Through the Brazilian Wilderness by Theodore Roosevelt

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THROUGH THE BRAZILIAN WILDERNESS
By Theodore Roosevelt

Etext prepared by Dagny, dagnypg@yahoo.com
and John Bickers, jbickers@ihug.co.nz

THROUGH THE BRAZILIAN WILDERNESS

BY

THEODORE ROOSEVELT

PREFACE

This is an account of a zoo-geographic reconnaissance through the
Brazilian hinterland.

The official and proper title of the expedition is that given it
by the Brazilian Government: Expedicao Scientifica Roosevelt-
Rondon. When I started from the United States, it was to make an
expedition, primarily concerned with mammalogy and ornithology,
for the American Museum of Natural History of New York. This was
undertaken under the auspices of Messrs. Osborn and Chapman,
acting on behalf of the Museum. In the body of this work I
describe how the scope of the expedition was enlarged, and how it
was given a geographic as well as a zoological character, in
consequence of the kind proposal of the Brazilian Secretary of
State for Foreign Affairs, General Lauro Muller. In its altered
and enlarged form the expedition was rendered possible only by the
generous assistance of the Brazilian Government. Throughout the
body of the work will be found reference after reference to my
colleagues and companions of the expedition, whose services to
science I have endeavored to set forth, and for whom I shall
always feel the most cordial friendship and regard.

THEODORE ROOSEVELT.
SAGAMORE HILL,
September 1, 1914

THROUGH THE BRAZILIAN WILDERNESS

I. THE START

One day in 1908, when my presidential term was coming to a close,
Father Zahm, a priest whom I knew, came in to call on me. Father Zahm
and I had been cronies for some time, because we were both of us fond
of Dante and of history and of science--I had always commended to
theologians his book, "Evolution and Dogma." He was an Ohio boy, and
his early schooling had been obtained in old-time American fashion in
a little log school; where, by the way, one of the other boys was
Januarius Aloysius MacGahan, afterward the famous war correspondent
and friend of Skobeloff. Father Zahm told me that MacGahan even at
that time added an utter fearlessness to chivalric tenderness for the
weak, and was the defender of any small boy who was oppressed by a
larger one. Later Father Zahm was at Notre Dame University, in
Indiana, with Maurice Egan, whom, when I was President, I appointed
minister to Denmark.

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. At the time I wished to go to Africa,
and so the subject was dropped; but from time to time afterward we
talked it over. Five years later, in the spring of 1913, I accepted
invitations conveyed through the governments of Argentina and Brazil
to address certain learned bodies in these countries. Then it occurred
to me that, instead of making the conventional tourist trip purely by
sea round South America, after I had finished my lectures I would come
north through the middle of the continent into the valley of the
Amazon; and I decided to write Father Zahm and tell him my intentions.
Before doing so, however, I desired to see the authorities of the
American Museum of Natural History, in New York City, to find out
whether they cared to have me take a couple of naturalists with me
into Brazil and make a collecting trip for the museum.

Accordingly, I wrote to Frank Chapman, the curator of ornithology of
the museum, and accepted his invitation to lunch at the museum one day
early in June. At the lunch, in addition to various naturalists, to my
astonishment I also found Father Zahm; and as soon as I saw him I told
him I was now intending to make the South American trip. It appeared
that he had made up his mind that he would take it himself, and had
actually come on to see Mr. Chapman to find out if the latter could
recommend a naturalist to go with him; and he at once said he would
accompany me. Chapman was pleased when he found out that we intended
to go up the Paraguay and across into the valley of the Amazon,
because much of the ground over which we were to pass had not been
covered by collectors. He saw Henry Fairfield Osborn, the president of
the museum, who wrote me that the museum would be pleased to send
under me a couple of naturalists, whom, with my approval, Chapman
would choose.

