The Mammoth Book of Losers Read online

  The man they chose by secret ballot to lead the expedition was a forty-year-old Irish career soldier and ex-police officer, Robert O’Hara Burke. He certainly looked the part – a huge, burly man with a wild, bushy beard, a mysterious scar on one cheek and an air of authority. But Burke had no sense of direction, let alone any experience of bushcraft. He regularly got lost on his way home from the pub.

  He prepared for his epic journey by lying for hours in a bathtub in his backyard in a pith helmet. Burke was also notoriously wayward in his private life and had racked up a mountain of gambling debts and was prone to terrible rages and impulsive, reckless decision-making.

  There was another curious dimension to his leadership – he wasn’t motivated by the prize money. He certainly wasn’t motivated by the fundamental explorer’s trait: curiosity. He simply wanted to impress a young actress named Julia Mathews, a star of the Melbourne stage with whom he had recently become infatuated.

  Burke’s second-in-command, George Landells, was hired because of his expertise with camels, several of which he had personally imported from India. The committee thought that camels were the ideal beasts of burden for the arid expanses of the Australian hinterland. Landells was accompanied by a young soldier from India, John King, as chief camel-tender, plus four Indian sepoys. Their third-in-command was a young surveyor from Devon – William John Wills. In total, the nineteen-man expedition comprised six Irishmen, five Englishmen, four Indians, three Germans and an American, plus twenty-three horses, six wagons and twenty-six camels.

  On 20 August 1860, a crowd of 15,000 turned out in Melbourne’s Royal Park to wave them off. Burke promised, “I will cross Australia or perish in the attempt,” then wearing his top hat, he mounted his horse Billy and, to the applause of the crowd and the sound of the band playing “Cheer, Boys, Cheer”, he set off at the head of a 500-yard-long cavalcade of men and camels carrying twenty tons of supplies and equipment, including a cedar-topped dining table and two chairs, a Chinese gong, twelve dandruff brushes for camels, four enema kits and sixty gallons of rum.

  From the outset, progress was painfully slow. The expedition was half a kilometre long and buckling under its own weight, partly due to the committee’s insistence on hauling several wagonloads of dried beef instead of travelling with livestock to slaughter along the way. One of the wagons broke before it even left Royal Park. Torrential rain also made their equipment sodden and heavy, but Burke chose to make the journey even more difficult by ignoring the established tracks and travelling cross-country. Meanwhile, Landell’s camels got drunk on the rum, given to them in the mistaken belief that it would prevent the animals from getting scurvy.

  While Burke rode imperiously at the head of the column, his disgruntled men were left to drag intoxicated camels through slippery mud, or dig out the horses and wagons when they became stuck in sand. They were also less than impressed when, at the end of the first day of travelling, Burke galloped all the way back to Julia Matthews in Melbourne and begged her to marry him. He never did get an answer.

  By the time the expedition reached Menindie, the last white settlement on the edge of the Australian desert, the expedition had already taken 56 days to cover 466 miles – the mail coach did the same journey in ten days. To speed things up, Burke decided to lighten the load by dumping some of the supplies, including the lime juice, which they needed to prevent scurvy, and the guns and ammunition. The scientists in the group, to their great annoyance, were ordered to dump most of their equipment and to pitch in and do the same manual work as everyone else.

  All the while, Burke was stamping the expedition with his own peculiar style of leadership, sacking and demoting people right, left and centre. Landells had decided by this time that Burke was mad and told him as much. Burke challenged him to a duel. Landells refused and quit, leaving the surveyor, William Wills, as deputy leader. The camel handling went to the small, shy John King. One by one, the men, despairing of Burke’s chaotic leadership, deserted and went back to Melbourne. By this time, only two of Burke’s original officers remained; fifteen men had been dismissed and another eight hired.

