Encyclopedia of Exploration: author's introduction to Part 1

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GENERAL ORGANIZATION

Although intended as a catalogue of expeditions, voyages and travels, rather than a biographical dictionary of the travellers themselves, as much biographical detail as the author could find, or deemed necessary, has been introduced in the interest of providing historical background. It must be appreciated, however, that remarkably little is known of many of the early travellers beyond their moments of glory. If an individual was responsible for more than one significant expedition, several articles for that person might be included, each preceded by a capital letter in brackets, indicating chronological order. In such instances the expeditions must have been viewed by the author as distinct and discontinuous, often involving an intermediate return to a home country or base, and must have been recorded with sufficient detail to justify a separate article and, in many cases, a unique set of references.
Many prominent explorers started their careers travelling in the company of others, so to avoid repetition, the reader is referred to those earlier journeys by means of cross-references. For example, the first two voyages of Francis Drake were not under his command and are therefore mentioned with cross-references in the article for his third, which was. If an expedition happened to be under the direction of more than one individual, or had co-leaders, or had ships sailing together with no overall commander, the expedition is in the same manner catalogued once only. The choice of title for the article then becomes discretionary or follows historical convention, and it might be necessary to try several names before the required entry comes to light. Occasionally a traveller receives an entry solely because he wrote a significant account of a particular region, or was instrumental in the success of a number of voyages, while, entirely as a bonus, a few geographers and collectors of travel narratives, like Purchas and Hakluyt, have been included even if they stayed at home. A number of maritime pilots, such as Juan de la Cosa, and others instrumental in the success of a number of expeditions, have their contributions acknowledged by dedicated articles. In general, if the author found it impossible to write more than a hundred words or so on a traveller, his or her name has been relegated to another article pertinent to the region or period, unless their discoveries are thought to command a particularly prominent position.
A considerable quantity of information in this book is presented here for the first time in English. It has been collated and organized by the author from the most reliable sources in other languages and much effort has been expended in evaluating contradictory and less reliable sources. Where the author has been unable to resolve such contradictions, both sides of the story have been presented.
Personal names are given in block capitals only at their first occurrence in each article. This allows rapid visual searching for the name of interest. If a name is appended by q.v., the person concerned will be found to have a dedicated entry elsewhere, either by virtue of leading a quite separate expedition or by deviating sufficiently from the primary route of the expedition in which his name occurs. Many such names will be those of accompanying scientists, captains of associated vessels in a fleet, and so on. While as many as 4000 names appear in passing, it has not been the author’s intention to include every crewman and cabin-boy; supplementary names are given where the information was available, or if the same name, interestingly at times, crops up in a number of different articles. Names of ships are always quoted in italics.
The author makes no apology for including a number of apocryphal voyages and travellers. It would be unscientific to condemn them to the literature of the fabulous while many of them boast widespread academic patronage. Some have recently undergone favourable (although arguable) reappraisal, so one can never be too careful. Conversely, some expeditions which had for many years been ‘set in stone’ have recently proved to be the objects of a fertile imagination. Even the account of the journey of Marco Polo to China has in recent years been condemned by certain eminent Sinologists as an elaborate fiction. Verifiable ‘spoof’ travel literature, widely popular since the Roman era, is often mentioned in passing, and an article has been devoted solely to the bibliography of fictitious voyages.

INDEXING OF PERSONAL NAMES
Articles are ordered alphabetically wherever possible according to the surname or family name of the traveller or commander of the expedition or voyage. In common with the ordering of most modern indexes, a space, hyphen or apostrophe in a name takes precedence of position over a letter. For example, LE VAILLANT comes before LEDERER; AL-JURJANI before ALARCÓN; CH’ANG CHUN before CHABANEL. However, as with all listings and indexes of this type, some sort of convention had to be adopted to deal with irregularities and ambiguities, as follows.

