Review by Merrill Distad, University of Alberta
“The Pacific Circle”, Oct. 2005, Bulletin No. 15

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Scarcely two years after the appearance of the first volume of Ray Howgego's Encyclopedia of Exploration, we are now treated to the second volume, which covers the period 1800 to 1850. Like its predecessor, this is a massive volume. It contains 732 major articles, covering more than 3,000 voyages and expeditions, undertaken aboard more than 1,000 ships, and it cites more than 10,000 published sources, both primary and secondary.
During the first half of the nineteenth century the map of the world took recognizably modern form; after 1850 only limited regions remained terra incognita, principally the interiors of Central Africa and of Australia, and much of the North and South Polar regions, which makes 1850 a suitable cut-off date. Moreover, with the major exception of David Livingstone, few of the explorers active during that period carried on into the second half of the century, thus making them fit tidily into the chronological span of volume two.
This era also witnessed a vast proliferation of travel literature and the beginnings of widespread tourism. The former fed the curiosity of an increasingly literate and affluent audience of readers, while the latter seemingly instilled "every traveler who set foot outside their native land...[with] the need to commit his or her experiences to print" (p. vii). From the ranks of amateurs emerged a class of professional travel writers and compilers of guidebooks. Howgego has therefore excluded travelers who ventured no further east than the Levant or eastern Anatolia, or further south than Africa's Mediterranean coast. He nonetheless substitutes a number of regional articles on travel and tourism. The parallel increase in periodical literature, including scores of journals published by geographical societies and governments, has led Howgego to enrich volume two's bibliographies with a huge number of explorers' accounts that appeared in these more ephemeral venues.
While the organization of volume two is substantially the same as its predecessor, biographies of "companion" travelers, who accompanied an expedition, are appended to the major articles in which their names first appear. This, the author explains, avoids "the frustration of constant cross-referencing." There remain, nonetheless, a very large number of helpful cross-references. Once again, the names of persons and ships are separately and thoroughly indexed, but there is still no indexing by geographical areas of activity or by nationality. While a contents table is often, quite understandably, omitted in alphabetically arranged books, the inclusion of a simple list of rhe major articles would have been helpful. The omission of maps of any kind, perhaps for reasons of space and cost, may be excused by the readers' presumed ability to consult historical atlases.
As in volume one, major articles include bibliographies of primary narratives, translations, later editions, and reprints, followed by biographies and general works for background reading. A series of regional, bibliographical summaries are appended to a number of major articles, personal, geographical, and corporate (a bibliography of whaling, attached to "Enderby Company: voyages in the Southern Ocean"). Thus, the article "United Stares to the east of the Mississippi" is followed by a bibliography of travelers' accounts that runs more than eight, double-column pages, while still omitting many tourist journals. More than 100 articles deal with the exploration of the American West, though the author defers to Hafen's massive Mountain Men and the Fur Trade and Thrapps Encyclopedia of Frontier Biography as more exhaustive sources. Two future American states were nonetheless selected for major articles: California (understandably) and Iowa (somewhat curiously), while the bibliography for Texas-already admitted to the union in 1845-is appended to the article on Stephen Austin. General bibliographies for Oregon and for Western Canada are respectively, appended to articles devoted to John McLoughlin and James Douglas. Quite apart from their arbitrary and sometimes puzzling placement, their coverage of general works is quite wide, rendering them useful bibliographies of settlement and development, as well as of exploration.
Pacific voyages are the subject of more than 100 major articles-primarily those that produced at least one, book-length, published narrative-while for lesser endeavors, mentioned only in passing, the author refers readers to sources such as Ward's American Activities in the Central Pacific and the many works of Glynn Barratt. Although no work of such immense scope can claim to be exhaustive, Howgego's maintains, and with the periodical literature even extends, the standard of bibliographic coverage he established in volume one. It is therefore surprising to find Helen Rosenman's fine translations of the journals of Dumont D'Urville's expeditions (1988) unaccountably absent. More troubling still are numerous typos, misspellings, inconsistencies, and omissions in titles, particularly evident in the bibliographic citations. More than once, for example, John McLoughlin's name appears as "McCloughlin," though happily it is not misspelled in the index of names. Small details, perhaps, but irksome nonetheless, and hallmarks of a book too hastily rushed into production. Let us hope that, having taken such pains to produce these magnificently handsome and scholarly volumes, the publisher will take more time to proof the succeeding volumes. In reviewing volume one I described Howgego's brilliant and Herculean achievement as "monumental and now indispensable" (see Bulletin 11, October, 2003). Volume two is no less so, and should earn the respect and gratitude of all who consult it.