The River of Doubt by Candice Millard

realize that they would need a separate expedition, one solely devoted to mapping its entire length, to know anything of substance about it. When he was told that Roosevelt’s objective was to “unravel the unknown aspects of our wilds,” Rondon himself had proposed the descent of the River of Doubt as one of five possible alternatives to Zahm’s more conventional route. No one who knew Roosevelt would have been surprised to learn that, of the five alternatives, he quickly chose the one that, in Rondon’s words, “offered the greatest unforeseen difficulties.”
    Even in a time when great feats of discovery were almost commonplace, a descent of the River of Doubt would be audacious. Not only was the river unmapped—its length and direction unknown and each whirlpool, rapid, and waterfall a sudden and potentially deadly surprise—but it coursed through a dense, tangled jungle that had a dark history of destroying the men who hoped to map it.
    One of the Amazon’s earliest explorers, the first nonnative to descend the Amazon River, Francisco de Orellana, suffered more than most. Orellana, who had lost one of his eyes during the conquest of the Incas in Peru, plunged into the Amazon rain forest in 1541, in the hope of discovering the legendary kingdom of El Dorado, whose ruler was said to coat his body in gold dust and then wash it off in a sacred lake. Orellana’s expedition, however, soon changed from a search for gold to a battle for survival. According to a friar who traveled with theexpedition and chronicled its journey, before the men even reached the Amazon River, they were reduced to “eating nothing but leather, belts and soles of shoes, cooked with certain herbs.” Once on the river, they fought nearly every Indian tribe they encountered, eventually losing roughly a dozen men to starvation and three others to poisonous arrows. Incredibly, Orellana survived to repeat the ordeal just three years later, this time losing 172 men to starvation and Indian attacks before himself succumbing to disease and, some said, heartbreak at the disastrous collapse of his ambitions.
    Thirteen years later, another ill-fated Spanish expedition, this one led by thirty-four-year-old Pedro de Ursúa, set out to find El Dorado, which was rumored to lie at the headwaters of the Amazon River. Although Ursúa had had many successes in his young life, on this expedition he made the fatal mistake of hiring Lope de Aguirre, a man whose name would later become practically synonymous in South America with deceit and brutality. As soon as the expedition reached the Amazon’s headwaters, Aguirre led a mutiny, murdering Ursúa in his hammock and installing another man, Fernando de Guzmán, as the expedition’s commander. Guzmán then met his own end one morning when Aguirre and a band of men awakened him at dawn and, after reassuring him—“Do not be alarmed, Your Excellency”—shot him at point-blank range with their heavy matchlock guns, known as arquebuses. Aguirre then took command of the expedition and tore through what is now Venezuela, ransacking towns, killing inhabitants, and burning homes. Spanish royalists finally caught up with him in Peru in late October 1561. In a bloody standoff, Aguirre was shot to death by two of his own men. He was then beheaded and his body quartered, gutted, and tossed into the road.
    The stories of death and disaster in the Amazon did not end with the withdrawal of the colonial powers from South America. As long as there was a wilderness in the heart of the continent, it seemed, men would be willing to risk their lives to find its riches, or at least discover what lay within. Less than twenty-five years before Roosevelt arrived in South America, a Brazilian engineer officer, Colonel Teles Pires,hoping to chart the course of an unmapped river that, like the River of Doubt, poured out of the Brazilian Highlands, lost all of his provisions in a descent through whitewater rapids. The expedition was then