Once he was on board the Aidan, his appetite had improved tremendously—for books as well as for food. Not only did he regain twenty-five of the fifty-five pounds he had lost in the Amazon, but, in the one week that it had taken the steamship to travel from Bridgetown, Barbados, to New York, he read dozens of books. In New York Harbor, however, it was clear to everyone who had turned out to welcome him home that, while Roosevelt still had the same fighting spirit, he had lost his legendary vigor. When his oldest son, Theodore Jr., offered his father his arm to help him negotiate a gangway, Roosevelt rebuffed him, snapping, “I am all right. I can take care of myself.” Every man present had been ready to offer the same aid, had Roosevelt been willing to accept it. “As he limped down the companionway … the impression was strong that the Colonel had endured the greatest hardships of his life,” a reporter for the New York Sun wrote. “That was borne out when one of his friends remarked: ‘I guess the Colonel will never take a trip like that again.’”
* * *
AFTER RECOVERING from the gravest and most immediate effects of his illness, Roosevelt had been eager to tell the story of his expedition’s journey, but the scale of that achievement was so extraordinary that, to his surprise and outrage, he was met not with praise, but with skepticism and disbelief. Even before he had left his hospital bed in Manáos, some of the world’s most prominent and respected geographers had stepped forward to question his accomplishment. Among the first to plant a seed of doubt was Sir Clements Markham, a former president of England’s famed Royal Geographical Society and the man who had sent Robert Scott to the South Pole. Markham, whose area of specialty was South America, and who had traveled extensively through the continent, scoffed that Roosevelt’s expedition “certainly is a very remarkable story.” “I feel somewhat incredulous as to Col. Roosevelt having actually discovered a new river nearly a thousand miles long,” he told a correspondent for the New York World.
A less eminent but arguably even more famous explorer, Henry Savage Landor, also attacked Roosevelt, even more directly and viciously. Landor, who had himself boasted of fighting his way through hundreds of miles of uncharted Brazilian wilderness—a feat that Rondon disputed—now called Roosevelt a “charlatan” and charged that his trip suspiciously mirrored Landor’s own. “It seems to me he only copied the principal incidents of my voyage,” he sneered. “I see he even has had the very same sickness as I experienced, and, what is more extraordinary, in the very same leg I had trouble with. These things happen very often to big explorers who carefully read the books of some of the humble travellers who preceded them. I do not want to make any comment as to so-called scientific work of Col. Roosevelt, but as far as I am concerned he makes me laugh very heartily, and I believe all those who have a little common sense will laugh just as much as I.”
Roosevelt first learned of the attacks on his expedition when he was in Barbados. By the time he reached New York, he was incensed and determined to confront his detractors head-on. Several American geographers and newspapermen had leapt to his defense, including an editorial in the New York World that growled, “If the Colonel says the river is a thousand miles long, it’s a thousand miles long. We wouldn’t knock off an inch to avoid a war.” Roosevelt, however, was the kind of man who fought his own battles. As for Markham, Roosevelt told the New York Times, the British geographer had “unconsciously paid the greatest possible tribute to what he had done.” If his expedition had not been one of great importance, Markham would not have bothered to attack it. Landor, on the other hand, he dismissed as “a pure fake, to whom no attention should be paid.”
These attacks on not just Roosevelt’s expedition but his character only heightened the excitement surrounding the speech he agreed to give at the National Geographic Society on May 26. The society, which had fought hard—and, in Henry Fairfield Osborn’s estimation, unfairly—for Roosevelt’s first speech on the River of Doubt, had rented out Convention Hall, then the largest hall in Washington, D.C., for the event. Following a dinner at the New Willard Hotel, owned by Belle’s father, Roosevelt rode to the lecture in a limousine—with Commander Robert Peary, the man credited with being the first to reach the North Pole, standing on the running board and leaning into an open window so that he could continue his conversation with the colonel.
