The Horror

YOU OPEN Raymond John Howgego’s book and dive into the world’s great and terrible past. The Encyclopedia of Exploration is a vast, meticulous and absorbing record of human restlessness that seems to be quite without precedent. Designed and published in Australia, printed in China in clear fine type laid out on good opaque paper in well-organised entries, its nearly 1200 large pages are sturdily bound in olive green cloth and supplied with three silver ribbon bookmarks. All this costs just under $300, which is a bargain. This is a necessary book, produced not by ‘a team of specialists’ huddled in the shelter of an institution, but by a single scholar driven by passion. A postage stamp-sized photo on the jacket’s back flap shows Raymond Howgego standing by a frontier marker stone in a snow-covered mountain pass linking China and Pakistan. This tiny image represents the only intrusion of the personal into a splendidly disinterested work, written in dry, clear, humorous and syntactically sound English. The entries are stripped to the bone, but not so much so that Howgego can’t find space to tell us that William Lithgow, the seventeenthcentury traveller, was known as Cut-lugged Willie, ‘after four brothers had cut off his ears when they found him with their sister’. One reason for getting out of Scotland and seeing the world. The book is a wonder for its exact economy of language alone. What is exploration? Howgego is wisely elastic in his inclusions. A hundred years ago, his task might have seemed easier. Explorers were the agents of empire, and empire was generally celebrated. Discovery was never neutral, and exploration meant annexation, occupation, civilisation. As the European empires expanded through Africa, Asia and the Pacific, territories became ever ‘wilder’ and their inhabitants ever more ‘fearsome and savage’. Accounts of exploration shed their scientific baggage and became a branch of popular adventure writing — especially for boys, the empire’s future builders and servants. It was eminently British and self-absorbed in an almost childlike way. A nostalgic whiff of it comes from the spongy pages of The Faber Book of Exploration (Benedict Allen, ed., 2002,) a collection of adventure passages from mainly British sources. The jacket uses an illustration from 1865 of two Englishmen in hats, nursing rifles and reclining in a canoe as two naked Africans manouevre it over rapids. Howgego, in his Encyclopedia, lacks these nineteenthcentury certainties, but he has his biases — toward Europe and the printed word, mainly — and his problems. How to organise material that covers the globe and all of history before the nineteenth century? Howgego fits it into a conservatively biographical format. Since the span of a life is one of the irreducible units of our human experience, this makes sense. But it does limit access to the book’s stupendously informative contents. Life is more than an accumulation of lives. You get nowhere in this book if you don’t know an explorer’s name. What if you want to know about Chinese explorers of the world beyond the middle kingdom, or who delineated Africa or the Arctic, or Western encounters with Japan, or the medieval Arab travellers, or Portuguese sea voyages? There is no obvious way in. The Encyclopedia’s information being parcelled out person by person through the great compendium, all you can do is turn the 1100 closely printed pages and hope to find enough (q.v.)s to lead you on. Sometimes an entry like ‘Islamic geographers 700–1800’ suggests that Howgego recognised the difficulty of the individual entry. The lengthy bibliography for the conquest of Mexico is under Cortés — obvious enough, but if you’re interested in Venezuela, you have to know the name of Diego de Losada, who founded Caracas in 1511. This book needs a dozen survey articles on major regions and periods of history to direct the reader to the relevant personal entries. It needs indexes grouping people by region and period. Personal coordinates are not enough in a work that ranges so far in time and space. The Encyclopedia will be a standard work of reference. It could be made even better. Howgego is clearly a meticulous detail man rather than a big picture man. The detail is wonderful and indispensable and there, but a reader needs more help in finding the right detail, and something to hang the detail on.