  The party was only making about two miles a day, so Burke decided to speed up their progress by splitting the group. One party was sent back to pick up more supplies. Meanwhile, Burke took the strongest horses and seven of the fittest men plus a small amount of equipment, intending to push on quickly to a series of waterholes known as Cooper’s Creek, about halfway to the north coast, and then wait for the others to catch up.

  In November 1860, Burke and his party reached Cooper’s Creek, beyond which no European had ever been before. The most difficult part of their journey lay ahead and they were approaching mid-summer. The sensible thing to do would be to wait for cooler weather, but Burke was impatient to press on. He decided to split the group again and make a dash for the coast. Half the group were told to stay put at Cooper’s Creek for three months and wait for the supplies to arrive. On 16 December, Burke, Wills, King and Charles Gray set off for the north coast with six camels, one horse and enough food for just three months.

  Burke had fatally underestimated how long the dash to the north coast and back would take. He was counting on covering the 1,900-mile journey in ninety days, but the four men would be walking up to forty miles a day at the height of the Australian summer in temperatures of 50ºC. There was another unexpected obstacle – a mountain range. Rather than go around it, Burke decided to take the shortest route straight over the top, forcing the terrified animals to climb up steep slopes and skirt sheer ravines while their feet were badly ripped by the rocks. By the time they made it through, the camels were in a pitiful state.

  They were now halfway through their ninety-day journey time, but were still 125 miles away from the north coast. It was clear that if they continued they would not have enough food or water get them back to Cooper’s Creek. For Burke, the choice between saving his men’s lives and winning the love of Miss Matthews was straightforward – he pressed on. Leaving King, Gray and the injured camels near a creek, Burke and Wills made a final push for the coast. After two months travelling with barely a rest day, they found themselves bogged down in a massive mangrove swamp. Unable to hack their way through the dense undergrowth, they gave up, exhausted, and decided to head back to their colleagues. They were only twelve miles from the coast.

  Emaciated, starving and too weak to catch anything to eat, Burke, King, Gray and Wills stumbled back towards Cooper’s Creek. They had used up nearly three-quarters of their rations, so each man’s share of food and tea was halved. One by one, their beasts of burden, including Burke’s horse Billy, were shot and eaten. Gray, who was suffering from dysentery and actually dying of starvation, was caught pilfering an extra ration of porridge. Burke thought Gray was faking illness and gave him a beating. After that, Gray could no longer walk and had to be strapped to a camel. Burke still thought that he was acting. Nine days later, Gray was dead.

  On 21 April 1861, Burke, Wills and King staggered into Cooper’s Creek camp, expecting to find the support team waiting for them with fresh supplies. It was deserted. The word “DIG” had been carved on a coolibah tree. Underneath the tree, they unearthed a food box with a note that confirmed their worst fears; the support team had left only a few hours earlier, giving them up for dead. Wills wrote in his diary: “Our disappointment at finding the depot deserted may easily be imagined – returning in an exhausted state after four months of the severest travelling and privation, with our legs so paralyzed so that each found it a most trying task to walk just a few yards.”

  After just a couple of days’ rest, Burke made another rash decision. Instead of waiting for the other party to reach the water hole, they would head off south – not back to Minnie by the way they came, but they would go through uncharted desert.

  Critically, Burke didn’t leave any sign that he and his party had reached the waterhole. As a result, when the original support team finally arrived some days later, ubable to find any evidence
that Burke had been there, they went home.

  Meanwhile, Burke, Wills and King lay dying only a few miles away, further down Cooper’s Creek. They had a stroke of luck when some Aborigines found them and took pity, offering food and water, but when they asked for something in return for their hospitality, Burke fired his gun at them. The Aborigines left them to their fate.

  Wills was the first to die, then Burke; King would have died as well had the Aborigines not returned and offered help. King was eventually found by a relief expedition on 15 September 1861. When he was sufficiently recovered, he led his rescuers to Burke’s bleached bones, his hand still clutching his pistol.

