How long did burke and wills expedition take

The Burke and Wills Expedition departed Melbourne on 20 August with a team of 19 men, 50 camels and horses, some wagons and drays and a large collection of supplies. These involved searching for good pastoral country on the western border of Queensland and exploring the inland. Burke, an Irishman, Victorian policeman and former member of the Irish military, succeeded in being the first European to cross the continent but died on the return trip.

They involved scientific curiosity, commercial initiative mixed with a sense of excitement. The two men decided to go back to Cooper Creek to see if Burke had returned. When they arrived on Sunday, 8 May, Burke had already left for Mount Hopeless, and the camp was again deserted. Burke and Wills were 35 miles 56 km away by this point. As the mark and date on the tree were unaltered, Brahe and Wright assumed that Burke had not returned, and did not think to check whether the supplies were still buried.

They left to rejoin the main party and return to Menindee. Initially the tree was known as "Brahe's Tree" or the "Depot Tree" and the tree under which Burke died attracted most attention and interest. As a result of the blaze on the tree and the subsequent popularity of the book Dig written in by Frank Clune, the tree became known as the "Dig Tree". There are three separate blazes on the tree; the camp number, a date blaze and the instruction to dig. Two of the blazes have grown closed and only the camp number blaze remains visible today.

The exact "DIG" inscription that Brahe carved is not known. In John Dick carved a likeness of Burke's face in a nearby tree along with his initials, his wife's initials and the date. After leaving the Dig Tree they rarely travelled more than 5 mi 8. One of the two remaining camels, Landa , became bogged in Minkie Waterhole and the other, Rajah was shot when he could travel no further.

Without pack animals, Burke, Wills and King were unable to carry enough water to leave Cooper Creek and cross the Strzelecki Desert to Mount Hopeless, and so the three men were unable to leave the creek. Their supplies were running low and they were malnourished and exhausted. The Cooper Creek Indigenous Australians , the Yandruwandha people, gave them fish, beans called padlu and a type of damper made from the ground sporocarps of the ngardu nardoo plant Marsilea drummondii in exchange for sugar.

At the end of May , Wills returned to the Dig Tree to put his diary, notebook and journals in the cache for safekeeping. Burke bitterly criticised Brahe in his journal for not leaving behind any supplies or animals. While Wills was away from camp, Burke foolishly shot his pistol at one of the Aboriginal Australians, causing the whole group to flee.

Within a month of the Aboriginal Australians departure, Burke and Wills both perished. Towards the end of June as the three men were following the Cooper upstream to find the Yandruwandha campsite, Wills became too weak to continue. He was left behind at his own insistence at Breerily Waterhole with some food, water and shelter. Burke and King continued upstream for another two days until Burke became too weak to continue.

The next morning Burke died. King stayed with his body for two days and then returned downstream to Breerily Waterhole, where he found that Wills had died as well. The exact dates on which Burke and Wills died are unknown and different dates are given on various memorials in Victoria.

The Exploration Committee fixed 28 June as the date both explorers died. King found a group of Yandruwandha willing to give him food and shelter and in return he shot birds to contribute to their supplies.

In all, six expeditions were sent to search for Burke and Wills, two commissioned by the Exploration Committee, three by the Royal Society of Victoria and one by the Government of South Australia.

Two went by sea in order to search the Gulf of Carpentaria for the missing expedition while the others began their search from different directions. After six months without receiving word from the Burke expedition, the media began questioning its whereabouts. Public pressure for answers increased and on 13 June , the Exploration Committee agreed to send a search party to find the Burke and Wills expedition and, if necessary, offer them support.

As Brahe did not have knowledge of Burke's whereabouts, Howitt decided a much larger expedition would be required to find the missing party. Leaving three of his men at the river, Howitt returned to Melbourne with Brahe to update the Exploration Committee. Over the next nine days Howitt found the remains of Burke and Wills and buried them.

In pitiful condition, King survived the two-month trip back to Melbourne, and died eleven years later, aged 33, never having recovered his health. He is buried in the Melbourne General Cemetery. After finding traces of the explorers, the Queensland Relief Expedition disembarked and the vessel returned to Melbourne. After disembarking from the Victoria in November, the Queensland Relief Expedition under the leadership of William Landsborough searched the gulf coast for the missing expedition.

Later it turned south and continued until it arrived in Melbourne in October Frederick Walker led the Victorian Relief Expedition. The party, consisting of twelve mounted men, seven of them ex-troopers from the Native Police Corps, started from Rockhampton on 7 September with the goal of reaching the Gulf of Carpentaria.