As Roosevelt entered Convention Hall at 8:30 p.m., ten minutes late, an usher at the front of the auditorium caught sight of him and signaled his arrival by waving a white handkerchief. The audience leapt to its feet and erupted in thunderous cheers and applause. This was the only hall in Washington large enough to hold the society’s five thousand invited guests, but it was far from luxurious. One reporter called it “dingy” and complained that it was “ill ventilated and situated on top of a huge retail market.” It was also stiflingly hot on this, one of the hottest days of a notably steamy summer for Washington. As Roosevelt’s venerable audience, which included everyone from ambassadors to Supreme Court justices to members of President Wilson’s own Cabinet, awaited his lecture, the stench of rotting meat and vegetables thickened the air around them.
Also among the crowd seated in the auditorium were George Cherrie, Leo Miller, Anthony Fiala, and Father Zahm. Since their journey had ended, Roosevelt had done what he could for each of the men of the expedition. He had invited the camaradas into his cabin on the Aidan, saluting them as heroes and giving them each two gold coins as a parting gift. He had sung Colonel Rondon’s praises everywhere he could be heard, ranking him as one of the four most accomplished explorers of his day. He had given Miller and Cherrie each a thousand dollars for their next expedition and had pledged to raise more. And, in an effort to soothe his friend Father Zahm’s bruised ego, he had asked Gilbert Grosvenor, the chairman of the National Geographic Society, to give the priest a special seat on the platform next to him during the speech.
From the moment Roosevelt entered the hall, it was immediately apparent to his audience that he had yet to recover from the trials of his expedition. “The striking thing about Mr. Roosevelt tonight,” one reporter wrote, “was that he looked tired, that his hands were cold and covered with perspiration and his voice weak…. His smile appeared to be forced and he gave the impression of a man who was being sustained by will power rather than by physical strength.” Roosevelt, however, was also sustained by righteous anger. He was determined to set the record straight, no matter what the cost to his health. Asking the journalists in the audience to take careful notes, he snapped, “I want to call your attention to the fact that I am using my term to scientific precision, and when I say ‘put it on the map,’ I mean what I say. I mean that … [the River of Doubt] is not on any map, and that we have put it on the map.”
The speech left Roosevelt’s detractors mute. Despite the miserable conditions and the fact that Roosevelt was so weak that few of the men in the audience could hear a word he was saying—“I sat in the front row and could barely hear him,” Grosvenor would later tell his son; “I don’t think 30 people could make out his words”—not a single member of the audience left the hall during the entire hour-and-a-half lecture. After this speech, the New York Evening Journal reported the following day, “any doubts that still linger about the River of Doubt hardly are justified…. With a little piece of chalk Colonel Roosevelt has put the River of Doubt upon the map of South America.”
Roosevelt’s chance to face down his European detractors, from Markham to Landor to every chuckling newspaperman on the continent, came in mid-June, when he sailed to the continent to attend Kermit’s wedding and speak before the Royal Geographical Society. As it turned out, Londoners were as eager to listen to what Roosevelt had to say as he was to be heard. Outside the front door of Burlington Gardens, five hundred men and women clamored to get into a hall that already held a thousand people and was equipped to hold, at the most, only eight hundred. Lifelong members of the Royal Geographical Society—each of whom had been guaranteed a seat at the lecture—were furious at being excluded, some even vowing to r
esign. A zealous suffragette held tight to the coattails of a reporter in an effort to gain entry, and one man burst into tears of frustration. Even Lord Earl Grey, a member of the Council of the Society who was to be given a place of honor on the platform with Roosevelt, was forced—much like Corinne Roosevelt Robinson at Madison Square Garden—to scale a stone wall in order to get inside.
Within the hall, every seat was taken, and the aisles were filled with the members of the council and their wives, who were forced to stand throughout the lecture. “All the benches and gangways were filled, the gallery was packed to overflowing, people sat on the front of the platform, crowded round the entrances, and occupied every available inch in their eagerness to see and hear Mr. Roosevelt,” a reporter for the Times of London wrote.
In his opening remarks, Douglas Freshfield, the president of the Royal Geographical Society, concluded by quoting a “high testimony to Mr. Roosevelt and his companions,” from Roosevelt’s most notable critic, Sir Clements Markham. Markham himself had failed to appear, explaining that he was ill, but his note was a gracious, if indirect, admission of defeat. By the time Roosevelt had finished his speech—rich with tales of disease-carrying insects and man-eating fish and punctuated by his trademark high-pitched giggle, which sent his audience into roaring waves of laughter—nearly all of England had surrendered.
