Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [205]
WHEN THE AMERICAN PARTY awoke on Wednesday morning (Roosevelt lying face downward because of the agony of his latest abscess) they found themselves cruising down the Rio Madeira aboard the SS Cidade de Manáos. “The throbbing of her engines seems good to us,” wrote Cherrie. “She is a fast boat and is carrying us rapidly toward the Amazon.”
In their sleep, they had been delivered from a river no longer mysterious, but known, every kilometer of it recorded in ink, and some paid for in blood. Roosevelt’s estimate, subject to official verification, was that they had explored 1,500 kilometers, or nearly one thousand miles, of a watercourse longer than the Rhine—or in his preferred phrase, “the largest unknown river in the world.” That more than fulfilled the hope he had expressed to Ethel five months before, that his expedition would represent “some small achievement of worth.”
At 2:30 P.M. the Amazon manifested itself, so sluggishly that it failed to impress. It looked like a muddy lake, flooded to immobility by the rainy season just ended. Roosevelt did not have the energy to include a description of it in his latest sheaf of manuscript, entitled “Down an Unknown River.” For weeks he had been unable to eat more than a few spoonfuls of solid food; now he was living on nothing but eggs and milk. Either because he was too weak to exercise his habitual circumspection about personal matters, or because his relief at having survived was so strong, he permitted himself an unusual degree of sentimentality in bringing the manuscript to an end:
Each man to his home, and his true love! Each was longing for the homely things that were so dear to him, for the home people that were dearer still, and for the one who was dearest of all.
Roosevelt did not know it, but Rondon had discreetly timed his arrival in Manáos for the small hours of Thursday, 30 April. This was to spare him the embarrassment of having many people see him carried down the gangway in a prone position. Even so, a reception committee was on hand, and he had to endure its welcome. A luxurious private “palacette” was provided him, courtesy of the governor of Amazonas. A sack of family mail awaited. Kermit, ecstatic, stayed up the rest of the night reading letters from Belle.
“Father about the same, but much more cheerful,” he noted in his diary.
Arrangements were made to ferry them the rest of the way down the Amazon on a cargo boat, along with Cherrie, Miller, and forty-eight tons of freshly harvested nuts. Such was the power of Roosevelt’s name that a British Booth Line steamship, the Aidan, was standing by at Belém do Para, ready to take him directly to New York.
Before leaving Manáos on the first day of May, he had his rear abscess lanced. This procedure left him still unable to walk, and he was taken aboard the cargo boat on a stretcher. The subsequent river voyage took four days. He spent all of it in the captain’s cabin, writing letters to his family and friends. One note was addressed to Arthur Lee in London. It showed that Roosevelt’s spirit was still strong, leaping ahead to future activity:
ON THE AMAZON, MAY 4, 1912
Dear Arthur,
I’ve had a bad fever bout and two abscesses, and am still in bed, so excuse pencil.
On June 11th I shall be in Madrid at Kermit’s wedding. I shall be in London about June 15th. Will you be there then? Can I come to Chesterfield Street? If not, can you engage me rooms at Brown’s or some other old fogey hotel? And, will you see Leonard Darwin, or whoever the present head of the Royal Geographic Society is, and tell him that whereas I had to refuse to give the Society a lecture on Africa, now I can and will give them a lecture on a genuine bit of South American exploration. We have put on the map an absolutely unknown river, running through seven parallels of latitude, almost on the 60th degree of longitude, into the Madeira; no map has a hint of it, yet it is the biggest affluent of the biggest affluent of the mightiest river in the world.… Love to the Lady!
Yours ever
Theodore Roosevelt
HE WAS PROFOUNDLY