eaten by the wild natives of Australia—­Conn in a place near Cooktown on the Queensland coast, and Curlewis and McCulloch on the Paroo River in New South Wales in 1862.  When we were together we had many very narrow escapes from death, and I have had several similar experiences since those days.  Howitt on his arrival at Cooper’s Creek was informed by the natives that a white man was alive with them, and thus John King, the sole survivor, was rescued.

Between 1860-65 several short expeditions were carried on in Western Australia by Frank Gregory, Lefroy, Robinson, and Hunt; while upon the eastern side of Australia, the Brothers Jardine successfully explored and took a mob of cattle through the region that proved so fatal to Kennedy and his companions in 1848.  The Jardines traversed a route more westerly than Kennedy’s along the eastern shores of the Gulf of Carpentaria to Cape York.

In 1865, Duncan McIntyre, while on the Flinders River of Stokes and near the Gulf of Carpentaria, into which it flows, was shown by a white shepherd at an out sheep station, a tree on which the letter L was cut.  This no doubt was one of Landsborough’s marks, or if it was really carved by Leichhardt, it was done upon his journey to Port Essington in 1844, when he crossed and encamped upon the Flinders.  Mcintyre reported by telegraph to Melbourne that he had found traces of Leichhardt, whereupon Baron von Mueller and a committee of ladies in Melbourne raised a fund of nearly 4000 pounds, and an expedition called “The Ladies’ Leichhardt Search Expedition,” whose noble object was to trace and find some records or mementoes, if not the persons, and discover the last resting-place of the unfortunate traveller and his companions, was placed under McIntyre’s command.  About sixty horses and sixteen camels were obtained for this attempt.  The less said about this splendid but ill-starred effort the better.  Indignation is a mild term to apply to our feelings towards the man who caused the ruin of so generous an undertaking.  Everything that its promoters could do to ensure its success they did, and it deserved a better fate, for a brilliant issue might have been obtained, if not by the discovery of the lost explorers, at least by a geographical result, as the whole of the western half of Australia lay unexplored before it.  The work, trouble, anxiety, and expense that Baron von Mueller went through to start this expedition none but the initiated can ever know.  It was ruined before it even entered the field of its labours, for, like Burke’s and Wills’s expedition, it was unfortunately placed under the command of the wrong man.  The collapse of the expedition occurred in this wise.  A certain doctor was appointed surgeon and second in command, the party consisting of about ten men, including two Afghans with the camels, and one young black boy.  Their encampment was now at a water-hole in the Paroo, where Curlewis and McCulloch had been killed, in New South Wales.