If Roosevelt and his men could have soared over the rainforest like the hawks that

wheeled above them, the river of doubt would have looked like a black piece of ribbon candy nestled

in an endless expanse of green. Here at the start of its torturous journey northward,

the river was so tightly coiled that at times it doubled back on itself,

and in every direction the jungle stretched dense and peniturable and untouched to the horizon.

The expedition was finally preparing to descend into the Amazon basin from the Highland Plato

that it had just crossed. Even from the air however, the river's path into the jungle lowlands

was so capricious and the terrain so uneven that it frequently disappeared entirely beneath the

dense green canopy, making it nearly impossible to follow. Rondon believed that the river of doubt

ultimately poured into the mid-Madeira, the principal tributary of the Amazon river.

On the basis of that educated guess, he had, before departing, sent a detachment of men to

travel up the mid-Madeira to the point where he calculated that he and Roosevelt would eventually

emerge. The detachment led by Lieutenant Antonio Pyrenees, remember that name? The man who had

nearly lost his tongue and his life to a piranha during Rondon's harrowing 1909 telegraph expedition.

Your Tongeless Indian. If he never spoke again, it would probably be better for the human race.

If you think about it, the last episode we talked about, he stuck it in his mouth, the piranha.

Yeah. And if you think about it, the piranha was turned sideways. It didn't bite down on his

tongue like I would think of traditionally, it bit his tongue sideways. Yeah, well it's like

mini shark with razor blade teeth. So welcome to the Gritty Podcast, folks. Today we are reading from

the book Theodore Roosevelt's Darkest Journey, The River of Doubt by Candice Milard.

This is, I don't know, episode five or something for... And we have a disclose to you guys,

this is actually a light horror book. This book is about Theodore Roosevelt's journey

...