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Perils
Fans of The
Perfect Storm or Into Thin Air
will especially enjoy Candice Millard’s account of President Theodore
Roosevelt’s perilous South American expedition in 1914 titled, The River
of Doubt. The title refers to the name of the uncharted river down which
Roosevelt and his small company navigated. On a trip where everything that
could go wrong did, Millard makes readers feel that they are alongside the
travelers. Roosevelt’s courage and strength
under the most trying conditions, including near fatal disease, makes this
book especially interesting. Here’s an excerpt, from the beginning of Chapter
5, “A Change of Plans,” pp. 52-56:
It took eight days for the Vandyck, trailing a white ribbon of foam, to steam from Barbados to Bahia, Brazil,
roughly a third of the way down South America’s
Atlantic seaboard. It would have been a much shorter trip but for the
continent’s enormous northeastern coastline, which juts into the ocean like a
broad shoulder, forcing ships to travel hundreds of miles east before
resuming their southward journey. Three days before reaching Bahia, the steamer crossed
the equator, an event that the crew and passengers celebrated with practical
jokes and deck games, in keeping with nautical tradition. But for Roosevelt
and his men, crossing from the Northern to the Southern Hemisphere was
especially significant, because it meant that they were passing the natural
wonder that was to be the ultimate object of their journey: the Amazon River.
From the deck of the Vandyck, out of sight of shore as they
steamed along the Brazilian coast, Roosevelt and his men could not see the
Amazon. But even at sea there was no escaping the sheer size and power of the
giant river, a nonstop deluge that by itself accounts for approximately 15
percent of all fresh water carried to sea by all of the planet’s rivers put
together. The river’s mouth is so vast that the island that rests in the
middle of it, Marajó, is nearly the size of Switzerland, and the muddy plume that spills
into the Atlantic reaches some hundred miles
out into the open sea.
For Roosevelt,
the prospect of exploring such a magnificent, unfamiliar phenomenon of
nature was irresistible. The ex-president was no doubt also thrilled that the
mighty Amazon was intimately related to another region he had explored and
come to love so well—Africa. As reflected by
the very route that the Vandyck was
following around the bulging coastline of South America, the continent had
once been connected to Africa, fitting neatly under the chin of West Africa,
just below what is today the string of small countries that reaches from Liberia to Nigeria.
Floating upon the planet’s
underlying core of molten rock, the plates that make up the earth’s outer
shell have shifted slowly but continuously throughout the planet’s history—a
process known as plate tectonics. Hundreds of millions of years ago, the
South American continent was part of a single primal “protocontinent”
known as Pangaea, which covered half the earth. During the Triassic period,
Pangaea began to separate into two independent continents—a northern continent,
known as Laurasia, and a southern continent,
Gondwanaland.
Approximately ninety
million years ago, Gondwanaland, which encompassed Africa, Australia, Antarctica, peninsular India, and South America,
also broke apart. The South American landmass drifted westward until it
collided with the Nazca Plate, which underlies much
of the Pacific Ocean. When the two enormous
plates met, the momentum of the impact thrust the western edge of South America over the edge of the Nazca
Plate. The result was a continent-long spine of rock and stone that formed
what are known today as the Andes
Mountains.
The creation of the Andes
dramatically altered South America’s
rainfall patterns and river system. Prior to the rise of the Andes, the
Amazon River had flowed in the opposite direction from its present course,
descending northwestward and separated from the Atlantic
Ocean to the east by a high stone ridge. The rise of the Andes blocked that westward route to the Pacific,
leaving the continent’s rivers and streams no outlet to the sea on east or
west. Cut off by the narrow cordon of mountains, rain that fell as little as
a hundred miles from the Pacific Ocean could
no longer reach it, and instead flowed back eastward, flooding the center of
the landmass.
Beyond merely redirecting
the drainage of rain that fell upon the continent, the towering mountains
also changed the location of the rainfall itself. By creating a barrier that
reaches as high as twenty thousand feet, the Andes serve as a trap for
moisture-laden winds from the interior, forcing clouds high into the
atmosphere, where they condense and bathe the Andes’ eastern slopes and the
basin’s lowland forests in nearly constant precipitation.
For millions of years, the Amazon River was a vast inland sea that covered the
central part of the continent. Finally, during the Pleistocene epoch, which
began approximately 1.6 million years ago, the rising waters broke through
the continent’s eastern escarpment and poured into the Atlantic
Ocean. In their wake, they left behind the world’s greatest
river system and the former inland seabed—a vast basin of rich sediments and
fertile lowlands perfectly suited to support an array of plant and animal
life almost without parallel on the face of the earth.
For all its exotic allure and potential
riches, the great Amazon
River Basin in 1913
remained a vast and remarkably mysterious place, untouched by modernity and
repelling all but the most determined attempts to explore its hidden
secrets. Although more than two-thirds of the Amazon Basin rests within
Brazilian borders, the vast majority of Brazilians in the early twentieth
century, crowded along the sun-soaked eastern coast, had little interest in
knowing what lay within the basin and no way to find out even if they had.
Communication between the coastal
cities and the country’s largely unexplored interior was difficult, and
travel was nearly impossible for the average person. The country’s sheer
size was one impediment; its dense forests and rapids-choked rivers were
another. The world’s fifth-largest nation, Brazil
encompasses 3.3 million square miles, making it more than two hundred and
fifty thousand square miles larger than the contiguous United States.
The approximately four-thousand-mile-long Amazon River slices through the northern
section of the country and is navigable for almost three-quarters of its
length—roughly the distance from Bangor, Maine, to San Francisco,
California—but its thousands of tributaries, which reach like tentacles into
every corner of Brazil, are fast, twisting, and wild. Until very late in the
nineteenth century, the only alternative for entering the interior was by
mule, over rutted dirt roads and through heavy jungle and wide, barren
highlands.
The potential political
consequences of such a vast, unknown territory in the heart of their country
had been brought home to Brazilian leaders in 1865, when Paraguay
invaded Brazil
along its southern boundary and more than a month passed before the emperor,
Pedro II, knew anything about it. Before he abdicated the throne twenty-five
years later, Pedro II, who had reigned over Brazil
since he was five years old, committed part of his military to the monumental
task of linking Brazil’s
coast with its interior by telegraph line. Stringing the line through the
jungle had since cost the Strategic Telegraph Commission the lives of
countless men, but the battalion had explored thousands of miles of
wilderness and was slowly mapping large swaths of the northern and southern
highlands and the wide Amazon
Basin.
Despite the progress the
telegraph commission had made, however, vast stretches of Brazil remained unknown and unmapped, and its
promise of adventure and discovery would soon prove too strong for Roosevelt to resist. The route that Father Zahm had drawn up entailed travel along five of the
best-known rivers on the continent: the Paraná, the
Paraguay, the Tapajos, the Negro, and the Orinoco, each of which
appeared on even the most rudimentary maps of South
America. Within days of his arrival in Brazil, however, Roosevelt
would abandon Zahm’s tame itinerary and commit
himself to an expedition that was much more interesting – and exponentially
more dangerous.
The gripping tale of The River
of Doubt will keep readers engaged on every page, and will increase
admiration for T.R.
Steve Hopkins,
February 23, 2006
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