The River of Doubt: Theodore Roosevelt's Darkest Journey

Summary (from the publisher): At once an incredible adventure narrative and a penetrating biographical portrait, The River of Doubt is the true story of Theodore Roosevelt’s harrowing exploration of one of the most dangerous rivers on earth.

The River of Doubt—it is a black, uncharted tributary of the Amazon that snakes through one of the most treacherous jungles in the world. Indians armed with poison-tipped arrows haunt its shadows; piranhas glide through its waters; boulder-strewn rapids turn the river into a roiling cauldron.

After his humiliating election defeat in 1912, Roosevelt set his sights on the most punishing physical challenge he could find, the first descent of an unmapped, rapids-choked tributary of the Amazon. Together with his son Kermit and Brazil’s most famous explorer, Cândido Mariano da Silva Rondon, Roosevelt accomplished a feat so great that many at the time refused to believe it. In the process, he changed the map of the western hemisphere forever.

Along the way, Roosevelt and his men faced an unbelievable series of hardships, losing their canoes and supplies to punishing whitewater rapids, and enduring starvation, Indian attack, disease, drowning, and a murder within their own ranks. Three men died, and Roosevelt was brought to the brink of suicide. The River of Doubt brings alive these extraordinary events in a powerful nonfiction narrative thriller that happens to feature one of the most famous Americans who ever lived.
From the soaring beauty of the Amazon rain forest to the darkest night of Theodore Roosevelt’s life, here is Candice Millard’s dazzling debut.  

 

Review: Theodore Roosevelt was frail and sickly as a child and suffered from life-threatening asthma. Through his own discipline and desire to defy hardship, he was able to overcome his physical infirmities. "Throughout his adult life, Roosevelt would relish physical exertion, and he would use it not just as a way to keep his body fit and his mind sharp but as his most effective weapon against depression and despair" (16). So in 1912 when at the age of 54 the former president lost the election for a third term in office and found himself defeated and idle, he scarcely hesitated at the offer from the Brazilian government to come tour their country. After the public tour ended, he decided to embark on an exploration of uncharted territory in the Amazon jungle. Roosevelt, along with Brazil's famous explorer Candido Mariano da Silva Rondon, Roosevelt's son Kermit, and a cadre of naturalists, locals, and other explorers embarked on a journey down the unmapped tributary of the Amazon known as the River of Doubt. This work of non-fiction chronicles the perilous journey the men faced and which Roosevelt nearly did not survive.

 

The journey was plagued and difficult from the start. Roosevelt delegated all the planning and preparation to others; a famously failed explorer of the Artic did the packing, which was therefore poorly executed for a tropical journey. It took nearly a month just to reach the River of Doubt and the group was weighed down by excessive crates and luxuries. The pack animals began to buck off their heavy loads and many animals died. Roosevelt also received word that his young cousin, Margaret Roosevelt, who had accompanied him on his tour of Brazil, had died of typhoid fever contracted during her time in South America. The group ballooned to include 148 camaradas, or local laborers,  and 11 officers. Roosevelt realized that if they would ever make it down the river they must reduce the size of their group and made the difficult decision of asking many to leave their expedition.

 

Even after drastically reducing the size of their party, the descent down the river was troubled from their entry point. Despite setting out with numerous boats, the group somehow arrived at the river with no boats at all, having left the others behind. They were forced to purchase seven roughly hewn dugouts from Nhambiquara Indians. Roosevelt described them in his diary saying, "One was small, one was cranky, and two were old, waterlogged, and leaky. The other three were good" (134). In addition to battling lack of enough food, natives shooting arrows at them, and a member of their own party who became murderous, the men's journey was complicated by constant rapids that meant they had to hack a path through the jungle and carry their boats for long stretches. One man drowned, they lost two dogs, and a camarada shot another man in the group. In response, the party left the murderer behind in the jungle to his likely gruesome and terrifying end. In the final weeks of the journey, Roosevelt suffered from high fever and infected abscesses and contemplated suicide in order to avoid being a burden of the group, but with his son's persistence and emergency surgery on the floor of the jungle to drain abscesses, Roosevelt somehow survived to make it out of the jungle.

 

Reading this today, it's hard to imagine a former president of the United States taking on such a fantastically dangerous journey. Even with twenty-first century equipment and technology, the Amazon is incredibly dangerous but for Roosevelt's group in 1914, it was even more harrowing. It's shocking that any of the group survived given the exposure to hostile natives, poisonous snakes, fever, extreme starvation, and lack of supplies they endured. Furthermore, seeing Roosevelt through the lens as not just a president but in one of his darkest hours gave me renewed appreciation for the man. No task was too good for him, he did not fear hardship or even death, and he had the fortitude and endurance of a man half his age.

 

The author did an excellent job of relaying the story of this expedition in an informative yet compelling manner. This reads like a narrative thriller and less like a dry history text. In addition, Millard does an excellent job of providing context information, such as motivating rationale for Roosevelt and a description of the jungle itself to allow the reader to have a more full understanding of the expedition and its significance. I did feel overwhelmed at times by the number of men in the expedition and would have liked either a character list or a more comprehensive understanding of how many or which men accompanied each phase of the journey. For instance, it was never totally clear to me how many men were in the original expedition versus the final group that descended the river. However, in sum, this was a fascinating, in-depth look at one of Roosevelt's adventures and one that could not be covered in such rich detail in a full length biography of his life.

 

Stars: 4