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.