He was most conscientious about his writing. Almost every day when he came in from hunting he would settle down to work on the articles that were from time to time sent back to Scribner’s. This daily task was far more onerous than any one who has not tried it can imagine. When you come in from a long day’s tramping, you feel most uninclined to concentrate on writing a careful and interesting account of the day’s activities. Father was invariably good-humored about it, saying that he was paying for his fun. In Brazil when the mosquitoes and sand-flies were intolerable, he used to be forced to write swathed in a mosquito veil and with long gauntlets to protect hands and wrists.
During the descent of the River of Doubt in Brazil there were many black moments. It was impossible to hazard a guess within a month or more as to when we would get through to the Amazon. We had dugout canoes, and when we came to serious rapids or waterfalls we were forced to cut a trail around to the quiet water below. Then we must make a corduroy road with the trunks of trees over which to haul the dugouts. All this took a long time, and in some places where the river ran through gorges it was almost impossible. We lost in all six of the ten canoes with which we started, and of course much of our food-supply and general equipment. It was necessary to delay and build two more canoes—a doubly laborious task because of the axes and adzes which had gone down in the shipwrecks. The Brazil nuts upon which we had been counting to help out our food-supply had had an off year. If this had not been so we would have fared by no means badly, for these nuts may be ground into flour or roasted or prepared in a number of different ways. Another source upon which we counted failed us when we found that there were scarcely any fish in the river. For some inexplicable reason many of the tributaries of the Amazon teem with fish, while others flowing through similar country and under parallel conditions contain practically none. We went first onto half rations, and then were forced to still further reduce the issue. We had only the clothes in which we stood and were wet all day and slept wet throughout the night. There would be a heavy downpour, then out would come the sun and we would be steamed dry, only to be drenched once more a half-hour later.
Launching a newly made dugout on the Dúvida
Working waist-deep in the water in an attempt to dislodge a canoe that had been thrown upon some rocks out in the stream, father slipped, and, of course, it was his weak leg that suffered. Then he came down with fever, and in his weakened condition was attacked with a veritable plague of deep abscesses. It can be readily understood that the entourage and environment were about as unsuitable for a sick man as any that could be imagined. Nothing but father’s indomitable spirit brought him through. He was not to be downed by anything, although he knew well that the chances were against his coming out. He made up his mind that as long as he could, he would go along, but that once he could no longer travel, and held up the expedition, he would arrange for us to go on without him. Of course he did not at the time tell us this, but he reasoned that with our very limited supply of provisions, and the impossibility of living on the country, if the expedition halted it would not only be of no avail as far as he was concerned, but the chances would be strongly in favor of no one coming through. With it all he was invariably cheerful, and in the blackest times ever ready with a joke. Sick as he was, he gave no one any trouble. He would walk slowly over the portages, resting every little while, and when the fever was not too severe we would, when we reached the farther end with the canoes, find him sitting propped against a tree reading a volume of Gibbon, or perhaps the Oxford book of verse.
There was one particularly black night; one of our best men had been shot and killed by a useless devil who escaped into the jungle, where he was undoubtedly killed by the Indians. We had been working through a series of rapids that seemed interminable. There would be a long carry, a mile or so clear going, and then more rapids. The fever was high and father was out of his head. Doctor Cajazeira, who was one of the three Brazilians with us, divided with me the watch during the night. The scene is vivid before me. The black rushing river with the great trees towering high above along the bank; the sodden earth under foot; for a few moments the stars would be shining, and then the sky would cloud over and the rain would fall in torrents, shutting out sky and trees and river. Father first began with poetry; over and over again he repeated “In Xanadu did Kubla Khan a stately pleasure dome decree,” then he started talking at random, but gradually he centred down to the question of supplies, which was, of course, occupying every one’s mind. Part of the time he knew that I was there, and he would then ask me if I thought Cherrie had had enough to eat to keep going. Then he would forget my presence and keep saying to himself: “I can’t work now, so I don’t need much food, but he and Cherrie have worked all day with the canoes, they must have part of mine.” Then he would again realize my presence and question me as to just how much Cherrie had had. How good faithful Cajazeira waked I do not know, but when his watch was due I felt him tap me on the shoulder, and crawled into my soggy hammock to sleep the sleep of the dead.
Father’s courage was an inspiration never to be forgotten by any of us; without a murmur he would lie while Cajazeira lanced and drained the abscesses. When we got down beyond the rapids the river widened so that instead of seeing the sun through the canyon of the trees for but a few hours each day, it hung above us all the day like a molten ball and broiled us as if the river were a grid on which we were made fast. To a sick man it must have been intolerable.
It is when one is sick that one really longs for home. Lying in a hammock all unwashed and unshaven, suffocating beneath a mosquito-net, or tortured by mosquitoes and sand-flies when one raises the net to let in a breath of air—it is then that one dreams of clean pajamas and cool sheets and iced water. I have often heard father say when he was having a bout of fever at home, that it was almost a pleasure to be ill, particularly when you thought of all the past discomforts of fever in the wilds.
Father’s disappointment at not being able to take a physical part in the war—as he has said, “to pay with his body for his soul’s desire”—was bitter. Strongly as he felt about going, I doubt if his disappointment was much more keen than that of the British and French statesmen and generals, who so readily realized what his presence would mean to the Allied cause, and more than once requested in Washington that he be sent. Marshal Joffre made such a request in person, meeting with the usual evasive reply. Father took his disappointment as he had taken many another in his life, without letting it harm his usefulness, or discourage his aggressive energy. “In the fell clutch of circumstance he did not wince or cry aloud.” Indeed, the whole of Henley’s poem might well apply to father if it were possible to eliminate from it the unfortunate marring undercurrent of braggadocio with which father’s attitude was never for an instant tinged. With the indomitable courage that knew no deterrent he continued to fight his battle on this side to make America’s entry no empty action, as it threatened to be. He wrote me that he had hoped that I would be with him in this greatest adventure of all, but that since it was not to be, he could only be thankful that his four boys were permitted to do their part in the actual fighting.
When in a little town in Germany my brother and I got news of my father’s death, there kept running through my head with monotonous insistency Kipling’s lines: