by Tim Flannery
I have given Lewis written instructions to justify his leaving me, should I die, and have made such arrangement as I can for the preservation of my journal and maps. The advance party has started again, and we followed till a little after sunrise, when our camels showed signs of distress, and we camped. Should the advance party see likely smokes they are to turn to them.
My party at least are now in that state that, unless it please God to save us, we cannot live more than twenty-four hours. We are at our last drop of water, and the smallest bit of dried meat chokes me. I fear my son must share my fate, as he will not leave me. God have mercy upon us, for we are brought very low, and by the time death reaches us we shall not regret exchanging our present misery for that state in which the weary are at rest.
We have tried to do our duty, and have been disappointed in all our expectations. I have been in excellent health during the whole journey, and am so still, being merely worn out from want of food and water. Let no self-reproaches afflict anyone respecting me. I undertook the journey for the benefit of my family, and I was quite equal to it under all the circumstances that could be reasonably anticipated, but difficulties and losses have come upon us so thickly for the last few months that we have not been able to move; thus our provisions are gone, but this would not have stopped us could we have found water without such laborious search. The country is terrible. I do not believe men ever traversed so vast an extent of continuous desert.
We follow this afternoon on the advance tracks as far as our camels can take us. Richard shot me a little bird. It was only about the size of a sparrow, but it did me good. If the country would only give any single thing we could eat, I should do very well, but we cannot find a snake, kite or crow. There are a few wallabies in the spinifex, but we cannot get them. Our miseries are not a little increased by the ants. We cannot get a moment’s rest, night or day, for them.
13th—My rear party could only advance eight miles, when the camels gave in. Our food is scanty enough, but our great want is water. We have a little, but dare not take more than a spoonful at a time, whilst the heat is so great that the slightest exposure and exertion bring on a parching thirst. We are as low and weak as living men well can be, and our only hope of prolonging our lives is in the advance party finding some native camp; we have seen smokes, but are in too crippled a state to go to them.
14th—Early this morning my son took our man White, and started in the direction of the smoke we had last seen. At midday, whilst I was sipping in solitude a drop of water out of a spoon, Lewis came up with a bag of water.
Never shall I forget the draught of water I then got, but I was so weak that I almost fainted shortly after drinking it. The advance party had run up a smoke and found a well about twelve miles off. Our lives were saved, but poor Charley was nearly killed. He had gone forward alone (at his own request, and as he had done before) to the native camp, the remainder of the party with the camels keeping out of sight. The blacks treated Charley kindly, and gave him water, but when he cooeed for the party to come up, and the camels appeared, then I suppose the men were frightened, and supposed Charley had entrapped them; they instantly speared him in the back and arm, cut his skull with a waddy, and nearly broke his jaw.
I do not think this attack was made with any premeditated malice, but doubtless they would have killed the lad, had not the remainder of the party, rushing to his rescue, frightened them away. Unfortunately, the few medicines we had not eaten had, by some oversight, been left behind at the camp, where we had abandoned almost everything but the clothes we happened to stand up in. Lewis returned to the well, and was to come out and meet us next day with more water. We started at sunset, but could not keep on the tracks for more than two miles when we camped.
15th—We made another effort at daylight to get on, but one of the camels broke down, though it had not carried a saddle. The poor beast had become quite blind, and staggered about in a most alarming way. We could not get her beyond a mile and a half, when she knocked up under the shade of a bush, and would go no farther. We therefore also sat down to await the water to be sent out to us. The heat was intense, and my son, having been obliged to walk because the camel could not carry him, suffered very greatly from thirst, and had not water been brought us before midday, it would have gone ill with him. Between 10 and 11 a.m. Lewis returned with water from the well.
The camel, though we gave it some water, could not move from the shade of the bush. We tried to drive it, and to drag it, but to no purpose, therefore we shot it.
* The number of flies in Australia, and the rapidity with which they breed, are quite horrible. Nothing in the shape of meat can be left exposed for a moment, otherwise a swarm of flies descend and seem to emit living maggots on the flesh. They assail the ears, nostrils and eyes of the traveller, who is unable to stir without a veil, and in Colonel Warburton’s expedition the additional precaution of rubbing Holloway’s ointment round the eye had to be taken. Owing to the flies and the impoverished condition of the blood, the slightest abrasion of the skin led to its festering and becoming an ugly wound. A little scratch, that under other circumstances would pass unnoticed, here becomes a troublesome, ulcerous sore. Some idea of the condition of the camel’s back may be imagined when the reader hears that the maggots were scooped out with a pint pot! [Charles Eden]
* A small black ant seems to have been the avowed enemy of this expedition. The ground literally swarmed with them, and a stamp of the foot brought them up in thousands. When the wearied men threw themselves down under the shade of a bush, to snatch the half-hour’s slumber their exhausted frames required, the merciless littie insects attacked them, and not only effectually routed sleep, but even rendered a recumbent position impossible. The scanty clothing possessed by the travellers was no protection; so feeble a bulwark was speedily under-run by the enemy, and their successful invasion announced by sharp painful nips from their powerful mandibles. Often, when the vertical sun poured down in full fierceness on their heads, and the poor shade afforded even by a bush would have been an inestimable blessing, the travellers were driven away from the shelter by their relentless persecutors, and in despair flung themselves down on the burning sand, where it was too hot even for an ant. By day or by night the little insects gave them no respite. [Charles Eden]
ERNEST GILES
Living, Raw, Dying, 1874
Ernest Giles was retrenched from the Victorian Post Office in 1854 during an austerity drive. The post office’s loss was our gain, for Giles went on to become one of the most audacious and eloquent explorers in the history of the continent. For Giles, exploration was a huge and irresistible game of brinkmanship. It was a game in which he gambled his life, the lives of his horses, and even his men. Here in the waterless wasteland later known as the Gibson Desert, we see Giles face his nadir. Yet even when things are at their most desperate, when the explorers are a hundred miles from nowhere, with just a few pints of water and one exhausted horse between them, all Giles can think of is the quest. ‘Oh, how ardently I longed for a camel,’ he writes, as he sees the distant and untouchable ranges on the horizon.
