Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [186]
A GASOLINE LAUNCH and two pranchas, or roofed cargo boats, were supposed to be available next morning to ferry the expedition up the Sepotuba. Then a message came that they were waiting at Porto Campo, a hundred kilometers north. So the Nioac had to be crammed to the gunwales with equipment amassed in Cáceres by Rondon’s local deputy, Lieutenant João Lyra. The size of the tents the Brazilians seemed to think necessary for survival on the uplands gave Roosevelt pause. With extra camaradas being recruited by the hour, he saw logistical problems looming. He had learned in Africa that the bigger a safari, the slower it moved, and the faster it depleted its resources.
As things were, the Nioac sailed so late that it did not reach Porto Campo until just before dawn on 7 January. This was as far up the narrowing stream as its flat bottom would take it. A portion of its cargo was transferred to the pranchas for advance shipment upriver. It was lashed to the side of the launch, and it labored off late in the day, straining against the current. Meanwhile, the Expediçào Cíentífica Roosevelt-Rondon established itself in a cattle pasture. Bilateral proprieties were observed. The two commanders camped side by side, behind a pair of flagpoles flying their national colors. Kermit roomed with his father, and the tents of the other principals extended in a line left and right. About a dozen camaradas and kitchen staff bivouacked along a second row. Every sunrise and sunset a bugle sounded and the two flags rose and fell, while all personnel stood at attention.
Despite this show of equivalence, the professional disparity between the Brazilian and American outfits was obvious. Rondon’s “commission,” as he called it, consisted of eleven superbly trained men. Lieutenant Lyra was an astronomer and surveyor; Captain Amílcar de Magalhães, a logistics expert; and Dr. José Cajazeira, an army physician. There was also a field detail comprising a geologist, a zoologist, an entomologist, a taxidermist, and a botanist—not to mention two general-duty officers and a cinematographer, equipped with miles of film.
Roosevelt’s team of seven was, with the exception of Cherrie and Miller, amateurish. Fiala had spent four years in the Arctic, but the skills he acquired there were unlikely to be of much use in the Amazonian jungle. Kermit had some, but not much, experience of the Brazilian wilderness, and was fluent in Portuguese. Harper was out of his element and looking for an excuse to go home. Zahm contributed nothing, although his Swiss servant, Jacob Sigg, had a capable pair of hands.
The absence of the launch gave Roosevelt an opportunity to hunt for the tapir he had promised his naturalists. He soon secured a big specimen, drilling it through the brain as it swam. On 10 January, going out after peccaries, he outscored Rondon three to one. “I have gotten specimens of all the mammals I was most eager to have,” he told Zahm, “and am now perfectly satisfied if I do not get a shot at another animal.”
After dinner that night, he and the priest had another of their moonlight colloquies. Promenading like the Walrus and the Carpenter under silver-edged storm clouds, they talked, in Roosevelt’s words, “of many things, from Dante, and our own plans for the future, to the deeds and the wanderings of the old-time Spanish conquistadores in their search for the gilded King, and of the Portuguese adventurers who then divided with them the mastery of the oceans and of the unknown continents beyond.”
Map of the Roosevelt-Rondon Expedition, 1914. (photo credit i15.2)
IT TOOK ANOTHER six days for the entire expedition to be shuttled to Tapírapoan, the main telegraph station in Mato Grosso. From here, Rondon’s still-raw wires ran north to Utiariti, then east to José Bonifácio, delineating the route the two colonels would