  Seven men had died in the attempt to cross the continent of Australia from Melbourne to the north coast and only one of the four men who failed to reach the north coast, John King, lived to tell the tale. Along the way, they were beset by terrible organization, infighting and disastrous preparation. None of this prevented the Government from proclaiming Burke and Wills national heroes. Their remains were given Australia’s first ever State funeral procession, drawing a crowd of up to 100,000 spectators.

  John King received a gold watch and a pension of £180 a year from the Royal Society of Victoria but didn’t live to enjoy it. His health never recovered and he died of pulmonary tuberculosis aged thirty-three.

  South Australia won the construction of the Overland Telegraph Line and John McDouall Stuart was eventually awarded the £2,000 for being the first man to cross the continent and live to tell the story. Victoria’s prize for her efforts was just a couple of very famous but very dead explorers.

  Least Successful Expedition by Camel

  The name of John Ainsworth Horrocks could have been written large as one of Australia’s greatest frontiersmen had his career not been cut tragically short. In 1846, he set out to conquer the hitherto impenetrable hinterland of South Australia with several goats, a bull called Harry and an unnamed camel imported from Tenerife. The addition of the camel to the party was seen as a logistical masterstroke because previous trans-Australian expeditions, equipped with horses and bullocks, had all perished in the fierce heat. The decision turned out to be less of a coup than anticipated when, not long into the journey, the camel attacked their cook, biting a large chunk out of his head, then chewed all of the expedition’s flour bags, wasting most of the supplies.

  A couple of days later, the recalcitrant camel struck again, lurching into Horrocks just as he was loading his gun, causing him to shoot himself accidentally in the lower jaw, knocking out half of his teeth. Horrocks died in agony from his injuries several days later, the first explorer to be shot dead by his own camel.

  “Where a calculator on the ENIAC is equipped with 18,000 vacuum tubes and weighs 30 tons, computers in the future may have only 1,000 vacuum tubes and weigh only 1.5 tons.”

  Popular Mechanics, March 1949

  Most People Lost While Searching for a Lost Expedition

  Ever since Columbus, explorers have been losing their lives and suffering the agonies of frostbite, scurvy and starvation in search of the Northwest Passage, a shortcut to China and the Indies that was thought to exist somewhere through the ice floes of northern Canada, thereby avoiding the long and treacherous voyage around the Horn of Africa.

  As an exercise in futility, it was hard to beat; one long chapter of failure, disaster and tragedy as ships disappeared and explorers failed to return. But there was one name above all forever linked with failed attempts to find the Northwest Passage – that of John Franklin.

  Franklin was the ninth of twelve children born to a Lincolnshire shopkeeper. His family had some famous connections – his uncle was the explorer Matthew Flinders, and one of his nieces was married to the poet Alfred Lord Tennyson. His first taste of exploration was on board the ship Investigator captained by his uncle Matthew, tasked with a survey of the still largely uncharted coast of Australia. The mission was never completed due to bad planning, scurvy among the crew and the general unseaworthiness of the ship. Franklin found himself shipwrecked on a sandbank for six weeks until he was rescued: a portent for the rest of his career as an explorer.

  Franklin was a surprise choice when the British Admiralty asked him to lead an overland surveying party to the Arctic in 1819. He had never taken part in – let alone led – an overland polar expedition before and knew nothing about canoeing or hunting. He was an overweight, unhealthy-looking thirty-three-year-old who suffered from circulation problems in his fingers and toes, even in warm weather. Not exactly most people’s idea of the hardy Arctic explorer. But he had impressed the Admiralty with his “dignified and impressive good sense, sound judgement and presence of mind”. Presumably, someone also thought that his experience in Australia would come in useful for a trip to the frozen north.

  Franklin’s first trip to the Arctic set a new benchmark for failed polar exploration. He took insufficient supplies and his men knew nothing about survival techniques. His colleagues found that he was incapable of doing anything without first having a cup of tea and always insisted on sitting down to three square meals a day and even then could never travel overland more than eight miles a day without being carried. He was a very religious man who took with him everywhere a twelve-point checklist entitled “Have I this day walked with God?” He refused to walk anywhere at all on Sundays.

