Brisbane Courier-Mail February 5, 2005

Review by John Wright

EPIC IS THE VENTURE

A new encyclopedia of exploration is as impressive as the journeys it describes, writes John Wright:

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MATTHEW Flinders deserved a kinder fate and might have found it had he not lived a century before radio and modern communications.

The English navigator, after circumnavigating Australia in 1802-03, was on his way back home when, unaware that England and France were at war, he called in at Ile de France (Mauritius) to repair his ship and was interned as a spy by French governor Charles Mathieu Decaen.

Decaen detained Flinders on Mauritius for more than six years until a British blockade of the French possession in 1810 effected his release. The explorer died in July 1814, the day after a presentation copy of his new journal, Voyage to Terra Australis, which he had largely written in captivity, was rushed to his deathbed.

Serious exploration has always carried the imperative of corroborative publication in one form or another. This explains why Flinders spent the last three years of his life perfecting his journal and, perhaps, why this bedside gesture towards a dying man must have assumed a particular importance.

British author and traveller Raymond Howgego, who briefly recounts the Flinders deathbed story in Encyclopedia of Exploration: 1800 to 1850, knows as much about the combined imperatives of scholarship and travel as anyone.

Howgego is a former physics teacher with a lifelong interest in exploration and those responsible for it. In 2003, after more than 15 years of travel and research, he astonished the academic world with Encyclopedia of Exploration to 1800 -- a mammoth, one-million-word text commissioned by Australian publisher Hordern House and now regarded as a definitive reference work on the history of exploration.

Monumental in scope and execution and described by the Times Literary Supplement as ``a towering work of scholarship'', the 1200-page book contains more than 2300 articles detailing every known explorer, every documented voyage or journey of exploration up to 1800 and every known ship they sailed in. It has a staggering 20,000 bibliographical citations.

The book, according to Hordern House, has been a runaway success in international library markets, and it reportedly has found a keen readership among non-academics as much for its compelling subject matter as for Howgego's enthusiastic approach.

The author maintains this enthusiasm and meticulous attention to detail and accuracy in his follow-up work covering exploration between 1800 and 1850. In 700-plus pages, it provides details of more than 3000 travellers including those who, like Flinders, left their mark on and in Australia.

By the early 19th century, when Flinders and Frenchman Nicholas Baudin were charting the Australian coast, history's great oceanic voyages were all but over, though Antarctica had yet to be discovered and it would be another century before Roald Amundsen would conquer the Arctic's Northwest Passage.

Over five decades to the mid-1850s, travellers would push into the unexplored regions of every continent except Antarctica.

Australia, a continent virtually untrodden by Europeans in 1800, would attract its own long list of explorers, among them Blaxland, Lawson and Wentworth, Oxley, Hume and Hovell, Cunningham, Sturt, Mitchell, Strzelecki, Eyre and the ill-fated Leichhardt.

All their journeys are in Howgego's exhaustive encyclopedia, from Gregory Blaxland's 1813 trek over the Blue Mountains with William Lawson and William Wentworth and the discovery in 1829 of the Darling River by Charles Sturt and Hamilton Hume, to Edward Eyre's epic overland trip from Adelaide to Albany in 1840-41, Leichhardt's Jimbour to Port Essington expedition in 1844-45 and his disappearance in 1848.

The detail is what makes Howgego's mini-biographies and histories so fascinating. Howgego writes that on Sturt's return from an 1844-45 journey into the centre to find the so-called and non-existent ``Inland Sea'' the explorer ``was by that time almost totally blind, blackened by sun and scurvy, and had to be put on a cart for the journey back to Adelaide''.

Leichhardt completed his own 1844-45 trek in the week that Sturt finished his. Leichhardt returned to civilisation in much better shape and to a hero's welcome, though Howgego tells us his control over the expedition was ``almost totally lacking'' and his navigation so poor that he once calculated he was 30km out to sea.

Not all historians have been as dismissive of Leichhardt's skills as an explorer, but what certainly isn't in question in this monumental and delightful work is Howgego's success in capturing through the stories of these 19th-century wanderers and explorers the indomitability of the human spirit.

Encyclopedia of Exploration: 1800 to 1850, by Raymond John Howgego (Hordern House, Sydney, $245 plus $15 postage. www.hordern.com or www.explorersencyclopedia.com)