Encyclopedia of Exploration Vol IV: review (click here to return to list of reviews)
Discovering exploration
Ian Morrison
Raymond John Howgego
ENCYCLOPEDIA OF EXPLORATION 1850-1940: CONTINENTAL EXPLORATION
Hordern House, $295 hb, 1047 pp, 9781875567423
THE CONCLUDING volume to Raymond Howgego's epic Encyclopedia of Exploration completes a remarkable undertaking by a small publisher. Hordern House, best known as one of Australia's leading antiquarian booksellers, has a record of producing high-quality publications, and Howgego's Encyclopedia -now totalling more than 3500 pages - is by any standards a great reference work. Volume 1 (published in 2003) covers the whole of human history up to 1800CE; Volume 2 (2004), 1800-50; and Volumes 3 and 4 (subtitled The Oceans, Islands and Polar Regions and Continental Exploration, respectively), 1850-1940.
As the earth's surface was mapped in ever greater detail - and for a widening diversity of purposes - during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the ranks of Howgego's 'explorers' in the later volumes are swelled by miscellaneous adventurers, deluded obsessives and outright ratbags. A highlight of Volume 4 is the entry for Frederick Albert 'Mike' Mitchell-Hedges (1882-1959), most famous for his discovery of an ' Atlantean' crystal skull in a ruined city in the forests of Honduras: it was subsequently revealed that he had in fact bought the skull at a Sotheby's auction, but that unprepossessing fact has failed to rattle the faithful (see http://www.mitchell-hedges.com/ for the opinions of the 'current caretaker' and for a link to the new Indiana Jones movie). Mitchell-Hedges was accompanied on his adventures by his adopted daughter Anna and the indomitable Lady Lilian Mabel Alice Richmond-Brown (1885-1946). Mitchell-Hedges and Richmond-Brown were both married to other people when they first took off together and, with true upper-class panache, they remained so for many years. Their expeditions are chronicled in such works as Battles with Giant Fish (1923), Unknown Tribes Uncharted Seas (1927), Land of Wonder and Fear (1931) and Danger My Ally (1954).
More orthodox characters in Volume 4 include the legendary explorers of central Africa (Burton, Speke, Livingstone, Stanley) and of central Australia (Burke and Wills, Stuart, the Forrest brothers, Canning, Gregory, through to the hapless Lasseter). Theodore Roosevelt's adventures in Africa and South America are included, as are the explorations carried out by Welsh settlers in Patagonia. The number of expeditions that involved the use of aeroplanes, along with the inclusion of pioneer motorists Georges-Marie Haardt (Africa, 1920s; Asia, 1930s) and Michael Terry (central Australia, 1930s), underscores the roll of rapid technological change during this period.
Howgego's writing is concise and factual, but never dry. Over the course of the four massive volumes, he takes a consistently sceptical approach to unconfirmed discoveries: if an expedition is not documented, if no information was disseminated as a result of it, it can be argued that it made no contribution to human knowledge. So, for example, for Howgego's purposes the activities of the Breton cod fishermen who were exploiting the Newfoundland banks a generation before the Cabots, or of the sealers who were operating in Bass Strait before it was officially discovered, are in essence irrelevant. More problematic are the claims of Spanish and Portuguese sightings of northern Australia before Jansz's voyage of 1606. The great land mass 'Java Le Grande' on the Dieppe maps is almost certainly not Australia - see Walter Richardson, Was Australia Charted before 1606? (2006) -but there is still considerable evidence that Jansz's discovery did not come out of the blue: Andrea Corsali's letter of 1517 refers, second-hand, to a large land mass south of New Guinea; and later sixteenth-century maps such as De Jode's Nova Guinae Forma et Situs (1593) and Wyt-fliet's Chica sive Patagonica etAustralis Terra (1597) are strongly suggestive of European sightings of Cape York. It seems reasonable, in any case, to assume that Jansz had reasonable expectations of finding land when he sailed south from New Guinea.
More problematic still are the questions of what exactly 'discovery' meant to the discovered, and to what extent 'human knowledge' is knowable or accessible by any individual human at any given point in time. Howgego's positivism is in this regard both his greatest strength and his greatest weakness: he is a scrupulous marshaller of facts and weigher of evidence; but he leaves it to others to explore the wider meanings of exploration. To have embarked on that course, though, would have resulted in something other than the comprehensive and authoritative reference work that is the Encyclopedia of Exploration. The addition of an 86-page 'Geo-chronological index' made available free on the publisher's website here
greatly enhances the value of the whole work, enabling the reader to construct a narrative of exploration in any part of the world. This index is not just another means of access, it is another way of seeing the whole subject: it shifts attention from the exploits of heroic individuals to the growth of knowledge as a collaborative, accumulative process.