The Beast in the Clouds: The Roosevelt Brothers’ Deadly Quest to Find the Mythical Giant Panda by Nathalia Holt
Well over a century has passed since President Theodore Roosevelt and his family captivated the world with their escapades and high energy.
The madcap TR, his patient wife Edith, and five children plus Theodore’s daughter from his first marriage, occupied the White House between 1901 and 1909. Arriving as the Victorian Era wound down, the Roosevelts were a big gulp of fresh air.
The four boys — Ted Jr., 14, Kermit, 12, Archie, 7, and Quentin, 4 — rode their ponies, played pranks with friends, and showed off exotic pets while photographers clicked away. When he wasn’t running the country, TR devoted time to his children. He imbued in them a love of nature and adventure.
In a fascinating new history, The Beast in the Clouds: The Roosevelt Brothers’ Deadly Quest to Find the Mythical Giant Panda, historian and journalist Nathalia Holt transports readers to 1928, where she follows Ted Jr. and Kermit, now 41 and 39, through the Chinese and Tibetan wilderness.
On mountaintops and plateaus, in forests, blizzards, and monsoons, they risked their lives and those of their fellow explorers in a no-holds-barred search for the “black-and-white bear” — the panda. The trip was funded by Chicago’s Field Museum, where the specimen eventually would be mounted and displayed.
Holt expertly weaves her knowledge of natural history and medicine into the tale of two interdependent brothers still grieving for their beloved father, who died in 1919. The author examines Ted Jr. and Kermit’s struggle to emerge as fully formed men in a world where TR’s celebrity had lost its currency.
Unreliable Maps
Startlingly, Holt explains, the continents were still “imperfectly mapped” in 1928, particularly Asia. “No one could be certain which mountain was the tallest on earth nor which trench in the ocean the deepest,” she writes.
The giant panda, which remained elusive even to Chinese villagers who lived at the edge of bamboo forests where the mammals thrived, had attained mythical status. Despite reported sightings of the bears, and plenty of sketches, Western zoologists sought solid evidence that the panda existed.
Guides and scientists craved the prestige of working on a Roosevelt expedition, but the exhausting, patchwork journey proved to be a mixed bag. Like most explorers, the Roosevelts were ambitious and exhilarated, but they traveled “like wanderers or hobbyists,” Holt notes.
In fairness, exploring uncharted territory is treacherous. But Ted Jr. and Kermit were particularly disorganized. Further, it is not clear that they fully understood that a civil war between the Chinese Nationalists, led by Chiang Kai-shek, and the Communists, led by Mao Zedong, had begun in 1927.
The Roosevelts were joined by 19-year-old Jack Young, a Chinese-American interpreter and guide, fluent in several languages and dialects; Herbert Stevens, a British biologist who worked so slowly with unfamiliar species of birds and flowers that the group eventually, politely ejected him; Suydam Cutting, a socialite and adventurer; and dozens of indigenous women and men who often led the way, foiled attacks and managed the mules, food, shelter and everything else.
There was little any of them could do about acute altitude sickness except agonize through “the worst night of their lives.”
A Thrilling Tale
Hiking through deep Himalayan snow and sunny meadows of poppies, the tired, unwashed group did not lose hope even as they emerged empty-handed from yet another ancient bamboo forest, “trunks so massive they resembled marble columns,” writes Holt, whose descriptions of the landscape put the reader right on the spot.
And then one day …
The Beast in the Clouds is an unusual achievement. The author has written a thriller of sorts: two brothers chasing a bear. The book is also a meditation on conservation and extinction.
Nathalie Holt recognizes that the triumphant capture of the panda had far-reaching consequences for ecology and biodiversity. Ultimately, she argues, the 1928 Roosevelt expedition became part of “an ever-expanding record of a disappearing world.”
About Nathalia Holt:
Nathalia (Nuh-thal-ie-uh) Holt, Ph.D., is the New York Times bestselling author of The Beast in the Clouds, Wise Gals, Rise of the Rocket Girls, The Queens of Animation and Cured. She has written for numerous publications, including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Los Angeles Times, The Atlantic, Slate, Popular Science, PBS and Time. She is a former fellow at the Ragon Institute of MGH, MIT and Harvard University. She lives with her husband and their two daughters in Pacific Grove, CA.
