Executive Times

 

 

 

 

 

2006 Book Reviews

 

The River of Doubt: Theodore Roosevelt's Darkest Journey by Candice Millard

Rating:

***

 

(Recommended)

 

 

 

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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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The recommendation rating for this book appeared

 in the March 2006 issue of Executive Times

 

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