"Adventure”, wrote Peter Fleming in 1933, “is really a soft option.” He
knew something about it, having sought the mad, dangerous sportsman Colonel
Percy Fawcett, who disappeared on an ill-starred expedition in 1925. Fawcett
sought an imaginary El Dorado in non-existent mountains in the depths of
Amazonia. Speculation about his fate inspired the black-comic debacle of
Evelyn Waugh’s A Handful of Dust, and the less well-known novel by V. S.
Pritchett, Dead Man Leading. The experience with Fawcett convinced Fleming
that “it requires far less courage to be an explorer than to be a chartered
accountant”. Now that we are back in times of depression and austerity we
can see what he meant. The financial world is a jungle, full of snake-pits
and poisoned darts.
Financiers, often unprepared for serious difficulty, must survive the crash,
when it comes, with unaided bravery. For a crazed obsessive like Fawcett,
madness numbs or transcends fear. His last note to his wife said (as Raymond
Howgego reminds us in the new volume of his Encyclopedia of Exploration),
“You need have no fear of failure”. By the time Fleming embraced adventure,
the traditional terrors really had diminished. The hippogriffs had vanished
from the map, like a depleted species. Technology made the unknown knowable.
Medicine made hostile environments endurable. Explorers had exhausted or
abandoned the pioneering work that was the subject of the early volumes of
Howgego’s masterly compilation. Exploration had already identified the best
routes to link just about all the societies that wanted to be in touch with
one another. There was not much of the “unknown” left, or so people rather
unreflectively supposed, and the major task was to burnish knowledge of the
relatively less well known. “Scientific exploration” – the craving to know
the planet and everything in it – displaced route-finding as explorers’ main
work. Or else explorers forsook all pretensions to noble aspirations and
wallowed in self-indulgence, self-promotion, or entrepreneurship, “for it is
easy”, as Fleming remarked, “to attract public attention to any exploit
which is at once highly improbable and absolutely useless. You can lay the
foundations of a brief but glorious career on the Music Halls by being the
First Girl Mother To Swim Twice Round the Isle of Man; and anyone who
successfully undertakes to drive a well-known make of car along the Great
Wall of China in reverse will hardly fail of his reward”. Where scientific
patrons, emulous governments, and learned societies had formerly met the
investment costs of soi-disant explorers, sensationalist media increasingly
intruded on the financial side. Exploration became entertainment.
Yet in some ways this represented a reversion to type, for wanderlust,
vainglory and self-romanticization were always part of explorers’ essential
psychic kit. In the Middle Ages and Renaissance they spun tales of mirabilia
for money and a rather meretricious form of fame. In the eighteenth and
early nineteenth centuries, more prosaic motives – commercial, imperial, and
scientific – had a moment of ascendancy. Then romance returned to the fore.
Raymond Howgego’s last volume begins roughly at that moment of resurgent
adventure, in 1850, and ends in 1940, more or less with the period of
degeneracy Fleming took part in and deplored. The author chronicles the
great romantic era of exploration, and his pages teem with specimens of
romantic life – defiant utopians, dauntless dreamers, hapless visionaries,
hopeless incompetents, insane idealists.
Howgego insists his work is complete. He even threatens, like Catullus, to
take to his bed. If true, it is a pity. I can think of no other work of
reference, on such a vast scale, compiled so efficiently, and so
comprehensively, by a single individual, since Johnson’s Dictionary.
Howgego’s writing has got better with each volume. He now commands
devastating deftness and pinpoint pithiness. In any case, 1940 seems to make
no sense as a terminus. The environment is always changing. Species are
always evolving and vanishing and awaiting cataloguers. Uncontacted peoples
are still emerging in the rainforest. Most of the biosphere remains
unpenetrated. Exploration goes on.
