The River of Doubt — An uncharted river that nearly killed a president

Summary

The Roosevelt–Rondon Scientific Expedition descended the Rio da Dúvida — the "River of Doubt," an uncharted tributary of the Amazon in the Brazilian state of Mato Grosso — between February and April 1914, and very nearly killed the former United States president Theodore Roosevelt. It was led jointly by Roosevelt and the Brazilian army officer and explorer Colonel Cândido Mariano da Silva Rondon, who had discovered the river's headwaters in 1909 and whose expertise, discipline and knowledge of the interior carried the party through. Of roughly twenty-two people who descended the river, three died: one paddler drowned in rapids, one camarada was murdered by another, and the killer was left behind in the forest. Roosevelt survived, gravely weakened, and never fully recovered his health.

The expedition trekked overland across the Brazilian highlands from December 1913, reaching the put-in on the River of Doubt and beginning the descent on 27 February 1914. The river proved far worse than imagined: a succession of rapids, gorges and waterfalls that forced exhausting portages, smashed and swamped the dugout canoes, and stretched a journey planned for weeks into a two-month ordeal through fever country. The camaradas — the Brazilian backwoodsmen who paddled and hauled — bore the heaviest labour. On 15 March the paddler Antônio Simplício da Silva drowned when his canoe was lost in the rapids; his body was never recovered. In early April a camarada named Julio de Lima, caught stealing food, shot and killed the foreman Manoel Vicente da Paixão; Julio fled into the jungle and was left behind.

Roosevelt himself nearly became the fourth death. On about 22 March he badly gashed his leg helping to free a canoe, the wound became infected, and malarial fever drove his temperature toward 105°F; the expedition's physician, Dr José Antônio Cajazeira, twice operated, once lancing an abscess. Delirious and unable to walk, Roosevelt at one point asked to be left behind so as not to slow the others, and his son Kermit refused to allow it. The party reached Rondon's pre-arranged relief at the confluence with the Aripuanã River on about 26 April 1914. Rondon renamed the river the Rio Roosevelt. Roosevelt, who had lost a quarter of his body weight, returned home broken in health and died less than five years later.

Timeline

A president, a colonel, and a river no one had mapped

Roosevelt came to the Amazon out of restlessness and defeat. Beaten in the 1912 presidential election, the fifty-five-year-old former president accepted an invitation to lecture in South America and to mount a natural-history collecting expedition for the American Museum of Natural History, bringing his son Kermit and the experienced field naturalists George Cherrie and Leo Miller. In Brazil the modest plan grew ambitious. Cândido Rondon — an army officer of Indigenous and Portuguese descent who had spent more than a decade building telegraph lines and mapping the interior, and who had located the headwaters of an unknown river in 1909 — proposed that they descend that river, the Rio da Dúvida, and chart it to its mouth. No one knew where it went, how far it ran, or what lay on it. Roosevelt agreed at once.

The two leaders were a study in contrast that nearly fractured the expedition. Rondon insisted on meticulous survey work, fixing the river's course by precise sightings as they went, in keeping with the scientific and cartographic purpose that justified the venture; Roosevelt, and the strain of the journey, pushed for speed. They clashed openly over it. Rondon's discipline, however — his deep experience of the Brazilian interior, his telegraph-line logistics, and above all his standing order to make peaceful contact with Indigenous peoples, captured in the motto of his commission, "Die if need be, but never kill" — was exactly the expertise the journey required, and it is largely why anyone survived. The overland march from December 1913 was itself brutal, wearing down men and pack animals before the river was even reached. When the party finally put its dugouts into the River of Doubt on 27 February 1914, about twenty-two people started down a river that none of them, and no map, could describe.

The river bites

The Rio da Dúvida was far more violent than its placid upper reaches had promised. Almost at once it broke into rapids, narrowed into gorges, and dropped over falls that no canoe could run, forcing the men to unload, drag the heavy dugouts overland through dense forest, and re-launch below — portages that consumed days and exhausted everyone. Canoes were battered, swamped and lost to the current, and with them went food and gear the expedition could not spare. The work fell hardest on the camaradas, the Brazilian backwoodsmen of mixed Indigenous, African and European ancestry who paddled, hauled and built the camps; Roosevelt himself praised them as willing and hard-working, and it was their labour that moved the expedition down the river at all. Provisions ran short, rations were cut, and the close, fever-ridden forest pressed in on a party that grew weaker by the week.

The river took its first life on 15 March 1914. The paddler Antônio Simplício da Silva was in a canoe that was caught and lost in the rapids; he was swept under and drowned, and his body was never recovered. Roosevelt recorded the suddenness of it — a strong, capable man gone in moments to the water. The drowning was the plainest expression of the river's character: a current that punished any error of footing or judgment instantly and without remedy, in a place where there could be no rescue and no recovery of the dead.

The Five Factors

Aftermath

The expedition succeeded in its scientific aim: it mapped a major, previously uncharted Amazon river roughly 400 miles long, and confirmed it as a genuine tributary of the Madeira–Amazon system, a real contribution to the geography of South America. Skeptics in the United States had doubted the river even existed; Rondon's survey settled the matter, and the river kept its new name, the Rio Roosevelt (locally also the Rio Teodoro). The human cost was severe and lasting. Three men died on the descent — Simplício, Paixão and the abandoned Julio — and Roosevelt's health was permanently broken; the recurrent malaria and the toll of the infection contributed to his death in January 1919, so that the "River of Doubt" is often counted among the things that killed him.

The expedition is now remembered as much for Rondon as for Roosevelt. Cândido Rondon, who would later head Brazil's Indian Protection Service and give his name to the state of Rondônia, has come to stand for a humane model of exploration — scientific rigour paired with a refusal to make war on the peoples of the interior. The camaradas, long anonymous in the telling, are increasingly credited for the labour that actually carried the expedition through, and the deaths of Simplício and Paixão are recorded soberly as the real price of a journey that the former president survived and they did not. Candice Millard's history The River of Doubt brought the episode to a wide modern readership and helped restore Rondon, the camaradas, and the river's Indigenous peoples to the centre of the story.

Lessons

References

• Roosevelt–Rondon Scientific Expedition WIKIPEDIA
• Teddy Roosevelt's Perilous Expedition on the Amazon SMITHSONIAN MAGAZINE
• The Amazonian Expedition That Nearly Killed Theodore Roosevelt HISTORY
• Into the Amazon PBS AMERICAN EXPERIENCE