The men whom Chapman recommended were Messrs. George K. Cherrie and
Leo E. Miller. I gladly accepted both. The former was to attend
chiefly to the ornithology and the latter to the mammalogy of the
expedition; but each was to help out the other. No two better men for
such a trip could have been found. Both were veterans of the tropical
American forests. Miller was a young man, born in Indiana, an
enthusiastic with good literary as well as scientific training. He was
at the time in the Guiana forests, and joined us at Barbados. Cherrie
was an older man, born in Iowa, but now a farmer in Vermont. He had a
wife and six children. Mrs. Cherrie had accompanied him during two or
three years of their early married life in his collecting trips along
the Orinoco. Their second child was born when they were in camp a
couple of hundred miles from any white man or woman. One night a few
weeks later they were obliged to leave a camping-place, where they had
intended to spend the night, because the baby was fretful, and its
cries attracted a jaguar, which prowled nearer and nearer in the
twilight until they thought it safest once more to put out into the
open river and seek a new resting-place. Cherrie had spent about
twenty-two years collecting in the American tropics. Like most of the
field-naturalists I have met, he was an unusually efficient and
fearless man; and willy-nilly he had been forced at times to vary his
career by taking part in insurrections. Twice he had been behind the
bars in consequence, on one occasion spending three months in a prison
of a certain South American state, expecting each day to be taken out
and shot. In another state he had, as an interlude to his
ornithological pursuits, followed the career of a gun-runner, acting
as such off and on for two and a half years. The particular
revolutionary chief whose fortunes he was following finally came into
power, and Cherrie immortalized his name by naming a new species of
ant-thrush after him--a delightful touch, in its practical combination
of those not normally kindred pursuits, ornithology and gun-running.

In Anthony Fiala, a former arctic explorer, we found an excellent man
for assembling equipment and taking charge of its handling and
shipment. In addition to his four years in the arctic regions, Fiala
had served in the New York Squadron in Porto Rico during the Spanish
War, and through his service in the squadron had been brought into
contact with his little Tennessee wife. She came down with her four
children to say good-by to him when the steamer left. My secretary,
Mr. Frank Harper, went with us. Jacob Sigg, who had served three years
in the United States Army, and was both a hospital nurse and a cook,
as well as having a natural taste for adventure, went as the personal
attendant of Father Zahm. In southern Brazil my son Kermit joined me.
He had been bridge building, and a couple of months previously, while
on top of a long steel span, something went wrong with the derrick, he
and the steel span coming down together on the rocky bed beneath. He
escaped with two broken ribs, two teeth knocked out, and a knee
partially dislocated, but was practically all right again when he
started with us.

In its composition ours was a typical American expedition. Kermit and
I were of the old Revolutionary stock, and in our veins ran about
every strain of blood that there was on this side of the water during
colonial times. Cherrie's father was born in Ireland, and his mother
in Scotland; they came here when very young, and his father served
throughout the Civil War in an Iowa cavalry regiment. His wife was of
old Revolutionary stock. Father Zahm's father was an Alsacian
immigrant, and his mother was partly of Irish and partly of old
American stock, a descendant of a niece of General Braddock. Miller's
father came from Germany, and his mother from France. Fiala's father
and mother were both from Bohemia, being Czechs, and his father had
served four years in the Civil War in the Union Army--his Tennessee
wife was of old Revolutionary stock. Harper was born in England, and
Sigg in Switzerland. We were as varied in religious creed as in ethnic
origin. Father Zahm and Miller were Catholics, Kermit and Harper
Episcopalians, Cherrie a Presbyterian, Fiala a Baptist, Sigg a
Lutheran, while I belonged to the Dutch Reformed Church.

For arms the naturalists took 16-bore shotguns, one of Cherrie's
having a rifle barrel underneath. The firearms for the rest of the
party were supplied by Kermit and myself, including my Springfield
rifle, Kermit's two Winchesters, a 405 and 30-40, the Fox 12-gauge
shotgun, and another 16-gauge gun, and a couple of revolvers, a Colt
and a Smith & Wesson. We took from New York a couple of canvas canoes,
tents, mosquito-bars, plenty of cheesecloth, including nets for the
hats, and both light cots and hammocks. We took ropes and pulleys
which proved invaluable on our canoe trip. Each equipped himself with
the clothing he fancied. Mine consisted of khaki, such as I wore in
Africa, with a couple of United States Army flannel shirts and a
couple of silk shirts, one pair of hob-nailed shoes with leggings, and
one pair of laced leather boots coming nearly to the knee. Both the
naturalists told me that it was well to have either the boots or
leggings as a protection against snake-bites, and I also had gauntlets
because of the mosquitoes and sand-flies. We intended where possible
to live on what we could get from time to time in the country, but we
took some United States Army emergency rations, and also ninety cans,
each containing a day's provisions for five men, made up by Fiala.

