Theodore Roosevelt’s Amazon Adventure: 10 Insane Facts

4. Starvation Was a Constant Threat

Insufficient supplies and failed resupply missions left the party scrounging for food, chewing on palm hearts and eating meager river fare to survive. Malnutrition became pervasive, contributing to the peril of their journey. The expedition’s troubles mounted over the next several weeks, with the team plagued by malaria, dysentery, and a lack of supplies. Even the indomitable Roosevelt began to suffer after he fell ill with fever and then sliced his leg open on a rock. Morale reached its lowest point in early April, when a porter named Julio shot and killed another Brazilian who had caught him stealing food. After failing to capture the murderer, the exhausted expedition simply abandoned him in the jungle. The 19 remaining explorers continued downriver, but their scientific expedition had turned into a fight for survival. Their clothes were reduced to rags, and they headed off starvation only by catching fish and scrounging for hearts of palm. Roosevelt, once among the team’s strongest members, became delirious from fever and infection. He repeatedly demanded to be left alone in the jungle to die, but Kermit refused to leave him behind. Naturalist George Cherrie later remembered, “There were a good many days, a good many mornings when I looked at Colonel Roosevelt and said to myself, he won’t be with us tonight.” Roosevelt eventually lost a quarter of his body weight, but he stubbornly held on and even endured emergency leg surgery on the riverbank. As the former president languished in his canoe, Rondon led the explorers into waters closer to civilization. With the aid of local “seringueiros”—Brazilian pioneers who lived in the jungle and harvested rubber—the men acquired new canoes and traversed the last few sections of rapids. Finally, on April 26, the team sighted a relief party that Rondon had previously ordered to meet them at the confluence of the River of Doubt and the Aripuanã River. After two months and hundreds of miles, they had reached the finish line. Though still sick, Roosevelt beamed with pride. In typically stoic fashion, he dashed off a telegram to the Brazilian government in which he called the nightmarish expedition “a hard and somewhat dangerous, but very successful trip.” (history.com)