• Certain travellers, particularly those belonging to the classical Greek or early Egyptian period, might be known by only one name, for example, Alexander or Xenophon. A name like Colaeus of Samos is therefore listed as COLAEUS of Samos.

• Church officials, brothers of holy orders, missionaries, etc. are generally indexed by their Christian names; for example, Thomas of Kana is indexed as THOMAS of Kana, not KANA, Thomas of; and Father Antonio as ANTONIO (Father).

• Norse navigators are indexed by their forename; for example, Leif Eirikson is indexed as LEIF EIRIKSON, not EIRIKSON, Leif.

• In those circumstances where the name is prefixed by de, von, van, del, etc., or the Arabic/Semitic ibn, bin, ben, the prefix is quoted after the forename in the alphabetic listing. For example: CARVAJAL, Alonso de; FADHLAN, Ahmad ibn. In earlier times, such names pointed simply to their place of birth, or in the Arabic sense their parentage, and were used to distinguish Alonso de Carvajal from Alonso de Córdoba, or Ahmad ibn Fadhlan from Ahmad ibn Muhammad.

• Exceptions to the above rule apply in circumstances where the family name consists of several inseparable words; for example, to retain sense, Alvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca is indexed as CABEZA DE VACA, Alvar Núñez. However, a name like Gabriel Soares de Sousa, which does not lose sense, is indexed as SOUSA, Gabriel Soares de, while the author appreciates that the more correct form should be SOARES DE SOUSA, followed by the forename, Gabriel. Even so, there are exceptions: the reader would expect to find Juan Ponce de León listed as PONCE DE LEON, Juan.

• Names prefixed by a definite article la, le,etc. retain the prefix in the forename listing; for example, Charles-Marie de la Condamine will be found as LA CONDAMINE, Charles-Marie de. By the same reasoning, Abu Hamid al-Ghazzali must be indexed as AL-GHAZZALI, Abu Hamid.

• Special care should be exercised where the popular name is actually an assumed title, a vanity much favoured by the earlier French explorers. Indexing in such circumstances is largely discretionary; for example, one would expect to find René Robert Cavalier, Sieur de la Salle listed as LA SALLE, René Robert Cavalier. Unless such a popular association already exists, the assumed title is generally not used. French hybrids, such as Joseph Boucher de Niverville, which combine family names, or family names with place names, might demand a little patience! In addition, attention should be paid to different individuals bearing the same name. While it is difficult enough sorting out the various members of the Hawkins family, the problem of numerous Pacific pilots called Juan Fernández will probably never be resolved.

• Early documents, particularly those written prior to the seventeenth century, have a tendency to endow the same person with a variety of very different names. There are several reasons for this confusion, not the least of which might have been the inability of the individual to spell his own name in the first place. Translators might place their personal nationalistic stamp on a name or, when writing in Latin, might Latinize the name to a point beyond recognition. Navigators and explorers in the service of a foreign country would often assume the foreign variant of their original name. This is especially true of navigators who alternated their allegiance between Spain and Portugal, leading to subtle but confusing changes in spelling and often radical changes in forename. There has been a trend in more recent scholarly texts to standardize the spelling of names in favour of the country of birth, regardless of later changes of national allegiance. This process has been largely adopted in the present work, the only exceptions being those anomalies that have passed into common use. In an English text one would not expect to find Columbus listed as Colombo, Colon, etc., or Cabot as Cabotto. Special care must be taken with names which have a number of acceptable spellings, for example Sousa and Souza. While the general index at the end of this book lists only one spelling, usually the most acceptable, slight variations might be encountered in the biographies themselves.

