Time Literary Supplement, May 9, 2003
Review by Fergus Fleming
Article reproduced here with their kind permission
TO THE END OF THE WORLD
... Raymond John Howgego’s Encyclopedia of Exploration to 1800 is something else.

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There are books with more pages (here 1,168) and there are books that are also quarto, but this book is bigger than all of them – and not just because of its considerable dimensions. Encyclopedia of Exploration exudes majesty. In fact, it resembles less a book than a topographical feature, something so compelling that you can not help looking at it, again and again just to confirm that it is there. It is rather like having the Matterhorn in your front room.
According to the blurb, Howgego has devoted fifteen years of his life to this project. It shows. The resulting, beautifully produced tome (sold worldwide by the Australian publisher’s website, www.hordern.com) tells you everything you need to know about every explorer who did anything worth knowing about before 1800. For example, opening it at its bookmarks (of which there are three) one reads about Pieter van den Brook, 1607-30, employee of the Dutch East India Company, who visited West Africa, the Coromandel Coast, and established the first Dutch factory at Arden; Lief Eriksson, fl. 1000, Viking settler of Greenland and discoverer of North America; and Antonio de Torres, 1439-1502, a Spanish navigator who sailed with Columbus on his second voyage to the West Indies. The entries are cross-referenced to a host to ancillary characters: thus Eriksson is linked to the man from whom he bought his ship, a German crewman who sailed with him, a castaway he picked up on his return to Greenland, his father Erik Raudi who discovered Greenland, his brother Thorvald who made a second journey to America and a fellow Viking called Thorgils Orranbeinforste who was shipwrecked off the east coast of Greenland and took three years to reach safety, encountering along the way a den of "witches" (presumably Inuit).
The breadth of Howgego’s research is astounding. So is its depth. For each explorer he provides a list of primary and secondary sources, many of which would put full-time biographers to shame. James Cook, for example, merits four separate entries with accompanying bibliographies, plus a three-page reading list for those who wish to take the bibliographies farther. Howgego has covered the most elusive years of recorded exploration with such thoroughness and panache that one can only bow before his expertise. Encyclopedia of Exploration is a towering work of scholarship. A second volume is promised, covering the years 1800-1850, and presumably there will be a third, if not a fourth. If they are anything like the first, they will be worth waiting for.
One caveat: as a "mousetrap", Howgego has included a fictitious entry, with the offer of a case of champagne for whoever finds it. Arguably, this diminishes the Encyclopedia’s value as a reference book. Those not as rooted in the arcane as the author will find themselves glaring suspiciously at every potential culprit. Is it Matias Abad who founded the first Spanish mission at San Francisco? Or is it Dmitry Zyrian, seventeenth-century Cossack explorer of northern Siberia? Or is it any one of the thousands in between? Or is it just a ghastly plot to keep the reviewer awake at night?