Mato Grosso appears as a wilderness traversed by Theodore Roosevelt during his journey through Brazil: a place of dugout travel, waters alive with danger, and a route toward the Amazon frontiers. The account makes the region less a mapped destination than the setting for an arduous expedition, culminating in Roosevelt’s arrival sick and injured.

The Journey Through Mato Grosso

Roosevelt travelled through Mato Grosso in a dugout. The waters were infested with tiny man-eating piranhas, making the river journey dangerous even before the route reached the rapids. The dugout passage gives the setting its defining character: the expedition moved through a landscape where travel itself exposed its occupants to risk.

Wildlife and the River Route

The account also presents Mato Grosso through the animals Roosevelt encountered. He shot tapirs and jaguars, and collected specimens of the white-lipped peccary. The journey continued through the rapids of the River of Doubt and down toward the Amazon frontiers, linking the region’s wildlife to a larger, hazardous river passage.

Illness and Narrative Significance

By the time Roosevelt arrived at the Amazon frontiers, he was sick, with an infected abscess in his leg. He lay stretched out beneath an awning in the dugout, beside a tame trumpeter bird. This closing image counters the scale of the expedition with bodily vulnerability: Mato Grosso is remembered both for the dangers Roosevelt faced in the landscape and for the illness with which he emerged from the journey.