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Roosevelt had set sail for South America in the fall of 1913, not quite a year after his failed attempt to regain the presidency
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When Roosevelt reached Brazil, the country's Foreign Minister abruptly offered him a rare opportunity: a chance to explore an unmapped river in the heart of the rain forest. So mysterious was this tributary that even the man who had discovered its headwaters five years earlier had no idea where it went and so had named it Rio da Dúvida--the River of Doubt
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In December 1913, Roosevelt, then 55, and a small group of men embarked on a journey to explore and map Brazil's River of Doubt.
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Just three months later, as Roosevelt lay on a rusting cot inside his expedition's last remaining tent listening to the roar of the river, he clutched the vial that he had carried for so long. Shivering violently, his body wracked with fever, he concluded that the time had come to take his own life.
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He was suffering from malaria and had developed a potentially deadly bacterial infection after slicing his leg on a boulder. In the sweltering rain forest, the cut had quickly become infected, causing his leg to redden and swell and sending his temperature soaring to 105°F.
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'To all of us,’ one of them wrote, ‘his report was practically a sentence of death.’ For Roosevelt, who could barely sit up, much less fight his way through the rain forest, the plan was simply an impossibility.
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One night a coral snake slithered from under a fallen tree and sank its fangs into Roosevelt's foot. But for his thick leather boots, he would have died an agonizing death.
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The expedition reached what appeared to be an impassable set of rapids--a series of six waterfalls, the last of which was more than 30 ft. high--Roosevelt was gravely ill, and his men were beaten down by exhaustion, hunger and fear.
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Roosevelt never fully recovered his health, but he refused any regret. ‘I am always willing to pay the piper,’ he once wrote, ‘when I have had a good dance.’