The trip I proposed to take can be understood only if there is a
slight knowledge of South American topography. The great mountain
chain of the Andes extends down the entire length of the western
coast, so close to the Pacific Ocean that no rivers of any importance
enter it. The rivers of South America drain into the Atlantic.
Southernmost South America, including over half of the territory of
the Argentine Republic, consists chiefly of a cool, open plains
country. Northward of this country, and eastward of the Andes, lies
the great bulk of the South American continent, which is included in
the tropical and the subtropical regions. Most of this territory is
Brazilian. Aside from certain relatively small stretches drained by
coast rivers, this immense region of tropical and subtropical America
east of the Andes is drained by the three great river systems of the
Plate, the Amazon, and the Orinoco. At their headwaters the Amazon and
the Orinoco systems are actually connected by a sluggish natural
canal. The headwaters of the northern affluents of the Paraguay and
the southern affluents of the Amazon are sundered by a stretch of high
land, which toward the east broadens out into the central plateau of
Brazil. Geologically this is a very ancient region, having appeared
above the waters before the dawning of the age of reptiles, or,
indeed, of any true land vertebrates on the globe. This plateau is a
region partly of healthy, rather dry and sandy, open prairie, partly
of forest. The great and low-lying basin of the Paraguay, which
borders it on the south, is one of the largest, and the still greater
basin of the Amazon, which borders it on the north, is the very
largest of all the river basins of the earth.

In these basins, but especially in the basin of the Amazon, and thence
in most places northward to the Caribbean Sea, lie the most extensive
stretches of tropical forest to be found anywhere. The forests of
tropical West Africa, and of portions of the Farther-Indian region,
are the only ones that can be compared with them. Much difficulty has
been experienced in exploring these forests, because under the
torrential rains and steaming heat the rank growth of vegetation
becomes almost impenetrable, and the streams difficult of navigation;
while white men suffer much from the terrible insect scourges and the
deadly diseases which modern science has discovered to be due very
largely to insect bites. The fauna and flora, however, are of great
interest. The American Museum was particularly anxious to obtain
collections from the divide between the headwaters of the Paraguay and
the Amazon, and from the southern affluents of the Amazon. Our purpose
was to ascend the Paraguay as nearly as possible to the head of
navigation, thence cross to the sources of one of the affluents of the
Amazon, and if possible descend it in canoes built on the spot. The
Paraguay is regularly navigated as high as boats can go. The starting-
point for our trip was to be Asuncion, in the state of Paraguay.

My exact plan of operations was necessarily a little indefinite, but
on reaching Rio de Janeiro the minister of foreign affairs, Mr. Lauro
Muller, who had been kind enough to take great personal interest in my
trip, informed me that he had arranged that on the headwaters of the
Paraguay, at the town of Caceres, I would be met by a Brazilian Army
colonel, himself chiefly Indian by blood, Colonel Rondon. Colonel
Rondon has been for a quarter of a century the foremost explorer of
the Brazilian hinterland. He was at the time in Manaos, but his
lieutenants were in Caceres and had been notified that we were coming.

More important still, Mr. Lauro Muller--who is not only an efficient
public servant but a man of wide cultivation, with a quality about him
that reminded me of John Hay--offered to help me make my trip of much
more consequence than I had originally intended. He has taken a keen
interest in the exploration and development of the interior of Brazil,
and he believed that my expedition could be used as a means toward
spreading abroad a more general knowledge of the country. He told me
that he would co-operate with me in every way if I cared to undertake
the leadership of a serious expedition into the unexplored portion of
western Matto Grosso, and to attempt the descent of a river which
flowed nobody knew whither, but which the best-informed men believed
would prove to be a very big river, utterly unknown to geographers. I
eagerly and gladly accepted, for I felt that with such help the trip
could be made of much scientific value, and that a substantial
addition could be made to the geographical knowledge of one of the
least-known parts of South America. Accordingly, it was arranged that
Colonel Rondon and some assistants and scientists should meet me at or
below Corumba, and that we should attempt the descent of the river, of
which they had already come across the headwaters.

