Lasseter’s Reef — A phantom gold reef that killed the man who claimed it

Lasseter’s Reef was a fabulously rich gold reef that Lewis Harold Bell Lasseter, an Australian prospector born in Victoria in 1880, claimed to have discovered in the central Australian desert decades earlier and could lead an expedition back to. In 1930 the newly formed Central Australian Gold Exploration Company (CAGE) bankrolled a well-equipped search on the strength of his story. The reef was never found, and Lasseter died alone in the desert in late January 1931, of starvation, thirst and exhaustion, after months in which Pitjantjatjara people sheltered and fed him. The reef has never been located by anyone, before or since, and most geologists regard it as a fiction.

The CAGE expedition left Alice Springs on 21 July 1930, far better outfitted than Lasseter’s tale warranted: a heavy Thornycroft truck, a six-wheeled support vehicle, an aircraft, an established base at Ilbilba, and a party that included the leader Fred Blakeley, the prospector George Sutherland, the engineer-driver Phil Taylor, the driver Fred Colson and the pilot Errol Coote, with Lasseter as guide. Lasseter could not find his reef. He shifted his story, claimed the party was scores of miles off course, and at the Kintore–Mount Leisler country Blakeley concluded the reef was imaginary and broke off the search. The main expedition withdrew in September 1930.

Lasseter refused to give up. He pressed on into the desert with a dingo-shooter named Paul Johns and a string of camels; the two men quarrelled and parted, and then Lasseter’s two camels bolted, stranding him on foot in the Petermann Ranges with almost no food or water. He survived as long as he did only because Pitjantjatjara people of that Country took him in — they recaptured his camels for a time, gave him food including nardoo he could not digest, and built him shelter. He went blind with “sandy blight” and grew steadily weaker, recording in his diary the despair of a man who had chased millions and would have traded them all for a loaf of bread. He died near Irving Creek around 30 January 1931. The Pitjantjatjara buried him; the bushman Bob Buck found and reburied the body, and recovered the diary from a cave, in March 1931.

Alexander Gordon Laing — First to reach Timbuktu, murdered days after leaving it

Major Alexander Gordon Laing, a Scottish army officer in his early thirties, became in August 1826 the first European known to have reached Timbuktu by an overland crossing of the Sahara, only to be murdered roughly five weeks later on the desert track north of the city, his journals never recovered. He had left the North African coast at Tripoli in July 1825 and crossed some 2,650 miles of desert before entering the fabled town on 18 August 1826.

Laing’s reward for the achievement was death. He stayed in Timbuktu about five weeks, gathering geographical and commercial notes, then left on 24 September 1826 to travel onward. Within two or three days, on the caravan track near Araouane, north of Timbuktu, he was killed by men of his own Arab escort. Contemporary accounts hold that he was strangled or beheaded; his servant survived to carry word of the killing, but Laing’s papers, maps and journals disappeared and were never found.

The expedition was driven as much by Anglo-French competition as by science: Timbuktu had become a symbol, and reaching it first was a prize of empire. Laing won the race in fact but not in lasting credit. He died before he could publish a word, and two years later the Frenchman René Caillié reached Timbuktu, returned alive, and claimed the geographical prize and the public fame. The loss of Laing’s papers fed a bitter dispute between his father-in-law, the British consul at Tripoli, and the French, who were accused without evidence of procuring the lost journals. What survives of the first European visit to Timbuktu is mostly a handful of letters posted before the final, fatal stretch.