XVIIA. D. 1860THE AUSTRALIAN DESERT
Whenthe Eternal Father was making the earth, at one time He filled the sea with swimming dragons, the air with flying dragons, and the land with hopping dragons big as elephants; but they were not a success, and so He swept them all away. After that he filled the southern continents with a small improved hopping dragon, that laid no eggs, but carried the baby in a pouch. There were queer half-invented fish, shadeless trees, and furry running birds like the emu and the moa. Then He swamped that southern world under the sea, and moved the workshop to our northern continents. But He left New Zealand and Australia just as they were, a scrap of the half-finished world with furry running birds, the hopping kangaroo, the shadeless trees, and half-invented fish.
So when the English went to Australia it was not an ordinary voyage, but a journey backward through the ages, through goodness only knows how many millions of years to the fifth day of creation. It was like visiting the moon or Mars. To live and travel in such a strange land a man must be native born, bush raised, and cunning at that, on pain of death by famine.
The first British settlers, too, were convicts. The laws were so bad in England that a fellow might be deported merely for giving cheek to a judge; and the convicts on the whole were very decent people, brutally treated in the penal settlements. They used to escape to the bush, and runaway convicts explored Australia mainly in search of food. One of them, in Tasmania, used, whenever he escaped, to take a party with him and eat them one by one, until he ran short of food and had to surrender.
Later on gold was discovered, and free settlers drifted in, filling the country, but the miners and the farmers were too busy earning a living to do much exploration. So the exploring fell to English gentlemen, brave men, but hopeless tenderfeet, who knew nothing of bushcraft and generally died of hunger or thirst in districts where the native-born colonial grows rich to-day.
Edgar John Eyre, for instance, a Yorkshireman, landed in Sydney at the age of sixteen, and at twenty-five was a rich sheep-farmer, appointed by government protector of the black fellows. In 1840 the colonists of South Australia wanted a trail for drifting sheep into Western Australia, and young Eyre, from what he had learned among the savages, said the scheme was all bosh, in which he was perfectly right. He thought that the best line for exploring was northward, and set out to prove his words, but got tangled up in the salt bogs surrounding Torrens, and very nearly lost his whole party in an attempt to wade across. After that failure he felt that he had wasted the money subscribed in a wildcat project, so to make good set out again to find a route for sheep along thewaterless south coast of the continent. He knew the route was impossible, but it is a poor sort of courage that has to feed on hope, and the men worth having are those who leave their hopes behind to march light while they do their duty.
Eyre’s party consisted of himself and his ranch foreman Baxter, a favorite black boy Wylie, who was his servant, and two other natives who had been on the northward trip. They had nine horses, a pony, six sheep, and nine weeks’ rations on the pack animals.
The first really dry stage was one hundred twenty-eight miles without a drop of water, and it was not the black fellows, but Eyre, the tenderfoot, who went ahead and found the well that saved them. The animals died off one by one, so that the stores had to be left behind, and there was no food but rotten horse-flesh which caused dysentery, no water save dew collected with a sponge from the bushes after the cold nights. The two black fellows deserted, but after three days came back penitent and starving, thankful to be reinstated.
These black fellows did not believe the trip was possible, they wanted to go home, they thought the expedition well worth plundering, and so one morning while Eyre was rounding up the horses they shot Baxter, plundered the camp and bolted. Only Eyre and his boy Wylie were left, but if they lived the deserters might be punished. So the two black fellows, armed with Baxter’s gun, tried to hunt down Eyre and his boy with a view to murder. They came so near at night that Eyre once heard them shout to Wylie to desert. Eyre and the boy stole off, marching sorapidly that the murderers were left behind and perished.
A week later, still following the coast of the Great Bight, Wylie discovered a French ship lying at anchor, and the English skipper fed the explorers for a fortnight until they were well enough to go on. Twenty-three more days of terrible suffering brought Eyre and his boy, looking like a brace of scarecrows, to a hilltop overlooking the town of Albany. They had reached Western Australia, the first travelers to cross from the eastern to the western colonies.
In after years Eyre was governor of Jamaica.
Australia, being the harshest country on earth, breeds the hardiest pioneers, horsemen, bushmen, trackers, hunters, scouts, who find the worst African or American travel a sort of picnic. The bushie is disappointing to town Australians because he has no swank, and nothing of the brilliant picturesqueness of the American frontiersman. He is only a tall, gaunt man, lithe as a whip, with a tongue like a whip-lash; and it is on bad trips or in battle that one finds what he is like inside, a most knightly gentleman with a vein of poetry.
