When Sir John Franklin’s last voyage ended in disaster in 1847, the map of the world was very different. For Europeans, at least, there was a single, standard map, and most of the lines on it described patterns of European influence or control. There were British colonies throughout Australia and New Zealand, and Christian missionaries of all denominations all across the Pacific. People were beginning to think of themselves as belonging to nations. The Boers had made their Great Trek into the hinterland of southern Africa. The United States of America stretched from sea to shining sea, and Simon Bolivar had sparked the idea of a similar federation in Latin America. The 1830s had seen the appearance of the telegraph (initially as a signalling device for a new form of transport, the railway) and the camera. Ships were powered by steam engines, and so were printing presses. In 1787 the fleet commanded by Arthur Phillip took the better part of nine months to sail from England to Australia; by 1850 that voyage could be done in weeks – and steam-powered printing presses made it easier and cheaper to publish books about that or any other voyage. Where there had been explorers, there would soon be tourists.

All these developments have ramifications for Raymond Howgego’s Encyclopedia of Exploration. Volume One (2002) made a virtue of inclusiveness: everyone who undertook a journey outside their home country was in, provided there was some written record of their travels. It covered the entire span of human history up to the year 1800 in little over a thousand pages. Volume Two needs almost 700 pages for a highly selective coverage of the half century from 1800 to 1850. For an Australian audience, Volume Two holds more direct, local relevance. In my first ten random openings, I chanced on five Australian explorers, one New Zealander, one South Pacific missionary and one circumnavigator.

Peter Robb concluded his review of Howgego’s first volume (ABR, March 2003) with the observation that ‘The promised sequel will be a very different book. By 1800 the world was mapped, and most of it spoken for by the imperial powers. The thrill was gone, and so was a little of the horror.’ Volume Two is indeed different from Volume One, although the publishers have maintained a uniform approach to design. Oddly, it seems less troubled by the Eurocentricity implicit in the concept of ‘exploration’, although it leads us close to the high water mark of European imperialism. Its selective approach demands the articulation of complex rules. For example:

it was decided to omit any traveller who had ventured no further than the eastern borders of Asia Minor … or had kept to the western side of the Caspian Sea. Travellers to the Mediterranean coast of North Africa were like-wise excluded, but a substantial article has been devoted to tourists and archaeologists in Egypt and the Holy Land. Those who penetrated the upper reaches of the two Niles generally have specific entries dedicated to them.

In short, it is a more conventional, straight-laced reference book than its predecessor. When the first volume was published, Howgego announced that it contained a fake entry and offered a crate of champagne to the first person to correctly identify it: as of December 2004, the prize is yet to be awarded. There is no such teaser for Volume Two.

There is, however, plenty of horror for those who seek it: Mungo Park, for example, who disappeared exploring the Niger River in 1805. Howgego notes that Park’s death was first reported in a Bombay newspaper in 1809 – a neat illustration of the spread of communication networks in the nineteenth century. (Frustratingly, he does not give a direct citation to the newspaper.) Howgego’s economic prose distils the essence of Park’s nightmare journey:

Many of his stores and equipment had been damaged by rain, one soldier had died … Anderson’s condition was deteriorating rapidly, while many of the straggling soldiers were left behind to fend for themselves … Park was left with only three soldiers; Lieutenant Martyn and Private Bolton were in reasonable health, but the third had become ‘deranged in mind’ … At various times as many as sixty canoes were chasing the party … the boat was almost capsized by hippopotami.

Or the cruel fate of Sir John Franklin’s expedition, equipped with plentiful supplies of canned food to survive the Arctic winter: the cans were sealed with lead, which contaminated the food. By the time the ships had been stuck in the ice for several months, no one on board was capable of rational decision making. They set off overland. Howgego writes: ‘An Inuit woman reported that the party fell down and died as they walked.’

Howgego’s spare, factual style is less effective when dealing with the complexities of frontier conflict. His account of the killing of the captain and crew of the Boyd at Whangaroa in 1809 presents the tragedy as a simple act of revenge for ill-treatment. However, as Lydia Wevers has shown (in Country of Writing, 2002), the Boyd ‘massacre’ and its aftermath were deeply problematic. It was one of those cases where the ‘facts’ matter less than the contested understandings of what ‘really’ happened. Wevers is not listed in Howgego’s bibliography.

Peter Robb’s major complaint against Volume One was the absence of a geographic index. I thought the omission was understandable: apart from anything else, it would have made the fake entry easier to spot! But Robb’s point was a good one. Although controlling the hierarchy of terms might present some conceptual difficulties, a geographic index could be generated with minimal fuss from the headings for the individual entries. A few maps would have been good, too, although they would have increased the price of the book. Here’s hoping that, whatever else Volume Three contains, it has a consolidated geographic index. More to the point, here’s hoping that there is a Volume Three. The depth and breadth of Howgego’s scholarship is awe-inspiring.