PREFACE

This is an account of a zoo-geographic reconnaissance through the
Brazilian hinterland.

The official and proper title of the expedition is that given it by the Brazilian Government:  Expedicao Scientifica Roosevelt- Rondon.  When I started from the United States, it was to make an expedition, primarily concerned with mammalogy and ornithology, for the American Museum of Natural History of New York.  This was undertaken under the auspices of Messrs. Osborn and Chapman, acting on behalf of the Museum.  In the body of this work I describe how the scope of the expedition was enlarged, and how it was given a geographic as well as a zoological character, in consequence of the kind proposal of the Brazilian Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, General Lauro Muller.  In its altered and enlarged form the expedition was rendered possible only by the generous assistance of the Brazilian Government.  Throughout the body of the work will be found reference after reference to my colleagues and companions of the expedition, whose services to science I have endeavored to set forth, and for whom I shall always feel the most cordial friendship and regard.

Theodore Roosevelt. 
Sagamore hill,
September 1, 1914

THROUGH THE BRAZILIAN WILDERNESS

I. The start

One day in 1908, when my presidential term was coming to a close, Father Zahm, a priest whom I knew, came in to call on me.  Father Zahm and I had been cronies for some time, because we were both of us fond of Dante and of history and of science—­I had always commended to theologians his book, “Evolution and Dogma.”  He was an Ohio boy, and his early schooling had been obtained in old-time American fashion in a little log school; where, by the way, one of the other boys was Januarius Aloysius MacGahan, afterward the famous war correspondent and friend of Skobeloff.  Father Zahm told me that MacGahan even at that time added an utter fearlessness to chivalric tenderness for the weak, and was the defender of any small boy who was oppressed by a larger one.  Later Father Zahm was at Notre Dame University, in Indiana, with Maurice Egan, whom, when I was President, I appointed minister to Denmark.

On the occasion in question Father Zahm had just returned from a trip across the Andes and down the Amazon, and came in to propose that after I left the presidency he and I should go up the Paraguay into the interior of South America.  At the time I wished to go to Africa, and so the subject was dropped; but from time to time afterward we talked it over.  Five years later, in the spring of 1913, I accepted invitations conveyed through the governments of Argentina and Brazil to address certain learned bodies in these countries.  Then it occurred to me that, instead of making the conventional tourist trip purely by sea round South America, after I had finished my lectures I would come north through the middle of the continent into the valley of the Amazon; and I decided to write Father Zahm and tell him my intentions.  Before doing so, however, I desired to see the authorities of the American Museum of Natural History, in New York City, to find out whether they cared to have me take a couple of naturalists with me into Brazil and make a collecting trip for the museum.