The Victorian Exploring Expedition set out from Melbourne on 20 August 1860 to make the first south-to-north crossing of Australia, from the southern colonies to the Gulf of Carpentaria, under Robert O’Hara Burke, a police superintendent with no exploration experience, and the surveyor and astronomer William John Wills. It was the most lavishly equipped expedition Australia had then mounted — roughly £57,000, nineteen men, twenty-six camels, twenty-three horses, and tonnes of supplies — and it failed not for want of provisions but through command, judgement and a fatal indifference to the people who knew the country.
Burke drove the party forward by repeatedly splitting it and stripping it down for speed. A four-man forward team — Burke, Wills, John King and Charley Gray — reached the Gulf country in February 1861 and turned back. Gray died on the return. The three survivors staggered into the Cooper Creek depot on the evening of 21 April 1861 to find it abandoned; the depot party under William Brahe, after waiting more than four months, had ridden out that same day, missing them by roughly nine hours. The cached supplies left at the marked “Dig Tree” were not enough to save them.
Burke and Wills died near Cooper Creek around late June or early July 1861 of starvation and exhaustion, their decline hastened by eating nardoo, an aquatic fern whose seed is toxic unless processed. Only John King lived, because the Yandruwandha people — on whose Country the men died — fed him fish and properly prepared nardoo, sheltered him, and kept him alive for some three months until a relief party reached him on 15 September 1861. The expedition is remembered in Australia as a heroic tragedy; the more accurate account is of preventable mismanagement survived only through Aboriginal generosity that the colonial mythology long erased.
The Emin Pasha Relief Expedition was a British-organized venture of 1886–89, led by Henry Morton Stanley, to march across central Africa and bring out Emin Pasha — the German-born governor of Egypt’s Equatoria province, isolated near Lake Albert after the Mahdist revolt cut him off from the north. Stanley approached not from the east coast but up the Congo, a far longer route, and in June 1887 divided his force of nearly 800 men on the Aruwimi River. He pushed ahead with an Advance Column through the Ituri rainforest and left a Rear Column of about 271 men at a camp called Yambuya, under Major Edmund Barttelot, to wait for porters promised by the slave-trader Tippu Tip and then follow. The Rear Column was not relieved in time and disintegrated. When Stanley returned to it at Banalya in August 1888, more than half the men were dead or had deserted, its officers were dead, dying, invalided or gone, and accounts of starvation, savage floggings and a recorded atrocity against an enslaved African girl had begun to spread.
The expedition’s professed purpose — relief — sat uneasily with its conduct. It was a private enterprise of the Scramble for Africa, funded by a committee under the shipowner William Mackinnon, entangled with King Leopold II’s Congo Free State and British commercial ambitions in East Africa, and it moved through the lands and lives of central African peoples as if they existed only to be used. The route through the Congo basin and the Ituri forest was murderous: of the 389 men of the Advance Column who left Yambuya, only 169 reached Lake Albert alive. The Rear Column’s fate was worse in character if not in raw numbers, because what destroyed it was not only disease and hunger but the cruelty of its own command.
The dead must be counted plainly, and most were African: the Zanzibari, Sudanese and Manyema porters who died of starvation and untreated illness, the men flogged to death on Barttelot’s orders, and above all the enslaved girl whom the naturalist James Sligo Jameson paid to have killed and eaten so that he could sketch it. Stanley did reach Emin Pasha and brought survivors to the east coast in 1889, but the venture is remembered less for that than for the Rear Column, an episode that stands as a case study in how an imperial expedition can become an engine of the suffering it claims to relieve.