  Franklin and his party got completely lost and somehow managed to set fire to his camp three times. As supplies ran low and the crew were weakened by cold and exhaustion, unrest turned to rebellion. Two of his officers fought a duel over a sixteen-year-old Indian girl. Faced with starvation, one of his crew – Midshipman Robert Hood – resorted to cannibalism. He had eaten two of the team and was just preparing a third for the table, with a bullet through the forehead, when he was shot dead by an Indian guide. For his troubles, the guide was executed by Franklin’s second-in-command, Dr John Richardson. Franklin, one of the few who made it back, survived by eating lichen, rotting reindeer skins and shoe leather.

  The British valued courage rather than talent from their explorers. Despite the fact that eleven out of twenty-three men had died, and having travelled 5,500 miles and only managing to map a tiny portion of coastline that everyone knew existed anyway, Franklin returned to a hero’s welcome and earned an unlikely reputation for toughness as “the man who ate his boots”.

  In 1925, Britain’s new hero set off on a second expedition to find the Northwest Passage, this time abandoning his terminally ill wife Eleanor; she died while he was away. Franklin’s second expedition was considerably more successful than the first and, although he was forced to turn back by terrible weather conditions and failed in his mission, at least this time no one was eaten.

  After this, Franklin took a break from Arctic exploration, married one of his late wife’s best friends, received a knighthood, then was posted to Tasmania to serve as lieutenant-governor. His stay in office was controversial and he was recalled when word reached London that most of the decision-making was actually being made by his new wife.

  Franklin returned home in 1843 to find that the British Admiralty were launching a fresh attempt to find the Northwest Passage and immediately volunteered his services. His offer was taken up only very reluctantly by British Naval Command; he was settled on as sixth choice after others declined or were rejected as too inexperienced. Franklin received his orders on 5 May 1845, by which time he was pushing sixty and had not taken a ship into the ice for twenty-seven years.

  This time, Franklin was equipped with the latest technology – his two ships Erebus and Terror had steam engines that could make four knots and the ships’ bows were reinforced with iron planks to help them break through ice. The cabins were heated by hot water piped through the floor and there were enough provisions to last for five years, including large quantities of china, cut glass and silverware and a library stocked with more than 1,000 books.

  Another novel addition to the expedition was canned food, a recent invention. Unfortunately, the tins w
ere not properly sealed, allowing lead to leach into the food. Lead poisoning was thought to be a contributing factor in the deaths of some of the team.6

  On 19 May 1845, Franklin set sail from London promising once again to deliver on the centuries-long search for the Northwest Passage. The ships stopped for supplies in Disko Bay, Greenland, in early July. They were last spotted by a couple of whalers on 28 July. Some time after that, the whole expedition vanished into the pack ice of Lancaster Sound and not one man was seen alive again.

  After two years without word from her husband, Lady Franklin pleaded with the Admiralty to send a rescue party. Given that the original expedition was provisioned for five years, the British Government was reluctant to launch a search mission, but they had not bargained for the indomitable Lady Franklin, who put up a prolonged public campaign for a search to continue until her husband was found, meanwhile winning extraordinary sympathy as the loyal, grieving wife of the missing hero. There was even a popular song of the time, “Lord Franklin”, to keep the search in the public consciousness.

  The government eventually gave way and offered a reward of £10,000 to anyone who could discover the fate of Franklin and his party. This prompted a mad scramble of ships heading northward. Interest in Franklin’s fate wasn’t only limited to Britain, as the United States also mounted several expeditions, most notably led by Elisha Kent Kane and Charles Francis Hall. A dozen ships were sent out to find Franklin in 1850 alone.

  One of the 1850 expeditions found three graves on Beechey Island, dated January and April 1846, and the remnants of a winter camp, including some tattered clothing and a few tins of meat, giving hope that Franklin’s party had travelled further west or perhaps north into the Polar Sea and was still largely intact.