amounted to a Latin re-creation of his own country, as described in
The Winning of the West:
a young republic whose borders had only recently been established, and whose indigenous tribes were not all pacified. Nine-tenths of its population lived along the Atlantic littoral, walled off from the interior by an Appalachian-like range, the Serra do Mar. Railroads were beginning to snake northwest from Rio and São Paulo (Kermit had done his bit to extend them), but much of Mato Grosso was still, as its name indicated, a “great wilderness.”

Topographically, this other Brazil was an immense shield of sandstone,
slightly ridged in the middle, rising to a western height of three thousand feet. One face drained southward into the vast basin of the Rio de la Plata, the other into the even vaster basin and floodplains of the Amazon. The watershed streams ran deep and abrasive, notching sharp valleys out of the sandstone until they bottomed out on crystalline granite, Brazil’s bedrock. Tributaries carved what looked like flat-topped mountains but were really remnants of plateau. On the torrid northern slope of the shield, some of these high residuals kept their temperate microclimates, while the trough beneath sweltered in an almost perpetual, fetid damp, teeming with the world’s greatest profusion of plant and insect life.
There were so many varieties of mosquitoes in Amazonas that their contrasting whines produced harmony.

Roosevelt found himself floating down toward it now, borne on the Dúvida’s seasonal swell. The momentum would have been exhilarating if Rondon and Lyra had not kept stopping to survey every curve in the river. Kermit made himself useful to them in his lead canoe, jumping out onto any promontory that commanded an equal view up and downstream. He held up a sighting rod for as long as wasps would permit, while the Brazilians worked with a telemeter and compass to calculate distances and direction. All day long the laborious process repeated itself, bend by bend, station by station. “
Kermit landed nearly a hundred times,” Roosevelt recorded, “and we made but nine and a third kilometers.”

The jungle was lovely to look at as it drifted by on either side, unending and unchanging. It exhaled sweet scents from its densely grown, vine-wrapped depths. Visibility inland extended only a few yards. Any spaces between the trees competing for light and air were screened with pendulous, parasitic leaves that reminded him of elephant’s ears. The last time he had seen
folhâs
that big, they had been attached to the real thing. At riverside, where the sun shone unrestricted, gorgeous butterflies hovered over the water. They were matched in the shade by fungi of extraordinary color and delicacy.

But Roosevelt the hunter saw little to get fat on. Butterflies greased no bread, and no explorer who valued his life would dare to cook an Amazonian mushroom. The forest canopy amounted to a separate habitat, roamed by species unlikely to descend. Bored with survey stops, he went ahead with George Cherrie and Dr. Cajazeira in the hope of finding some break in the vegetation that might yield game. A meadow presented itself as ground for the expedition’s first camp. There were a few tapir trails through the trees, but none fresh enough to pursue. The river was too engorged for profitable fishing. Fiala’s tinned rations would have to do until meat could be found.

Roosevelt had the tents pitched, a guard posted, and stoves crackling by the time the surveyors turned up, weary but pleased with their mapping. The sky, overcast for much of the day, cleared at sunset. Dinner was served under a brilliant powdering of stars, or
estrêlas
as Rondon called them, in one of the
many Portuguese words Kermit found more mellifluous than English. Gnats,
pium
flies, and mosquitoes swarmed only moderately.

ALTHOUGH ROOSEVELT WAS
taken aback by the general soundlessness of the jungle, he heard enough bird calls in the morning to help Cherrie hunt for specimens. The naturalist did the shooting. They were rewarded with a brilliant turquoise
cotinga
and a woodpecker, whose display represented every color of the rainbow except yellow.

At noon they resumed their journey downriver. The other canoes had preceded them. Roosevelt reveled again in the beauty around him. He admired the fretwork of palm fronds against the sky and the gleaming green of rain-slicked leaves, melting into gold where the sun fell.
He studied the different skin tones of his half-naked paddlers as they bent their backs over the water. Julio, up front, had the olive complexion of a pure Portuguese; Luiz the steersman was black; Antonio, amidships, was a coppery Parecís.

The Dúvida seemed charged with as much upcountry spill as its valley could hold. But just after Roosevelt’s dugout caught up with the rest of the flotilla,
a big affluent gushed in from the right. Rondon deduced it to be the Rio Festa da Bandeira, which the command detachment had crossed some ten days before, in Nhambiquara country. Its inflow proved that the Dúvida was a major river.

Encouragingly, 16.5 kilometers were explored that day, and 20.7 the next, despite frequent showers that dropped scrims between Kermit’s rod and Lyra’s
têlemetro
. In such conditions they simply sat and soaked until the sun came out. Then instruments, cameras, and clothes steamed off in the slamming heat. It was March now. Signs of Indian settlement were seen: a burned field here, a vine-bridge there. But no human beings showed themselves. Cherrie shot a large dark-gray monkey, and Roosevelt enjoyed his first simian stew, which he found “
very good eating.”

