The Mammoth Book of Losers Read online

  Fool’s Gold

  Some explorers, like John Franklin and his pursuit of the Northwest Passage, gave their lives trying to find something that was widely believed to have existed. Lewis Lasseter was unique because he died trying to find something that was entirely a figment of his own imagination.

  Lewis Hubert Lasseter (or Harold Bell Lasseter as he later called himself) was the son of an English labourer who emigrated to Australia in the 1870s. Known to acquaintances as “Possum”, he was a short, stocky, swarthy man with a deep scar on his balding scalp. Although self-educated, he was described as literate and very well spoken. The details of his early life, like so much of Lasseter’s career, are sketchy, but he claimed that as a teenager he served in the Royal Navy and was discharged in 1901. Some time after that, he travelled to the United States, where he got married and became a Mormon. A few years later, he returned to Australia and, by 1908, was working as a farm hand in New South Wales. During this period, he tried to take out various patents on his own inventions, including a disc plough, a wheat storage system and a device for making pre-cast concrete. None of these ideas ever got off the drawing board and the patents lapsed without the fees being paid.

  At the outbreak of the First World War, Lasseter tried to enlist three times but was declared medically unfit. In 1924, he married again, this time to an Australian nurse – Louise Lillywhite – describing himself as “Lewis Harold Bell Lasseter, bachelor”, having never actually divorced his first wife. Meanwhile, he was holding down various jobs as a carpenter, including six months spent working on the construction of the new Sydney Harbour Bridge. Later, he wrote to the government of New South Wales, unsuccessfully demanding compensation on the basis that the architect John Bradfield had stolen his design for the bridge.

  But Lasseter’s capacity for self-delusion hadn’t yet peaked. In 1929, he fired off another letter to his government with an even more extraordinary claim – he had discovered a giant reef of gold somewhere in central Australia. He claimed he made his discovery in 1900 while trying to walk alone from Alice Springs to the west Australian coast. He would have died had he not been found by a passing camel driver who took him to the camp of a surveyor named Harding. He and Harding returned to find the reef but got lost because their watches were wrong. According to Lasseter, he had spent the best part of the next three decades trying to raise money for an expedition to find the reef. The government consulted a geologist, who dismissed Lasseter as a crank, and decided to take no action.

  Lasseter subsequently retold the story many times and each time the details varied – according to one version he was only seventeen when he made the trip. In 1930, he took his story to the leader of the Australian Worker’s Union and part-time bare-knuckle fighter John Bailey, an extraordinary character who had literally fought his way upwards in sheep-shearing sheds. By this time, Lasseter’s reef had grown to nine miles long and had “gold as thick as plums in a pudding”. Lasseter, meanwhile, was presenting himself as “a qualified ship’s captain” and said that he had worked for years on coastal boats. Bailey was sceptical, on account of Lasseter’s conflicting and vague versions of events, but the lure of gold in a time of economic depression made his pipe dream particularly seductive. It led to the formation of the Central Australian Gold Exploration Company, with Bailey as Chairman, to fund an exploratory expedition to find the reef.

  The party set off westward from Alice Springs on 21 July 1930 equipped with a Gypsy Moth aeroplane, a six-wheeled Thornycroft truck plus a back-up truck. Accompanying Lasseter were expedition leader Fred Blakely; experienced prospector George Sutherland; engineer and driver Philip Taylor; driver Fred Colson; pilot Errol Coote; and Captain Blakeston-Houston, who described himself as “explorer”. There was also a native guide called Mickey, whose job it was to find water in the desert – a formidable task, as central Australia was in the middle of a fierce drought and most of the known waterholes had dried up.

  Right from the start, Lasseter proved to be a difficult companion and an unreliable guide. His behaviour became increasingly strange; he was morose and uncooperative and spent his time singing Mormon hymns and writing up his diary. His fellow travellers became more sceptical the further into the desert they went. It was becoming more and more obvious from his lack of knowledge of bushcraft that he had never been in that part of central Australia before, let alone discovered a reef studded with gold.

  On reaching Mount Marjorie (now Mount Leisler), Lasseter suddenly announced that they were 150 miles too far north of the area they were supposed to be searching. Worse still, they realized that they did not have enough provisions to make the trek to Lasseter’s revised location and would have to make a ninety-five-mile diversion back to their base camp to restock.

