Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [195]
There was nothing to do but make camp and start portaging through the woods next morning at dawn. First, the stores and other baggage were moved ahead to a point where the river broadened again. This was simple, if laborious, work, with everyone shouldering as much weight as he could support. It took all day. Rain fell in sheets, but not enough to drown giant horseflies the size of bumblebees. They bit till the blood ran. Roosevelt smeared himself with fly dope, which soon washed off. After dinner, it worked better, repelling at least some of the tiny polvora flies that swarmed about him. They waited until he was asleep and sweating, then swarmed down to prick him awake. Kermit was unsympathetic. He had the Rooseveltian propensity to boils, and was suffering from an eruption so painful that he could do little but lie on one side and read Os Lusíadas.
“ ‘THE GOODWILL, THE ENDURANCE, AND THE BULL-LIKE STRENGTH OF THE CAMARADAS.’ ”
The expedition undertakes one of its many portages. (photo credit i16.1)
The next one and a half days were even worse, with mosquitoes, pium flies, and vicious little aromatic bees responding to what was clearly a general alert in the insect world. Meanwhile, fourteen men chopped a “corduroy road” along the riverbank. They corrugated it with a couple of hundred slender logs, then twined a rope around themselves and hauled the canoes over with a block and tackle. Toward the end, the carry degenerated into a series of sandstone ledges. All seven dugouts—one of which weighed 2,500 pounds—had to be winched down, their keels shaving shallower as they rasped to the foot of the slope. In the process, the biggest boat split, and the leaky one sank as soon as it was relaunched. It had to be salvaged by force. Roosevelt, aware that he was no longer capable of such exertion, wrote a tribute to “the goodwill, the endurance, and the bull-like strength of the camaradas.”
The damaged canoes were caulked and dried out enough to let the expedition continue on the afternoon of 5 March. It made another twelve kilometers, and so did its attendant swarm of aromatic bees. They had stingless cousins whom Roosevelt found even peskier. Omnipresent at every camp, these tickly creatures crawled over his extra-sensitive skin with a maddening persistence, sucking at sweat glands and trying to invade every body orifice. He got some relief when the Dúvida broadened out, and Luiz could steer a good distance from both banks.
THE NEXT RAPID took three days to bypass. Another one materialized only five kilometers below.
Roosevelt soon learned not to yield to euphoria each time smooth brown water followed white. His canoe might be gliding like a gondola, but he would see riffles and whirlpools that warned of hidden boulders. Some porphyritic outcrops were too high for any flood. They announced themselves with a distant thunder that was always depressing, because even when side channels looked runnable—the river was now a hundred meters wide—there was a risk of losing provisions from the low-riding cargo pontoons. That meant more tree felling, more portaging, and less and less progress.
On the morning of 11 March the expedition woke to find that the Dúvida had risen during the night, and shattered the two biggest canoes against some rocks. A very large dugout had to be carved to replace them. The only available tree was a yellow tatajuba whose wood was so dense that its chips sank in the river like bits of iron. The camaradas set to work on it. Rondon estimated that the job would take as long as three days. Lyra and Kermit used the interval to hunt for badly needed meat. They got a jacu bird for the principals and two monkeys for the men.
In spite of fretting that the expedition was consuming means and preying upon itself, Roosevelt took pleasure in being alone in the jungle. There were spells, all too rare, when biting insects lost track of him and he could marvel at the interrelationships, half coexistent, half