One day in 1908, when Roosevelt’s Presidential term was drawing to
a close, Father Zahm, a priest, called on him. The priest had just
returned from a trip across the Andes and down the Amazon. He proposed
that when Roosevelt left the Presidency he should take a trip with him
into the interior of South America.
Roosevelt’s African trip was then uppermost in his mind, so the subject
was dropped. Five years later, however, Roosevelt accepted invitations
from Argentina and Brazil to address certain societies. It occurred to
him then that after making this tour he could come north through the
middle of the continent into the valley of the Amazon. His plans for
the trip were soon under way. Frank Chapman, curator of the American
Museum of Natural History, New York, gladly appointed the naturalists
George K. Cherrie and Leo E. Miller to accompany the party. Both were
veterans of the tropical American forests. Father Zahm also agreed to
go. Kermit Roosevelt joined the party.
On December 9 of the same year, as the party left Asuncion to ascend
the Paraguay, Colonel Rondo and other Brazilians joined the expedition
as representatives of the Brazilian government.
In the latter part of the next February the party started their
long descent of the Duvida--“The River of Doubt.” Colonel Roosevelt
describes this voyage interestingly in his book “Through the Brazilian
Wilderness.” Many dangers confronted them. The descent of the rapids
was perilous to men and boats. They were in danger of being slain
through encounters with Indians. They faced the necessity of long,
wearing portages or contact with impassable swamps. Fever and dysentery
were ills that haunted that region. Starvation, caused by the loss of
supplies, was not beyond the bounds of possibility.
On they went, however, enduring the dangers and hardships they
encountered like the true explorers they were. They had to wade through
water for days at a time. Their shoes were never dry. Insect bites
became festering wounds in their bodies. Poisonous ants, biting flies,
ticks, wasps and bees never ceased to torment them.
Under these circumstances the temper of the men was sorely tried. At
last came a tragedy. Julio, one of their attendants, a powerful fellow
but a rogue, shot Paishon, a good-natured negro sergeant. The murderer
escaped into the wilderness and was never found.
At last, exhausted and almost broken by their terrible hardships, they
reached their destination. They had put on the map a river of some
1,500 kilometers’ length from its highest source to its confluence with
the Amazon.
Some of his statements on the subject of his explorations and
discoveries were twisted and ridiculed by the press. The fact remains
that he rendered a great service to geographers by locating the mouth
of this river exactly. Other explorers had discovered its source but
they possessed neither the courage nor endurance to follow it to its
mouth. It was a real River of Doubt, because nobody knew where it led
until Colonel Roosevelt cleared away the mystery.
Colonel Rondo, chief of the Brazilian mission which had accompanied the
Colonel’s party, told later how the Colonel’s leg had become infected.
While the party was shooting the rapids in the River of Doubt, he said,
the boat came near being capsized, and in trying to save it Colonel
Roosevelt received a wound in the leg. Poison spread from this to the
blood and impeded the Colonel’s walking.
When he returned to New York, highly honored by the Brazilian
government and praised for his achievements by explorers who knew the
greatness of his undertaking, he was a sick man. Fever burned within
him. His constitution was undermined. He admitted now that he had
waited too long to undertake the hardest and most perilous task of his
life.
These facts lead inevitably to the conclusion that the trip to South
America marked the beginning of the end for the Colonel. Friends and
physicians point to the fact that from that time began the series of
maladies that attacked him recurrently until his death. Viewing the
terrible hardships Roosevelt experienced on this journey of exploration
it is not going wide of the mark to say that he laid on the altar of
science a score of what would have been his most fruitful years.