* * *
ROOSEVELT HAD won again. He had humiliated his enemies, defended his expedition, and restored his reputation. However, he still had one insidious foe: the fever and infection that had nearly claimed his life on the River of Doubt and which now refused to release its hold on his aging and overused body. When he docked in France, on his way to Spain for Kermit and Belle’s wedding, he had “stepped briskly” and declared that he had never felt better in his life. By the time he left Europe, however, his fever had returned, and he had to admit to his old friend Arthur Hamilton Lee that he was “not in good trim.”
Upon returning to the United States, Roosevelt got right back to work, writing dozens of letters and articles, attacking the Wilson administration, and giving speeches on behalf of the sinking Progressive Party. In May, The Literary Digest had written that he would have to “demonstrate his growing skill as an explorer and discoverer” if he hoped to find any remnants of the party that he had helped to found just a few years earlier. The Progressive Party loyalists, insisting that they had a bright future before them, had continued to resist the advances of the Republican Party. By 1916, however, the party had gasped its last, and most of its members quietly disappeared within the Republican fold.
The following year, Roosevelt’s driving ambition turned from politics back to the military, and he became obsessed with leading a regiment to war, as he had done a quarter-century earlier. This time his sights were set on Europe and World War I, but President Wilson—perhaps simply believing him unfit for such a position, or perhaps fearing that his old rival would return home a reminted war hero and an unbeatable adversary in 1920—refused to let him go. Roosevelt’s only consolation was that he had four young, healthy sons who could fight and, if necessary, die for their country. True to their father’s ambitions and teachings, each son fought to be the first to get to the front. Each conducted himself honorably and bravely on the battlefield. Three were wounded, and the fourth, Quentin, who would always be Edith’s baby, was killed.
The death of his beloved “Quenikins” devasted Roosevelt. Months after the news had reached him at Sagamore Hill, friends had glimpsed him alone in his barn one day, his arm around his horse’s neck, sobbing. Death in battle was the kind of ending that Roosevelt had always imagined for himself, not for his sons, and his role in urging them to fight and risk their lives weighed heavily on him. Instead of dying in combat or on a remote, unexplored river, the ex–Rough Rider himself was destined to die slowly, ingloriously, and, for those who loved and admired him, far too soon. Early in 1917, Roosevelt had begun what was to be his final physical decline. He spent the month of February at Roosevelt Hospital in Manhattan, writing to Kermit that his ailment stemmed from his “old Brazilian trouble. Both the fever and the abscesses recurred and I had to go under the knife.”
In October 1918, Roosevelt turned sixty years old. Although sick, frustrated, and brokenhearted over Quentin’s death, he continued to fight, refusing to bow to the sorrow and grief that he had outrun his entire life. “When the young die at the crest of life, in their golden morning, the degrees of difference are merely degrees in bitterness,” he had written to his sister Corinne. “Yet there is nothing more foolish and cowardly than to be beaten down by sorrow which nothing we can do will change.” By November, he was back in the hospital, so ill he was hardly able to walk or even stand. When told that he might be confined to a wheelchair for the rest of his life, Roosevelt paused and then replied, “All right! I can work that way too.”
He returned home to Sagamore Hill on Christmas Day. At 4:00 a.m. on January 6, 1919, James Amos, the man who had long been Roosevelt’s loyal valet, awoke with a start from his chair near Roosevelt’s bed, which had been set up in what had once been the family’s busy second-story nursery. The sound that had awoken Amos was a hoarse, strangled breathing—the sound of Theodore Roosevelt dying. Amos alerted Roosevelt’s nurse, who rushed to get Edith. By the time she reached her husband, he was already dead.
