River of Doubt

By Candice Millard

Theodore Roosevelt. I love him for the National Park System. But before reading this book I knew almost nothing else about him. When I heard the synopsis, that it is a story of Theodore Roosevelt’s journey to locate an unmapped tributary of the Amazon my curious question was “what would motivate anyone to want to do that?” The fun for me, in this book, was the way Millard continued to entertain my curiosity about Roosevelts’s motivation. The journey was ill-conceived, poorly planned, scarcely supplied and unremittingly dangerous. Millard did the exhaustive job of research, drawing on books, interviews, archival journals and probably more documents than I can imagine to weave the scattered details into Roosevelt’s ‘hero’s journey’. There are 352 footnotes and seven single spaced pages of bibliographical references. Makes one want to yawn, right?

But no, Millard’s book reads like the adventure story I hoped for. And she uses historical detail to paint a picture of the man and his quest, which began with physical challenges at 11 years old which drove his need for physical strength and exertion.

She takes us into details of the Amazon such as a milky liquid extracted from a vine and used to paralyze the gills of fish harvested from the river by local Indians. She shows us the hubris of white American men in canoes rotting from the moisture as they encounter the Cinta Larga tribe, and are challenged by their wise interdependence on the environment in which they survive. She shows us a fierce determination, overcoming inconceivable challenges. For me, the river and the jungle become characters themselves. Characters which reduced Roosevelt to near death as a ravaging infection rendered him unable to do anything other than lie in a dugout canoe. After defections and murder, the remaining members of the party were left to navigate the remainder of the journey.

Roosevelt recovered, though Millard shows how the journey aged and changed him. She describes him at his return to New York harbor as “thin, drawn, and leaning on a cane…a dark tropical tan covered a face that had lost its youthful fullness and gained a network of new deeply etched line.”

So extraordinary was his achievement, Roosevelt found when he began to share his story it was met with skepticism and disbelief. He spent his final years defending his expedition and challenged by the toll which that journey had taken on his health.

And so I don’t really have an answer to my question. What was Roosevelt’s motivation? Why does anyone conjure a dream and pursue it with such dogged determination? What drove pioneers across the United States? What drove engineers to find a way to land on the moon? What is the source of unrelenting drive and determination in the face of death and failure. Is it a running away from something? Or a running toward something? Or some primal, human combination of both?