The author has not resolved all the problems of organization. The division of
the period into two volumes with what are ultimately arbitrary limits will
cause users difficulties until the promised comprehensive index is available
on the web. It will surprise readers who scour in vain the volume dedicated
to maritime, Antarctic and boreal subjects to find the coastal surveys of
Alaska reserved for the volume on “continental exploration”. By giving some
individuals secondary entries under other explorers’ names, and compiling
others briefly under geographical headings, Howgego makes the book harder to
use (though he has responded to critics and in the new volume has tried to
keep these problems to a minimum).
Above all, Howgego’s commitment to include everyone ever designated “explorer”
– whether wisely or fondly – condemns him to inconsistency and
incompleteness. In the middle of an excellent entry on Charles Granville
Bruce, one of the Everest victims in 1924, Howgego does something he avoided
in previous volumes. He defines what he understands as “exploration”: adding
to geographical knowledge, preferably by way of an unknown route. But his
terms of reference do not allow him to stick to a coherent theme. Some
inclusions even baffle the author. The sedentary Emil Bretschneider, we are
told, “never explored far afield”. Why anyone has ever classed Aimé Félix
Tschiffely as an explorer is inexplicable, but Howgego faithfully relates
that showman’s peregrinations by horseback and steamer from Buenos Aires to
Washington, DC, and continues the tale down to the embalming of the
horseman’s two criollo steeds.
There are plenty of archaeologists and botanists in the book, as well as
recorders of topographical and geological data, but zoologists and
anthropologists occur disappointingly rarely – especially if one thinks that
the great historical accomplishment of modern explorers has been to put the
sundered cultures of the world in touch with one another. It seems a great
shame to leave out Lucio Victorio Mansilla, who wrote a subtle and engaging
account of his expedition to meet the Ranquele Indians of Argentina, but
does not even appear in the summary on Patagonia, or in the bibliography.
Louis Agassiz is well represented for his Brazilian jaunts, but his most
characteristic work in that country – designed to show that miscegenation
weakened fertility – is unmentioned. W. W. Rockhill is the subject of a
lively entry, but his important contributions on Siberian ethnography do not
figure in it. Michael Leahy, the gold prospector who discovered the “lost
civilization” of the highlands of New Guinea in the 1930s, is a particularly
disappointing omission.
By gleaning the names of his heroes from existing books for t, Howgego makes
himself a hostage to convention, and non-white, non-Western explorers hardly
appear in his pages, save for a couple of pundits. It would have been
pleasing to complement the entries on the Himalayan surveyors Hari Ram and
Nain Singh with a few lines, at least, on Pundit Kunthip, who mapped the
route to Lhasa, or to make some space for the African slaver known as Tippu
Tip, whose caravans and coffles helped to open up the interior of the “dark
continent”.
Yet, for the reader who seeks delight by dipping into the book, the
idiosyncrasies magnify the pleasure. There are many surprising cameos. Roger
Casement has a long entry, thanks to the humanitarian investigations that
led him deep into Congo and Brazil. Peter Kropotkin features, thanks to a
journey into Siberia “to see Darwinism in action” and a survey of
ancient trade routes into Manchuria, where, he claimed, “no European” had
gone before. The Comte de Gobineau puts in an appearance, on the strength of
his researches in Iran. Howgego is scrupulous about editorial objectivity,
and his disapproval, rarely detectable, is usually concealed beneath subtle
irony or pedantic humour, but Gobineau draws something close to a
denunciation for works on linguistics that “display a lack of basic
training”, while “his fanciful historical theories, idiosyncratic racial
theories, and esoteric viewpoints” are treated with deadly editorial
Verfremdung: they “brought harsh criticism from those who knew better”.