• Wherever alternative names and spellings are known to have been widely used, including nicknames and concatenations, they are placed in brackets at the opening of the article. Spelling was not standardized in many European languages (notably English, with its trailing e’s) until at least the eighteenth century, leading some authors to actually spell their own names differently within the same document (Walter Ralegh is a prime example). In such extreme circumstances it was difficult to know what to do for the best. Chinese names have been transliterated largely according to the Wade-Giles system, still favoured by many authors, while the pinyin equivalent might be quoted if thought necessary. The transliteration of Arabic characters is little more advanced now than when T.E. Lawrence delighted in spelling each Arabic word differently at every occurrence in his text. Although Arabic names in this book will be recognizable once found, the reader might need to exercise a little flexibility in locating them. The present author, himself a student of Arabic as well as many of the languages of the Indo-European group, has attempted to rationalize names as far as possible in line with the most recent printed or Internet documents. Dutch names (always the subject of numerous apparently acceptable spellings) were often suffixed with the letter z, an abbreviation for zoon. Thus, Cornelis, Cornelisz and Corneliszoon might well be the same person. Early Egyptian names carry as many as four transliterations to suit all tastes, and the Russians get nearly as many.

• In a very few circumstances no forename is quoted. The symbol ? indicates that the forename, often despite painstaking research, could not be discovered by the present author or, as is more likely the case, is not recorded in the primary sources. It was commonplace for military officers or crew members to be called only by their title or rank, for example Mr., Captain, Lieutenant, it being likely that the expedition chronicler never heard or knew their forenames. French travel narratives were notorious for their omission of Christian names, simply calling everybody Monsieur. Similarly, some Catholic missionaries might be known only as Brother or Father.Such titles are placed in parentheses.

PLACE NAMES
The modern regional and country names placed at the head of every article are intended to give only the broadest indication of the field of exploration, and are included to facilitate browsing.
Wherever possible the place name given at its first occurrence in an article is that in use at the time of the expedition and, if known, it carries the spelling used in the primary source. If the spelling differs widely from that in common use at the time, the more acceptable contemporary equivalent is also quoted. Every effort has been made to provide the modern equivalent of place names, or to identify geographical locations. This has often been an arduous task and frequently a subject of pure speculation. Although large urban centres rarely disappear entirely from the face of the earth, early settlements do, or are relocated to more suitable environments, leaving little trace of archaeological evidence. Of particular difficulty is the type of voyage that ‘sailed for thirty days across the ocean and made landfall on a rocky cape where there were many birds’. In such instances the author has exercised his personal judgement, in consultation with the most definitive commentaries. The modern identification of place names is given in parentheses after an equality (=) symbol, while the most recent Comprehensive Edition of the Times Atlas has been used as the standard for spelling. If the modern location is too small or insignificant to be shown in the Times Atlas, the nearest named site is quoted. Many native African place names recorded by eighteenth century travellers will no longer be found on maps. These often took the name of the contemporary local ruler, and would change, or even relocate, when the ruler died. Many of them, however, continued to appear, often with unjustified prominence, in atlases produced in the closing years of the nineteenth century, and may be located without too much difficulty.
It is at all times most important to appreciate that the earliest explorers often had little or no idea where they were. Measurement of longitude before the middle of the eighteenth century was hopelessly inaccurate, while transcontinental expeditions often traced their route from one distorted coastal chart to another. Even so, some navigators, like William Baffin, calculated longitude with an accuracy that sometimes defies comprehension. Measurements of latitude, often quoted with some significance by polar voyagers, were far more reliable, particularly if the expedition employed the services of a trained astronomer. It is worth mentioning that an expedition of 1536 to the interior of South America achieved latitude calculations to a verifiable accuracy of one minute (about a mile).