  There was more bad luck when the Gypsy Moth crashed and the pilot Coote was hospitalized. Meanwhile, the trucks were bogged down in sand in temperatures exceeding 50ºC. Blakely decided that he’d had enough; he denounced Lasseter as a fraud and quit the expedition. The rest soon followed, leaving Lasseter alone with a twenty-two-year-old dingohunter called Paul Johns whom they had met back at base camp. Johns was persuaded to join the party on account of his team of seven camels, which were thought to be more practical than trucks.

  Lasseter and Johns set off to find the reef but, once again, Lasseter’s erratic behaviour began to create problems and, after a series of petty arguments, relations deteriorated to the point where they were barely speaking. When they reached Malagura Rockhole, Lasseter decided to wander off to look for the reef on his own.

  Five days later, he returned to camp with some mineral samples and informed Johns that he had found the gold reef. Johns asked him to reveal the exact location, but Lasseter refused. Johns called Lasseter a liar. A fistfight ensued and Johns quit, leaving just Lasseter and two camels. Shortly afterwards, Lasseter was quite literally caught with his trousers down. Suffering badly from dysentery, he went to defecate but forgot to tether the camels properly. They bolted, taking with them the last of his supplies. Lasseter tried to shoot down the fleeing camels, but missed. The gunshots alerted a nearby Aboriginal hunting party, who took pity on him and led him to a waterhole, but then left him to his fate.

  Lasseter spent his final days starving to death in a cave. Self-deluded to the very end, he wrote in his diary: “What good a reef worth millions? I would gladly give it all for a loaf of bread.”

  A bushman called Bob Buck found his body and his diary, in which Lasseter claimed that he had “rediscovered” his reef and pegged his claim. Modern technology, including satellite imagery, seismic testing and remote sensing, shows that it is geologically impossible for gold ever to have formed in the areas where Lasseter claimed that it was located. But the myth of “Lasseter’s Lost Reef” persisted and led to scores of further expeditions.

  The expedition leader Fred Blakeley, who also appears to have been a bit of a fantasist, went on to write an account of the expedition – Dream Millions – which claimed that Lasseter did not starve to death but somehow made his way to America to avoid being charged with fraud.

  Least Observant Explorer

  Louis Antoine de Bougainville was the first Frenchman to sail around the world. In 1767, while sailing through the South Pacific, his passage was blocked by a huge coral reef. He peered through his telescope and could see just beyond the reef a mass of land, but he didn’t think it was worth investigating, thereby narrowly failing to discover Australia (and claim it for France) three years before Captain James Cook.

  His perceptiveness was also found wanting when it came to his crew. Bougainville set sail with a team of scientists including Philibert Commerson, a French naturalist, accompanied by his faithful assistant Bonnefoy, who lugged his equipment around the South Pacific and shared his cabin. On Tahiti, during an attempted rape by an over-excited local chief, the valet’s clothes were ripped off, revealing that Bonnefoy was, in fact, a woman called Jeanne Baret. At first Commerson denied any part in the deception, but he
later admitted that they had, in fact, been living together for the previous four years.

  Ms Baret is now officially recognized as the first woman to circumnavigate the world; the plant Commerson named after her, however, has now been changed from Beretta bonnafidia to Turrea heterophylla.

  “Radio has no future.”

  Lord Kelvin, Scottish mathematician and physicist, former president of the Royal Society, 1897

  Most Inaccurate Discovery of a Mountain Range

  In 1824, the Scottish botanist David Douglas set off on an epic plant-hunting expedition in the Rocky Mountains of America, braving whirlpools, grizzly bears, robbery, frostbite and near-starvation to bring 240 new species of plants to Britain, including the ubiquitous Douglas Fir, the staple of the Victorian gentleman’s garden.

  Douglas suffered from rapidly deteriorating eyesight due to snow blindness, and this impairment led to an epic blunder. On his return home from one of his trips to the Rockies, he announced the discovery of two giant peaks, which he named Mount Hooker and Mount Brown, after two distinguished British botanists. For almost seventy years the mountains were the subject of great excitement and speculation and were listed on every map as the two highest peaks in the Canadian Rocky Mountains. Strangely, however, they continued to elude the best efforts of experienced mountaineers to find either one of them.

