Even Rondon, who had faced down mutinous soldiers and ridden on horseback into hostile Indian territory, showed extreme caution when bathing in the river. Having seen his co-commander barefoot, Roosevelt could easily guess at the reason. One morning during a telegraph line expedition, Rondon had found a shallow pool to bathe in at the edge of a river. He had carefully inspected it first, but the moment he slipped a foot into the water, a piranha had attacked, clipping off one of his toes with a single bite.
More painful to Rondon was the loss of a friend to piranhas in 1904. While crossing a river on a wounded mule, the man, who, like Rondon, had been a top cadet at the Military Academy, was attacked by piranhas drawn to the mule’s blood. By the time his companions found him, there was nothing left on his skeleton but the feet in his boots.
Roosevelt referred to piranha as “the fish that eats men when it can get the chance.” By the time he had reached the River of Doubt, he had heard dozens of horrifying stories of piranha that had left nothing but white bones on a riverbed after seizing upon a wounded soldier or an unfortunate child. Astounded by their blood lust, he called the fish “ferocious little monsters,” and his vivid retelling of catching them on the Paraguay River caused a sensation in the United States when his Scribner’s articles began to hit the newsstands. “The [piranha’s] rabid, furious snaps drive the teeth through flesh and bone,” he wrote. “The head with its short muzzle, staring malignant eyes, and gaping, cruelly armed jaws, is the embodiment of evil ferocity; and the actions of the fish exactly match its looks. I never witnessed an exhibition of such impotent, savage fury as was shown by the piranhas as they flapped on deck. When fresh from the water and thrown on the boards they uttered an extraordinary squealing sound. As they flapped about they bit with vicious eagerness at whatever presented itself. One of them flapped into a cloth and seized it with a bulldog grip. Another grasped one of its fellows; another snapped at a piece of wood, and left the teethmarks deep therein.”
Piranha had already left their teeth marks on several members of Roosevelt’s own expedition. They had bitten off part of one of Leo Miller’s hands while he and Cherrie were collecting in the Gran Chaco during Roosevelt’s speaking tour. “Suddenly I heard an outburst of considerable profanity,” Cherrie later recalled, “and he [Miller] came running to show me his hand, from which a good sized piece had been torn by a pirañha, the most bloodthirsty inhabitant of tropical waters.” Cherrie himself had been nearly devoured alive on another expedition, when he had fallen from a tree branch and landed in the middle of a piranha feeding frenzy—a frenzy that he had incited by tossing into the river pieces of another piranha that he had caught earlier in the day. Even years after the incident, Cherrie shuddered at the memory of that extraordinarily close call.
As I fell I made a wild grab at the limb and, in so doing, I struck my arm against a small projection, tearing a long gash in the flesh. Even in the fraction of a second it took me to fall I realized that I was bleeding and that my blood would instantly incite an attack by the murderous fish. To be sure, the bank was only a few yards distant; but the lightning-like rapidity of the piranha left me little chance to escape unhurt. My whole instinct was to strike out instantly for the shore. Even a poor swimmer would have made it in a dozen strokes. But I retained enough of my reason to know that my one chance of escape lay in keeping the fish at bay before they became crazed with the taste of blood. So not only did I strike out for the shore but I set up a violent motion of twisting and splashing with my arms and legs. Even then I felt a blow and a sharp pain in my shoulder that told me one of the fish had struck. All I could do was to continue my furious splashing. Luckily I succeeded in reaching the shore, though badly bitten before I dragged myself out of the water. The physical effort of my contortions had exhausted me. It was some time before I could get up strength enough to start back to camp. I still bear the scars of that encounter. And I know that had I been even slightly stunned by my fall I should never have lived to tell the tale.
As terrifying as the piranha were, many of those who lived in the settled areas of the Amazon would have preferred them to the tiny, almost transparent catfish known as the candiru. This sharp-spined fish is the only other animal besides the vampire bat that is known to survive solely on blood. Most species of candiru are only about an inch long, and they usually make their living by swimming into the gill chambers of larger fish. To other fish, the candiru is relatively harmless, because, when full to capacity, it simply swims back out of the gill chamber and burrows into a riverbed to digest its blood meal. To humans, however, the miniature catfish is a potentially lethal menace.