DATES
The dates quoted adjacent to the title of each article indicate the duration of the expedition, or the period of travel. If only one date is quoted the journey took place within a single year. Within the text precise dates have been quoted, to the nearest day if possible, in the form day.month.year (e.g., 29.4.1699 for 29 April 1699), wherever the information has been available. If not, the information is either not known to the author or is not recorded in the original sources. It must be appreciated that many travellers composed their narratives from memory some time after the event, while others, like Marco Polo and Leo Africanus, tended to present somewhat generalized descriptive accounts of the regions visited, from which it is not always easy to piece together a precise chronology for their route. It is not unusual for even the year to be remembered wrongly. Ralph Fitch, for example, either accidentally skips a year or spends a disproportionate length of time in one place. If dates have been estimated, they are indicated by ‘c.’ (circa). If dates have been provided authoritatively but even then without agreement between scholars, they are separated by a forward stroke (for example, 1693/95). Birth dates are often subject to errors of a year or two because of the tendency of individuals or their associates to quote their age at the time, rather than their year of birth.
The day of the week is more often correctly remembered, but the date recorded wrongly. Such is true of the first sighting of the Pacific by Balboa: recorded as a Tuesday while the date actually corresponds to a Sunday. Missionaries and early Iberian seamen made widespread use of Saints’ days in their narratives, providing remarkable reliability and often naming places after the relevant saint. In addition, particular care must be exercised when dealing with dates of voyages; there might be as much as a few days’ difference between a sighting and a landing, or even weeks between boarding a ship and leaving a port. Many of the dates associated with early Greek voyages are little more than inspired guesswork, while the vagaries of ancient Egyptian chronology remain as bewildering as ever, even though many authors delight in specifying the very year. The original Egyptian texts tend to date an expedition by the year within a particular king’s reign; but the problem for us arises in properly dating the start of the reign. The present author has taken the various Egyptian chronological systems into account and for each dynasty has specified what he regards as the most extreme range of dates, separated by a forward stroke. The exact date will probably fall within the stated range, which might be as large as a hundred years for the Archaic period, reducing to five years or so for the later dynasties. Norse voyages, however, can usually be regarded as accurate to within a year or two.
No attempt has been made by the author to resolve the differences between the Julian and Gregorian calendars; the date given in the earliest source has simply been accepted at face value. Spain, Portugal, Italy and France adopted the Gregorian calendar in 1582, and the Catholic states of Germany in the following year. Protestant regions of Germany waited until 1700, as did some of Scandinavia, except for Sweden, which adopted a most confusing system of gradual conversion not fully resolved until 1844. Britain put it into effect as late as 1752, while Russia continued to use the Julian calendar until the Revolution. Some confusion is therefore bound to arise in situations where expeditions of different nationality arrived at the same place or, for example, a Swede or Frenchman travelled across Russia or a Spaniard visited a British colony. The reader is best referred to Frank Parise’s excellent The Book of Calendars (New York 1982), which provides clearly laid out comparison tables, as well as lists of Saints’ days.
The present work omits any expeditions which set out after 1 January 1800, while those which were already in progress by that date are documented to their conclusion. If a traveller’s career happened to span two centuries, a passing reference only is made to the later, nineteenth century travels.

SHIPS
Wherever the information has been available, the number of ships or vessels comprising a fleet, and their names (where known), have been quoted, along with senior members of the crew and the number of crewmen. It must be appreciated that different vessels of the same name often exist, and that vessels were commonly re-named, sometimes in mid-voyage. Captured foreign vessels, if not scuttled, were nearly always re-named, while Spanish vessels generally had two names: one a somewhat flowery religious appellation, and the other a more manageable nickname used by the crew. There is frequently some disagreement about the number of vessels comprising a fleet, particularly if the chronicler chose to ignore smaller vessels, support ships or kits assembled on arrival. Similarly, the quoted number of crew members is also subject to wide variation; many died at sea or deserted at ports of call, and the precise number depends very much on when the count was taken.

