Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [203]
THE EXPEDIÇÀO CÍENTIFICA Roosevelt-Rondon made good use of its forty-eight-hour halt. Everybody needed a break from paddling and portaging. It was pleasant to relax in an open space, reasonably insect-free, in limpid light, after so many weeks in dark forests and valleys. For once there was no rain, just abundant sun to dry out blankets, and clear pools to bathe in. Two of the camaradas went out with a net, and brought back a gigantic catfish, more than enough for a communal feast under the stars (among them an inverted Dipper, pointing north). A bright moon made the joining of waters gleam like tossing silver.
Roosevelt ate little. The malaria had killed his appetite. In addition, dysentery was eroding his body, leading to a gauntness that renewed Kermit’s fears for him. His leg was so angry with what Cherrie called “oriental ulcers” that he was unable to get any exercise, except when forced to portage—which in turn placed a strain on his heart.
Rondon doubted there would be many more barriers to the progress of the expedition. According to his aneroid barometer, the Dúvida had fallen 202 meters since its passage under the wooden bridge near José Bonifácio. This suggested to him that the Amazon basin was bottoming out. Yet over the course of the next five days, the river continued to be as resentful of burdens on its back as Captain Amílcar’s pack team had been. “We are still surrounded by hills, and the roar of rapids is in our ears!” Cherrie wrote in his diary for 8 April. Every virgin promontory, right or left, disclosed another steaming set ahead. Roosevelt had to be carried past each. Soon he was not even able to sit upright in his dugout. A platform was improvised for him to lie on—tarpaulin spread across a bed of food tins—but then the sun beat down on him intolerably, and he sweated away further body salts. His men rigged an awning that gave him some relief from the heat, if not from the humidity that steamed off the river.
He remained fully conscious, able to admire the lush beauty of palm and banana trees glistening in the forest after showers, or emerging wraithlike from the mist that hung over them every morning. Along with Kermit, obsessed with the notion of marrying Belle in May or early June, and Cherrie, longing for Vermont, he became daily more homesick for the temperate north. Maple buds would be red now around Sagamore Hill, and windflowers and bloodroot blooming. For perhaps the fortieth time, Roosevelt watched the pontoons thumping their way over wet boulders and regretted the Canadian canoes he had left behind. “How I longed,” he wrote in his manuscript, “for a big Maine birchbark, such as that in which I once went down the Mattawamkeag at high water! It would have slipped down these rapids as a girl trips through a country-dance.”
On 14 April the river at last allowed an advance of 32 kilometers. The explorers were so used to disappointment, they did not dare to exult. But there were no rapids the next morning, and after a smooth run of two and a half hours, somebody noticed a signpost on the left bank of the river. It read simply, “J. A.”
As a boy sailing on the Nile, Roosevelt had seen the fundamentals of civilization proclaim themselves thus: the column, the tablet, the cipher. As a statesman, he had passed through the gates of many palaces. But now, having nearly died, and being threatened yet with death from blood poisoning (he had a violent abscess on his inner right thigh, and another forming on his buttock), he could look on this wooden marker as something more thrilling than Karnak or Schönbrunn.
“J. A.” TURNED OUT to be Joaquim Antônio, one of the rubber-tappers who were staking claims all over Amazonas in response to the worldwide automobile boom. Had he been at home, in his clean, cool palm-thatched house, he would have been able to tell the explorers what he called the Dúvida, and whether he had any inkling that it originated in Mato Grosso. But he was engaged elsewhere.
They had to keep paddling for another hour until they came upon an old black fisherman, the