And then, when Giles is alone, without water and horse, he hangs grimly on in conditions that would have killed a lesser man. The tiny wallaby he eats alive, and which perhaps tips the balance from death to life, is a meal that few could have written about so enthusiastically.
20th April 1874—Gibson and I, having got all the gear we required, took a week’s supply of smoked horse, and four excellent horses, two to ride and two to carry water, all in fine condition. I rode the Fair Maid of Perth, an excellent walker; I gave Gibson the big ambling horse, Badger, and we packed the big cob, a splendid bay horse and fine weight-carrier, with a pair of water-bags that contained twenty gallons at starting. The other horse was Darkie, a fine, strong, nuggetty-black horse, who carried two five-gallon kegs of water and our stock of smoked horse, rugs etc. We reached the Circus, at twenty miles, early, and the horses had time to feed and fill themsel
ves after being watered, though the grass was very poor.
21st—While I went for the horses Gibson topped up the water-bags and kegs, and poured a quantity of water out of the hole on to a shallow place, so that if we turned any horses back, they could drink without precipitating themselves into the deep and slippery hole when they returned here. As we rode away, I remarked to Gibson that the day was the anniversary of Burke and Wills’s return to their depot at Cooper’s Creek, and then recited to him, as he did not appear to know anything whatever about it, the hardships they endured, their desperate struggles for existence, and death there, and I casually remarked that Wills had a brother who also lost his life in the field of discovery. He had gone out with Sir John Franklin in 1845.†
Gibson then said, ‘Oh! I had a brother who died with Franklin at the North Pole, and my father had a deal of trouble to get his pay from government.’ He seemed in a very jocular vein this morning, which was not often the case, for he was usually rather sulky, sometimes for days together, and he said, ‘How is it, that in all these exploring expeditions a lot of people go and die?’
I said, ‘I don’t know, Gibson, how it is, but there are many dangers in exploring, besides accidents and attacks from the natives, that may at any time cause the death of some of the people engaged in it; but I believe want of judgment or knowledge or courage in individuals often brought about their deaths. Death, however, is a thing that must occur to everyone sooner or later.’
To this he replied, ‘Well, I shouldn’t like to die in this part of the country, anyhow.’
In this sentiment I quite agreed with him, and the subject dropped. At eleven miles we were not only clear of the range, but had crossed to the western side of Lake Christopher, and were fairly enclosed in the sandhills, which were of course covered with triodia.† Numerous fine casuarinas grew in the hollows between them, and some stunted bloodwood trees (red gum) ornamented the tops of some of the sandhills. At twenty-two miles, on a west course, we turned the horses out for an hour. It was very warm, there was no grass. The horses rested in the shade of a desert-oak tree, while we remained under another. These trees are very handsome, with round umbrageous tops; the leaves are round and fringe-like.
We had a meal of smoked horse; and here I discovered that the bag with our supply of horseflesh in it held but a most inadequate supply for two of us for a week, there being scarcely sufficient for one. Gibson had packed it at starting, and I had not previously seen it. The afternoon was oppressively hot—at least it always seems so when one is away from water. We got over an additional eighteen miles, making a day’s stage of forty.
The country was all sandhills. The Rawlinson Range completely disappeared from view, even from the tops of the highest sandhills, at thirty-five miles. The travelling, though heavy enough, had not been so frightful as I had anticipated, for the lines of sandhills mostly ran east and west, and by turning about a bit we got several hollows between them to travel in. Had we been going north or south, north-easterly or southwesterly, it would have been dreadfully severe.
The triodia here reigns supreme, growing in enormous bunches and plots, and standing three and four feet high, while many of the long dry tops are as high as a man. This gives the country the appearance of dry grassy downs; and as it is dotted here and there with casuarina and bloodwood trees, and small patches of desert shrubs, its general appearance is by no means displeasing to the eye, though frightful to the touch. No sign of the recent presence of natives was anywhere visible, nor had the triodia been burnt for probably many years. At night we got what we in this region may be excused for calling a grass flat, there being some bunches of a thin and wiry kind of grass, though white and dry as a chip. I never saw the horses eat more than a mouthful or two of it anywhere, but there was nothing else, and no water.
