Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [170]
AS A FANTASY, Roosevelt’s South American project was not new. It had been implanted in his mind five years before, by one of the intellectual eccentrics he had enjoyed entertaining in the White House. Father John Augustine Zahm, C.S.C, Ph.D., was a former professor of physics at Notre Dame University, author of Sound and Music, a survey of the science of acoustics going back to Pythagorean times, and—more to the President’s taste—Evolution and Dogma. He was also the author of two travel books, Up the Orinoco and Down the Magdalena, and Along the Andes and Down the Amazon. Like David Livingstone before him, Father Zahm was a globetrotter rather than a man of God.
If it had not been for the more powerful appeal of Africa in 1909, Roosevelt might have yielded to his suggestion that they together “go up the Paraguay,” then cross Brazil’s central plateau and descend the Rio Tapajoz, a tributary of the Amazon. The two men had kept in touch, and Roosevelt had made a point of alluding to Zahm’s evolutionary theology in his essay on faith and reason.
There was a certain inevitability to him seeing the “funny little Catholic priest” at an American Museum lunch early in June. Frank M. Chapman, the museum’s director of ornithology, had gathered a group of naturalists to ascertain if any of them might like to accompany Roosevelt on his proposed expedition. Father Zahm did not quite qualify, but he was avidly anxious to participate, and had value as a multilingual scholar who knew Brazil well—or claimed to. Before the lunch was over, the Colonel and the sixty-two-year-old cleric were a team, and it remained only for Chapman to get Henry Fairfield Osborn, president of the museum, to authorize their joint venture.
Osborn and Chapman were among Roosevelt’s closest scientific friends, and the expedition would cover ground unknown to collectors, so he approved them as a matter of course. Chapman suggested the names of two professionals to go along, both veterans of tropical American forests: George K. Cherrie, an ornithologist and mammalogist, and Leo E. Miller, a field naturalist skilled at specimen retrieval.
Roosevelt reviewed their dossiers and thought that Chapman had chosen well. Cherrie was one of the best naturalist-explorers in the United States. Whipcord-tough at forty-seven, with a clipped, military manner, he had spent more than half his life south of the border. The mere fact that he had sired six children, one of them born along the Orinoco within pouncing distance of jaguars, was enough to recommend him. But Cherrie had the added credentials, irresistible to Roosevelt, of having once been a gun-runner in Colombia, and a two-time jailbird for revolutionary activities in Venezuela. Readers of The Wilderness Hunter and The Rough Riders were aware that the Colonel had a weakness for men who packed pistols, impregnated their wives regularly, and showed scant reverence for the law.
Miller was currently on assignment in British Guiana. But he had youth and Chapman’s word in his favor, so he was recruited sight unseen. Anthony Fiala, a forty-four-year-old former Arctic explorer who ran the sports department at Rogers, Peet & Co., became the fifth member of the expedition, in charge of equipment, supplies, and transport. Just how much gear and extra personnel would be needed depended on the final itinerary, to be mapped out by Father Zahm. Fiala soon proved his worth by ordering two light, strong, cedar-and-canvas Canadian power canoes as backups to the eight-hundred-pound steel riverboats that Zahm seemed to think suitable for jungle travel.
By the end of June, Roosevelt had a pleased sense that another great trek, and maybe another great book contract, loomed ahead in the fall. With his autobiography now in syndication, his literary essays set in type, and Edith off to Europe to visit her sister, he was free to take Archie and Quentin to Arizona. “Thank heavens! I have never had more work