The River of Doubt: Theodore Roosevelt's Darkest Journey
by Candice Millard
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Book Summary Information
Author: Candice MillardEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2006-10-10
ISBN: 0767913736
Number of pages: 432
Publisher: Anchor
Book Reviews of The River of Doubt: Theodore Roosevelt's Darkest Journey
Book Review: River of Doubt
Summary: 5 Stars
In 1912, the Republican President Howard Taft, who had succeeded Theodore Roosevelt's presidency, ran for a second term against the Democrat Woodrow Wilson. Roosevelt, hoping for a return to office after a four year respite, and up to then a Republican, ran under his own ticket, the Progressive, or Bull Moose, Party. When the tally was in, Roosevelt had received more votes than Taft, but Wilson won the election. Just as in 1884, when Roosevelt had gone to the Dakota Badlands after the death of his mother and wife (they both died on the same day), and just as in 1909, when he had gone to Africa after conclusion of his seven years as President, now after his defeat at the polls in 1913, Roosevelt went to South America. This book is about that trip.
The trip was poorly planned and prepared for and the men that went with Roosevelt were not all up to the rigor the expedition would come to demand of them. In fact, the trip became something else entirely from what it had been planned to be, and most of the original company of men who traveled with Roosevelt to South America didn't accompany him on the impromptu, alternate expedition. The River of Doubt (so named because its character and length were unknown) held no place in the initial itinerary and in the end it became the expedition's sole purpose. This river, a thousand-mile long tributary of the Amazon river was uncharted, unexplored, and turbid with danger deep within the South American frontier of the Amazon jungle. Even getting to the river cost the men over a month of agony and hardship. The South American trip appears to have been a mismanaged bungle from the start, and the unanticipated redirection of the expedition to the scientific charting of a untried river through dangerous unexplored jungle was foolhardy. Theodore Roosevelt, however, was up for it.
"Tell Osborn", Roosevelt wrote in a letter to Frank Chapman before the intentions of the original expedition had changed, "I have already lived and enjoyed as much of life as any nine other men I know; and I have had my full share, and if it is necessary for me to leave my bones in South America, I am quite ready to do so." (62)
The expedition was lead by the Brazilian explorer Colonel Cāndido Mariano da Silva Rondon who had discovered and named the river without exploring it five years earlier, and he was intent now on a complete survey of the river, no matter how slow the pace of exploration. Roosevelt's twenty-four-year-old son Kermit, who was building bridges with the Anglo Brazilian Iron Company in Brazil, accompanied his father, and out of the original company that had left North America, only one other, naturalist George Cherrie, traveled with the Roosevelts down the River of Doubt. All other members of the twenty-two man expedition were either part of Rondon's contingent or "camaradas", the working crew, rough men who paddled the dugout canoes, portaged them for days when necessary (their weight was "up to twenty-five-hundred pounds apiece"; p. 135), and with machetes hacked into the dense jungle a sufficient clearing for each night's camp.
This was not a relaxing, sunny excursion down a lazy river. The men were low on provisions, they lost canoes and with them more provisions, a camarada was drowned (Kermit nearly drowned in the same accident), they were fearful of attack by a hostile indigenous tribe (the Cinta Larga: Rondon's dog was killed by them), there were poisonous snakes (Roosevelt only avoided being poisoned because the leather of his boot deflected a coral snake's fangs), there were swarming pestilential insects, rapids and waterfalls demanded frequent portaging of the heavy dugout canoes, and it rained and rained and it rained.
It got worse. Roosevelt injured his leg while helping recover a nearly lost canoe and then, weakened by infection, was hit and debilitated by malaria. "No man has any business to go on such a trip as ours unless he will refuse to jeopardize the welfare of his associates by any delay caused by weakness or ailment of his," he wrote [writes Candice Millard]. "It is his duty to go forward, if necessary on all fours, until he drops." (265)
"So determined was Roosevelt not to endanger the life of anyone else in his expedition that he had made a secret provision for a quick death in the Amazon, should it become necessary. Before he even left New York, he had packed in his personal baggage, tucked in among his extra socks and eight pairs of eyeglasses, a small vial that contained a lethal dose of morphine." (266)
They had reached an apparent impasse in the river and it seemed they would have to abandon the canoes in order to survive and go on. Roosevelt, sick with malaria and hobbled by his infected leg, made a decision. He called George Cherrie and Kermit to his tent. "Boys," he said. "I realize that some of us are not going to finish this journey. Cherrie, I want you and Kermit to go on. You can get out. I will stop here." (267) Kermit, resolved to save his father's life, devised a way to transport the canoes over the impasse.
Theodore Roosevelt's account of this journey is in his 1914 book "Through the Brazilian Wilderness". Kermit Roosevelt's book, from 1921, is "The Long Trail". Theodore Roosevelt died in 1919. His son Kermit, never having achieved the greatness of his early promise, committed suicide in 1943.
Summary of The River of Doubt: Theodore Roosevelt's Darkest Journey
At once an incredible adventure narrative and a penetrating biographical portrait, The River of Doubt is the true story of Theodore Roosevelt?s harrowing exploration of one of the most dangerous rivers on earth.The River of Doubt?it is a black, uncharted tributary of the Amazon that snakes through one of the most treacherous jungles in the world. Indians armed with poison-tipped arrows haunt its shadows; piranhas glide through its waters; boulder-strewn rapids turn the river into a roiling cauldron.
After his humiliating election defeat in 1912, Roosevelt set his sights on the most punishing physical challenge he could find, the first descent of an unmapped, rapids-choked tributary of the Amazon. Together with his son Kermit and Brazil?s most famous explorer, Cāndido Mariano da Silva Rondon, Roosevelt accomplished a feat so great that many at the time refused to believe it. In the process, he changed the map of the western hemisphere forever.
Along the way, Roosevelt and his men faced an unbelievable series of hardships, losing their canoes and supplies to punishing whitewater rapids, and enduring starvation, Indian attack, disease, drowning, and a murder within their own ranks. Three men died, and Roosevelt was brought to the brink of suicide. The River of Doubt brings alive these extraordinary events in a powerful nonfiction narrative thriller that happens to feature one of the most famous Americans who ever lived.
From the soaring beauty of the Amazon rain forest to the darkest night of Theodore Roosevelt?s life, here is Candice Millard?s dazzling debut.
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