When it comes to parasitizing people, a very rare occurrence, the candiru’s modus operandi is to enter through an orifice—from a vagina to an anus. It is most famous, however, for wiggling its way into a urethra. The most widely discussed, if highly controversial, theory is that candirus are attracted to urine streams, mistaking them for the gill streams of fish. Before the unsuspecting bather knows what is happening, the candiru has followed the stream to its source, slipped inside, sunk its spines in the soft tissue, and begun to gorge on its host’s blood. For the candiru, this is a fatal move. While it can easily swim out of a fish’s gills, it cannot find its way out of a human urethra. Even if it could swim backward, its stiff spines prevent it from going in any direction but forward.
For the person whom the candiru has parasitized, the situation is potentially just as dire, and the cure can be as bad as the affliction. The candiru soon dies where it is, but its body continues to block the urethra, causing excruciating pain and, if not removed, death. Candiru removal, however, is difficult, especially in the remote tropics. In 1897, George Boulenger, a Belgian ichthyologist and herpetologist, presented a candiru to the Zoological Society of London and related a gruesome story, told to him by a doctor named Bach, of the extreme measures to which men in outlying villages were willing to go in order to rid themselves of a candiru. “The only means of preventing it from reaching the bladder, where it causes inflammation and ultimately death, is to instantly amputate the penis,” Boulenger told his no doubt horrified audience. “Dr. Bach had actually examined a man and three boys with amputated penis [sic] as a result of this dreadful incident.” Dr. Bach was later discredited because he had not personally witnessed either the attacks or the amputations, but his was not the first, or the last, story of a penectomy performed on a man whose urethra had been blocked by a candiru.
The potential danger for the men on the River of Doubt came not just when they swam in the river but even when they urinated in its shallow waters. Instances of candirus parasitizing people are rare, but in the one case in which a doctor fully documented his removal of a candiru from a young man, the victim’s explanation of how the fish had entered his urethra was nearly as shocking as the fact that it was there at all. Up to that point, most scientists had assumed that, in order for the fish to find its way into a urethra, that part of the victim’s anatomy had to be submerged in the water. In this case, however, the victim reported that, just before the attack, he had been standing in a river urinating, but the water had reached only to his upper thighs, and his penis had not even touched the river, much less been submerged in it. The candiru, he claimed, had abruptly leapt out of the water, shimmied up his urine stream, and disappeared into his urethra. He had made a desperate lunge for the fish, but it was too fast and too slippery. The incident occurred in a small town more than a hundred miles from Manáos, and the local doctors had been at a loss to help the man. By the time he was finally moved to Manáos for treatment, he had been unable to urinate for more than a week, and his stomach had become so distended that he looked six months pregnant. The doctor who eventually operated on him was able to successfully remove the candiru—without resorting to amputation.
* * *
ON THE morning of March 1, the expedition’s third day on the River of Doubt, the survey canoes once again got an early start, and the rest of the expedition followed ar
ound 11:00 a.m. The rain began almost as soon as they shoved off the bank.
Carried relentlessly forward by the swift current, the boats had just started to round a bend when the forested riverbank on both sides abruptly began to change. Out of the mist and rain, a collection of clearly manmade structures materialized before them, and the men suddenly realized that they were being propelled—without warning or preparation—into the middle of an Indian village. With no opportunity to retreat, and dangerously exposed, they braced themselves in their low-riding dugouts.
As they moved swiftly toward the village, however, they could see that it showed no signs of activity. Perched on both banks of the river, the village appeared to be devoid of life. Its population had vanished, and the jungle had already begun to reclaim the land. The palm-thatch roofs on the huts were rotting, and what appeared to have been small cultivated areas were overgrown—“studded,” Roosevelt wrote, “with the burned skeletons of trees.” At the river’s edge, a fish trap bobbed in the current, little left beyond a few hewn sticks to distinguish it from the mass of vegetation growing on the banks.