On the fourth day the expedition was moving smoothly and surveying with increased efficiency, thanks to the high level of the river as it slid over invisible rocks and half-submerged
boritana
palms (their protruding fronds, still full of life, combing the current).
After twenty kilometers the valley constricted, and the Dúvida gained pace. A roar of white water came from ahead. All canoes swung to the right bank, and the paddlers leaped out to moor them. Roosevelt accompanied a reconnaissance party forward and came upon some seriously obstructive rapids.
Curls, falls, ponds, and whirlpools descended in a misty chute nearly a mile long. At one point it narrowed amazingly, forming a spout through which the water gushed with fire-hose force.

There was nothing to do but make camp and start portaging through the woods next morning at dawn. First, the stores and other baggage were moved
ahead to a point where the river broadened again. This was simple, if laborious, work, with everyone shouldering as much weight as he could support. It took all day. Rain fell in sheets, but not enough to drown giant horseflies the size of bumblebees. They bit till the blood ran. Roosevelt smeared himself with fly dope, which soon washed off. After dinner, it worked better, repelling at least some of the tiny
polvora
flies that swarmed about him. They waited until he was asleep and sweating, then swarmed down to prick him awake. Kermit was unsympathetic. He had the Rooseveltian propensity to boils, and was suffering from an eruption so painful that he could do little but lie on one side and read
Os Lusíadas
.

“ ‘T
HE GOODWILL, THE ENDURANCE, AND THE BULL-LIKE STRENGTH OF THE
CAMARADAS
.’ ”
The expedition undertakes one of its many portages
.
(photo credit i16.1)

The next one and a half days were even worse, with mosquitoes,
pium
flies, and vicious little aromatic bees responding to what was clearly a general alert in the insect world. Meanwhile, fourteen men chopped a “corduroy road” along the riverbank. They corrugated it with a couple of hundred slender logs, then twined a rope around themselves and hauled the canoes over with a block and tackle. Toward the end, the carry degenerated into a series of sandstone ledges. All seven dugouts—one of which weighed 2,500 pounds—had to be winched down, their keels shaving shallower as they rasped to the foot of the slope. In the process, the biggest boat split, and the leaky one sank as soon as it was relaunched. It had to be salvaged by force. Roosevelt, aware that he was no longer capable of such exertion, wrote a
tribute to “the goodwill, the endurance, and the bull-like strength of the
camaradas.
”

The damaged canoes were caulked and dried out enough to let the expedition continue on the afternoon of 5 March. It made another twelve kilometers, and so did its attendant swarm of aromatic bees. They had stingless cousins whom Roosevelt found even peskier. Omnipresent at every camp, these tickly creatures crawled over his extra-sensitive skin with a maddening persistence, sucking at sweat glands and trying to invade every body orifice. He got some relief when the Dúvida broadened out, and Luiz could steer a good distance from both banks.

THE NEXT RAPID
took three days to bypass. Another one materialized only five kilometers below.

Roosevelt soon learned not to yield to euphoria each time smooth brown water followed white. His canoe might be gliding like a gondola, but he would see riffles and whirlpools that warned of hidden boulders. Some porphyritic outcrops were too high for any flood. They announced themselves with a distant thunder that was always depressing, because even when side channels looked runnable—the river was now a hundred meters wide—there was a risk of losing provisions from the low-riding cargo pontoons. That meant more tree felling, more portaging, and less and less progress.

On the morning of 11 March the expedition woke to find that the Dúvida had risen during the night, and shattered the two biggest canoes against some rocks. A very large dugout had to be carved to replace them. The only available tree was a yellow
tatajuba
whose wood was so dense that its chips sank in the river like bits of iron. The
camaradas
set to work on it. Rondon estimated that the job would take as long as three days. Lyra and Kermit used the interval to hunt for badly needed meat. They got a jacu bird for the principals and two monkeys for the men.

In spite of fretting that the expedition was consuming means and preying upon itself, Roosevelt took pleasure in being alone in the jungle.
There were spells, all too rare, when biting insects lost track of him and he could marvel at the interrelationships, half coexistent, half predatory, of tropical flora and fauna. He drank the oily sap of milk trees, ate dark, tart honey, and luxuriated in the fragrance of white and lilac
sobralia
orchids. From time to time he was able to classify a passing flock of ant-thrushes, or put his shoe on a coral snake and watch interestedly as it spent its venom on the leather. But the green-glowing environment was for the most part bare of observable life. What sounds came from the trees at night were (to his zoological ear) either batrachian or orthopterous. They began to taper off in the small hours. Dawn, which had been deafening in the Mount Kenya forest, was often eerily silent.