RIVER WITHOUT A CAUSE

Historian Moses traces Theodore Roosevelt’s perilous trip through the Amazon in 1914 and a later attempt to replicate it.

After his failed bid for president in 1912, a deflated Roosevelt was hungry for a redemptive adventure and decided to embark on a historic journey: a scientific expedition into the heart of the Amazon wilderness, including a formidable descent down what was ominously called the River of Doubt. He was joined by Brazil’s most renowned explorer, Col. Cândido Rondon, dubbed by one newspaper “The New Apostle of the Jungle.” The trip was astonishingly dangerous—three men died, one by murder, and Roosevelt became so ill from an infected wound to his leg that he contemplated suicide; his 24-year-old son, Kermit, talked him out of it. In 1992, Charles Haskell and Elizabeth McKnight, the co-founders of New Century Conservation Trust, brashly decided to follow Roosevelt’s footsteps and organized an expedition of their own with 20 travelers. They included author Moses, a reporter who grippingly recounts the trip in these pages, and the group was advised by Robert Carneiro, an expert from the American Museum of Natural History. The author writes that the latter warned the group that they might encounter Indigenous people who might respond with hostility: “Look right through them,” he advised. “Don’t run, don’t show fear. Slowly, very slowly, reach into your pocket and pull out a kazoo. I wish I was in Dixie might be good.” The Rio Roosevelt expedition, as it came to be called, was an untidy mélange of adventure, discovery, and disaster, due to what Moses characterizes as unreliable leadership. Haskell, Moses asserts, claimed that he’d served in the Vietnam War, but later admitted he hadn’t: “When I asked why on earth he would tell such a lie, he answered, ‘Because I was afraid no one would follow me if I didn’t have those credentials.’”

Over the course of this book, Moses proves himself to be as astute a historian as he is a reporter; he not only chronicles the 1990s expedition vividly, but he also brings to colorful life Roosevelt’s original trip. The former president is aptly portrayed as a larger-than-life figure—a man of nearly indefatigable vigor, who showed seemingly supernatural composure in the face of grave danger. As his son Kermit admiringly wrote: “Father’s courage was an inspiration never to be forgotten by any of us. With it all he was invariably cheerful, and in the blackest of times ever ready with a joke. Nothing but Father’s indomitable spirit brought him through.” Also, the author thoughtfully captures the “brutal battles between prospectors and Indigenous” people over a superabundance of natural resources, especially mahogany wood, and the ways in which contact with the world at large had greatly diminished the lives of many locals—most notably the Cinta Larga, a once vibrant people who, Moses writes, had “lost their myths.” This remarkable double chronicle—at once a history and a memoir—deftly combines journalistic meticulousness and novelistic storytelling, introducing reader to what Roosevelt called the “land of unknown possibilities.”

An arrestingly dramatic account of two explorations, led by strikingly different men.