Around another bend in the river lay the remains of a bridge that dangled a couple of feet above the water, just a few stout poles that had been driven into the riverbed, and a long rope of liana that had been twisted for strength and stretched from one bank to the other to form a handrail. The rest of the bridge was gone, swept away by the swollen river.
The village—the first sign of human life that they had seen since launching their boats—was irrefutable proof that Indians lived on the banks of the River of Doubt. While this knowledge doubtless thrilled Rondon, it must have been sobering to the rest of the men in the expedition. They had no way to know if these Indians were hostile, but for the sake of their own safety, and judging by the Nhambiquara’s initial reaction to Rondon, they had to assume that they were. In fact, Rondon speculated that these Indians were a subgroup of the Nhambiquara called the Navaité. Rondon nominally had a treaty with the Nhambiquara, but there was no reason to believe that this group would honor that treaty—or even that they knew anything about it, or Rondon. The only certainty was that, if they were still alive, the Indians who once lived in this village would see the expedition before the members of the expedition would see them.
There was nothing to explain why the Indians had deserted their village. Perhaps they had moved into the interior as the river began to rise, or had found better land for planting or hunting elsewhere and so set out to establish a new home. But they also could have been massacred by another tribe, or even another group within their own tribe. Whatever the explanation, on this gray day, with the light dwindling in the silent forest, the village had the eerie unease of a ghost town—the dwelling place of spirits rather than of men of flesh and bone.
* * *
THE GLOOM of the day’s events lifted somewhat when Cherrie, from his seat in Roosevelt’s canoe, heard the very real and tantalizingly close sound of game. His ears—an ornithologist’s most finely tuned collecting tool—caught the distinctive “eeolk, eeolk” of the woolly monkey coming from the branches of a tree just overhead. Woolly monkeys are highly intelligent, extremely sensitive animals. In captivity, they have even been known to weep when upset. But when Cherrie raised his rifle, took aim, and fired, he was not thinking about adding an interesting specimen to his museum collection; he was thinking about dinner. Moments later, a monkey with dense gray fur, a long prehensile tale, and a round, protruding belly pitched forward and fell heavily out of the trees. As they watched the monkey tumble through the branches, the men briefly forgot their worries and concentrated on the prospect of fresh meat for dinner.
Their excitement, however, nearly turned to catastrophe a few hours later, when, in their haste to make camp, they forgot one of the most fundamental rules of the rain forest: Watch your step. With their dinner in hand, the men searched for a dry stretch of shore on which they could spend the night. Finally finding a level spot a few feet above the river, they landed, moored their boats to some trees, and began clearing a site for their third camp. As usual, they did not venture far from the water’s edge, but what they did not realize that night was that the brush they were clearing concealed a coral snake.
Of all the creatures of the rain forest, none are more reliably lethal to man than snakes. Naturalists complain that venomous snakes are hard to find in the jungle. They disappear in a mat of branches and leaves, or hide beneath a fallen tree. But they are there, and when they strike, they are deadly.
The most infamous of South America’s poisonous snakes are the ringed coral snake and the pit viper. A relative of North American rattlesnakes and copperheads, pit vipers have long horizontal fangs that snap into place like switchblades when they are ready to strike. Within seconds, their victims begin to sweat, vomit, and swell. Death comes from renal failure or intracranial bleeding. In 1931, Clodomiro Picado, a Costa Rican biologist and snakebite expert, described the horrors of a pit-viper bite: “Moments after being bitten, the man feels a live fire germinating in the wound, as if red-hot tongs contorted his flesh; that which was mortified enlarges to monstrosity, and lividness invades him. The unfortunate victim watches his body becoming a corpse piece by piece; a chill of death invades all his being, and soon bloody threads fall from his gums; and his eyes without intending to, will also cry blood, until, beaten by suffering and anguish, he loses the sense of reality.”