I had to travel through Brazil, Uruguay, the Argentine, and Chile for
six weeks to fulfil my speaking engagements. Fiala, Cherrie, Miller,
and Sigg left me at Rio, continuing to Buenos Aires in the boat in
which we had all come down from New York. From Buenos Aires they went
up the Paraguay to Corumba, where they awaited me. The two naturalists
went first, to do all the collecting that was possible; Fiala and Sigg
travelled more leisurely, with the heavy baggage.

Before I followed them I witnessed an incident worthy of note from the
standpoint of a naturalist, and of possible importance to us because
of the trip we were about to take. South America, even more than
Australia and Africa, and almost as much as India, is a country of
poisonous snakes. As in India, although not to the same degree, these
snakes are responsible for a very serious mortality among human
beings. One of the most interesting evidences of the modern advance in
Brazil is the establishment near Sao Paulo of an institution
especially for the study of these poisonous snakes, so as to secure
antidotes to the poison and to develop enemies to the snakes
themselves. We wished to take into the interior with us some bottles
of the anti-venom serum, for on such an expedition there is always a
certain danger from snakes. On one of his trips Cherrie had lost a
native follower by snake-bite. The man was bitten while out alone in
the forest, and, although he reached camp, the poison was already
working in him, so that he could give no intelligible account of what
had occurred, and he died in a short time.

Poisonous snakes are of several different families, but the most
poisonous ones, those which are dangerous to man, belong to the two
great families of the colubrine snakes and the vipers. Most of the
colubrine snakes are entirely harmless, and are the common snakes that
we meet everywhere. But some of them, the cobras for instance, develop
into what are on the whole perhaps the most formidable of all snakes.
The only poisonous colubrine snakes in the New World are the ring-
snakes, the coral-snakes of the genus elaps, which are found from the
extreme southern United States southward to the Argentine. These
coral-snakes are not vicious and have small teeth which cannot
penetrate even ordinary clothing. They are only dangerous if actually
trodden on by some one with bare feet or if seized in the hand. There
are harmless snakes very like them in color which are sometimes kept
as pets; but it behooves every man who keeps such a pet or who handles
such a snake to be very sure as to the genus to which it belongs.

The great bulk of the poisonous snakes of America, including all the
really dangerous ones, belong to a division of the widely spread
family of vipers which is known as the pit-vipers. In South America
these include two distinct subfamilies or genera--whether they are
called families, subfamilies, or genera would depend, I suppose,
largely upon the varying personal views of the individual describer on
the subject of herpetological nomenclature. One genus includes the
rattlesnakes, of which the big Brazilian species is as dangerous as
those of the southern United States. But the large majority of the
species and individuals of dangerous snakes in tropical America are
included in the genus lachecis. These are active, vicious, aggressive
snakes without rattles. They are exceedingly poisonous. Some of them
grow to a very large size, being indeed among the largest poisonous
snakes in the world--their only rivals in this respect being the
diamond rattlesnake of Florida, one of the African mambas, and the
Indian hamadryad, or snake-eating cobra. The fer-de-lance, so dreaded
in Martinique, and the equally dangerous bushmaster of Guiana are
included in this genus. A dozen species are known in Brazil, the
biggest one being identical with the Guiana bushmaster, and the most
common one, the jararaca, being identical, or practically identical
with the fer-de-lance. The snakes of this genus, like the rattlesnakes
and the Old World vipers and puff-adders, possess long poison-fangs
which strike through clothes or any other human garment except stout
leather. Moreover, they are very aggressive, more so than any other
snakes in the world, except possibly some of the cobras. As, in
addition, they are numerous, they are a source of really frightful
danger to scantily clad men who work in the fields and forests, or who
for any reason are abroad at night.

