Although I have always craved and felt invigorated by travel—with an inclination that occasionally veers toward the obsessive—I’ve never been particularly drawn to adventure stories. This somehow seems inconsistent, as if a taste for adventure in life should trigger a taste for adventure in literature. Adventures stories are certainly popular, and that’s especially true for children, so I’ve often wondered whether I was missing something crucial, something that would make these stories come alive in my imagination.
Perhaps my memory is faulty, but I don’t recall, even as a child, finding that much interest in archetypical stories about quests. It seems fairly straightforward to be excited by daring, fright, and the unknown, to flip quicker and quicker through the pages of a Joseph Conrad story about the sea, to get lost with the explorers in a Jules Verne story, or to be entranced by the survival stories written by Jack London, but that wasn’t ever my experience. With a writer like Conrad, in fact, the intricate prose and psychological penetration of his characters holds my interest more than his supposedly adventurous plots. One exception might be an autobiography written for children by Michael Collins, the third member of the most famous Apollo mission, a book that captivated me enough that I remember reading pages aloud to my mother. There’s quite obviously an adventure when you travel to the moon—but I believe that I was most intrigued, even at a young age, by the psychological aspect of how Collins went all the way to the Moon but was forced to remain inside the shuttle, the only astronaut unable to take a step on the surface.
Yet I seem to have finally stirred this latent desire for adventure with Larry Rohter’s magisterial biography of Cândido Rondon, satisfying my interest for the history of a place, the psychology of a man, and for those childhood elements of exploration that are, in daily life, so often missed. Of course it does help to have a main character who possesses the rare ability to support the weight of a long subtitle—Into the Amazon: The Life of Cândido Rondon, Trailblazing Explorer, Scientist, Statesman, and Conservationist—because Rondon is one of those remarkable people in history, one of those people who somehow manage to fit a few lifetimes into just one life.
My sense is that the typical person underrates the power of biography, which, when artfully composed, can give you textures that you won’t otherwise understand—about a period, a person, a place. Watching the decades unfold through a subjective perspective, though the experiences of an individual, also gives you a flavor for the times that are unavailable in standard history books. If you’re interested in travel, in learning about the actual sensations of a place, this subjective lens seems necessary, especially as most people appear to function with such fuzzy, misguided pictures of the past. Rohter smartly orients the reader in the beginning of this biography by noticing that Rondon “was born the month Abraham Lincoln was assassinated and died just before his ninety-third birthday, shortly after the Soviets launched Sputnik 1 into outer space,” ensuring that this one life, impressively, improbably, gives a portrait of the dynamism that’s inherit to that long period in history.
It is worth knowing that the eventual statesman and refined general was born in Mato Grosso, which is somewhat in the middle of the continent, far from the Brazilian coast, deep into the wilderness, in a land that I must describe as remote—a truth that’s accurate regardless of your departure point. Not only was the capital of Rio de Janeiro a long and perilous trip, one that Rondon didn’t take as a child, almost nobody that he met would have taken that trip. Picture a childhood, instead, that’s akin to the rural ideal, full of hunting and fishing and exploration, where the elements of life are the elements of nature, and then picture that this same boy becomes a stately, cultivated man later in life, who is an advisor to Presidents, and Marshal of the Brazilian Army at aged 90.
When you examine those early years there’s a romanticism to the script that seems almost too clichéd. The young child is too precocious. He’s too clever. He’s ahead in all his classes. It becomes obvious to those around him that he’s destined for greatness. So he must be sent to the city. There’s a familial holdout, a disagreement, because he’s needed as a laborer, the argument goes, until the holdout is convinced that he must be sent away. The mythology here, the archetypical quality of the story, makes me skeptical, but sometimes the story actually does shape to the mold.
And it would be difficult to overestimate the importance of these early years in fashioning the Rondon that arrives on the political stage years later, but I find the emergence of his character a tad inexplicable. There’s his drive for knowledge, his hunger for books, the hours he spends reading, yet there’s also his desire for adventure and travel and nature—all, in total, visible from the start. I can appreciate these traits, and I can see how a mature adult can cultivate this spectrum, finding a balance, but I have a trickier time comprehending how such a young child embraces the competing aspects of his character, especially when there isn’t a model for the behavior. This prompts you to wonder about the roots of character, about how much is solidified at birth, about how much is cultivated, because the spark comes so early with him, yet there’s no moment where you can spot the trigger.
Rondon did eventually travel to Rio de Janeiro and enroll in officer school, excelling in math and engineering, and soon establishing himself, once again, as an exceptional student. Just like most students that you’ve met, he decided to wake a few hours before dawn, permitting more time to focus on his daily reading and writing and exercise, all habits that he maintained throughout his life. Autodidacts often have a relentlessness, it seems, and perhaps that’s what happens when you begin the race just a bit behind the starting blocks, so far away from the center of power. Rondon fits this description, though it isn’t clear whether it comes from a fear of falling behind or from a drive to get ahead.