BIBLIOGRAPHIES
The bibliography associated with each article is quite obviously intended to provide a direct route for further research. It was the author’s intention to provide the reader with immediate guidance towards the major sources for particular expeditions, without the need for cross-referencing, and this approach has necessitated some duplication of references. Nevertheless, something of the order of 30,000 separate books and articles have been listed. Every effort has been made to trace a primary source for each expedition – that is, an account either written by, or dictated by, the leader of the expedition or by any others who accompanied it. Narratives reproduced in the large collections or histories of voyages and travels, such as are found in Hakluyt, Purchas, Ramusio, Commelin, etc., are generally sufficiently first-hand to be regarded as primary documents. However, many expeditions have no printed primary source, and in such situations the author has attempted to locate the relevant manuscripts. Recent commentaries and edited reprints are particularly valuable in tracing locations and place names; quite often the geography of the regions treated by earlier translators was imperfectly understood.
The bibliographies are in general divided into two sections: the first lists primary sources, usually in order of significance, while the second consists mainly of later commentaries, arranged alphabetically. It has been an almost impossible task keeping abreast of recent reprints and re-issues, but the author has done his best to list everything still in print at the time of going to press. If q.v. is attached to the name of the author, the reader is referred to the dedicated article for that author for a more detailed publication history.
If a particular traveller is known to have published a large number of works, they are generally all listed, even though they may not in any way be relevant to his travels. Individuals mentioned in passing within a particular article might also have bibliographic references associated with them. If a printed document is known to be particularly brief, the number of pages is often given. In certain circumstances, the reader is referred to the bibliography appended to an alternative article, often suggesting that there is no distinct primary source, and that the only references occur in more general works on particular periods or regions. Extensive bibliographies pertaining to particular fields of exploration or trade will especially be found under the articles listed below. These also include works of a more general nature, for example histories and commentaries on specific regions, historical periods or trading companies:

In addition, comprehensive listings are included with the articles for the various East India companies and the Compagnie des Indes. The works cited are often those with a more general content, not relevant to particular expeditions, which were difficult to place elsewhere in this guide. Minor voyages which added little to the history of exploration, or about which the author has no further information, are often included in such listings. Birth and death dates have occasionally been added to authors’ names, when known, while comments enclosed within square brackets are those of the present author. They have generally been added to provide extra information on the precise content of the book where this was not obvious from its title. The addition of q.v. to the author’s name means that there is an article for the author himself.
Many of the original documents associated with early Spanish voyages have been reproduced in the hundreds of volumes of colecciones. The more significant of these will be found under the articles for Pizarro, Cortés and Columbus, and they will, of course, contain much material relevant to other travellers. While searching for particular sources, it is worth looking at articles for other individuals associated with an expedition (indicated by q.v.), or seeking out similar expeditions in the same region or during the same period. Certain regions are provided with extensive bibliographies under the article for their first settler or colonizing expedition – for example, a listing for the history of Jamaica appears under the entry for William Penn, and that for Guiana under Robert Harcourt. In fact, nearly every significant travel book printed before 1800, as well as most of those published since, can be found somewhere.
Most travel books published before 1800 were given titles that occupied virtually the entire area of the title page, possibly to persuade the intending purchaser that something truly original or exciting was contained between the covers. These titles have sometimes been reduced in length in the present work, but not so much that the exact edition could not be located if the need arose. In addition, sufficient of the title has been retained to convey at least the nature of the volume and the type of information that the reader can expect to find. All original spellings and misspellings in the early titles have been left unaltered; ‘v’ and ‘vv’ have however been normalized to ‘u’ and ‘w’ and, largely to make reading easier, upper case letters placed in mid-sentence have generally been reduced to lower case unless demanded grammatically or linguistically.
Comprehensive bibliographies for North America will be found under the following articles which, between them, include most of the early travel literature of the United States:

WORLD EXPLORATION IN 1800
By 1800, almost the entire temperate coastline of the world had been charted to a relatively high degree of accuracy, as a glance at a world map by Aaron Arrowsmith will show. The only significant gap in the map, to be filled by Baudin and Flinders during the first three years of the following century, existed between Bass Strait and the Great Australian Bight on the southern coast of Australia. In addition, virtually all the major island groups had been discovered. The second half of the eighteenth century had marked a turning point in the history of cartography. In particular it saw the demise of the fabulous in favour of the scientific, many of the landmarks that had straddled the interior of the continents being replaced only by those that could be verified by more recent expeditions. The result was that certain regions, notably the interior of Africa, were suddenly emptied of detail, while the reports of early travellers in other regions were largely ignored, their sightings being regarded as too inaccurately defined, or too out-of-date, to qualify for the new era of mapping.