  The search for Douglas’s giant twin peaks was finally brought to a close when someone carefully re-read his original notes and couldn’t help noticing that he claimed to have climbed both mountains in a single afternoon. It was also difficult to understand how Douglas, even with his eyesight problems, could have failed to notice that the other mountains nearby were much higher than the ones he had just climbed.

  Douglas’s short career as a mountaineer ended prematurely. In 1834, while looking for plants in Hawaii, the short-sighted botanist stumbled into a pit that had been dug to trap wild cattle and was crushed to death by a falling bullock.

  “It is apparent to me that the possibilities of the aeroplane, which two or three years ago were thought to hold the solution to the [flying machine] problem, have been exhausted, and that we must turn elsewhere.”

  Thomas Edison, American inventor, 1895

  Most Inaccurate Discovery of a Mountain Range: Runner-Up

  In 1818, the Arctic explorer Captain Sir John Ross led two ships, the Isabella and the Alexander, on the first of a series of attempts to find the Northwest Passage. His plan was to sail around the north-east coast of America and on to the Bering Strait.

  When Ross reached Lancaster Sound in Canada, he peered through his telescope and “saw” that his way was blocked by a huge range of mountains, so he turned his ships round and went home. It was all very confusing for his officers because no one else on the ships saw Ross’s phantom geographical features and they were urging him to press on.

  Back home, Ross stuck to his version of events. He even described the mountains at length in his journal and gave them a name – the Crocker’s Hills. A year later, when Ross’s former first mate William Edward Parry sailed “through” Croker’s Hills, Ross admitted that he might have got it wrong. His detractors suggested they should be renamed “Choker’s Hills” instead.

  Having embarrassingly mistaken a mirage for a mountain range, and then named it after a secretary of the British Admiralty, Ross was desperate to restore his tarnished reputation. In 1829, he tried again, but this time the Admiralty refused to give him any more ships. Instead, he turned to a friend, Felix Booth, who had made a fortune from Booth’s Gin, to underwrite the trip. This, the only significant Arctic expedition ever launched under private sponsorship, resulted in the largest land mass on Earth to take its name from an alcoholic beverage – “Boothia”.8

  Ross sailed away on a tiny, rickety old steam ship called the Victory with high hopes but his joy was short-lived. Only a few weeks into the journey, he was so annoyed with the performance of the ship’s faulty steam boiler that he had it thrown overboard. He then directed his vessel into an icy cul-de-sac (he named it the “Gulf of Boothia”), one from which his ship, despite years of heroic efforts by her officers and crew, was destined never to return.

  Fortified by consumption of gin supplied by his sponsor, in the midst of unspeakable hardship, Ross took time out to run up a flag for the king’s birthday, and when a polar bear chewed off a colleague’s leg, he ordered the ship’s carpenter to knock up a replacement. Long given up for dead, Ross was eventually rescued and returned home with a memento from his epic trip – the head of a native Inuit gentleman he had befriended – for phrenological analysis.

  Once again, Ross’s map-making skills caused controversy. Back in England, using his authority as expedition leader, he named a group of islands he had never actually seen the “Clarence Islands” then added a few fictional islands to the group, just to impress the new king (and former Duke of Clarence) William IV.

  Least Successful Balloon Trip

  The history of nineteenth-century Arctic exploration was one of relentless failure. Attempts by sledge and ship had failed; in fact, nobody was even sure wheather the North Pole lay on land or sea. Then in 1896, Salomon August Andrée, Swedish engineer and amateur balloonist, had a bright idea – why not fly to the Pole in a balloon?

  Andrée was the son of a wealthy Swedish chemist. He caught the balloon bug when he was twenty-two and on a trip to the United States got to meet the veteran American balloonist John Wise. Andrée was working in the patent offices in Stockholm when he bought his first balloon. He made his maiden flight in 1893 and went on to make another eight.

