you.”
Roosevelt had at first welcomed the addition of his son to his expedition, but the news of Kermit’s engagement made him hesitate. He did not want Kermit to accompany him on an unavoidably dangerous journey when he had a fiancée who was anxiously awaiting his return. “I did not like Kermit to come on this trip with me,” Roosevelt wrote his daughter-in-law Eleanor, “but he did not wish to be married in my absence, and moreover felt that this semi-exploration business was exactly in his line.” However, in a letter to Belle, Kermit confessed that he was determined to go on this expedition not for his own sake but for his father’s, and he would count the days until the journey’s end. “It just doesn’t seem as if I could live so long without seeing you, but I feel so very sure that I am doing what you would want me to do,” he wrote her. “Yesterday mother gave me another long talk about father, and about some other ways I must look after him. She’s dreadfully worried about him, and there’s nothing for me to do but go.”
Kermit’s commitment to his father’s expedition was painfully tested on November 26, when he watched his mother and cousin set sail for the Panama Canal from Valparaiso, on Chile’s Pacific coast. The thought of the months ahead of him without Belle made Kermitmiserable. Yet he stood resolutely by his father’s side as the ship carrying Edith and Margaret disappeared in the distance.
“We would have both felt that I must go with father,” he wrote to Belle that night. “If I weren’t going I should always feel that when my chance had come to help, I had proved wanting, and all my life I would feel it.”
C HAPTER 6
Beyond the Frontier
O N THE MORNING OF December 12, 1913, Colonel Cândido Rondon—five feet three inches tall, with dark skin, a shock of black, slightly graying hair and a ramrod-straight posture—was looking crisp and starched in his dress whites as he anxiously paced the deck of the
Nyoac
, a shallow-river steamer that was anchored at the juncture of the Paraguay and Apa Rivers on Brazil’s southern border. Peering into the distance, Rondon searched for a column of smoke, a tall steel mast, anything that would herald the arrival of the
Adolfo Riquielme
, the Paraguayan president’s gunboat-yacht that was carrying Theodore Roosevelt to meet him.
After almost two months in South America, Roosevelt had finally completed his official duties, and could now devote himself entirely to his long-anticipated expedition into the Amazon. So remote was the region he had agreed to explore, however, that even getting to the River of Doubt would require a journey of at least two more months—first by boat and then on muleback. Crossing into Brazil on the broad Paraguay River, Roosevelt and his men would continue upstream as far as possible, disembarking at a telegraph station andfrontier town called Tapirapoan. They would then make their way across four hundred miles of the Brazilian Highlands, passing through open plains, scrub forest, barren desert, and dense jungle to reach the river, and launch their boats down its black, fast-moving waters.
With every mile of this journey, the expedition would be moving farther from populated areas, and closer to the edge of the unknown. Although the initial leg of boat travel offered a last opportunity for relative comfort and safety, the grueling overland journey would take them well past the frontier of settled lands, and into dangerous wilderness regions where the first outposts of military and governmental authority had only recently been established, and where harsh terrain and fierce indigenous tribes still posed a grave threat to intruders.
Even for the most hardened, ambitious Brazilian frontiersmen, the territory that Roosevelt was preparing to cross was considered too difficult and dangerous to settle or explore. Indeed, except for indigenous tribesmen, only a handful of men in the history of Brazil had ever
Roosevelt had at first welcomed the addition of his son to his expedition, but the news of Kermit’s engagement made him hesitate. He did not want Kermit to accompany him on an unavoidably dangerous journey when he had a fiancée who was anxiously awaiting his return. “I did not like Kermit to come on this trip with me,” Roosevelt wrote his daughter-in-law Eleanor, “but he did not wish to be married in my absence, and moreover felt that this semi-exploration business was exactly in his line.” However, in a letter to Belle, Kermit confessed that he was determined to go on this expedition not for his own sake but for his father’s, and he would count the days until the journey’s end. “It just doesn’t seem as if I could live so long without seeing you, but I feel so very sure that I am doing what you would want me to do,” he wrote her. “Yesterday mother gave me another long talk about father, and about some other ways I must look after him. She’s dreadfully worried about him, and there’s nothing for me to do but go.”
Kermit’s commitment to his father’s expedition was painfully tested on November 26, when he watched his mother and cousin set sail for the Panama Canal from Valparaiso, on Chile’s Pacific coast. The thought of the months ahead of him without Belle made Kermitmiserable. Yet he stood resolutely by his father’s side as the ship carrying Edith and Margaret disappeared in the distance.
“We would have both felt that I must go with father,” he wrote to Belle that night. “If I weren’t going I should always feel that when my chance had come to help, I had proved wanting, and all my life I would feel it.”
C HAPTER 6
Beyond the Frontier
O N THE MORNING OF December 12, 1913, Colonel Cândido Rondon—five feet three inches tall, with dark skin, a shock of black, slightly graying hair and a ramrod-straight posture—was looking crisp and starched in his dress whites as he anxiously paced the deck of the
Nyoac
, a shallow-river steamer that was anchored at the juncture of the Paraguay and Apa Rivers on Brazil’s southern border. Peering into the distance, Rondon searched for a column of smoke, a tall steel mast, anything that would herald the arrival of the
Adolfo Riquielme
, the Paraguayan president’s gunboat-yacht that was carrying Theodore Roosevelt to meet him.
After almost two months in South America, Roosevelt had finally completed his official duties, and could now devote himself entirely to his long-anticipated expedition into the Amazon. So remote was the region he had agreed to explore, however, that even getting to the River of Doubt would require a journey of at least two more months—first by boat and then on muleback. Crossing into Brazil on the broad Paraguay River, Roosevelt and his men would continue upstream as far as possible, disembarking at a telegraph station andfrontier town called Tapirapoan. They would then make their way across four hundred miles of the Brazilian Highlands, passing through open plains, scrub forest, barren desert, and dense jungle to reach the river, and launch their boats down its black, fast-moving waters.
With every mile of this journey, the expedition would be moving farther from populated areas, and closer to the edge of the unknown. Although the initial leg of boat travel offered a last opportunity for relative comfort and safety, the grueling overland journey would take them well past the frontier of settled lands, and into dangerous wilderness regions where the first outposts of military and governmental authority had only recently been established, and where harsh terrain and fierce indigenous tribes still posed a grave threat to intruders.
Even for the most hardened, ambitious Brazilian frontiersmen, the territory that Roosevelt was preparing to cross was considered too difficult and dangerous to settle or explore. Indeed, except for indigenous tribesmen, only a handful of men in the history of Brazil had ever
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