Asia
The region within the present boundaries of Russia, as far as the East Cape and the Arctic coast, was well known as a result of the Great Northern Expeditions under Bering and others. Almost the entire Arctic coast of Siberia had been charted, although some of it only from the landward side as no single continuous voyage had navigated the complete coastline. India, China, the East Indies, and the Middle East as far as central Iran had been mapped in some detail – China (with the help of the Jesuits) to exceptional accuracy. The trade routes of Central Asia were well known, although some of them had not been travelled by Europeans for a long time, and little had been seen of the country between them. Similarly, the major routes through Nepal, Bengal and Kashmir, as far as the southern limits of Tibet, were known, but the Tibetan plateau itself remained a blank. Outer Mongolia, except for the single trade route through its centre, was unknown to Europeans, as was the interior of Burma and South East Asia, which, except for a few excursions into Vietnam and Laos, and a single early Dutch expedition along the Mekong, remained to be explored. The Arabian peninsula, particularly its southern half, was little known outside the Arab world.

Africa
The geography of North Africa, Egypt, parts of the Sudan, and most of Ethiopia was well known. Browne had reached Dharfur (in Sudan), while Hornemann had crossed the Sahara from Cairo to Murzuk and had then continued south to Nigeria (although his death prevented the more southerly extension of his route from being shown on the maps). Apart from a few very early and poorly documented journeys, no European had crossed the western Sahara, although a few reliable routes appear on the maps, derived, one assumes, from Arabic sources. Mungo Park had reached the Niger from Gambia, and had confirmed its direction of flow, but the course of the river to the east of Segu in Mali was unknown. French expeditions had penetrated to the upper Senegal, but little else beyond a few miles from the coast of West Africa had been explored. On the west coast of Central Africa the geography of Angola was known to within two or three hundred miles of the coast, and the Congo (Zaire) as far as a little beyond Stanley Pool. On the central eastern coast, only the immediate hinterland of the trading ports was known, while further south the Portuguese had penetrated as far as Matabele Land, the middle Zambezi and Lake Malawi. Lacerda’s expedition of 1798 had reached Lake Mweru, but no European is known to have crossed Central Africa. In the south, geographical knowledge was confined to the region southwest of the Orange River. A few excursions had taken place across the Orange into Namibia and Griqualand, but it was not until 1801 that Barrow reached Lattakoo (near present Kuruman).

Australia
Although much of the coastline of Australia had been seen by Europeans, and the general shape of the continent had been defined by early Dutch and later English expeditions, a complete reappraisal of the shape of the continent was not undertaken until the Flinders and Baudin expeditions of the early years of the nineteenth century. By 1800 no European had penetrated more than a few miles from the coast, and then only in the region around Port Jackson. Almost the entire coastline of modern Victoria was unknown.

South America
By 1800 much of the general topography of South America had been established, and the flow of most of the major river systems was well known. However, knowledge of the interior of Brazil needed to be pieced together from a large number of fragmentary sources, many of them inaccurate and unscientific, while the regions between the tributaries of the Amazon were to remain unexplored until the twentieth century. Jesuit missionaries, prior to their expulsion, had mapped most of Paraguay, Bolivia, northern Argentina and southwestern Brazil. Prospectors and military expeditions had penetrated Minas Gerais and Mato Grosso, and several traders and explorers had accomplished the grand circuit from Paraguay to the mouth of the Amazon following the Guaporé-Madeira route. The Río Araguaia had been opened as a trade route from Minas Gerais to the Amazon, but the country between the rivers Araguaia and Madeira remained totally unexplored. The hinterland of the coastal stretch between Rio de Janeiro and Salvador was also poorly known. A few explorers had navigated the Río São Francisco and its tributaries, but little penetration had taken place towards the east and west of the river. In the north and west of Amazonia, boundary commissioners had surveyed as far as the borders of Venezuela, Guyana and Colombia, but the westernmost extremities of Brazil remained largely unrecorded by Europeans. The southern provinces of Paraná and Santa Catarina had yet to see European settlement. In Argentina a few excursions into Patagonia had taken place, but the region south of the Río Negro, then regarded as being of little commercial interest, remained as one of the largest blanks on the maps.