  During these early voyages, his balloon had an unnerving tendency to drift uncontrollably out to sea and drag the basket across the surface of the water. He tinkered with the steering and invented his own system made of drag ropes hanging off the balloon. The friction of the ropes was supposed to slow it down enough to allow small sails to be used to turn the balloon.

  Andrée proclaimed his unique steering system a huge success and showed it to the Swedish Ballooning Association. They begged to differ; in theory, Andrée’s drag rope system shouldn’t work at all. In fact it was a liability because the ropes were likely to break or become entangled with each other, or get stuck to the ground, dragging Andrée’s low-flying balloon down with them. They put Andrée’s “success” down to wishful thinking and opportune winds. There was also the fact that most of the time he was inside clouds and had no idea where he was or which way he was travelling.

  In theory, a balloon could retain sufficient gas for a thirty-day flight, though in practice no one had ever stayed up for more than fifteen days. Andrée was convinced that if a balloon started as close to ninety degrees north as possible, it could sail over the Pole and land on the other side in Alaska.

  In 1896, he outlined his reckless plan to reach the North Pole by hydrogen balloon to the Swedish Royal Academy. Despite reservations expressed by the experts, he was a persuasive speaker and his enthusiasm was contagious. When the public got to hear about Andrée’s project, there was a huge amount of interest. National pride was at stake; Sweden was anxious to reassert its position in Polar exploration after falling behind Norway. Any anxieties anyone may have had about the validity of Andrée’s plan were simply swept away in a tidal wave of patriotic pride.

  He figured that it would take about 130,800 krone to fund his expedition – a sum equal to about £1 million today – but once the Swedish Royal Academy were on board, financing proved to be no obstacle. King Oscar II donated 36,000 krone and Alfred Nobel, inventor of dynamite and donor of scientific prizes, pitched in with a considerable sum as well. Other donations quickly followed.

  Andree’s Polar balloon Örnen (the Eagle) was made in Paris and delivered to Danes Island, Spitzerbergen, where he had constructed an enormous hangar. The balloon had three layers of varnished silk, was ninety-seven feet tall and sixty-seven feet in diameter and weighed a ton and a half. For his crew, Andrée selected Nils Ekholm, a meteorological res
earcher, and Nils Strindberg, a young physics student. Between them, the three-man team covered a broad range of technical and scientific know-how, but they had little experience in large balloons and none in Arctic conditions.

  In fact, the whole expedition was based on a series of wildly optimistic assumptions. Andrée believed that the Arctic summer was ideal weather for the expedition because the men could work around the clock in the long daylight conditions. He thought that any snow or ice that might pose a threat by sticking to the balloon, thereby weighing it down, would simply fall off or melt away. He also assumed that the winds would blow more or less in the same direction throughout the expedition. It was all guesswork. Even Ekholm, the Arctic weather researcher, had no idea where the wind was likely to take them because observational data simply did not exist. Fatally, Andrée believed that his navigational system employing drag ropes would ensure the success of the expedition, even though they hadn’t really worked on test flights. In fact, there was no proof that Örnen would fly at all. It had been shipped directly to Sweden by the manufacturer without ever being tested.

  In the summer of 1896, the team assembled at Danes Island to make their first attempt. The launch was covered by journalists from all over the world. For six weeks, the Swedish nation held its breath while the expedition waited at base camp for the right wind and weather. And they waited. It never came.

  In August, the captain of the ship they had chartered informed Andrée that he was going home because his iceberg insurance had expired. The balloon was deflated and the expedition crept back to Stockholm; the man who had been labelled a national hero was now an object of international criticism and ridicule, variously denounced as a “fraud” and “publicity seeker” by journalists.

  In the spring of 1897, Andrée tried again. This time the winds were favourable and the team was ready to depart. The balloon was heavily loaded. Besides the usual supplies of food, clothing, ammunition and scientific and photographic equipment, they had a collapsible boat, a sledge of Andrée’s own design and the materials to construct a darkroom while in flight. In addition, they had an assortment of improbable extras, including Russian and US money in coins, a porcelain bowl, a white shirt in its original wrapping material, a dress tie, old newspapers and two tickets to the 1897 Stockholm Exhibition. They also had 55 lbs of chocolate, a good supply of champagne donated by sponsors, and two bottles of port which had been given to them by the King of Sweden.