Yet it is still too easy to forget the improbability of this story—which in simple biographic detail comes across as a story of adventure. It is impressive, yes, to see such a fluidity with languages, to see his prowess in engineering, and his sudden eruption of youthful confidence, but you start to wonder about the genesis of this story once he codifies his principles of nonviolence while in, of all places, a military academy, principles that would somehow be sustained through a long military career, however paradoxical that might appear. And those principles affect the crucial subject that’s present throughout Rondon’s life, the one subject that links his childhood with what he’s most remembered for today: his political work in service of the people who were indigenous to the lands that he explored, principles that capture an idealism that seems more fitting for the 21st Century than his time.
His formal expeditions began once he started to lead journeys through the most unreachable regions of Brazil—with his engineering knowledge and rural background and, not incidentally, desire to travel to places that most soldiers loathed making him the ideal candidate. He lived at a time when he could be charged with connecting those regions with the newest technology of telegraph lines, finally allowing information to reach the heart of the country in minutes rather than weeks, but he also lived long enough to see those same telegraph lines become obsolete, once it was clear that radio was so much more efficient for communication.
The list of achievements and notable activities give this book some thrust—including, for instance, the numerous and seemingly scheduled government coups, which either entangled Rondon or which he smartly made sure to avoid—but the hinge on which this story swings, for American readers at least, is his long expedition through the Amazon with Theodore Roosevelt. There’s a reasonable argument that this expedition on its own captures the entire Rondon character in précis: as a diplomat for Brazil who can suitably entertain a former United States President; as an explorer who is equipped to head a long journey through unmapped and unknown territory; as a scientist who is proficient enough to catalogue the route. There’s a taste of adventure in how these identities coalesce, in the 19th Century ideal of the intellectual explorer, the diplomat who carries a weapon that he will never fire, the man who is capable in the jungle but who also knows how to speak to a President.
When we greet each other Bororo-style, we are ready for the strong odor of naked bodies, stained with dye. In contrast, when we trade niceties in the language of Molière, we are imperceptibly led to gestures and words of the most refined elegance.
If you’re looking to combine the literary with a bit of adventure, this looks just about right. Although perhaps my mind is too close to the grossly and hilariously unprepared Roosevelt, who brought supplies “more suited to a gourmet feast than a jungle expedition.” When the Brazilians opened up the American containers, they discovered, “cases of olive oil, cases of mustard, malted milk, stuffed olives, prunes, applesauce…even Rhine wine.” Even though this disastrous journey in the Amazon eventually included at least one murder and potentially one act of manslaughter, the jettisoning of the gourmet supplies marked, for me at least, the saddest moment.
Before the journey begins its descent, however, you might start to believe that a jaunt through the Amazon sounds like a good idea, especially when the journey is just beginning, and the grander, the immensity, the egotism, of the plans start to take shape. I found myself—comfortably positioned, holding the book near a window, enjoying a cool breeze—believing that maybe I should put something similar on my itinerary. A trek into the Amazon. A trek that skips the tours that you find online. A trek that’s more adventurous, more daring, more akin to the route that Rondon traveled. This was the moment when I felt the visceral quality of an adventure story, when I couldn’t put down the book because I wanted to grab a machete and cut a path through this unmapped, enigmatic territory. Now it wasn’t exactly the section about the piranhas that gave me pause. Nor was it the section about endless rains that compelled Roosevelt to write, “everything became moldy except what became rusty.” It was the manner in which Rondon started to track the time that reduced my cravings for adventure.
The insect infestations were so severe and widespread that Rondon was able to clock the phases of the day by them: in daylight, the tiny stingless bees were most troublesome, entering “through the ears, the nostrils, the mouth and entangling themselves in the hair.” At dusk came the diminutive Amazon black fly, which enjoyed feeding on human blood and tended to swarm around vulnerable, thin-skinned areas like the nape of the neck, the ears, or the ankles. With darkness came the much larger mosquito, also a blood feeder, making its way under mosquito netting.
The trip nearly killed Roosevelt and almost certainly shortened his life. Although he does come across as vigorous, and sporting, in this narrative, full of verve and with a genuine interest in the Amazon and the people of Brazil, a slip in a river that is now called the Rio Roosevelt resulted in a calamitous wound. Amid the rains and exhaustion and growing dangers, both Rondon and Roosevelt display an admirable amount of pluck, seen clearly in how each man recalled the other in later years, and in how Rondon, forever the explorer from Mato Grosso, short on supplies, after a murder, unsure about the route, still believed that “the forest I had learned to love would never allow us to die of hunger.”
When you do reach the end of this remarkable life, the question of how it coalesced, this unlikely merging of the literary with the adventurous, this orderly solider with the independent mind, isn’t something that you’ll feel confident in answering. I’m impressed—though I still don’t comprehend the genesis. I think it is a fine ideal, too, though I doubt most contemporary readers would know where to begin. The story of this life is an adventure story, and that’s an adventure story where the protagonist relishes books and writing and culture, which seems like a combination that’s worth emulating. One way that the sensibility is memorized today is through Rondônia, the only state in Brazil that’s named after a person, which matches the line of longitude near his 1909 expedition, the only line of longitude named for a person. In both locations, you’ll find mostly wildness, the unexplored, the untouched, but for someone comfortable in both the jungle and with cartographer's tools, that seems just about right.