Lost Expedition STARVING in the Desert

- For many explorers they are heroes who challenge the unknown. With courage and determination, they walk into the darkness to find the light on the other side. But this is not one of those stories. This is a story of failure and incompetence, of a man whose desire for fame and fortune led to the deaths of seven men, wasting away in the

desert

, until illness and exhaustion killed them. This is the dark story of the "Burke and Wills Expedition." In 1853, an Irish soldier named Robert Burke emigrated to Australia and joined the police force. His charisma allowed him to rise quickly and Burke assumed the coveted position of magistrate in the colony of Victoria.

Quick-tempered and eager for fame and distinction, his gestures were eccentric and his decisions arbitrary. Locals referred to him as a daredevil with reckless streaks. He considered himself a bad reflection as a gentleman who, at 39, had not yet found a wife. Burke tried unsuccessfully to win the affections of a local theater girl, but she rejected his advances. Still rejected by her rejection and with nothing to lose, he was determined to make a name for himself. In 1860, the opportunity arose for Burke's size lumber to elevate him to the level of wealth and status he so desperately desired. The South Australian government was offering a reward of £2,000 for the first man to cross the Australian continent, from south to north, a distance of more than 2,000 miles.

The objective of the

expedition

was to discover new lands in the harsh interior of the continent and pave the way for the installation of a telegraph connecting Australia with the Dutch East Indies and then with Europe. By nominating himself to lead the

expedition

, he captivated those in powerful positions into believing that he was the best candidate. He had no prior experience exploring and had never ventured very far into the wild. A quarrelsome nature, Burke also lacked the temperament of a good leader. He was not at all qualified to command an expedition. Oblivious to the shortcomings, the Expedition Committee placed all its trust in Burke.

A letter from the committee said: "We entrust you with the utmost discretion." This was the first of a series of errors that would doom the expedition from the beginning. The committee also selected William Wills, a 27-year-old surveyor, to be third in command and responsible for surveying the newly discovered land. A brilliant and inquisitive man, Wills was Burke's opposite in every way. He would prove to be one of the few competent men on the expedition. Rushing to organize the effort, Burke gathered supplies and recruited 16 men to join him on the long march. The expedition carried with it a large amount of equipment, including unnecessary and cumbersome items such as a solid oak table and a Chinese gong, packed under heavy carts.

The expedition set out from the city of Melbourne in the Colony of Victoria on August 20, 1860. Its objective was to reach the Gulf of Carpentaria in tropical northern Australia. The group's progress was incredibly slow, traveling only three miles on the first day. After two months, the expedition had only traveled a few hundred miles, through relatively flat and inhabited territory. Frustrated by the slow progress and Burke's routine reprimanding of his perceived misbehavior, the men became even more demoralized. Instead of trying to boost the morale of his group, Burke fired 13 of the expedition's men and rehired eight unskilled workers from towns around him.

In the town of Kinchega, in western New South Wales, the expedition's second-in-command and his only surgeon resigned in disgust after arguing with Burke over his lack of care for the camels. The expedition was beginning to fall apart. To make matters worse, Burke discovered that another expedition led by explorer John Stewart had set out from Adelaide in southern Australia, hoping to cross the continent first. This news devastated Burke, as Stewart was an efficient and well-regarded explorer, his own group only reaching a speed of two miles per hour. Surely Stewart would beat him in the race to cross the continent.

Acting accordingly, Burke decided to divide the group by taking the strongest horses and seven of the fittest men to a place called Cooper's Creek, the farthest limit of the Europeans' northern expansion. Upon reaching the creek, the plan was to camp for several months to wait for the rest of the expedition to catch up and for the weather to cool before continuing their journey. With the threat of victory being taken from him, Burke grew older and more patient, and after only a week he decided to split the match again. Burke and Wills along with two other men, Gray and King, continued north on December 16, in the height of summer in Australia, leaving four men under the command of William Bray at Coopers Creek camp.

Burke's inexperience caused her to overestimate his abilities and underestimate how long the trip would take to reach the north coast and return. The men left behind were instructed to wait three months and, if Burke did not return, leave for the south. Wills secretly ordered Bray's group to wait four months, as he had determined that Burke had incorrectly interpreted the maps. Burke and Wills encountered temperatures exceeding a scorching 120 Fahrenheit or 50 degrees Celsius in the shade, traveling through oppressive heat in conditions we can barely imagine. The group advanced north through the

desert

. After several grueling weeks, the group reached a mangrove swamp that blocked their path.

This was the Flinders River delta, a vast tropical wetland that was difficult to traverse. They could taste the salt water of the ocean and could see the tide rise and fall within the swamp. But no matter how hard they tried, they found that the path was impossible. They were only a few dozen miles from the coast, their final destination, but 15 miles into the swamplands they were forced to turn back. The agony of this decision must have weighed heavily on Burke, but he knew that time and rations were running out. It had taken them two months to get here and the men had consumed more than two-thirds of their food, having not waited for autumn as originally planned, their situation worsened when the monsoon season began.

