 Thank you. Thank you for that introduction Clay that was wonderful and thank you all for coming. It is a real Pleasure to be here. I have been looking forward to this Symposium and I'm very flattered to be included among such Accomplished writers and speakers. So it's an honor to be asked to speak here tonight. Thank you for having me One of the many things I learned while I was researching the River of Doubt is that If you want to understand who Theodore Roosevelt was The man Theodore Roosevelt was You have to understand him outside of the presidency Outside of the political arena even You have to understand him in the context of the natural world And for that reason I think that this symposium goes to the heart of who Roosevelt was He was an adventure He was an adventure in the tradition of the greatest scientists and explorers of the 19th and early 20th centuries Men like William Burroughs John Muir Ernest Shackleton Rolled Omonson Roosevelt was a scientific Adventure he was a man who not only loved the thrill of exploration and the beauty of the natural world But also had an extraordinary understanding of it and a deep desire to uncover its most closely held secrets One of the principal reasons I wanted to write this book to tell the story Was because it places this great complex man in one of the greatest and most complex environments on the planet For a writer the Amazon rainforest is just a treasure trove The subject of the Amazon is so big that thousands of books could be written without exhausting it What we do know about this part of the world is remarkable and there's still so much that we don't know Of course the same probably could not be said about the other main subject of the book Theodore Roosevelt as all of you know Roosevelt is an incredibly popular and familiar figure and Many fine biographies have been written about him But the closer I looked the more convinced I became that there was still an important dimension of his life that had yet to be Adequately explored. I think that when most people think of Roosevelt They think of the great leader the great statesman the great president and he was all of those things But what he was for more of his life and as passionately as anything else was a naturalist and What intrigued me was the story of his greatest achievement in that area His descent of an unmapped river in the Amazon the River of Doubt This expedition which took place after he tried and failed to gain the presidency in 1912 has been I think Largely overlooked precisely because it came after after his active political career and To the extent that it is discussed it's often put in the same categories as grand hunting trips But let me tell you this was no hunting trip Even by the extraordinary standards of Roosevelt's life. This was a wholly different kind of challenge This was a serious Scientific expedition that became an extraordinary story of survival It was a contest of man against nature Man against man and even man against himself While Rosevelt and his men were on this river they lost nearly all their supplies to rapids One man drowned The rest of the men including Roosevelt's own son nearly starved and when the survivors emerged from the rainforest they were in rags They were shadowed and attacked by indigenous tribesmen Roosevelt became Gravely ill and nearly committed suicide in an attempt to save the other men When Roosevelt was president he famously complained that he'd never really had the opportunity to prove himself He said in essence if you don't have the great event you don't have the great leader on The river of doubt he found that event This is a type of desperate all or nothing struggle for survival that reveals character in its truest Form it's a story of an exceptional man a leader not on the scale of nations and armies But among this tiny siege group of men who have been driven to the limits of human endurance This expedition is almost unimaginable by today's standards You have to think of it in terms of someone like Bill Clinton or J. L. Ford Announcing that they will on their own explore Mars. It's just that extreme Even today this river is in one of the most remote parts of the planet and in 1914 It was just a blank spot on the map It was a geographical mystery It was a kind of challenge that explores today can only dream about in fact This river got its name because even the man who discovered its headwaters had no idea where it went It was also incredibly dangerous As you can see from this slide and as all of you know the the Amazon River runs from west to east The river of doubt runs from south to north it begins in the Brazilian Highlands Runs through the Amazon basin and and empties into the Madera, which is the principal tributary of the Amazon But while the Amazon is wide and sluggish the river of doubt is fast and twisting and full of rapids Even for professional explorers, this would have been an extreme challenge Something that would be reserved for someone of the caliber of Robert Perry or Cernus Shackleton Not an amateur and certainly not a 55 year old former president Given the risks the first question you might ask is why would Roosevelt go on such a dangerous expedition and The answer is that as much as anything else in his life this journey epitomized his interests and his personality as I said Roosevelt was an extraordinary Naturalist even from his earliest childhood. He was fascinated by insects and birds anything he could capture He was the kind of kid who kept mice under his bed and spiders in his dresser drawer but when he studied them he did so carefully and systematically Roosevelt himself told a great story about his childhood interest in natural history said It started one day when he was just a kid and he was walking up Broadway to buy some strawberries and he saw this dead seal that someone had pulled out of New York Harbor and You know, I think that for most kids the seal wouldn't have had any interest beyond just the joy of watching it grow More and more disgusting every day But Roosevelt said that it filled him with every possible feeling of romance and adventure and you know You can just imagine him daydreaming about this dead seal. He visited it every day. He measured it with his pocket ruler He wrote a natural history treatise about it and he never forgot it. Theodore Roosevelt was a very unusual little boy and As he grew so did his interest in nature and his knowledge of nature He always knew mammals very well, but he knew birds even better and he never let anything get in his way of Studying them and enjoying them not even the presidency When Rose was president he had a retreat in Virginia called pine not and one weekend He invited the world famous naturalist John Burroughs to join him at pine not to identify birds And while they were there the two men identified 75 birds and waterfowl and Roosevelt knew all of them, but two and Burroughs knew all of them, but two But Roseville actually knew one more than that He had seen another bird of Lincoln's sparrow the weekend before and a nearby field And so after church one day he took Burroughs to the field to see if they could find it They didn't find it, but if they had Theodore Roosevelt a career politician would have identified more birds than Burroughs one of our nation's most Renowned ornithologists and Burroughs never got over it The second reason that Rose went on the Sexpedition was in reaction to losing the election of 1912 As Clay was saying if you look at the entirety of Roosevelt's life, you can see a pattern Again and again when he faced hardship or disappointment. He turned to physical adventure physical challenge as a type of therapy He wanted these tough challenges that tested his strength and his courage and helped him forget and Being Roosevelt the more dangerous they were the better This pattern started pretty early in his life when he was just a sophomore at Harvard and his father died and he had been extremely close to his father and he was devastated and He went to the backwoods of Maine and he pushed himself So hard that a doctor traveling with him told his guide watch out for Roosevelt who'd kill himself before even says he's tired Just a few years later He faced an almost unimaginable tragedy when his mother and his first wife Died on the same night as clay was reading for you And it was after that that he came here and he spent the next two years with just intermittent trips back east Corral and cattle fighting drunk cowboys chasing down thieves and never ever giving himself a break He harmed himself physically and emotionally and he relied on that for the rest of his life