River Without a Cause: An Expedition through the Past, Present and Future of Theodore Roosevelt's River of Doubt

by Sam Moses

A riveting journey down Theodore Roosevelt's "river of doubt" with a diverse crew of adventurers, scientists, and Indigenous leaders who shine light on the past, present, and future of a natural wonder.

Sam Moses took part in the adventure of a lifetime when he, along with seventeen men and two women, embarked on the Rio Roosevelt Expedition. They would follow the former president's wake down five-hundred miles of extreme whitewater into the dark heart of the Amazon. The party was guided by two chiefs from the Cinta Larga tribe—the same tribe that stalked Roosevelt’s expedition in 1914—who, between rapids, tell the story of the tribe’s own Trail of Tears.

After the wildest whitewater is past, Moses travels with the chiefs to their village to witness the massive illegal mahogany logging from their forest, the Roosevelt Indigenous Territory. River Without a Cause puts us in the raft during those heart pounding rapid descents, as we experience the drama, dynamics and disputes between the Bull Moose and his co-leader, Brazil’s most famous explorer, the rigid Colonel Candido Rondon. As the Amazon stands on the precipice of hope with the election of a new Brazilian president, River Without a Cause is a moving and galvanizing tale of adventure that is a fitting tribute to this world wonder.

Genres: Nonfiction, History

288 pages, Hardcover

Published March 5, 2024

Reviews

[Howard Cincotta · Rating 3 out of 5]

In one sense, this book’s 1992 Amazon expedition has an obvious “cause”: retracing the epic 1914 river adventure by former president Theodore Roosevelt and Brazilian explorer Candido Rondon down the River of Doubt, later Rio Roosevelt. It was an experience that almost led to Roosevelt’s death from injury and illness. Roosevelt survived, wrote a book about his experiences, but never fully recovered from the ordeal.

For Rondon, the expedition proved to be another achievement in the extraordinary career of one of Brazil’s greatest explorers and, far ahead of his time, an unbending advocate for the country’s indigenous peoples.

But from another perspective, author Sam Moses acknowledges, the 1992 leaders could never really decide whether their other principal purpose was to advocate for the Amazonian environment, conduct scientific surveys, or campaign to protect indigenous lands, notably those of the Cinta Larga tribe, through which the River of Doubt flowed.

For armchair adventurers like me, River Without a Cause offers many rewards in its double-vision account of the hardships suffered by Roosevelt and company in 1914 — shadowed by the hidden Cinta Larga — and the 1992 reenactment. Along with the predictable challenges of insects, heat, and whitewater rapids, both expeditions dealt with the conundrum of weight. Roosevelt’s expedition, along with hauling half-ton dugout canoes, found itself continuously discarding excessive supplies, including tents, rations, and books (to feed Roosevelt’s insatiable reading habit), throughout the trip.

Logistics and bureaucratic headaches bedeviled the 1992 expedition as well, along with the repeated dilemma of whether to run a dangerous set of rapids or portage around them. In those scenes, Moses is excellent at celebrating the magical, dangerous, and seductive Amazon rainforest.

Beyond the elements of high adventure, however, River Without a Cause can feel dispiriting. The three Cinta Larga chiefs who participated in the 1992 expedition — Pui, Tatare, and the colorful Oitamina — are sympathetic but compromised figures. Born into primitive jungle conditions, they sincerely wanted to provide for their people; yet they proved unable to resist the enticements and money of the outside world, especially the wealth that flowed from illegal mahogany logging. In subsequent years, as we learn in an afterword, mahogany was replaced by large-scale gold and diamond mining. Yet somehow the flow of money evades the bulk of the Cinta Larga, who even today remain impoverished and lacking basic in healthcare and educational facilities.

The 1992 expedition experienced utterly predictable personality clashes, often triggered by the underlying perennial argument about whether they were conducting some kind of scientific survey or just trying to survive and descend a difficult rainforest river. Tweed Roosevelt, TR’s grandson, for example, was an expedition member, but others resented him for being treated as the sole leader by the media.

The earlier Roosevelt-Rondon expedition had similar personality clashes as well, but the stakes were far higher: at certain points, their sheer survival was at stake. Moreover, an argument between larger-than-life figures like Roosevelt, his son Kermit, and Marshal Rondon was far more dramatic and consequential than 1992 squabbles about the excessive weight of satellite radios.

[Kathy Davis · Rating 1 out of 5]

It's easy to see why publishers rejected this book. It reads like one big cut and paste job.