Through the Brazilian Wilderness
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On the occasion in question Father Zahm had just returned from a trip across the Andes and down the Amazon and came in to propose that after I left the presidency he and I should go up the Paraguay into the interior of South America.
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T.R. was writing was very gradiloquent, and this book really gives readers a excellent example of this. Read about the journey that finished with T.R. having a river named after him (Rio Duvida renamed to the current Rio Roosevelt), and gave him the sickness that would eventually lead to his death less than five years later.
Reader’s Rating: 5 / 5
TR’s account of his expedition to explore the River of Doubt shows a lot of the reasons we still admire him. First, he was a serious scientist. He was dedicated to learning new species of wildlife (and could rattle off their Latin names with the best of them), mapping unknown stretches of river, and observing the ways of foreign lands. We know TR as a physical character and regularly forget what a highly intelligent man he was.
Second, his writing is momentously under-appreciated. He doesn’t breeze over his descriptions of wildlife or the landscape–it’s pretty technical stuff–but he does it clearly and concisely. As a name who has labored through countless pedantic textbooks, I took comfort in his words, “Ability to write well, if the writer had nothing to write about, entitles him to mere derision. But the greatest thought is robbed of an immense proportion of its value if expressed in a mean or obscure manner.”
Third, despite the above, he could still suffer enormous physical hardship at an ancient age. Battling rapids, carrying canoes, fighting disease, and hunting game, TR had the combination of brawn and intelligence that’s seriously missing in our leaders today, especially the lightweight that now sits behind TR’s desk.
This book is also a fantastic window into a time and place forever lost to history. TR’s writing projects a clear photo in your mind of undiscovered wilderness and fantastic adventure.
Reader’s Rating: 5 / 5
As persons familiar with his history know, Theodore Roosevelt was truly a unique, gifted and accomplished person. He was naturalist, historian, huge game hunter, politician, statesman, conservationist and recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize rolled into one. If he had followed the interests and predilictions of his youth, he would have grown up to be a naturalist rather than President of the United States. As a boy he had a vast collection of frogs, squirrels, snakes, birds, insects that he called the Roosevelt Museum of Natural History.
Science’s loss was politics gain. But, T.R. never lost his interest in scenery. Following his presidency, he set out on an expedition to explore and map unknown regions of Paraguay and Brazil on the 950-mile River of Doubt, a previously unexplored tributary of the Amazon River. The scientific endeavor became an suffering to test the expedition’s courage and stamina as it faced overpowering heat, treacherous rapids, wild animals, devouring ants, endless insects, fever, dysentery and more. The expedition collected thousands of species of birds and mammals, but Roosevelt would die a few years after completing the expedition. Roosevelt admired persons who lived life with passion and for what he called “the Fantastic Adventure.” This tale chronicles one of T.R.’s last fantastic adventures in his predictable unique style.
Reader’s Rating: 4 / 5
Theodore Roosevelt was a man’s man. A New York kid whose taste for adventure was sparked in his boyhood by a dead seal for sale on a Broadway sidewalk. Harvard student, soldier, Rough Rider, youngest President ever and one who survived the assassin’s bullet, maverick politician, Nobel Prize winner, hunter and conservationist, and finally the man who, at 55 years ancient, explored an unknown region of the Amazon river basin. Imagine one of today’s ex–Presidents undertaking a similar adventure. For six weeks, in 1914, Roosevelt and his party paddled and carried their canoes down a previously unexplored 950-mile river now called the Rio Roosevelt. Men died, boats were lost, food became scarce, treacherous animals and natives were about, fever borne by insects sickened many in the party (and led to Roosevelt’s own death five years later). This is the stuff of “Through the Brazilian Wilderness”.
Roosevelt’s additional works, including “The Rough Riders”, are better known, and this one is not fantastic literature. As a replacement for, it is a remarkable adventure tale by an appealing man. The book is essentially Roosevelt’s trip diary, colored by his fantastic enthusiasm for adventure and the natural world. Even before reaching the Amazon, Roosevelt stops at a Brazilian snake research lab that so captures his attention that he writes seventeen pages about it. At all times, he makes careful note of the wildlife he encounters, not reasonably with the depth of a professional scientist, but with the trained eye of a dedicated and veteran hobbyist. He squeezes in some amusing tales about piranha fish that he heard –and rumor has it that believed. Naturalists of the day killed animals in the name of science, which places in context Roosevelt’s joy in hunting and his comments: first on alligators (“They are regularly treacherous and are permanently destructive to fish, and it is excellent to shoot them”) and later on conservation (“There is every reason why the excellent people of South America should waken… to the duty of preserving from extinction the wildlife which is an asset of such interest.”). The book is most poetic in its description of animal life, and particularly in registering surprise that the heap insects are far more pernicious than any of the better-known dangers such as alligators, huge cats, or piranhas.
The book’s is not perfect, and Roosevelt is not a fantastic leader in a literary sense, rather building up in enthusiasm what he lacks in prose and penetrating insight. There is no attempt at political analysis, he simply praises Brazilians as excellent hosts who have ongoing down the road to democracy. He sees the land he travels through as like the United States of perhaps a hundred years earlier, so there are frequent predictions that a promising location is ripe for development. The limited foray into politics is to praise Positivism, the ideology of the Brazilian military class that emphasized modernity and structure, and that not incidentally justified the many instances of military intervention in Brazilian politics over the years. Finally, the one annoyance is the recurring theme (perhaps a dozen times in all) of the right danger of the journey. Over and over we read that the river has never been charted, that it is truly treacherous, that the explorers are not your armchair-adventurer variety, and that such voyages will automatically be simpler for persons who follow in the future. We get that.
Roosevelt was an appealing man, his enthusiasm and taste for adventure are communicable. The book is not a literary triumph, but it is a fun read and an brilliant journey through the Amazon
Reader’s Rating: 4 / 5