Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [199]
After discussion, they agreed on a less laborious method of procedure. But Roosevelt made one thing clear. “Senhor Kermit no longer rides up front.”
CLEARING SKIES AND baking heat. Rapids, rapids, rapids. Portages too numerous to count. Rare fish dinners, but still no meat. Evasive tapirs. Grilled parrots and toucans. Monkey stew. Palm cabbage. Wild pineapples. Fatty Brazil nuts. Disappearance of fifteen food tins. Three weeks of rations left. Oxford Book of French Verse. Mountains crowding in. Men hit with fever, dysentery. Malcontents multiply. Daily chapter-writing. How to describe the utterly worthless camarada, Julio de Lima? “An inborn, lazy shirk with the heart of a ferocious cur in the body of a bullock.”
On 27 March, Roosevelt was standing with some other principals below an especially violent rapid. One of the pontoons came down empty, guided by two paddlers, ran into a curl, and overturned. Then the current hurled it into deep water and jammed it against some boulders. He was the first to jump into the river and try to help the paddlers save it. Cherrie and other expedition members followed. They slipped and stumbled as they hacked at the lashings of the pontoon, with waves seething round their chests. Six or seven naked, screaming men, including Kermit, clambered onto an island and threw down a rope to secure the separated canoes. Eventually both vessels were dragged free and moored. But in the struggle, Roosevelt cut his right leg on a rock.
Twelve years before, as President, he had been riding in a barouche that collided with a speeding trolley car. He had been thrown to the side of the road, unhurt except for an ugly bruise on the left shin. It had developed into an abscess serious enough to mandate two operations and several weeks in a wheelchair. The surgery, involving a syringe probe and scraping of the periosteum, had left him with a permanent feeling of fragility in that leg. During his second term, he had rapped it while riding, causing such an inflammation that the White House physician had considered another operation, to remove atrophied bone. And in the summer of 1910, there had been a recurrence of osteoperiostitis, oddly accompanied by Cuban fever.
This insult to Roosevelt’s other leg caused an ache that would not go away. He began to limp and his color reddened overnight. Next morning, three black vultures sailed over the camp. Then Rondon came back from a reconnaissance trip downriver. Cherrie could tell from his expression that he had terrible news.
There was a three-kilometer gorge ahead, Rondon said, full of rapids and falls, and so precipitous (it dropped more than thirty meters) that none of the canoes could be roped through. Nor, in his opinion, could they be portaged. The forested banks were too dense and too steep. All six vessels would have to be abandoned. Every man except Roosevelt must transport as heavy a load of necessities as he could carry along the rim of the gorge until it came to an end and more canoes could be cut.
The Americans overruled him. They insisted that time and supplies were too short to permit the construction of a new flotilla. Kermit was sure he and Lyra could coax the canoes at least some of the way by water and the rest by land, winching them up one side of the gorge if necessary.
Rondon agreed to let them try. But his pessimism was contagious, worsening the expedition’s morale. Each principal had to pare personal baggage down to the lightest minimum. Roosevelt kept only the helmet, clothes, and shoes he stood in, plus a change of underwear and one set of pajamas. He clung to his black manuscript box and rifle, as well as a few other essentials: “my wash-kit, a pocket medicine case, and a little bag containing my spare spectacles, gun grease, some adhesive plaster, some needles and thread, the ‘fly dope,’ and my purse and letter of credit, to be used at Man