22nd—The ants were so troublesome last night, I had to shift my bed several times. Gibson was not at all affected by them and slept well. We were in our saddles immediately after daylight. I was in hopes that a few miles might bring about a change of country, and so it did, but not an advantageous one to us. At ten miles from camp the horizon became flatter, the sandhills fell off, and the undulations became covered with brown gravel, at first very fine. At fifty-five miles it became coarser, and at sixty miles it was evident the country was becoming firmer, if not actually stony. Here we turned the horses out, having come twenty miles.
I found one of our large water-bags leaked more than I expected, and our supply of water was diminishing with distance. Here Gibson preferred to keep the big cob to ride, against my advice, instead of Badger, so, after giving Badger and Darkie a few pints of water each, Gibson drove them back on the tracks about a mile and let them go, to take their own time and find their own way back to the Circus. They both looked terribly hollow and fatigued, and went away very slowly. Sixty miles through such a country as this tells fearfully upon a horse. The poor brutes were very unwilling to leave us, as they knew we had some water, and they also knew what a fearful region they had before them to reach the Circus again.
We gave the two remaining horses all the water contained in the two large water-bags, except a quart or two for ourselves. This allowed them a pretty fair drink, though not a circumstance to what they would have swallowed. They fed a little while we remained here. The day was warm enough. The two five-gallon kegs with water we hung in the branches of a tree, with the pack-saddles, empty water-bags etc. of the other two horses.
Leaving the Kegs—I always called this place by that name—we travelled another twenty miles by night, the country being still covered with small stones and thickly clothed with the tall triodia. There were thin patches of mulga and mallee scrub occasionally. No view could be obtained to the west; all around us, north, south, east and west, were alike, the undulations forming the horizons were not generally more than seven or eight miles distant from one another, and when we reached the rim or top of one we obtained exactly the same view for the next seven or eight miles. The country still retained all the appearance of fine, open, dry, grassy downs, and the triodia tops waving in the heated breeze had all the semblance of good grass. The afternoon had been very oppressive, and the horses were greatly disinclined to exert themselves, though my mare went very well.
It was late by the time we encamped, and the horses were much in want of water, especially the big cob, who kept coming up to the camp all night, and tried to get at our water-bags, pannikins etc. The instinct of a horse, when in the first stage of thirst in getting hold of any utensil that ever had water in it, is surprising and most annoying, but teaching us by most persuasive reasons how akin they are to human beings. We had one small water-bag hung in a tree. I did not think of this just at the moment when my mare came straight up to it and took it in her teeth, forcing out the cork and sending the water up, which we were both dying to drink, in a beautiful jet which, descending to earth, was irrevocably lost.
We now had only a pint or two left. Gibson was now very sorry he had exchanged Badger for the cob, as he found the cob very dull and heavy to get on; this was not usual, for he was generally a most willing animal, but he would only go at a jog while my mare was a fine walker. There had been a hot wind from the north all day. The following morning (23rd) there was a most strange dampness in the air, and I had a vague feeling, such as must have been felt by augurs, and seers of old, who trembled as they told events to come; for this was the last day on which I ever saw Gibson. It was a lamentable day in the history of this expedition. The horizon to the west was hid in clouds. We left the camp even before daylight, and as we had camped on the top of a rim we knew we had seven or eight miles to go before another view could be obtained. The next rim was at least ten miles from the camp, and there was some slight indications of a change.
We were now ninety miles from the Circus water, and 110 from Fort McKellar. The horizon to the west was still obstructed by another rise three or four miles away; but to the west-north-west I could see a line of low stony ridges, ten m
iles off. To the south was an isolated little hill, six or seven miles away. I determined to go to the ridges, when Gibson complained that his horse could never reach them, and suggested that the next rise to the west might reveal something better in front. The ridges were five miles away, and there were others still farther preventing a view. When we reached them we had come ninety-eight miles from the Circus. Here Gibson, who was always behind, called out and said his horse was going to die, or knock up, which are synonymous terms in this region.
Now we had reached a point where at last a different view was presented to us, and I believed a change of country was at hand, for the whole western, down to the south-western, horizon was broken by lines of ranges, being most elevated at the southwestern end. They were all notched and irregular, and I believed formed the eastern extreme of a more elevated and probably mountainous region to the west. The ground we now stood upon, and for a mile or two past, was almost a stony hill itself, and for the first time in all the distance we had come we had reached a spot where water might run during rain, though we had not seen any place where it could lodge.
Between us and the hilly horizon to the west the country seemed to fall into a kind of long valley, and it looked dark, and seemed to have timber in it, and here also the natives had formerly burnt the spinifex, but not recently. The hills to the west were twenty-five to thirty miles away, and it was with extreme regret I was compelled to relinquish a farther attempt to reach them. Oh, how ardently I longed for a camel! How ardently I gazed upon this scene! At this moment I would even my jewel eternal have sold for power to span the gulf that lay between! But it could not be, situated as I was; compelled to retreat—of course with the intention of coming again with a larger supply of water—now the sooner I retreated the better.