Antiques Trade Gazette No. 1578 December 2002
Article reproduced here with their kind permission
Review by Ian McKay

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CHRISTMAS came rather late and weighty this year; it arrived with the postman, whose sometimes Eeyoreish demeanour is not improved by the need to deliver exceptionally heavy book parcels. But for the great volume that he brought to my door just a couple of weeks back, I give thanks, and would happily have proffered a handsome tip, had it not been likely to provoke a dour lecture on the perils of interfering with the due processes of the Royal Mail.
Raymond John Howgego has been researching the history of travel and exploration for most of his adult life and the encyclopedia that I am so briefly praising here has been 15 years in the making.
The bare but substantial bones first. This quarto format encyclopedia weighs in at 7lb, runs to more than a million words on 1184pp and contains 2327 major articles, as well as 4000 cross-references, 30,000 bibliographical citations and 7500 index entries for persons or ships mentioned in the main text.
It was planned as a catalogue of expeditions, voyages and travels, rather than a biographical dictionary, so while at first sight it may appear to be a monumental A-Z of explorers and travellers, you will find that between entries on Cosmas of Alexandria and Philippe Couplet, comes one dealing with Cossack expansion into Siberia, complete with extensive, bibliography, and where someone has been involved in more than one significant journey, separate articles are provided.
The entry for Hernán Cortes, for example, contains a brief biographical note, followed by articles on three major expeditions and in this case, one of the more extensive bibliographies in particular fields of exploration or trade provided in the encyclopedia ­ five pages of reference material on the Conquest of Mexico and other parts of Central America.
This, like all the more substantial bibliographies found in the encyclopedia, is divided into two parts ­ the primary sources, contemporary documents and early books, and the later works and general commentaries. Some 30,000 individual books and articles are cited ­ many of them, of course, more than once ­ and Mr Howgego’s extensive researches have brought forth much information not previously available in English.
Many explorers began their careers travelling in the company of others so, to avoid repetition, users of the encyclopedia are directed to those earlier journeys by means of cross-reference ­ a device that is used to great effect by Mr Howgego, whose prefatory notes on indexing of personal names and cross-referencing should be carefully studied by anyone who acquires this excellent reference book.
I have had little enough time to run road tests, but the first time that I did search out an obscure traveller ­ as recorded in an earlier issue of the Gazette ** ­ the result was all that I hoped it would be and my closer acquaintance, which with such a monumental work will take some time, promises to be very rewarding.
Following a time-honoured tradition, Mr Howgego has seamlessly inserted a spurious entry, complete with fabricated bibliography, in an attempt to protect his copyright. The secret is known only to Mr Howgego, the entry having apparently eluded the publishers, editors and ‘the several learned authorities who perused the book prior to publication’. Given that, he then goes on to say that ‘sufficient clues have been written into the text to allow recognition by the informed scholar without reference to other sources’. Any of those learned folk who actually saw and passed that entry may be excused a blush or two, but a case of champagne is offered by the author to anyone else who can find Wally, as it were.
I am no scholar, but I suspect that my semblance of knowledge and understanding is going to be greatly enhanced over the coming years, thanks to Hordern House and Mr Howgego’s encyclopedia, and even those with already extensive reference libraries in the field will surely welcome this all-encompassing, one, or first-stop option.
The publishers can be contacted at PO Box 22, Potts Point, Sydney, New South Wales 1335, Australia, or at the following websites, www.hordern.com and www.explorersencyclopedia.com ­ the latter being one where additions, corrections or other suggestions are welcomed and, after due moderation by Mr Howgego, will be periodically assembled into a single downloadable and printable update.
This website and other internet resources will doubtless aid Mr Howgego in his work on a further volume that is intended to cover the period 1801-50.
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** The following had appeared a couple of weeks previously...

THE LAST sales of the old year held by Dominic Winter took place on December 11 and 12 and the first of them, a general sale, opened in the usual way with travel books ­ among them a good copy of the 1698 first edition of John Fryer’s New Account of East-India and Persia in Eight Letters, the joints of the contemporary blind panelled calf gilt binding skilfully repaired, that was sold at £1650 to Folios.
A merchant adventurer and surgeon in the service of the East India Company, Fryer left England in December 1672 and spent four years on the Coromandel and Malabar coasts, visiting and describing Surat, Bombay and Madras, as well as travelling to Gokarna, Karwar, Goa and Junmar. The years 1677-79 were spent in Persia and he had one more short spell in India before sailing for England in 1681, but it was to be another 18 years before he could be persuaded to publish an account that, according to my source*, is ‘accurate and reliable with numerous anecdotes told with a fine sense of humour’.
The auctioneers state that this was the first and only edition, but I also learn from my newly acquired reference book that a Dutch edition was published in The Hague in 1700 and that a facsimile was produced in Delhi in 1985.

* Hordern House have just sent me a copy of Raymond Howgego’s monumental Encyclopaedia of Exploration for notice or review. That notice will appear in a couple of week’s time, but Fryer was the very first name I looked up and the results, I have to say, were certainly impressive.