Anyway the Melbourne people were cracked in 1860 when they wanted an expedition to cross Australia northward, and instead of appointing bushmen for the job selected tenderfeet. Burke was an Irishman, late of the Hungarian cavalry, and the Royal Irish Constabulary, serving as an officer in the Victorian police. Wills was a Devon man, with some frontier training on the sheep runs, but had taken to astronomy andsurveying. There were several other white men, and three Afghans with a train of camels.
They left Melbourne with pomp and circumstance, crossed Victoria through civilized country, and made a base camp on the Darling River at Menindie. There Burke sacked two mutinous followers and his doctor scuttled in a funk, so he took on Wright, an old settler who knew the way to Cooper’s Creek four hundred miles farther on. Two hundred miles out Wright was sent back to bring up stores from Menindie, while the expedition went on to make an advanced base at Cooper’s Creek. Everything was to depend on the storage of food at that base.
While they were waiting for Wright to come up with their stores, Wills and another man prospected ninety miles north from Cooper’s Creek to the Stony Desert, a land of white quartz pebbles and polished red sandstone chips. The explorer Sturt had been there, and come back blind. No man had been beyond.
Wills, having mislaid his three camels, came back ninety miles afoot without water, to find the whole expedition stuck at Cooper’s Creek, waiting for stores. Mr. Wright at Menindie burned time, wasting six weeks before he attempted to start with the stores, and Burke at last could bear the delay no longer. There were thunder-storms giving promise of abundant water for once in the northern desert, so Burke marched with Wills, King and Gray, taking a horse and six camels.
William Brahe was left in charge at the camp at Cooper’s Creek, to remain with ample provisions until Wright turned up, but not to leave except in dire extremity.
Burke’s party crossed the glittering Stony Desert, and watching the birds who always know the way to water, they came to a fine lake, where they spent Christmas day. Beyond that they came to the Diamantina and again there was water. The country improved, there were northward flowing streams to cheer them on their way, and at last they came to salt water at the head of the Gulf of Carpentaria. They had crossed the continent from south to north.
With blithe hearts they set out on their return, and if they had to kill the camels for food, then to eat snakes, which disagreed with them, still there would be plenty when they reached Cooper’s Creek. Gray complained of being ill, but pilfering stores is not a proper symptom of any disease, so Burke gave him a thrashing by way of medicine. When he died, they delayed one day for his burial; one day too much, for when they reached Cooper’s Creek they were just nine hours late. Thirty-one miles they made in the last march and reeled exhausted into an empty camp ground. Cut in the bark of a tree were the words “Dig, 21 April 1861.” They dug a few inches into the earth where they found a box of provisions, and a bottle containing a letter.
“The depot party of the V. E. E. leave this camp to-day to return to the Darling. I intend to go S. E. from camp sixty miles to get into our old track near Bulloo. Two of my companions and myself are quite well; the third, Patten, has been unable to walk for the last eighteen days, as his leg has been severely hurt when thrown from one of the horses. No person has been up here from Darling. We have six camels andtwelve horses in good working condition. William Brahe.”
It would be hopeless with two exhausted camels to try and catch up with that march. Down Cooper’s Creek one hundred fifty miles the South Australian Mounted Police had an outpost, and the box of provisions would last out that short journey.
They were too heart-sick to make an inscription on the tree, but left a letter in the bottle, buried. A few days later Brahe returned with the industrious Mr. Wright and his supply train. Here is the note in Wright’sdiary:—
“May eighth. This morning I reached the Cooper’s Creek depot and found no sign of Mr. Burke’s having visited the creek, or the natives having disturbed the stores.”
Only a few miles away the creek ran out into channels of dry sand where Burke, Wills and King were starving, ragged beggars fed by the charitable black fellows on fish and a seed called nardoo, of which they made their bread. There were nice fat rats also, delicious baked in their skins, and the natives brought them fire-wood for the camp.
Again they attempted to reach the Mounted Police outpost, but the camels died, the water failed, and they starved. Burke sent Wills back to Cooper’s Creek. “No trace,” wrote Wills in his journal, “of any one except the blacks having been here since we left.” Brahe and Wright had left no stores at the camp ground.
Had they only been bushmen the tracks would have told Wills of help within his reach, the fish hookswould have won them food in plenty. It is curious, too, that Burke died after a meal of crow and nardoo, there being neither sugar nor fat in these foods, without which they can not sustain a man’s life. Then King left Burke’s body, shot three crows and brought them to Wills, who was lying dead in camp. Three months afterward a relief party found King living among the natives “wasted to a shadow, and hardly to be distinguished as a civilized being but by the remnants of the clothes upon him.”
“They should not have gone,” said one pioneer of these lost explorers. “They weren’t bushmen.” Afterward a Mr. Collis and his wife lived four years in plenty upon the game and fish at the Innaminka water-hole where poor Burke died of hunger.
Such were the first crossings from east to west, and from south to north of the Australian continent.