Roosevelt in Brazil
During my 2018 trip to the Pantanal in Brazil I learned that Teddy Roosevelt had travelled there a century earlier. This piqued my curiosity and I decided to learn more about that trip.
In 1913, after having lost his bid for a third term as American president to Woodrow Wilson, the 55-year-old Roosevelt embarked on an arduous trip - presumably to recover and recharge from the election debacle. He travelled to Brazil to navigate the mysterious and uncharted river called River of Doubt. With him came naturalists from the American Museum of Natural History who would collect live animal specimens for the museum. The Brazilian engineer Colonel Candido Rondon joined him as co-leader of the group. He was to help survey and map the river. The expedition was called the Roosevelt-Rondon Expedition.
This trip, lasting from late 2013 to May 2014, was the last adventure of Roosevelt, the dauntless outdoorsman. It started badly: before they finally reached the river they wanted to navigate, their expedition had to cross the rugged Brazilian highlands where several members fell sick. They also lost most of their pack animals to exhaustion.
Finally, in February 2014, a team of twenty-two started boating down the river. This part of their journey was even more treacherous. They were short of food and often ate monkeys and parrots in addition to fish (though one wonders why they did not consume the Brazil nuts which had sustained the expedition of Alexander von Humboldt a century earlier.) When they landed on the riverbank to camp for the night, they were tormented by mosquitoes and stinging flies. The team had to contend with malaria and dysentery. They were followed by a tribe of suspicious Indians during part of their cruise. The river itself was wild at places and the boats endured miles and miles of rapids.
But there were rewarding moments too. Roosevelt saw magnificent azure blue butterflies flying up and down over the rivers and heard some extraordinary insect calls including one that sounded like a steamboat whistle. And in the end they had mapped 1500 kilometers of this wild river, which the Brazilians renamed Roosevelt River in his honour.
On the river Roosevelt saw, for the first time, a voracious, aggressive fish with sharp teeth. He was amazed that this fish, alone, often attacked a prey larger than itself. When Colonel Rondon miscalculated the presence of this fish and went into the water, it bit off his little toe. Needless to say, an entire shoal of this fish was deadly. Blood made it crazy. Known as “cannibal fish” or the “man-eating fish” then, today this fish is called the Piranha.
One day, someone from the team shot a crocodile on the riverbank. Wounded, the animal dived back into the water, but its blood attracted Piranhas. The crocodile immediately returned to land, preferring death in the company of men to being devoured alive by the deadly fish.
Roosevelt never fully recovered from the illnesses contracted and wounds suffered from his Brazilian trip and died in his sleep five years later. But this trip was another accomplishment of a great outdoorsman.
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