For the country that he had served and inspired for so many years, and which was still reeling from World War I, Roosevelt’s death was as stunning as it was painful. The newspapers the next morning were filled with long obituaries, and pictures of the former president with his famous big teeth and pince-nez, but for most Americans his death still seemed impossible. A man like Roosevelt could never die. When John Burroughs was asked for a remembrance of his old friend and fellow naturalist, he spoke for a grieving nation when he wrote, “Never before in my life has it been so hard for me to accept the death of any man as it has been for me to accept the death of Theodore Roosevelt. A pall seems to settle upon the very sky. The world is bleaker and colder for his absence from it. We shall not look upon his like again.”
* * *
OF THE men who had planned and led the descent of the River of Doubt in the spring of 1914, Roosevelt was not the first to die. Just three years after the expedition completed its journey, Rondon’s faithful lieutenant and longtime companion, João Salustiano Lyra, drowned while attempting to survey the Rio Sepotuba, the river that Roosevelt and Rondon had steamed up on their way to Tapirapoan and the commencement of their overland journey. As the current swept him to his death, Lyra’s last act was to throw his survey notebooks onto the riverbank so that they would be spared for posterity—a tribute to the teachings of Rondon, who had so often asked him to risk his life in the pursuit of a greater cause.
After his abrupt dismissal from the expedition, Father Zahm, the co-planner of Roosevelt’s journey, continued to write about travel to distant lands, but never achieved the fame he had so long dreamed of. To the extent that his family name was to make headlines, it was his brother, Albert, rather than Father Zahm, who was to earn them, becoming a key figure in of one of the nation’s most notorious attempts to rewrite history. As head of the Smithsonian Institution’s aerodynamics laboratory, Albert Zahm became a principal proponent of the contention that the Smithsonian’s former director, Samuel Langley, had invented the airplane before the successful flight of the Wright brothers’ famous Flyer in 1903. The controversy generated by that claim—now widely discredited—so angered the Wrights that in 1928 Orville Wright chose to donate the original Wright Flyer to the Science Museum in London rather than permit it to be displayed in the United States. Only after a new regime at the Smithsonian retracted Zahm’s claims was the Flyer finally returned to the United States in 1948. At work on a new travel book, Father Zahm himself fell ill and died at age seventy in Germany, and his body was returned to the United States for burial at Notre Dame, where a campus hall now bears his name.
Despite the many close calls of Georg
e Cherrie’s adventure-filled life, he died in bed after a long retirement with his family on his beloved Vermont farm. After his expedition with Roosevelt, he continued his work as a field naturalist in South America for several years, collecting more than a hundred thousand birds over his lifetime. But the call to Rocky Dell had always been strong, and one day he finally went home for good. He loved fishing for brook trout in the stream that ran through one of his fields, tending his bees, and spending time with his grandchildren, who thought that he was “the biggest man in the world.” He died at Rocky Dell in 1948, when he was eighty-three years old.
Only one man in the expedition lived longer than Cherrie. Despite the near-constant hardship and danger of his chosen career, Cândido Rondon lived to be ninety-two years old—thirty-two years longer than Roosevelt. Rondon’s telegraph line, the central achievement of his life, was finally inaugurated on January 1, 1915, less than a year after he and Roosevelt had completed their journey. The telegraph line, however, was fated to fall obsolete in much less time than Rondon had taken to build it. The same year the line opened, radiotelegraphy found its way to Brazil, rendering unnecessary the copper telegraph wires that Rondon and his men had strung across eight hundred miles of the country’s uncharted interior.
Like Roosevelt, Rondon returned home a hero and remained one for the rest of his life. He was hounded by photographers and journalists, invited to meet the president of Brazil, asked to run for political office (an opportunity he repeatedly declined), and promoted first to brigadier general and then, near the end of his life, to marshal. In the 1920s, after meeting Rondon on a trip to Brazil, Albert Einstein nominated him for the Nobel Peace Prize, and, in 1956, the Brazilian government renamed a territory of ninety-four thousand square miles—nearly twice the size of England—Rondônia in his honor. Two years later, on January 19, 1958, having explored and mapped more of the Amazon than any other man alive, and having made first contact with dozens of isolated Indian tribes, Cândido Mariano da Silva Rondon died in his own bed at his home in Rio de Janeiro.