Antiquarian Book Review forthcoming
Article reproduced here with their kind permission.
By William Reese

download PDF document (18kb)

In Amarillo, Texas, there is a steakhouse which offers a 72 ounce steak. If you can eat all four and a half pounds at one sitting the meal is on the house. No such special offer applies to Raymond Howgego’s massive ENCYCLOPEDIA OF EXPLORATION TO 1800 just published by Hordern House in Sydney. Weighing in at just under seven pounds, this staggering compilation of data is as hefty as the story it attempts to encompass, the exploration of the world from antiquity up to the beginning of the modern era. It takes a number of sittings to get the feel of the work, much less digest it.
First of all, before I cavil, I have to say that this is a truly remarkable and extremely useful work of reference. It brings together in one place a vast amount of information on early explorers and exploration. The author asserts, and I see no reason to doubt, that he references some 30,000 books and articles in his notes. These he has conveniently divided into primary and secondary sources at the end of each entry. The mainly biographical entries are concise and generally give the user a good thumbnail description of an individual’s career, where they went, and what they did. A number of the more important individuals have multiple entries to distinguish between separate voyages. If you want to know, in a nutshell, the story of a Luke Foxe or an Afonso de Albuquerque, with references to the sources, then this book works perfectly. Buried within the volume are many more references to many more things, although extracting the added data may be more laborious, as I will come to. There is an index to persons mentioned (about 4000) and an index of ship names, a most useful addition. The author has done a very creditable job of wrestling with the difficulties of ancient and pre-modern names and their spellings. The lists of references are not always given in the kind of full bibliographical format book people might prefer but they will get you where you need to go.
Physically, this volume is beautifully designed, with the ease and comfort of the reference user in mind. While it makes for a hefty tome, it is far better in one volume (funny how you always have the wrong volume of a set). The sturdy sewing and binding looks like it will stand up to a lot of pounding, and the book lies flat easily when opened. A nice added touch is the three silk place-markers integral to the binding. There is so much data that even with 1168 pages fairly small type is used, but the double-column format and the capitalizing of important personal names aid greatly in quick reference. In short, the production of the book itself is completely supportive of the volume's function, and it is a handsome and well-made book.
The primary problem with this book is not the data it contains but how it is arranged. The author starts the preface by saying the work was "intended as a catalogue of expeditions, voyages and travels, rather than a biographical dictionary…." Whatever the intention, almost all of the entries are biographical. It would have been logical to taken a place and provide an entry on the history of its exploration. The author does this, but not where you might expect. Thus, his entry on early Portuguese India is not under Portugal and India but is the entry following those on the great Portuguese captain Albuquerque. In the preface Howgego lists 28 descriptions of places and/or time periods that are associated with individual explorers, and says extensive bibliographies can be found there. This is the only tool to find your way to the excellent five page bibliography of early Portuguese India unless you happened to look up Albuquerque. Even when one refers to the list in the preface one does not always get what is promised. To take the first one, Christopher Columbus, we are promised an extensive bibliography of "Early Voyages in the Caribbean and West Indies." What we get is an excellent bibliography of Columbus with some material on other early exploration.
What all this comes down to is the crying need for an index. The author evidently felt that being an encyclopedia, there was no need for one, as encyclopedias don’t have indexes. But encyclopedias should be arranged in logical order- "India" should be under "India", not an appendix to an individual. One could find early Mexico by seeing the notice that it is associated with "Cortes" in the introduction, but why should it not be under "Mexico"? Cortes was certainly the leader, but there are plenty of other conquistadors in this book, and he didn’t do it by himself. Then there are entries such as "Capuchin Missionaries in Tibet 1707-1745" (entry C36). Not that many people know off the top of their heads what order of missionaries were in Tibet in the 18th century, and the only one who merits his own entry is Ippolito Desideri, not exactly a household name. If I’m just a bozo who wants to know about early Tibet (and I am that bozo) there is no way for me to get a foothold here without specialized knowledge.
This is such a vast, almost overwhelming, labor of love that I hate to be critical. Anyone who is seriously interested in early exploration absolutely needs this book on their shelves, and will find it a rewarding source of information and an invaluable guide to primary and secondary sources. But I urge the author and his publisher to include an index in the contemplated next volume. The goal of a reference book should be swift discovery, not patient exploration.