"Doubt me a river"

Theodore Roosevelt had his own way of responding to loss and rejection throughout his life.

This sickly asthmatic son of a wealthy Knickerbocker family, whom some doubted would even reach adulthood, overcame his nervous and timid childhood by following the advice of his father to "make your own body".

He embraced physical challenges and adopted, in his own words, a "strenuous life", developing a Hemingway-esque machisimo.

When told he shouldn't climb stairs because of a bad heart, he climbed the Matterhorn.

He boxed, rowed, lifted weights, hiked, hunted and collected, setting a pattern in his life where, when burdened by grief or rejection, he replenished himself in action and nature. After the death of his first wife he found solace in the Dakotas.

The hero of the Battle of San Juan Heights in Cuba during the Spanish American War became the youngest man ever to come to the Presidency when McKinley was assassinated.

Elected in his own right for a second term, he brokered the Treaty of Portsmouth which ended the Russo-Japanese War for which he became the first American Noblel laureate.

He built up the US Navy that helped vanquish Spain and fomented a revolution (which he never officially admitted) in Panama that allowed the US to built the Panama canal, becoming the first President to leave the US while in office when he inspected the partly built Canal.

After his failed bid for a third term in 1912, (by which he split the Republican party running against his once friend Taft), he beame a political pariah, abandoned by his friends and ridiculed by his enemies. His actions had put a Democrat, Woodrow Wilson, into the White House, the first in 16 years.

Struggling with depression and despair, he took up an offer by Brazil's Foreign Minister to explore an unmapped river in the Amazon, named the Rio da Duvida, River of Doubt, because the man who had discovered its headwaters had no idea where it led.

The chance for renewal went disastrously wrong with a malarial and delerious Roosevelt at one stage contemplating taking his own life with morphine.

Just to reach the river Roosevelt's party endured a gruelling monthlong journey across the Brazilian Highlands, and lost dozens of mules to starvation and exhaustion, forcing them to abandon provisions.

Dugout canoes bought from local tribesmen sat only a few centimetres above the caiman and piranha infested water. The party was plagued by insects and all fell prey to malaria. More sinister, they were shadowed by an indigenous tribe that never showed itself but attacked one of their members.

One man drowned, another was murdered in an argument. Short of food and unlucky in catching fish, the men ate nuts, hearts of palm and the white sap of milk trees.

When they came to a series of six waterfalls, each over 9m high they were at the end of their tether. Roosevelt was delerious with fever and malaria and asked the men to go on without him. His son Kermit, a bridge-builder, worked out a sytem by which he could lower the dugouts over the falls with ropes and get everyone out.

All but three men including Roosevelt and his son, survived the expedition. The river was put on the map and renamed Rio Roosevelt.

Of the expedition Roosevelt later said "I had to go. It was my last chance to be a boy."

In 1918, his son Quentin was killed in the war in France. Roosevelt died of a coronary in his sleep the next year at the age of 60. Roosevelt's face is one of the four on Mt Rushmore. He had been nominated for the Medal of Honour for his actions in Cuba during the Spanish American War, but had been denied it at the time for political reasons. In 2001 President Bill Clinton awarded him the medal posthumously.

Ref: The River of Doubt by Candice Millard

Have you read something interesting you would like to share? Send it along!