reached the headwaters of the River of Doubt and survived to tell the tale. Those men had been led by Cândido Rondon.
* * *
B ORN IN the remote western-Brazilian state of Mato Grosso, in a little town called Mimoso that was twenty miles south of the state’s capital, Cuiabá, Rondon had grown up in painful isolation from the rest of Brazil. His earliest memories were of war and irreparable loss. His father, Cândido Mariano da Silva, a
caboclo
, or man of mixed Indian and European descent, died from smallpox six months before his son was born. Just days later, the Paraguayan dictator Francisco Solano López invaded Mato Grosso in retaliation for Brazil’s military intervention in the Uruguayan civil war. Since there were no lines of communication at that time between Mato Grosso and the Brazilian capital, the remote, impoverished people of Mato Grosso could not look to the government for aid.
The War of the Triple Alliance, a bloody five-year war that pittedParaguay against an alliance of Brazil, Uruguay (run by a puppet government controlled by Brazil), and Argentina, officially began in 1865, the year that Rondon was born. Under constant siege, the people living in Mato Grosso’s far-flung towns fled to Cuiabá in search of protection. Rondon’s mother, who was one-quarter Terena Indian and one-quarter Borôro Indian, snatched up her infant son and ran. All she found in Cuiabá, however, was the same deadly disease that had killed her husband. In 1867, half the refugees in Cuiabá, roughly six thousand people, died from smallpox. In the midst of famine, widespread disease, and war, Rondon survived. His mother did not.
Survival against great odds was to become a hallmark of Rondon’s life, but so too were loneliness and isolation. Orphaned at the age of two, Rondon was cared for by his grandparents until they too died while he was still a boy. He was then sent to live with his mother’s brother, a man who adopted him, gave him his surname, and educated him until, at the age of sixteen, Rondon moved to Rio de Janeiro. The city must have seemed utterly alien to a young man who had grown up in the backwoods of Mato Grosso. It is no surprise that he gravitated toward the only semblance of a family that was available to him: the Escola Militar, Rio’s military school.
Rondon, however, was not like the other boys at the military school, and nearly a year passed before he began to feel comfortable there. Even as a teenager, Rondon was serious and driven; he was also poor beyond anyone’s understanding. He woke up at 4:00 a.m. every day to swim in the sea and was back in his dark room by 5:00 a.m., studying by the thin light of a whale-oil lamp while the other students, most of whom had been out late the night before, burrowed deeper into their beds, dreading the 6:00 a.m. reveille. Besides his extraordinary discipline, Rondon’s extreme poverty and rural background made him an outcast. Too poor even to afford textbooks, he never left campus with the other boys on the weekends, and he was nicknamed “the hairy brute” because he was so awkward in social situations. The earnest young man’s isolation was so complete that noone around him noticed that he was starving. Living on a meager diet of rice and beans, and working night and day in an effort to complete a two-year degree in only one year, he became so malnourished that he finally collapsed while descending a flight of stairs on his way to a math class.
Rondon lost an entire year of school while he slowly recovered, but he spent the time tutoring other students and never gave up his ambitions for a military career. After returning to school, he earned a bachelor’s degree in mathematics and the physical and natural sciences, and, while still in his early twenties, was promoted to military engineer, a title that ensured him a lifelong professorship or a well-respected position as an intellectual at the military headquarters in Rio—positions that would
* * *
B ORN IN the remote western-Brazilian state of Mato Grosso, in a little town called Mimoso that was twenty miles south of the state’s capital, Cuiabá, Rondon had grown up in painful isolation from the rest of Brazil. His earliest memories were of war and irreparable loss. His father, Cândido Mariano da Silva, a
caboclo
, or man of mixed Indian and European descent, died from smallpox six months before his son was born. Just days later, the Paraguayan dictator Francisco Solano López invaded Mato Grosso in retaliation for Brazil’s military intervention in the Uruguayan civil war. Since there were no lines of communication at that time between Mato Grosso and the Brazilian capital, the remote, impoverished people of Mato Grosso could not look to the government for aid.
The War of the Triple Alliance, a bloody five-year war that pittedParaguay against an alliance of Brazil, Uruguay (run by a puppet government controlled by Brazil), and Argentina, officially began in 1865, the year that Rondon was born. Under constant siege, the people living in Mato Grosso’s far-flung towns fled to Cuiabá in search of protection. Rondon’s mother, who was one-quarter Terena Indian and one-quarter Borôro Indian, snatched up her infant son and ran. All she found in Cuiabá, however, was the same deadly disease that had killed her husband. In 1867, half the refugees in Cuiabá, roughly six thousand people, died from smallpox. In the midst of famine, widespread disease, and war, Rondon survived. His mother did not.
Survival against great odds was to become a hallmark of Rondon’s life, but so too were loneliness and isolation. Orphaned at the age of two, Rondon was cared for by his grandparents until they too died while he was still a boy. He was then sent to live with his mother’s brother, a man who adopted him, gave him his surname, and educated him until, at the age of sixteen, Rondon moved to Rio de Janeiro. The city must have seemed utterly alien to a young man who had grown up in the backwoods of Mato Grosso. It is no surprise that he gravitated toward the only semblance of a family that was available to him: the Escola Militar, Rio’s military school.
Rondon, however, was not like the other boys at the military school, and nearly a year passed before he began to feel comfortable there. Even as a teenager, Rondon was serious and driven; he was also poor beyond anyone’s understanding. He woke up at 4:00 a.m. every day to swim in the sea and was back in his dark room by 5:00 a.m., studying by the thin light of a whale-oil lamp while the other students, most of whom had been out late the night before, burrowed deeper into their beds, dreading the 6:00 a.m. reveille. Besides his extraordinary discipline, Rondon’s extreme poverty and rural background made him an outcast. Too poor even to afford textbooks, he never left campus with the other boys on the weekends, and he was nicknamed “the hairy brute” because he was so awkward in social situations. The earnest young man’s isolation was so complete that noone around him noticed that he was starving. Living on a meager diet of rice and beans, and working night and day in an effort to complete a two-year degree in only one year, he became so malnourished that he finally collapsed while descending a flight of stairs on his way to a math class.
Rondon lost an entire year of school while he slowly recovered, but he spent the time tutoring other students and never gave up his ambitions for a military career. After returning to school, he earned a bachelor’s degree in mathematics and the physical and natural sciences, and, while still in his early twenties, was promoted to military engineer, a title that ensured him a lifelong professorship or a well-respected position as an intellectual at the military headquarters in Rio—positions that would
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