Summary

In 1912, Theodore Roosevelt, former president of the United States, was at a crossroads. Having dramatically lost his bid for an unprecedented third term in the White House, he was adrift both politically and personally. Consumed by a "bruised spirit," he sought solace in the only therapy he knew: arduous physical challenges and the thrill of uncharted territory. Roosevelt's life had been marked by a peculiar pattern: responding to adversity and emotional setbacks with bursts of strenuous activity, whether boxing at Harvard after his father's death or ranching in the Dakota Badlands after the deaths of his first wife and his mother on the same day. This time, the Amazon beckoned. An invitation from Argentina's Museo Social offered Roosevelt the chance not just to travel to South America but to explore one of earth’s last unmapped wildernesses: the Amazon rain forest.

Roosevelt's initial South American expedition was conceived as a relatively safe and tame speaking tour. It was to take him by steamer and comfortable riverboats up the continent’s broad, well-known rivers. However, a chance encounter changed everything. When he met Cândido Rondon, Brazil's greatest explorer and the head of the Strategic Telegraph Commission, Roosevelt abandoned the original plan and agreed to descend an uncharted river with Rondon and a small band of men. The river, known as the Rio da Dúvida, or River of Doubt, had been discovered by Rondon five years earlier but never mapped. Its course and its character were almost completely unknown, even to the man who had named it. Roosevelt's decision to descend this river would transform an uneventful trip into one of the most perilous journeys in the history of Amazon exploration.

The River of Doubt’s rapids, which had been obscured by the high water of the rainy season, began to emerge almost as soon as the expedition embarked, and they quickly proved to be even more challenging, destructive, and even deadly than Roosevelt and Rondon could have predicted. After only a few weeks, the expedition found itself with fewer canoes than men and less than half its provisions left. Worse, the jungle was empty of food and filled with potentially deadly predators and diseases, including malaria, which left Roosevelt’s son, Kermit, sweating and shaking in his hammock night after night. The Cinta Larga Indians, the river’s indigenous inhabitants who had never seen a white man, stalked the expedition relentlessly, and Lobo, Rondon’s favorite dog, was killed in an ambush. After his canoe was capsized and smashed in one particularly terrifying series of rapids, Kermit barely escaped with his life, and one of their paddlers was drowned. Then, the expedition’s worst fears were realized when the camarada Julio de Lima murdered Paishon, one of Rondon's most trusted sergeants.

Roosevelt himself had become gravely ill from a bacterial infection, and one morning he found himself in such pain and so weak with fever that he resolved to take the morphine he had packed for such an occasion. Recognizing his father’s desperation, Kermit refused to leave, and Roosevelt, fearing that his son would not abandon his body but would attempt the impossible task of bringing it out of the jungle, was obliged to promise that he would keep going, if only to save Kermit's life. The expedition, however, was still at the most dangerous part of the river, surrounded by dense forests, sheer canyons, and roaring rapids. Their rations were perilously low, and their canoes were rotting and falling apart. Then, just as their circumstances seemed bleakest, Roosevelt and his men, against all odds and with a good measure of luck, encountered a knife-cut vine, a sign that civilization and the promise of rescue were, they hoped, within reach.

The River of Doubt was exactly as advertised. Its mysteries were as numerous as its dangers, and it was a triumph simply to survive its descent. Roosevelt emerged a thin ghost of his former self, fifty-five pounds lighter and so weak that he had to be carried from the river on a stretcher. Although sick and exhausted, he was determined to prove his accomplishment to the geographers and journalists around the world who derided him as a charlatan, and scoffed that a former president of the United States could not possibly have discovered a nearly thousand-mile-long river in the deepest, most remote reaches of the Amazon rain forest. After recuperating in Barbados and then returning to New York, Roosevelt recounted the journey in detail at the National Geographic Society in Washington, D.C. Weeks later, he gave the same lecture to an equally incredulous but impressed audience at the Royal Geographic Society in London. His reputation restored, he turned his attention back to his family and home, his adventures, at last, behind him. Roosevelt’s journey down the River of Doubt would leave a lasting legacy on not just the map of South America but on the lives of the men who survived it. However, few if any of them realized how close they had come to being destroyed—not by the rapids or even by disease, but by the Indians they had never seen, and who had watched them every step of the way.