5 August: Boreham on John Edward Eyre

Westward Ho!
John Edward Eyre, whose birthday this is, early gave indisputable evidence that he was compounded of those sterling ingredients of which pioneers and pathfinders are made. Like so many of the early Australian explorers, Eyre was born in England but was attracted to these lands at an early age by the alluring possibility of infinite adventure. He was only 17 when he landed in Sydney, and by the time he was out of his twenties he had experienced so much in the way of romance that he hurried back to England to write a book about it. He was 23 when he made his first important contribution to the opening up of Australia. Collecting stock in the Port Phillip district, he drove them overland to Adelaide. By this juvenile exploit he not only forged a link between the two centres, but he caught a vision of the feasibility of still more pretentious pilgrimages of a similar kind in days to come. If, he argued to himself, it was possible for Hume and Hovell to blaze a trail from Sydney to Melbourne, and if, as he himself had demonstrated, it was possible to drive cattle from Melbourne to Adelaide, why should not the entire continent be threaded with arteries and highways? In a fine frenzy of exploratory enthusiasm, born of the enthusiastic welcome accorded him in South Australia, he talked freely of the longer and more hazardous journeys that he would undertake in the immediate future. He would plant the British flag in the crusty heart of the continent; he would cross Australia from sea to sea; he would do a dozen things that had always been regarded as beyond the range of possibility. Such fervour, falling from the lips of a youth who had already covered himself with glory, swiftly became infectious. Eyre was lionised. The young ladies of Adelaide were lost in wonder at his prowess. As an expression of their admiration of his past triumphs and of their confidence in his future fame, they worked for him a silken Union Jack and bade him plant it out in the vast unknown. Thus encouraged, Eyre felt that great things were expected of him and he set to work to vindicate the faith of his admirers.

Baulked At The Start
His first idea—condemned by older heads as suicidal—was to penetrate the interior. But the stars in their courses seemed to be fighting against him. He was dogged by misfortune of every kind; the season proved utterly unsuitable; his water supply failed; and he realised that to proceed was simply to throw away his life on a project that promised little or nothing in the shape of practical utility or scientific discovery. Wisely, therefore, he resolved to return and to seek new realms of conquest in other directions. Foiled in the North, he turned his eager face to the West. He made up his mind that he would set out across the continent and never rest until his eyes rested on the blue expanse of the Indian Ocean. He would turn his back upon the little patch of civilisation in the eastern extremity of Australia, and would press on until he beheld the sun setting over western waters. Such a dream—whether realised or not—stamps a man with all the elements of greatness. Even if he never lives to see his heroic aspiration crystallise into reality, he deserves to be remembered with gratitude and honour for having been the architect of a magnificent design. Would he, it may be wondered, have set out on that audacious journey if he had cherished any inkling of the sufferings that awaited him before he reached the end of the long, long trail. A trifle subdued by his abortive venture northward, Eyre resolved on this occasion, to set out without blare of trumpet or roll of drum. He had failed once; but he was of those men whom failure only goads to greater enterprise. He made little fuss; he said scarcely anything of his intention; he took into his confidence one or two comrades whose assistance or companionship he desired; he quietly collected his remarkably modest equipment; and then, without farewell or demonstration of any kind, he set out upon his tremendous and hazardous undertaking.

It is almost impossible to exaggerate the fortitude and endurance which marked that famous journey. He left Adelaide on February 25, 1841, being then 25 years of age. He was accompanied by a friend named Baxter, and by three natives. The expedition quickly plunged into difficulty. The heat was much more intense, the desert much more forbidding, and the pests much more fatal than Eyre had thought possible. Among his first experiences he found himself pressing across the burning sands without water, his horses almost mad with thirst. His companions advised retreat. Reminding them of the distance they had covered since they last found water, Eyre argued that they knew to their cost of the terrors behind them and he reasoned that it was safer and better to go on. Then came a spell of five days without water. The horses had to be securely fastened to prevent them from rushing to the sea to slake their intolerable thirst. The plea for a return was renewed, only to be met by the same contention. "Had they enjoyed the desert so much that they must needs recross it?" Baxter urged return, but Eyre knew only one word and that word was "Forward!" Then came the mutiny. On April 29, two of the native members of the party shot Baxter and decamped with everything worth taking. "The horrors of my situation," says the explorer, "glared upon me with startling reality. At the dead hour of night, in the wildest wastes of Australia, I was left with but one native boy for a companion, and upon his fidelity I could not rely. For aught I knew he might be in league with the others, who were possibly lurking about with a view to taking my life as they had taken Baxter's! Ages can never efface from my brain the hideous torments of that awful night nor would the wealth of the world tempt me to go through it again." Eyre persisted in his westward journey until, reduced to a skeleton and at his last gasp, he suddenly sighted a vessel out at sea. It proved to be the Mississippi, a French whaling barque, whose captain, an Englishman named Rossiter, took Eyre on board and nursed him back to health. Indeed, he pressed his guest to abandon his project and to sail with the ship to its next port. But Eyre revolted at the idea. He accepted a fortnight's hospitality. Then, refreshed, he insisted on being set down exactly where he had been taken up, and, turning his face once more to the West, he heroically finished his tramp. He reached Albany on July 7 and was thus the first man to carve a path across the entire continent.

A Stormy Career
Unhappily, Eyre's later days were somewhat clouded. Anxious to honour one who had achieved such well-merited renown, the British Government, in 1846, made him Lieut.-Gover­nor of New Zealand under Sir George Grey. Later he was appointed Governor of St. Vincent and Antigua, and then in 1861 he was sent as Acting Governor to Jamaica, succeeding to the full Governorship in 1864. The year following, his troubles began. The situation was full of ugly possibilities. The slaves had recently been freed; the blacks outnumbered the whites by nearly 30 to one, and a negro insurrection broke out. Eyre handled the crisis with exemplary firmness and even—so his critics maintained—with needless severity. A violent storm broke out. Men like Thomas Huxley, John Stuart Mill, Thomas Hughes, and Herbert Spencer denounced Eyre as a murderer. On the other hand, Charles Kingsley, Lord Cardigan, and Thomas Carlyle defended him with no less vigour. The case against him eventually collapsed; his traducers betrayed manifest vindictiveness; Lord Beaconsfield conferred a pension on the explorer; and the country generally endorsed Carlyle's verdict that Eyre was "a just, humane, and valiant man, faithful to his trusts everywhere, and with no ordinary faculty for executing them." In that calm and restrained judgment Australia will certainly concur, and his name will be immemorially revered as that of one of our most redoubtable and most illustrious pathfinders.

F W Boreham

Image: John Edward Eyre