Be Prepared - Burke and Wills
| Category: | Preparedness |
|---|---|
| Notes: | A true story from 1860-61 Australia. Use it before a big trip, a high-adventure trek or a planning meeting. It's a serious one; the explorers died, mostly from poor planning and from refusing help. |
In 1860, Australia's best-funded expedition set out from Melbourne to cross the whole continent, from south to north, to the Gulf of Carpentaria. Nobody had ever done it before. Thousands of people came to cheer them off.
The leader was Robert O'Hara Burke, a police officer. He was brave and confident and full of energy. He had never been an explorer. He had no bush skills. He couldn't navigate. But he was in charge.
The expedition took nineteen men, twenty-seven camels, twenty-three horses and six wagons. They packed twenty tons of supplies. That included a cedar-topped oak dining table with matching chairs, a Chinese gong, and sixty gallons of rum, which was supposed to be for the camels. The wagons were so heavy they got stuck in the mud before they'd even left Melbourne.
Burke was impatient. Halfway across, at a place called Cooper Creek, he split the group. He left a few men at a supply camp, and took three others and dashed north to the coast. The men at Cooper Creek were told to wait three months.
Burke, his second-in-command William Wills, and two others reached the mangrove swamps near the northern coast. Then they turned back. But they'd brought too little food for the trip home, and they were starving. One of the four died on the way.
The supply party at Cooper Creek waited for four months, a month longer than Burke had asked. Then, with men falling sick, they packed up, carved a message into a tree, and left. Burke, Wills and the last man, John King, staggered into the camp on the evening of that very same day. They had missed them by about nine hours.
Under the tree the word DIG was carved. They dug, and found a box of food. That tree, the Dig Tree, still stands today.
But here's the part of the story I want you to remember. Living all around Cooper Creek were the Yandruwandha people. They had lived in that country for thousands of years. They knew where the water was and how to find food. They came to the explorers' camp and gave them fish, and a kind of bread made from the seeds of a plant called nardoo.
Burke didn't trust them. He drove them away. He tried to make the nardoo bread himself, the wrong way, and it gave them almost no nourishment. Burke and Wills both died beside Cooper Creek that winter, surrounded by food they didn't know how to find, a few miles from people who could have shown them.
John King survived. He went to the Yandruwandha, and they took him in, and fed him, and looked after him for more than two months until a rescue party found him.
The Scout motto is Be Prepared. Burke had money, men, camels, and twenty tons of gear, and he wasn't prepared. He packed the wrong things, he hurried when he should have planned, he didn't learn the skills, and when help was offered, he was too proud to take it.
Being prepared isn't about how much stuff you carry. It's about learning the skills before you need them, making a plan and sticking to it, and being humble enough to listen to people who know more than you do. The one man who did that is the one who came home.