North America
The topography of the United States to the east of the Mississippi was well known by 1800, as was the region of the old Spanish dominions in the southwest: California, Texas, New Mexico and Southern Arizona. A single Spanish expedition (unknown to most cartographers of the time) had mapped parts of Utah but, although traders had crossed much of the region between North Dakota and New Mexico, geographical knowledge of the interior remained fragmentary. The section of the Rocky Mountains between the borders of Canada and New Mexico had been seen only by some early Spanish expeditions and possibly a few fur traders. The interior of Nevada, Oregon, Washington, Idaho and (probably) Wyoming had received no known European visitors before 1800. To the north of the 49th parallel, the topography was a little better known due to the expansion of the English and French fur trade. Mackenzie had followed his river to the Arctic coast, and had crossed the Rockies to the Pacific. Hearne had reached the Arctic via the Coppermine River, while others had entered the Barrens to the west of the Hudson Bay and had reached the Rockies by way of the Peace and Athabasca Rivers, and by both branches of the Saskatchewan. The interior of Ungava was unknown, as were many of the islands to the north of Canada. Much of the southern and western coast of Alaska had been charted, but no European had penetrated the interior.

The Polar Regions
Expeditions in search of passages to Asia via the northeast and northwest had charted much of the coasts of northern Europe, Greenland, and the east-facing Canadian Arctic islands by an early date. No vessels had penetrated beyond the islands enclosing the Hudson Bay, and much of the sea to the north of the eastern tip of Baffin Island had not been visited for two centuries. Svalbard (Spitsbergen) was well known to whalers, and Novaya Zemlya had been charted, but of the other Arctic island groups only the New Siberian Islands had been seen. In the south, Cook and others had unknowingly made close approaches to the Antarctic coast, but no expedition had provided confirmation of the existence of a southern continent.

SOURCES
Wherever possible primary sources, or recent definitively edited translations and reprints, have been used in the preparation of this book. Secondary sources, as well as some of the more general and encyclopedic reference works, which were themselves often compiled third-hand from other similar documents, were frequently found to be unreliable and contradictory. Given that for each of the 2300 articles at least one document would necessarily have been consulted, and that for some of the longer or more complex items as many as ten or twenty sources might have been used, one begins to appreciate the magnitude of this undertaking.
Widespread use has been made of Internet resources. The Internet came into general use during the formative stages of this work when probably fewer than fifty web sites carried relevant information, and then not much of it of use. However, by the closing stages of preparation for publication that number had multiplied to tens of thousands of online documents, although it must be said that most remained superficial in content. One unfortunate effect of the Internet was that it provided an ideal channel for the perpetuation of errors: inaccurate information was reflected from one site to another in the belief that it was correct, endowing certain voyages and discoveries with a modern mythology which sometimes proved difficult to untangle. But the Internet did provide the complete texts of Strabo, Pliny, Ramusio, the Catholic Encyclopaedia, the Handbook of Texas, Thwaite’s Jesuit Relations and many large biographical dictionaries, as well as countless catalogues of books, both ancient and modern. In general, the impact of the Internet on the present work has probably been strongest with respect to some of the lesser known travellers, many of whom would have failed to appear at all due to paucity of information.
What the Internet did bring with it was the magic of e-mail, allowing immediate contact with like-minded people throughout the world and the rapid exchange of information, particularly with regard to local sources which would otherwise have been difficult to access. Thus the author established a worldwide circle of friends, all of them scholars in their own right, who were happy to give up their time to exchange ideas, research local documents and provide translations into English.