Howgego is now confident enough to enrich his entries with delightful
asides, and fascinating “notes” too oblique for a mind dulled by the
travails of writing an encyclopedia. The note on camels in the US can be
especially recommended. From it we gather that schemes to introduce them
foundered when the Civil War distracted Colonel Henry Wayne, who, having won
the gold medal of Société Impériale Zoologique d’Acclimatation for his
efforts, “forgot all about camels and rose to the rank of
brigadier-general”. To the entry on Moisés Bertoni, a great ethnobotanist in
late nineteenth-century Paraguay, Howgego adds an illuminating note on the
herb stevia, Bertoni’s most promising discovery, which would supply the
world with a healthy alternative to sugar but for the obstruction of the
saccharin industry. Apparently trivial insertions on individuals enliven the
book by disclosing curiously representative facts. It is delightful to learn
that the wife of George Wyman Bury, “known as Abdullah Mansur”, who wrote
Arabia Felix, was a guest at King Farouk’s first wedding after working as
film censor, or that the hotel frequented in Rome by Brasseur de Bourbourg,
who discovered and misinterpreted many great artefacts of Mayan antiquity,
“is now a Holiday Inn”, or that Beatrix Bulstrode, who hardly qualifies as
an explorer, but who shared a Pekin cart to Ulan Bator with an excise
official in 1913, “finally married her customs officer”, who “went on to be
secretary of the London-based China Association”.
Readers will enjoy ardent debates about which is their favourite entry. St
George Gore’s makes excellent reading, because of the jaw-dropping
profligacy of his shooting trip in the Yellowstone Valley in 1854–6. He made
a bonfire of his surplus equipment rather than sell it, having reputedly
bagged 105 bears, some 2,000 buffalo and 1,600 elk and deer “for pure
sport”. Ignoring the protests from native peoples and US officials, he “made
his way back to England, after which nothing of consequence need be recorded
of him”. Howgego somehow seems at his best in entries on female explorers.
Ella Maillart, for instance, represented Switzerland in sailing, skiing and
hockey, lodged with Countess Tolstoy in Moscow, and with Kirgiz, Khazaks and
Uzbeks on her way to the Taklamakan. She befriended Peter Fleming in Peking,
motored around Afghanistan with a drug addict, and lived to the age of
ninety-four.
The palm for an adventurous life, however, and for an improbable romance in
the spirit of the age, must surely go to Alexandra David-Néel. She was a
doctrinaire feminist, theosophist and anarchist, who was an expert in
oriental languages and a professional opera diva, having played Marguerite
in Faust, among many other loud and leading roles. She married a yachtsman
in Tunis in 1904, before decamping eastwards to become the “spiritual
sister” of the ruler of Sikkim, and, for a while, after her royal lover’s
murder, a cave-dwelling anchoress. She emerged in the company of a young
monk who became her “adopted son” and companion on a three-year journey to
Lhasa in the guise of a beggar. On returning to Paris, she occupied a tent
outside the Musée Guimet. When she died at the age of 100 she was at work on
simultaneous biographies of Jesus Christ and Mao Tse-tung. There are long
books about her, but Howgego treats her perfectly in a single page.
Reading the entry on Count László Almásy, the restless aviator who inspired
Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient, I was struck by a coincidence
Howgego does not mention. One of the Count’s more madcap schemes, as the
Encyclopedia reveals, was to scour the Great Sand Desert in 1935 for the
fabled oasis of Zenzura and the remains of the lost army of Cambyses I. This
is Biggles’s project in the best of his adventures, Biggles Flies South,
published in 1938. Biggles exceeds the glamorous Count. Not only does he
find the lost army, but he is also captured by descendants of its survivors
before the usual happy ending. How delicious to think of Michael Ondaatje as
the literary successor of Captain W. E. Johns.
Raymond John Howgego
ENCYCLOPEDIA OF EXPLORATION 1850 TO 1940
Continental exploration
1,047pp. Potts Point, NSW: Hordern House. Aus $295.
978 1975567423
Felipe Fernández-Armesto is Professor of History at Tufts
University, Massachusetts. He is the author of nineteen books, most recently
Pathfinders: A global history of exploration, Amerigo: The man who gave his
name to America, and The World: A history, all of which were published last
year.
