Australian Library Journal May 2003
Article reproduced here by kind permission

Review by Ian Morrison, University of Melbourne

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The first thing to say about Raymond Howgego’s Encyclopedia of Exploration is that it will surely become a standard reference work. This first volume contains 2327 entries covering the period up to 1800. Much of the information it contains is not otherwise available in English; it is unusually rich in accounts of non-European travellers. A second volume, currently in preparation, will cover 1800-1850.

The second thing to say is that is effectively critic-proof: Howgego has included a fake entry, with the express intention of ‘tak[ing] the pee out of some so-called experts’ (interview in the Age [Melbourne]. 30 November 2002, Saturday Extra, p3); and he is offering a case of champagne to the first reader to identify the hoax. The publishers claim loftier motives – ‘such a ploy [is] a means to protecting copyright’ – but the point remains: if you cannot spot the hoax, what validity do any of your comments have?

Well, this reviewer – suppressing the urge to phone his local TAFE and demand to know why they don’t offer short courses in Epistemology – is prepared to go into print with the assertion that everything he has checked in the Encyclopedia of Exploration to 1800 has proven to be reliable and authoritative.

The Encyclopedia of Exploration passes all the standard tests of a reference book. It is sturdily constructed, as large reference books need to be. The text is well-designed for legibility and printed on fine white paper – hopefully of archival quality, although no statement is made to this effect. The indexes – to people and to ships - are accurate and exhaustive. Every entry includes a list of primary and secondary sources; the fake entry can be identified by anyone with the time to read through 2327 articles and perform some basic checks on the citations. Readers of the Encyclopedia are invited to e-mail additions and corrections to Howgego; these will be vetted and made available on the publishers website at www.hordern.com as a ‘permanent corollary’ to the text.

Faced with such high production values and attention to detail, it is a little surprising to find that the only illustration in the volume is on the dust jacket and endpapers. In a 1000-page volume devoted to the subject of exploration there is not one single map. To get full value from Howgego’s work you will need access to a good historical atlas.

Every piece of writing requires hard decisions on what to leave out, and it is easy to find marginal figures who might have merited an entry to themselves. For example: there is an entry for Charles Clerke, commander of the Discovery on Cook’s third voyage, who took overall command after Cook’s death in 1779; but James King, who took command following Clerke’s death a few months later, only receives a passing mention. King chalked up some notable achievements in his short life: he completed the official account of Cook’s third voyage, published his own astronomical observations, was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society, and was responsible for collecting some if not all the tapa cloth contained in Alexander Shaw’s Catalogue of the different specimens of cloth collected in the three voyages of Captain Cook.

More controversial is Howgego’s policy of including ‘apocryphal’ travellers. In his introduction he argues that 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. Conversely, some expeditions…have recently proved to be objects of a fertile imagination. ‘With regard to medieval European travellers in particular Howgego might have added that the weight of convention more-or-less obliged them to lift stories from other voyage narratives as if they were their own: how far Sir John Mandeville really travelled remains an open question, but for his contemporaries the inclusion of wonders described in other travel books would have enhanced rather than diminished the credibility of his narrative. Quite properly for the compiler of a standard reference work, Howgego adopts a conservative approach to disputed claims – presenting the arguments in support of Marco Polo in such a way as to implicitly endorse them, and concluding in his account of Mandeville with the remark that ‘a healthy debate will no doubt continue to rage’.

There is also an entry on ‘Fictitious voyages’, which includes an extensive list ‘included only as a guide for the unwary’. The list is organised chronologically and concentrates on ‘those works which best create the illusion of authenticity’- but nevertheless finds room for such titles as The Discovery of a world in the moone (1638), The hairy giants (1671), Relation d’un voyage du pole Arctique au pole Antarctique, par le centre du monde (1721), and Restif de La Bretonne’s La decouverte australe par un homme-volant (1781). Other traps for the gullible apparently include Gabriel de Foigny’s La terre australe connue (1676, entered under the English translation of 1693), in which the hermaphrodite Jacques Sadeur washes up on the coast of a vast, flat continent where the population is crowded into a few large cities. The ‘Australians’ (Foigny was the first to use the word) have no distinctions of class or gender, but they are profoundly xenophobic - they murder shipwreck victims, or at best leave them to die - and for no obvious reason are locked into a war of extermination with their neighbours.

Who could possibly find a shadow of truth in such a fantastic tale? However, as Howgego says you can never be too careful.

Ian Morrison, University of Melbourne