Page:The Boy Travellers in Australasia.djvu/546

522 eighteen men, twenty-seven camels (which had been imported specially for the service), a great many pack-horses, and several wagons.

"They formed a camp on Cooper's Creek, and left a party in charge of it, under command of a man named Brahé; Burke and Wills, with two men, King and Gray, with one horse and six camels, then pushed on to the Gulf of Carpentaria, and thus made the journey across the continent. On their return they suffered great privations; Gray died, and the others were so weak that they hardly had strength to bury him; the horse was killed for food, four of the camels were abandoned, and on the evening of April 21, 1861, the three men crawled into the camp on Cooper's Creek.

"Imagine their despair when they found the camp deserted, and the word '' rudely cut on a tree. They did dig, and found a bottle containing a letter saying that the camp had been abandoned by Brahé that very morning. He had left a few articles of food, but no stimulants, tea, or clothing, of which they were in great need. They rested a few days, and then tried to reach a sheep-station one hundred and fifty miles away; but they were driven back by scarcity of water, and both the camels broke down and had to be shot. Brahé returned to the camp only two hours after Burke and Wills left it; but Burke had buried his despatches in the hole where the bottle was found, replaced the earth carefully, and left no sign to indicate that he had been there. Consequently Brahé supposed the explorers had not returned.

"The wanderers found some friendly natives who assisted them, but both Burke and Wills died of exhaustion within a few days of each other, about six weeks after their return to the camp. King joined a party of natives, and was eventually rescued and brought to Melbourne. He was found by one of four search expeditions that were sent out by the Victorian Government as soon as it was known that the depot on Cooper's Creek had been abandoned. Though only one of these expeditions was able to afford assistance to the missing explorers, all made interesting journeys, and added considerably to the stock of geographical information concerning the country.

"Since the unhappy termination of the expedition of Burke and Wills several expeditions have sought to explore Western Australia. The first man who succeeded in traversing the Great Desert from east to west was Colonel Egerton Warburton, who started from Alice Springs, on the overland telegraph route, in April, 1873, and reached the mouth of the Oakover River, in Western Australia, in the following December. He had seventeen camels when he started, but was obliged to kill or