Quadrant, 2003
Review by Dr. Milton E. Osborne
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TRAVELLERS IN ANTIQUE LANDS
By Milton Osborne

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At a time when any subject, however trite, seems to qualify for publication in the guise of an encyclopedia, or worse a set of lists, the appearance of an Encyclopedia of Exploration to 1800 is a refreshing cause for celebration. This volume, the first of a projected three, has the characteristics that should be the basis of any good encyclopedia. It is authoritative, compendious and highly readable. Within nearly 1200 pages and 7500 entries the book provides an account of explorers and their achievements from the earliest recorded traveller, Zimri-Lim (1760BC), to the giants of the eighteenth century including, of course, James Cook.
Remarkably, the encyclopedia is the work of one man, Raymond Howgego, an English physicist who has turned a fascination with travel and exploration into a vocation. In this great plum pudding of a book a reader dips into its pages to find unexpected treasures alongside familiar figures. Cook, Dampier and Cabot will be familiar to an English-speaking audience, as will the now controversial Marco Polo (the entry in the encyclopedia assumes he did go to China but rehearses the arguments of the sceptics).
Those with an already developed interest in exploration will welcome the attention given to men such as Tomes Pires, the apothecary-turned-merchant who chronicled the early Portuguese entry into South-East Asia in the sixteenth century, and the Dutchman Jan Huyghen van Linschoten, whose intelligence about Portuguese activities in the East was instrumental in the establishment of the Dutch East India Company, the Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie.
Beside these familiar, or a least better known, names the range of travellers Howgego identifies is staggering. None are more so than the Chinese pilgrims and officials who criss-crossed the Asian continent and the Indian Ocean from the early centuries of the Christian era to the fifteenth century, the time of the great sea voyages of the eunuch admiral Zeng He(Cheng Ho in the older rendering of his name)
Under the patronage of the Ming emperor, Zeng commanded or directed no fewer than seven voyages into the Indian Ocean between 1405 and 1433, making China the dominant maritime and commercial power in the region and reaching as far as Africa. Famously, following one of his voyages Zeng brought back the first giraffe ever to be seen by the imperial court. This was a prize so rare that the emperor himself greeted the beast on arrival at the palace gates.
Yet Zeng He’s achievements with imperial patronage, given the huge ships and vast crews of his expedition, seem somehow less impressive than the travels of a man such as Zang Qian(Chang Ch’ien). Supported by hundreds of men rather than the thousands who accompanied Zeng He, Zang travelled for more than twenty years,(138-116BC) through Central Asia, was held prisoner for ten years in Kashgar, and in the course of his journeys opened up the Silk Route across Asia.
The role of missionaries in the saga of exploration emerges clearly in this book, whether the territory involved is in the Americas, Africa or Asia. With their greater numbers and widespread networks reporting back to central authorities we learn much more from the Catholic priests and friars then from their Protestant counterparts.
It is widely known that religious were central to the exploration of French Canada and Latin America, which once included California. But how many will be aware of the name Jean-Baptiste Regis, the French Jesuit who, with missionary colleges, prepared a map of the Chinese empire in the early eighteenth century and was responsible for mapping the Great Wall? And it is to a priest, Father Gaspar de Cruz, a Portuguese Dominican, that we owe some of our earliest detailed information about Cambodia in the sixteenth century, the period after the abandonment of the great city of Angkor. Perhaps not surpassingly, the abundance of priestly travellers from different orders did not always make for harmony among these competitors for souls, nor did their presence, for the most part, lead to any sizeable numbers of converts, with the notable exception of Latin America.
Accustomed as we are nowadays to rapid travel, a constant if unstated theme that emerges from this book is the extent to which concepts of time were very different in the period that Howgego surveys. By the end of the eighteenth century improvements in naval technology had certainly led to voyages being shorter than they had been many centuries before. But in many cases the difference in the length of the voyages was not dramatic, and if voyages were made over longer distances they were still carried out at a measured pace. On land the time taken to travel from one place to a distant other was still remarkably slow. Yet the men, and they are mostly men whose travels are recorded in this book, appear to have embarked on their journeys with the acceptance that their travels could last for months, and even years.
As with any good encyclopedia, the Encyclopedia of Exploration to 1800 is complete with the scholarly apparatus permitting a reader to probe deeper into the individuals and travels described. Specialists may quibble about some information contained, however. For instance, did the famed Arab traveller Ibn Batuta in fact visit Cambodia as he travelled in South East Asia, as his entry states? Yet this reviewer can only note one significant omission from the book. This is of Chou Ta-kuan (Zhou Daguan), the Chinese envoy who visited Cambodia in 1296-97 and left us with the only eyewitness account of the city of Angkor while it was still the greatest in South-East Asia
This is a book for travellers, whether actual or from their armchairs. It is beautifully produced, a credit to its compilers and its publisher.

A graduate of Sydney and Cornell, and currently Visiting Fellow in the Faculty of Asian Studies at the Australian National University, Milton Osborne is the author of eight books on the history and politics of Southeast Asia, including
The French Presence in Cochinchina and Cambodia 
River Road to China: The Search for the Source of the Mekong, 1866-73 
Southeast Asia: An Introductory History 
Sihanouk: Prince of Light, Prince of Darkness 
The Mekong: Turbulent past, uncertain future