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In April 1914, on a riverbank deep in the western Amazon, Theodore Roosevelt called his son Kermit to his side and told him to leave him behind. The former president of the United States was burning with fever, his leg swollen with infection, and he had decided he was the reason the expedition was going to die on an unmapped river.
The men refused. What happened next is one of the most remarkable survival stories in the history of exploration, and it is documented in detail because the people living it kept writing everything down.
Roosevelt and Rondon in a dugout canoe on the River of Doubt
How a President Ended Up on an Unmapped River
After losing his bid for a third term in 1912, Roosevelt planned a fairly tame speaking tour of South America. The Brazilian government suggested something else: join Colonel Cândido Rondon, Brazil's greatest explorer, in descending the Rio da Dúvida, the River of Doubt.
Colonel Roosevelt with Colonel Rondon, 1914
The river had earned its name. Rondon had found its headwaters in 1909, but no one knew where it went or what it passed through, a genuine blank space on the map of the Amazon basin.
Roosevelt accepted immediately. On February 27, 1914, after months of overland travel, nineteen men pushed off into the unknown: Roosevelt, his son Kermit, Rondon, American naturalist George Cherrie, and fifteen Brazilian camaradas.
What the River Did to Them
The problems started almost at once. The river turned out to be a long chain of rapids, and the expedition's heavy dugout canoes were repeatedly smashed or swallowed by them, costing days each time a new one had to be carved.
Food ran short within weeks, and malaria ran through the party. In one set of rapids, a canoe carrying Kermit capsized and a camarada named Simplício was pulled under; his body was never found.
Camp on the Rio Téodoro, Mato Grosso, Brazil
The Cinta Larga people, whose territory the river crossed, shadowed the expedition the entire way. They were never seen directly, but the men found arrows and abandoned villages, and they understood that their survival was a decision someone else was making.
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A Murder in the Party
By early April the expedition was starving, and a camarada named Julio was caught stealing food. When a respected porter named Paixão confronted him, Julio took a rifle and shot him dead.
Julio fled into the forest. The expedition was too weak to hunt him down, so they left him in the jungle and kept moving, a decision Roosevelt and Rondon argued over for days.
The President Who Asked to Be Left Behind
Around the same time, Roosevelt gashed his leg while working to free pinned canoes. The wound became infected, his fever climbed, and he was soon too weak to walk.
He had brought a lethal dose of morphine for exactly this situation, and by several firsthand accounts he urged the others to go on without him. Kermit refused outright, and Roosevelt later admitted he stayed alive largely because he knew his son would not leave a body behind.
On April 26, 1914, the survivors reached a relief party waiting at the river's mouth. Sixteen of the nineteen men had made it, and Roosevelt had lost roughly a quarter of his body weight.
What the River Is Called Now
Skeptics back home doubted the journey had happened at all, so Roosevelt, barely able to speak, defended it before the National Geographic Society that May. A 1927 expedition retraced the route and confirmed every claim.
Map of the expedition's complete route through South America
Brazil renamed the river the Rio Roosevelt, and it still carries that name today. Roosevelt never fully recovered his health, and he died less than five years after coming out of the jungle, having added a roughly 400-mile river to the map of the world.
Until next time,
Emails From Afar Team
Join the Creature Craze!!
Back in September, the team behind both Letters From Afar and Emails From Afar launched a brand new venture… especially for kids.
Introducing:
Creature Cards are collectible animal trading cards packed with incredible creatures, bold artwork, fun facts, danger ratings, and holographic rares.
From deep-sea monsters to jungle predators, every pack brings the wild world to your fingertips.