Even after leaving the swamp, the men began fighting in the muddy terrain, which further slowed their progress. Several camels began to weaken and had to be killed, but their emaciated corpses turned out to be thin and fair for the men. As time passed, they began to abandon their team when pack animals fell, and on April 10, their last horse, Billy, was shot and eaten. Shortly thereafter, both Burke and Gray contracted dysentery. The grumpy Burke believed that Bray was faking the illness and when he caught Gray stealing food from one of his backpacks, he brutally beat him. On April 8, Gray could barely walk and on April 17 he died.

Little is known about the nature of Gray's death, but it is believed that Burke had seriously injured the man who was already weak from the illness. The three remaining men buried Gray in a shallow unmarked grave and continued south. After another two weeks of travel, the men finally returned to Coopers Creek. The camp was deserted, with no way of knowing how close the men were. Bray's group had left without them only a few hours earlier, the campfire still burning. The men fell to their knees and cried. After a while, the men saw a tree with marks on it, engraved on the trunk was the date of that day and the word dig, digging the ground near the tree, they found a small box with supplies and a letter addressed to the men. .

He explained that Bray's match could no longer wait. Scurvy had taken hold of the men, although only a few hours later Burke's party knew that, due to their deteriorating state of health, they would not be able to reach them. Realizing the seriousness of the situation, Burke, Wills and King changed course and set out for a distant cattle station in southern Australia, 150 miles to the southwest, the nearest point of civilization. Before leaving, Burke wrote a letter detailing his fate and taking it to the same place where the suppliers had been. They left no new carvings on the tree to indicate that they had ever returned to Cooper's Creek.

This would prove to be another fatal mistake. As Burke, Will, and King struggled across the desert, they followed the river downstream toward the southwest. Their speed was slow, advancing only five miles a day. After their last camel became stranded in the river, they shot it dead. Now, without pack animals, the men could no longer carry enough water to get out of the river and complete their overland journey through the desert. Suffering from malnutrition, the men encountered natives who offered them roots and plants in exchange for a little sugar, but unknown to them, one of the plants was sapping their strength, consuming this raw plant caused them a severe vitamin deficiency, although They were eating food and their bodies became weak.

After several days of slow progress, Wills must have realized that his chances of survival were slim. He returned to the Coopers Creek camp to deposit his journal, which contained his maps and observations of the expedition, in the supply box, hoping that his sacrifice would come to nothing. While he was away, Burke had become increasingly paranoid and, in his delusional state, shot one of the natives helping them, causing the entire tribe to flee. Burke was heard cursing Bray for not leaving them enough supplies or pack animals. By June 1861, the men's pace had slowed to a crawl and famine had set in.

Suffering from exhaustion and not wanting to be a burden on the other, Wills insisted that the other two go ahead and leave him to die in a waterhole. He wrote a letter addressed to his father and gave it to King for safekeeping. In it, he wrote: "These are probably the last lines you'll ever get" from me. "We are on the verge of famine." In the letter, Will stated that he had no faith that God would save him and that he had accepted his fate. The two men continued to let Wills die. After fighting for nine months, watching the expedition crumble before his eyes with no one else to blame, Burke lay down for the last time and died just two days after Wills.

This left King alone in the vast Australian desert. Shortly after leaving Coopers Creek, Bray's party encountered the heavy wagon train attempting to reach the base camp at Coopers Creek. The convoy had also suffered. They had been attacked by local tribes and three of their group had died on the slow march north. With a lingering sense of guilt, Bray made the decision to return to Cooper's Creek to see if Burke's group had returned. He suspected that he had left too soon and that the fighting men might have been awaiting his return. After retracing his steps, Ray returned to the camp a few weeks later, finding it deserted with no evidence that the men had ever returned, without thinking to check if the supply box had been touched.

He assumed that Burke and Wills had not returned. Bray's party left camp a second time and returned south in the hope that Burke and Wills would make their way back. After six months without receiving news of the expedition, the media began to question the group's whereabouts. Faced with mounting public pressure, several rescue efforts set out from Melbourne to find the

lost

expedition. Continuing north and searching for several months along the Flinders River, the rescue party made a surprising discovery. They encountered a group of natives and with them traveled a white man dressed in rags and plagued with diseases.

Rescue surveyor Edwin Welch called the man and asked him if he was from the Burke and Wills expedition. In a horse voice, he confirmed that he was John King. When asked about the whereabouts of the other men, he replied: "Dead, both dead." A long time ago." King fell to the ground and wept bitterly. In total, Burke and Wills were in the desert for 10 months. Without having made the crossing, their main contribution was the maps and the diary that Wills had the foresight to return In the case of Coopers Creek, one of the rescuers, while searching for Burke and Wills, managed to cross Australia from north to south in just nine months, receiving a £2,000 reward for their efforts as the first men to do so.

The tragedy of Burke and Wills's story lies in the near misses and the ease with which the mistakes made could have been avoided. In a cumulative twist of irony he achieved the level of fame he so desired in the abject failure of the. expedition. Thank you for watching this video, leave a like and a comment and see you next time.