The River of Doubt: Theodore Roosevelt's Darkest Journey by Candice Millard

Author:Candice Millard
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, azw3
Published: 2011-05-20T19:06:28+00:00

THAT NIGHT, after the men, now numbering only twenty-one, had finished their portage around the last waterfall, they retired to their tents and hammocks. Hunched over his small table, Roosevelt acknowledged in the article he was writing that his son had had a “very narrow escape.” Had they lost Kermit rather than Simplicio that day, he wrote, he did not think he could have borne the pain of bringing “bad tidings to his betrothed and to his mother.” Kermit’s near-drowning had been a result of the young man’s own recklessness, but Roosevelt felt a heavy weight of responsibility for having chosen to descend this dangerous river, and for having brought his son along with him. Although Kermit had joined the expedition in order to protect his father, Roosevelt’s mission from this point onward would be to protect Kermit, and to ensure that he made it out of the rain forest alive.

Having faced his own mortality and having caused, albeit indirectly, another man’s death, Kermit showed no signs of remorse or even any sense of responsibility when he scribbled a brief account of the day’s events in his journal that night. He recorded the fact of Simplicio’s death as tersely and unemotionally as he did his own near-drowning. “Simplicio was drowned,” he wrote. If he felt sorrow for Simplicio’s death, or regret for his own rash decision to cross to the other side of the river when Rondon had warned him not to, he did not admit it in his diary. Nor did he appear to have any desire to change his ways. If Roosevelt had hoped that this tragedy had driven some degree of fear or even caution into his son, he was to be disappointed.

The man who seemed to be most shaken by what had happened that day was Cherrie. Having spent half his life traveling through South American jungles, he understood the gravity of their situation better than did Kermit or Roosevelt, and he was more concerned about surviving the journey than was Rondon. Although he regretted Simplicio’s death, he was much more disturbed that they had lost Kermit’s dugout and most of its cargo. “The loss of a human life is always a tragedy,” he wrote. “But the loss of the canoe and its contents was an even greater tragedy to the remaining members of our party.” In his last letter home, which he had written the day before they launched their boats on the river, Cherrie had told his wife, Stella, that he hoped to be back in Vermont in time to help sow the spring crops at Rocky Dell. “We may reach New York by the end of May,” he had written. “I hope we shall for I would like very much to be able to help get in the potatoes and other crops.” He realized now, however, that if he was ever going to see his family or Rocky Dell again, the expedition could not afford any more losses like those they had suffered that day.

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