Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [192]
HARD RAIN. MUD SLIDING IN SHEETS. Ominous telegraph at next station. Lauriodó and Fiala overturned on a rough stretch of the Papagaio. Half their provisions swept away. Fiala nearly drowned. Rio dos Formigas. Well named: local ants small, black, carnivorous. Big blue-and-yellow macaws. Rio do Calor. Two expedition dogs stolen by Indians. Rio Juiná. Balsa ferry. Sand. Skeletons. Blinding sun. Most lethal part of Nhambiquara nation. Rio Primavera. Rain. Kermit plagued with boils. Pium flies by day. Polvora (“powder”) flies by night, floating freely through mosquito nets. Baking heat. More rain. More rivers. Roosevelt reading Gibbon’s Decline and Fall. Rio Festa da Bandeira. Rio Iké. Wooded country now: sparse, scrubby chapadão. Mules starving. Vampire bats. Bullocks streaming with blood. Rio Nicolao Bureno. Indian hunting party. Pineapple wine. Campfire. Naked dancers under the moon. Wailing pipes. Former President of United States clapping to beat of stomping feet. Fragrant jungle. No game. Rain falling torrencialmente. Landscape opening out. Government research farm. Melons, milk, fresh eggs. Mais canja. Mais nudity. Nhambiquara girls around here even pluck pubic hair. For extra allure, one maiden wears a small, live, scalp-hugging monkey. Weather clearing. Telegraph line ends in a clutch of thatched cabins. José Bonifácio station at last.
IT WAS 23 FEBRUARY 1914. The Americans had been away from home for more than three and a half months. They had taken thirty-three days just to cross the sertão from Tapírapoan, and their most arduous challenge still loomed. Impatient to proceed, they spent only one night in José Bonifácio before shifting to the advance camp that Amílcar had established closer to the Dúvida. It took three more days for Roosevelt and Rondon to organize the Gi-Paraná and Dúvida expeditions.
Both teams were fitted out with the barest portable minimum of provisions, ammunition, and equipment necessary to sustain them for seven weeks. Books were classified as essential cargo. Roosevelt packed the last two volumes of his Gibbon, as well as works by Sophocles and Epictetus, the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, and Thomas More’s Utopia. Kermit chose Camões and some other Portuguese works; Rondon, Thomas à Kempis’s Imitation of Christ; Lyra, miniature editions of Goethe and Schiller in German.
The three Brazilian officers were persuaded to share one tent, and the three Americans a balloon-silk fly that kept out vertical rain, but little else. Roosevelt thought it wise to stow a one-cot medical tent, “for any one who might fall sick.” He finished the seventh chapter of his book for dispatch back to Cáceres, added an appendix and illustrations list, with sample photographs enclosed, and even sketched out a title page:
“CROWDING SO CLOSE THAT HE HAD TO PUSH THEM GENTLY AWAY.”
TR writing, surrounded by Nhambiquaras. (photo credit i15.4)
THROUGH THE
BRAZILIAN WILDERNESS
BY
Theodore Roosevelt
WITH ILLUSTRATIONS FROM
PHOTOGRAPHS BY KERMIT ROOSEVELT
AND OTHER MEMBERS OF THE EXPEDITION
On the morning of 27 February, Roosevelt, Kermit, Cherrie, Rondon, Lyra, and Dr. Cajazeira had a bountiful Brazilian breakfast. Then their Gi-Paraná colleagues escorted them to the spot where Rondon’s telegraph engineers had thrown a rough wooden bridge across the Dúvida. Seven shovel-nosed dugouts awaited them, already loaded with stores. The vessels lay so low in the water that they needed sidefloats to hold them stable. Most of them looked strong and sound, but two were old and leaky, dragging heavily on their ropes. Someone had caulked them as best he could. Sixteen strong canoeiros stood ready with paddles.
The inscrutable river coursed northward into the jungle, sixty-five feet wide, swift, deep, black, and silent. Goodbyes were exchanged. Roosevelt, Cherrie, and Dr. Cajazeira took their places in the biggest canoe. It displaced one and a half tons and was manned by a bowman, steersman, and midship paddler. Rondon’s and Lyra’s smaller craft rode ahead, with Kermit’s, the smallest of all, in vanguard position. Both