Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [183]
Roosevelt had reacted to Müller’s proposal with entire predictability. “I want to be the first to go down the unknown river.”
The minister warned him that his personal safety could not be guaranteed in a part of the country where many explorers had died. This caution had no more effect than worried letters from Frank Chapman and Henry Fairfield Osborn, president of the American Museum.
“I have already lived and enjoyed as much of life as any nine other men I know,” Roosevelt wrote Chapman. “I have had my full share, and if it is necessary for me to leave my remains in South America, I am quite ready to do so.”
Caution required that he pass along Müller’s warning to his six colleagues: Father Zahm, George Cherrie, Leo Miller, Anthony Fiala, Frank Harper, and Kermit. Zahm was the least thrilled. He had no interest in terra incognita. All he had ever done in Brazil was follow pathways that the Conquistadors had trodden before him, in reasonable safety. He liked his comforts, and preferred not to have his progress slowed by poisoned darts, pium flies, and other hazards of jungle travel.
Cherrie and Miller, in contrast, had reacted to the change of plan with the enthusiasm of naturalists offered a new field of study. Fiala’s only concern as director of supplies was how to get five tons of baggage down a river that might be nothing but rapids. Merely transporting the stuff beyond Utiariti would be a challenge. Harper was prepared to travel where needed in his capacity as the Colonel’s secretary, but he saw limited opportunities for stenography in the wilderness. Roosevelt had told all five men that they need accompany him no farther than José Bonifácio station, near the rise of the Dúvida. Anyone who then wanted to drop out could do so, return south via the Paraguay, and sail for home.
Kermit, of course, needed little encouragement. Neither love for Belle Willard, nor the melancholy that had begun to affect him in adulthood (he was now twenty-four, and inclined to seek comfort in alcohol) could compete with the thrill of another venture into another continental interior, in company with his beloved father.
AT DAYBREAK ROOSEVELT, Rondon, and Kermit stepped down from the Nioac onto marshy ground. It was raining heavily. Under the guidance of some camaradas with dogs, they headed vaguely south. They hacked their way through saturated thickets, sinking often into ponds, gasping the near-liquid air. Mosquitoes hummed on waterproof wings, insatiable for blood. But their bites were nothing to the pinching of fire ants, and potentially lethal stings from maribundi wasps. At length the rain gave way to a steamy sun that pulsated down without drying anything. The hunters salted their wounds with sweat, raising sores that soon festered. Palm-needle slashes were of more concern, because any flow of blood into deep water would arouse the surgical interest of piranha fish.
Rondon was used to such torments. Born on the Mato Grosso forty-eight years before, the son of a Borôro mother and a half-Portuguese, half-Guaná father, yet capable of discussing fine points of theology and mathematics, he personified Roosevelt’s ideal of primitive force sheathed in civilized restraint. During their first meeting over tea, Rondon had casually described how he once lost a toe to a piranha. Roosevelt had listened with delight, memorizing every detail for publication:
He was about to bathe and had chosen a shallow pool at the edge of the river,