The Book Collector, Autumn 2003
Article reproduced here with their kind permission

Review by John Hemming

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The Encyclopedia of Exploration to 1800 is one man's labour of love, the product of fifteen years of research and travels by someone enthralled by his task. Raymond Howgego is a British physics teacher, now in his late fifties, who in 1997 gave up his teaching career to work full-time on his passion to record every possible explorer. This first book is a prodigious achievement, the size of a telephone directory, 1168 pages containing 2327 articles on explorers (and a handful of ship-wrecks and places, such as Taiwan, amid all the adventurers). It is quite extraordinary that one man, trained in a different discipline and with no previous publications to his name, has produced a splendid work of reference that would normally have been compiled by a host of specialist experts. We learn that the author is working on a sequel, to cover the period 1800 to 1850.
Inevitably, with a task of this magnitude, there are flaws. The most serious is the lack of an index of places. The biographical entries are alphabetical and there are indices of persons and of ships, but not of the far-flung places they were trying to reach. There are no maps of illustrations. So a reader wishing to know the sequence of exploration of a region has to begin by knowing the names of its explorers. Once the reader has a lead, Mr Howgego helps him with admirable cross-referencing to other explorers. There are occasional bibliographies of regions, but most are not in the index so that you stumble across 'Prussian voyages to Alaska' under Chirikov, 'The Philippines' under Legazpi, 'Pennsylvania' under Penn, 'the Carolinas' under Hilton, and so forth, whereas 'Cossacks' get their own entry. Because this huge book was compiled by one man over many years, the quality of bibliographies (one after each entry) varies considerably: some are incomplete and dated, others (such as Malaspina) up-to-date and excellent.
The author makes a valiant effort to go back in time - the earliest explorer I noticed was the Egyptian King Sahura's expedition to Punt in 2450 BC, and Abraham (but not Moses) gets an entry as do some ancient Greeks and Romans. He also includes a good selection of Arab, Chinese and Viking explorers, although you need to know modem Chinese spelling-reform to find the great fifteenth-century admiral under Z for Zheng He.
For the period under review, the majority of explorers are Spanish and Portuguese. This causes problems with missing accents, particularly because most names are in capital letters and the printers were maddeningly unable or unwilling to put accents (even tildes) onto any of these. I like Mr Howgego's practice of giving separate entries for each phase of the greater explorers' careers. Thus Captain Cook gets four masterly chapters, for his Canadian charting and then for each voyage. The style of the book is matter-of-fact, with few quotations or flights of fancy; and the lengths of entries generally correspond well to the importance of each subject.
It is often hard to separate exploration from conquest. In the case of Peru, the author correctly gives more weight to Pizarro's or Soto's discoveries than to their roles in the conquest - and the latter are often skewed or inaccurate. There is also difficulty in deciding whether chroniclers were also explorers. Again in Peru, I think that Howgego is too generous to Garcilaso de la Vega, crediting him with travelling 'throughout the Inca empire and collecting every available scrap of information' even though he left the country aged nineteen and did not start his history of it until he was over sixty; but there are at least short entries for far more accurate traveller/writers Cieza de Leon, Acosta and Cobo. Among the many Portuguese in the Encyclopedia, I was glad that he included the flowering of brilliant surveyors who charted remote Amazon rivers in the 1780s (I think that one of my books was the main source for data about them). I could see no important explorer missing; but I also failed to find a fictitious entry with which the author teases his readers.
With the explorers I know well, there were often spelling slips or places where I disagree -with the narrative or the conclusions drawn from it. But these are trivial criticisms of such a monumental endeavour, so packed with information and the product of so much dedicated research. Opening the Encyclopedia at random, a reader is overwhelmed by the endurance, sweat and courage expended by so many explorers, and by the curiosity (and pursuit of wealth and fame) that drove them forward into the unknown. He is also amazed by the tenacity of Raymond Howgego in recording their exploits.