Initially it’s hard to root for the explorers considering their goal: to track down and kill a giant panda.
That’s what brothers Ted and Kermit Roosevelt, sons of former president Teddy Roosevelt, had in mind when they set out on a Himalayan expedition to bring back evidence of the last large mammal in the world yet unknown to science. Previous expeditions had failed to find the mysterious creature.
The sibling outdoorsmen’s 1929 journey is detailed in a new book, The Beast in the Clouds: The Roosevelt Brothers’ Deadly Quest to Find the Mythical Giant Panda, by Nathalia Holt.
Less than a century ago, most humans had never heard of the giant panda. Of those who had, many believed the creature was fantasy. Others thought that, if it existed, it would prove to be a ferocious combination of a black bear and a polar bear.
“The Roosevelts desired this one animal so acutely that they could barely speak about it with each other, much less anyone else,” Holt writes. They didn’t let even their closest friends know what they were doing.
Theirs was a dangerous and thrilling expedition. The duo are revealed as intriguing and multidimensional as they face countless hardships on the trail in the pursuit of science, conservation and personal achievement. (In that era, killing animals in the name of scientific knowledge was considered an aspect of conservation.)
Holt paints detailed portraits of the Roosevelts as well as other members of their team. We meet the talented Tai Jack Young, a multilingual, Hawaiian-born translator and naturalist who developed a lifelong friendship with the brothers. And Herbert Stevens, a British scientist who gets so distracted examining the flora and fauna that he repeatedly got lost, caused delays and was eventually cut loose from the expedition.
The explorers had planned to travel 500 miles but ended up covering more than 1,000, mostly on foot, through rainforests, blizzards, snowy mountain passes and bamboo jungles. Parts of the trail were still covered in snow and ice in April and May. And they were trekking amid the Chinese Civil War, which pitted the Republic of China against the Chinese Communist Party.
I’m not an adventurer. If I were part of a pioneer wagon train traveling to settle the West in the 1800s, I doubt I would have survived past St. Louis. But I’m drawn to nonfiction accounts of people who risk their lives and brave the perils of nature to settle a scientific question or to stake their place in history.
Holt’s is the latest in a string of such books I’ve found engrossing. Others include The River of Doubt by Candice Millard, which narrates Theodore Roosevelt’s harrowing 1913-14 trip along a dangerous river in the Amazon (son Kermit was along on that trip, which included a cameo appearance by Rev. John Zahm, CSC, of Notre Dame); The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder by David Grann, about a British naval vessel and the mutiny after its wreckage in 1741; and River of the Gods, also by Millard, about the quest for the source of the Nile.
Ted and Kermit’s search for the panda echoed in life-threatening form the imaginary “bear hunts” — the delightful games of hide-and-seek their father led during their youth. “Where’s the bear?” the Roosevelt children would cry as they romped through the family home until they found their father’s hiding spot.
But this trek was no romp. The brothers faced the loss of food supplies when the expedition’s mules wandered off during a blizzard as well as opium addicts, robbers who attacked the hunting party, severe altitude sickness and death.
While it all sounds like something out of an Indiana Jones movie, Holt also details the über-masculine Roosevelt brothers’ surprising softer sides. They bring along books to read on the trail: Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen and Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë.
For that era, the Roosevelts displayed enlightened views on women. Their team of guides, called porters, is more than half female — native women with vast knowledge of the mountains and superlative athleticism. Western China, Ted wrote approvingly, was “the land of women’s emancipation.” The brothers paid their male and female guides equally.
Ted was a shopaholic, eager to browse and buy up Chinese cultural artifacts when their party took breaks in villages along the trail. At one point, he bought some religious books from a man in a temple — then had to return them the next day when he learned they were holy texts that belonged to the upset townspeople.
In the years that followed, the Roosevelt brothers came to question their role in proving the black-and-white bear’s existence. Kermit, who led a troubled life, would urge a complete ban on the capture and hunting of pandas. But once opened, this Pandora’s Box could not be shut.
Two stuffed pandas — including the one shot by the Roosevelt brothers — remain on display today in the Hall of Asian Mammals at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago.
Margaret Fosmoe is an associate editor of this magazine.