ENCYCLOPEDIA OF EXPLORATION 1850 TO 1940: The Oceans, Islands and Polar Regions.
By Raymond John Howgego. (Hordern House, Sydney, 2006.) Pp. 724. isbn i 875567 41 0. A$245.oo.
Raymond Howgego has produced another astounding volume, the third in his monumental and definitive Encyclopedia of Exploration. As always, he alone has done all the research - and travelled to many of the remote locations: feats that, in any other compendium, would have been done by a large team of experts and editors. This volume covers the ninety years from 1850 to 1940, a period when ocean and air travel became global and photography was a new medium of record, and when the last blanks on maps were filled, but before the great modern era of purely scientific research and discovery.
To reduce the subject-matter, Howgego chose to devote this volume to Oceans, Islands and Polar Regions - the cold and wet places. This works well for Polar Regions, since the book covers their heroic age. Some of the islands are very large (New Zealand, Borneo, New Guinea and Madagascar, for instance) so that their sections involve terrestrial exploration, most of which will of course come in the fourth and final volume. This book has 120 regional articles (in addition to hundreds of biographies of individuals), but the reader is helped by a much-needed index to these composite essays, and many of them trace the history of their exploration from early times to the present. As the introduction justifiably boasts, 'if the articles on New Zealand were extracted from this and previous volumes, they would alone constitute probably the most comprehensive account of New Zealand exploration ever written'.
Howgego's account of the dispute about whether Robert Peary or Frederick Cook was the first to reach the North Pole overland is a model of scholarly impartiality. He notes the doubts about Cook's claim to have climbed Mount McKinley in 1906, and sets out the pros and cons of whether Cook reached the Pole when he disappeared with some Inuit between March 1908 and April 1909. After giving many negative aspects of Cook's case, Howgego concludes that: 'The massive "Cook-Peary controversy" . . . has continued to rumble on without resolution and remains to this day a major subject of debate among polar historians.' In the entry on Peary, he also notes controversial aspects of that explorer's narrative: that in March 1909 he did the 213-kilometre dash from Bartlett's forward camp north of Ellesmere Island to the Pole in only four days, 'a speed that most modern Arctic travellers find hard to accept'; he left Captain Robert Bartlett behind - detractors say to remove the only man who could verify the accuracy of his latitude calculations; and after crossing the Pole he claimed to have 'traversed 213 kilometres of fractured polar ice in fifty-six hours - a speed that even the most ardent Peary supporters find difficult to imagine.' But the RGS in London voted by a narrow majority to award Peary its special medal for reaching the Pole, and the United States government also, finally, gave him the appropriate honours.
The other great polar contest, between Roald Amundsen and Robert Falcon Scott, is handled with equal tact and accuracy. Howgego shows how Amundsen finally decided to attempt the South Pole although his funding had been for a North Polar bid, after he heard that his friend Cook had reached the North Pole. Howgego contrasts Amundsen's good planning and good luck with Scott's bad luck. This encyclopaedia is always factual. So it merely records, without comment, Amundsen's tactic of shooting dogs at various stages and then feeding the frozen carcasses to the remainder, and Scott's misfortunes with his pit ponies.
One omission surprised me: that of Alfred Russel Wallace in the islands of what is now Indonesia. His earlier work on the Amazon is in Howgego's previous volume because it started in 1848; but his eight years of travel in south-east Asia were all within the remit of this volume. Wallace's achievements included new discoveries of birds of paradise, the classic book The Malay Archipelago, the 'Wallace Line' of zoological change east of Borneo, and the famous essay on evolution by natural selection that he sent to Charles Darwin.
This is an essential and enduring work of reference; but it is also a cornucopia of thrilling stories of wonderful explorers. You can open it at random and read with pleasure about the adventures, hazards, triumphs, bravery and determination of remarkable men and women. The intellectual achievement of the author, Raymond Howgego, ranks with those of his subjects.
JOHN HEMMING