The coral snake, which lurked under the brush as Roosevelt and his men waded ashore to make camp that night, had venom as deadly as that of the pit viper. A member of the Elapidae family, which includes cobras and mambas, the coral snake is not as aggressive as a pit viper and has much shorter fangs, but its venom is just as potent and certainly as painful. Once injected, the venom immediately attacks the victim’s nervous system, causing excruciating and irreversible paralysis. Eventually the respiratory system collapses, and the victim, acutely aware of what is happening to him, slowly suffocates to death.
So lethal is the bite of a coral snake that, in rural Brazil at the time of Roosevelt’s expedition, local people did not even attempt to treat it. No antivenom existed, and the moment someone was bitten, he was given up for dead. In North America, naturalists use an old adage—“Red touching yellow, dangerous fellow”—to help distinguish between nonvenomous snakes and the lethal coral snake, with its distinctive black, red, and yellow bands. This adage, however, is useless in the Amazon, where many of the more than fifty species of coral snakes have red and yellow bands that do not touch, but are deadly nevertheless.
While the camaradas noisily cleared a space in the overgrown shoreline for their campsite, they at first did not notice the three-foot-long coral snake, which had darted out of its hiding place. As their callused and dirt-streaked bare feet moved upon the thin layer of leaf litter, the snake slithered by, growing increasingly agitated. When threatened, a coral snake thrashes its body and tail, often in prelude to an attack. Perhaps it was this whiplike movement that finally attracted the attention of one of the camaradas, just as he was about to plant his foot squarely on the venomous snake. Terrified, the man grabbed an ax and swung wildly, driving the snake away from his feet—and toward Roosevelt.
Roosevelt reacted quickly, although perhaps not with his usual athletic grace. “Despite his two hundred and twenty pounds avoirdupois,” Cherrie later recalled, “he [Roosevelt] did a much livelier dance in attempting to set his foot on the snake than he did when he danced the hornpipe on shipboard.” When Roosevelt’s foot finally came thundering down, it missed its mark, crushing the snake’s body rather than its lethal head. Rearing back, the snake attacked. Roosevelt, still wearing his heavy, hobnailed boots, watched as the snake’s short fangs plunged into the tough leather and spilled its venom down the side of his boot. He had been spared an agonizing, certain death by a quarter-inch of leather.
CHAPTER 14
Twitching Through the Woods
AFTER THREE DAYS ON the River of Doubt, not one of t
he men in the expedition would have disputed Rondon’s choice of name for this winding, enigmatic river. Not only did it continue to keep its ultimate destination a mystery, but it defied even the most experienced rivermen among them to predict where it would take them in the course of a single day. “The number of twists and turns and doublings back and forth of the river were almost incredible,” Cherrie wrote. As far as the men could see, the River of Doubt had only one virtue: It was as placid as a lowland stream. It moved just quickly enough to relieve the paddlers of some of their work, but it rarely showed any more signs of life than a gentle current that rocked their canoes like a hand on a cradle. When they set off on the morning of March 2, the river was reassuringly familiar, lazily spreading through the forest and carrying them in a northwesterly direction. By the middle of the afternoon, however, the paddlers felt a subtle but disturbing change. The current had begun to quicken.
Each of the Amazon’s thousands of tributaries starts at a high point—either in the Andes, the Brazilian Highlands, or the Guiana Highlands—and then steadily loses elevation and picks up speed until it begins to approach the Amazon Basin. Scientists have divided these tributaries into three broad categories—milky, black, and clear—in reference to the color that they take on while carving their way through three different types of terrain. Alfred Russel Wallace, British naturalist and friend of Henry Walter Bates and Charles Darwin, made the distinction widely known in the mid-nineteenth century when he published his Narrative of Travels on the Amazon and Rio Negro. Wallace noted the striking difference between the milky Amazon and the black waters of the Negro where they collide on the northern bank of the Amazon. Seen from above, the meeting of these two colossal rivers looks like black ink spilling over parchment paper. The visual effect is heightened because the Negro, which is warmer and thus lighter in weight, rides on top of the Amazon, and the rivers do not fully blend until they have traveled dozens of miles together downstream.