On 4 December they came across a group of Aboriginal Australians, killing 12 in the fight that ensued. Two of the expedition's five officers had resigned, thirteen members of the expedition had been fired and eight new men had been hired.

The experienced explorer John McDouall Stuart had taken up the challenge. Burke split the group, taking the strongest horses, seven of the fittest men and a small amount of equipment, with plans to push on quickly to Cooper Creek and then wait for the others to catch up. They left Menindee on 19 October, guided by William Wright who was appointed third-in-command.

At Torowotto Swamp Wright was sent back to Menindee alone to bring up the remainder of the men and supplies and Burke continued on to Cooper Creek. Cooper Creek. A plague of rats forced the men to move camp and they formed a second depot further downstream at Bullah Bullah Waterhole. It was thought that Burke would wait at Cooper Creek until autumn March the next year so that they would avoid having to travel during the hot Australian summer.

However, Burke waited only until Sunday, 16 December before deciding to make a dash for the Gulf of Carpentaria. Burke, Wills, John King and Charles Gray set off for the Gulf with six camels, one horse and enough food for just three months. Brahe was ordered by Burke to wait for three months; however, the more conservative Wills had the maps and a more realistic view of the task ahead, and secretly instructed Brahe to wait for four months. Gulf of Carpentaria. Edward Jukes Greig,. Except for the heat, travel was easy.

As a result of recent rains water was still easy to find and the Aborigines , contrary to expectations, were peaceful. On 9 February they reached the Little Bynoe River, an arm of the Flinders River delta, where they found they could not reach the ocean because of the mangrove swamps in their way. By this stage, they were desperately short of supplies. They had food left for 27 days, but it had already taken them 59 days to travel from Cooper Creek.

The return journey. On their way north, the weather had been hot and dry, but on the way back the wet season broke and the tropical monsoonal rains began. A camel named Golah Sing was abandoned on 4 March when it was unable to continue.

Three other camels were shot and eaten along the way and they shot their only horse, Billy, on 10 April on the Diamantina River , south of what is today the town of Birdsville. Equipment was abandoned at a number of locations as the number of pack animals was reduced.

To extend their food supply, they ate portulaca. Gray also caught an 11 lb 5. Both Burke and Gray immediately came down with dysentery. Gray was ill, but Burke thought he was "gammoning" pretending.

On 25 March on the Burke River just south of what is now the town of Boulia , Gray was caught stealing skilligolee a type of watery porridge and Burke beat him. By 8 April Gray could not walk; he died on 17 April of dysentery at a place they called Polygonum Swamp.

The location of Gray's death is unknown, although it is generally believed to be Lake Massacre in South Australia.

While the possibility that Burke killed Gray has been discounted, the severity of the beating Burke gave has been widely debated. The three surviving men stopped for a day to bury Gray, and to recover their strength—they were by this stage very weak from hunger and exhaustion.

They finally reached Cooper Creek on 21 April, only to find that the camp had been abandoned several hours earlier. Return to Cooper Creek. Sunday evening, 21 April , oil on canvas, Burke had asked Brahe and the depot party to remain at the camp on the Cooper for 13 weeks. On 5 June William Patton also died. He buried a cache of food and a note stating his intention at the foot of a coolabah tree. About nine hours after Brahe departed, Burke, Wills and King arrived. They found the cache, which had enough supplies for a month, but instead of following Brahe back to Menindee or staying at the depot, on 22 April they decided to head south west to try to reach a station at Mount Hopeless.

Burke, Wills and King buried a message of their own under the Dig Tree explaining their plans. They were careful to leave no trace that they had been there, so that Aboriginal people would not dig up the letter.

Brahe too left no indication of his visit, so that when Wills doubled back for one last look at the depot on 27 May , he found nothing to suggest that anyone had returned to search for them. Wills died alone, having urged the other two to leave him and keep searching for Yandruwandha people who had been generous with their food and hospitable since the expeditioners had arrived at Cooper Creek.

Up to this point, these overtures of cooperation had been met with suspicion and sometimes hostility by the explorers. King eventually found the Yandruwandha people, who accepted him into their community and saved his life. Burke and Wills died of malnutrition, which was accelerated by the onset of beri-beri — a deficiency of thiamine, vitamin B1.

The explorers contracted beri-beri by eating nardoo, a clover-like plant which contains an enzyme that breaks down thiamine. Nardoo was regularly eaten by the Yandruwandha people. They carefully prepared the plant to eliminate the enzyme and gave it to the explorers. Burke and Wills, however, ate the plants raw.