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.
Heinrich Barth, a German scholar attached to a British-sponsored expedition, crossed and recrossed the Sahara and the central Sudan between 1850 and 1855, outlived both of his European companions, reached Timbuktu and returned alive — bringing home one of the most valuable records of inner Africa ever produced by a nineteenth-century traveller. Where almost every contemporary in this case file died, Barth survived a five-year journey of some 10,000 to 12,000 miles, and he survived it not by force or luck but by preparation, discipline, and a working respect for the peoples whose country he crossed.
Born in Hamburg in 1821 and trained as a classical scholar and linguist, Barth set out from Tripoli early in 1850 with the British government expedition led by James Richardson, alongside a second German, the astronomer Adolf Overweg. Both leaders died of disease — Richardson in March 1851, Overweg in September 1852 — leaving Barth to carry the mission on alone. He explored the country around Lake Chad, mapped the upper Benue, and pushed west to Timbuktu, which he reached on 7 September 1853.
Barth’s survival turned on the things triumphalist exploration usually disdained. He spoke Arabic fluently and learned Hausa, Kanuri, Fulani and other African languages; he compiled vocabularies for some forty tongues; he was the first European to take the oral traditions of the Sudanic peoples seriously as historical sources, and he described the cultures he passed through with respect rather than contempt. In Timbuktu, where a non-Muslim European faced execution, his life was saved by the protection of the Tuareg-Arab scholar and spiritual leader Sheikh Ahmad al-Bakkay al-Kunti, who sheltered him in his own house against those who wanted him killed. Barth returned to Europe in September 1855 and published a vast, five-volume record of the journey. He died, comparatively unrewarded and under-appreciated in his lifetime, in Berlin in 1865. The verdict here is survival — and the mechanism of that survival is the lesson the rest of the file lacks.
The Calvert Scientific Exploring Expedition set out from Mullewa, Western Australia, on 13 June 1896 to fill in the last blank spaces on the colony’s map, crossing the Great Sandy Desert toward the Fitzroy River in the Kimberley. It was a camel survey of eight men under the surveyor Lawrence Allen Wells, financed by the London mining promoter Albert Frederick Calvert and conducted under the South Australian Branch of the Royal Geographical Society of Australasia. Two of the eight died in the desert: Charles Frederick Wells, the leader’s cousin and second-in-command, and George Lindsay Jones, the young mineralogist and photographer.
The deaths followed a decision to divide the party in waterless country. By October 1896 the expedition was deep in the dunes, its camels sickening on poisonous plants and water nearly impossible to find. From a camp near a soak the party called Separation Well, Charles Wells and Jones rode off on a “flying trip” to the north-west to extend the survey, intending to rejoin the main column at the next watering point. The two parties never met again. The main body reached the Fitzroy on the Derby track in early November; Wells and Jones, unable to find water and with their camels failing, turned back to follow the main party’s tracks and died of heat and thirst on or about 21 November 1896.
Their fate was not known for half a year. Lawrence Wells mounted repeated searches, and the Western Australian government sent the surveyor William Rudall, who relied on an Aboriginal tracker named Cherry and quartered some 60,000 square kilometres of desert without finding them. The mummified bodies were found at last on 27 May 1897, about 26 kilometres south-west of Joanna Spring, by a recovery party that included two Aboriginal trackers and the Afghan cameleer Dervish Bejah. Jones’s diary, recovered with the remains, recorded the dwindling water, the loss of the camels, and the men’s last failed search for a soak. The geographical results were real; so was the cost, and a colonial inquiry later cleared Lawrence Wells of blame for the separation that killed two of his men.