The poison of venomous serpents is not in the least uniform in its
quality. On the contrary, the natural forces--to use a term which is
vague, but which is as exact as our present-day knowledge permits--
that have developed in so many different families of snakes these
poisoned fangs have worked in two or three totally different fashions.
Unlike the vipers, the colubrine poisonous snakes have small fangs,
and their poison, though on the whole even more deadly, has entirely
different effects, and owes its deadliness to entirely different
qualities. Even within the same family there are wide differences. In
the jararaca an extraordinary quantity of yellow venom is spurted from
the long poison-fangs. This poison is secreted in large glands which,
among vipers, give the head its peculiar ace-of-spades shape. The
rattlesnake yields a much smaller quantity of white venom, but,
quantity for quantity, this white venom is more deadly. It is the
great quantity of venom injected by the long fangs of the jararaca,
the bushmaster, and their fellows that renders their bite so generally
fatal. Moreover, even between these two allied genera of pit-vipers,
the differences in the action of the poison are sufficiently marked to
be easily recognizable, and to render the most effective anti-venomous
serum for each slightly different from the other. However, they are
near enough alike to make this difference, in practice, of
comparatively small consequence. In practice the same serum can be
used to neutralize the effect of either, and, as will be seen later
on, the snake that is immune to one kind of venom is also immune to
the other.

But the effect of the venom of the poisonous colubrine snakes is
totally different from, although to the full as deadly as, the effect
of the poison of the rattlesnake or jararaca. The serum that is an
antidote as regards the colubrines. The animal that is immune to the
bite of one may not be immune to the bite of the other. The bite of a
cobra or other colubrine poisonous snake is more painful in its
immediate effects than is the bite of one of the big vipers. The
victim suffers more. There is a greater effect on the nerve-centres,
but less swelling of the wound itself, and, whereas the blood of the
rattlesnake's victim coagulates, the blood of the victim of an elapine
snake--that is, of one of the only poisonous American colubrines--
becomes watery and incapable of coagulation.

Snakes are highly specialized in every way, including their prey. Some
live exclusively on warm-blooded animals, on mammals, or birds. Some
live exclusively on batrachians, others only on lizards, a few only on
insects. A very few species live exclusively on other snakes. These
include one very formidable venomous snake, the Indian hamadryad, or
giant cobra, and several non-poisonous snakes. In Africa I killed a
small cobra which contained within it a snake but a few inches shorter
than itself; but, as far as I could find out, snakes were not the
habitual diet of the African cobras.

The poisonous snakes use their venom to kill their victims, and also
to kill any possible foe which they think menaces them. Some of them
are good-tempered, and only fight if injured or seriously alarmed.
Others are excessively irritable, and on rare occasions will even
attack of their own accord when entirely unprovoked and unthreatened.

On reaching Sao Paulo on our southward journey from Rio to Montevideo,
we drove out to the "Instituto Serumtherapico," designed for the study
of the effects of the venom of poisonous Brazilian snakes. Its
director is Doctor Vital Brazil, who has performed a most
extraordinary work and whose experiments and investigations are not
only of the utmost value to Brazil but will ultimately be recognized
as of the utmost value for humanity at large. I know of no institution
of similar kind anywhere. It has a fine modern building, with all the
best appliances, in which experiments are carried on with all kinds of
serpents, living and dead, with the object of discovering all the
properties of their several kinds of venom, and of developing various
anti-venom serums which nullify the effects of the different venoms.
Every effort is made to teach the people at large by practical
demonstration in the open field the lessons thus learned in the
laboratory. One notable result has been the diminution in the
mortality from snake-bites in the province of Sao Paulo.

In connection with his institute, and right by the laboratory, the
doctor has a large serpentarium, in which quantities of the common
poisonous and non-poisonous snakes are kept, and some of the rarer
ones. He has devoted considerable time to the effort to find out if
there are any natural enemies of the poisonous snakes of his country,
and he has discovered that the most formidable enemy of the many
dangerous Brazilian snakes is a non-poisonous, entirely harmless,
rather uncommon Brazilian snake, the mussurama. Of all the interesting
things the doctor showed us, by far the most interesting was the
opportunity of witnessing for ourselves the action of the mussurama
toward a dangerous snake.

The doctor first showed us specimens of the various important snakes,
poisonous and non-poisonous, in alcohol. Then he showed us
preparations of the different kinds of venom and of the different
anti-venom serums, presenting us with some of the latter for our use
on the journey. He has been able to produce two distinct kinds of
anti-venom serum, one to neutralize the virulent poison of the
rattlesnake's bite, the other to neutralize the poison of the
different snakes of the lachecis genus. These poisons are somewhat
different and moreover there appear to be some differences between the
poisons of the different species of lachecis; in some cases the poison
is nearly colorless, and in others, as in that of the jararaca, whose
poison I saw, it is yellow.

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