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 so rapidly 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.
II
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 and surveying. 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.