Owing, However, To Some Disagreement, The Whole Party Returned To The Starting Point, But Being Reorganised It Started Again With The Same Number Of Members. There Were About Twenty Head Of Bullocks Broken In To Carry Pack-Loads; This Was An Ordinary Custom In Those Early Days Of Australian Settlement.

Leichhardt also had two horses and five or six mules:

This outfit was mostly contributed by the settlers who gave, some flour, some bullocks, some money, firearms, gear, etc., and some gave sheep and goats; he had about a hundred of the latter. The packed bullocks were taken to supply the party with beef, in the meantime carrying the expedition stores. The bullocks' pack-saddles were huge, ungainly frames of wood fastened with iron-work, rings, etc.

Shortly after the expedition made a second start, two or three of the members again seceded, and returned to the settlements, while Leichhardt and his remaining band pushed farther and farther to the west.

Although the eastern half of the continent is now inhabited, though thinly, no traces of any kind, except two or three branded trees in the valley of the Cooper, have ever been found. My belief is that the only cause to be assigned for their destruction is summed up in the dread word "flood." They were so far traced into the valley of the Cooper; this creek, which has a very lengthy course, ends in Lake Eyre, one of the salt depressions which baffled that explorer. A point on the southern shore is now known as Eyre's Lookout.

The Cooper is known in times of flood to reach a width of between forty and fifty miles, the whole valley being inundated. Floods may surround a traveller while not a drop of local rain may fall, and had the members of this expedition perished in any other way, some remains of iron pack-saddle frames, horns, bones, skulls, firearms, and other articles must have been found by the native inhabitants who occupied the region, and would long ago have been pointed out by the aborigines to the next comers who invaded their territories. The length of time that animals' bones might remain intact in the open air in Australia is exemplified by the fact that in 1870, John Forrest found the skull of a horse in one of Eyre's camps on the cliffs of the south coast thirty years after it was left there by Eyre. Forrest carried the skull to Adelaide. I argue, therefore, that if Leichhardt's animals and equipment had not been buried by a flood, some remains must have been since found, for it is impossible, if such things were above ground that they could escape the lynx-like glances of Australian aboriginals, whose wonderful visual powers are unsurpassed among mankind. Everybody and everything must have been swallowed in a cataclysm and buried deep and sure in the mud and slime of a flood.

The New South Wales Government made praiseworthy efforts to rescue the missing traveller.

Enter page number Go  Previous Next
Page 12 of 394
Words from 5761 to 6260 of 204780