Encyclopedia of Exploration to 1800: A Comprehensive Reference Guide to the History and Literature of Exploration, Travel, and Colonization from the Earliest Times to the Year 1800

A comprehensive reference guide to the history and literature of exploration, travel and colonization from the earliest times to the year 1800. The vast scope of the Encyclopedia of Exploration makes it a work unlike any other in its combination of historical, biographical and bibliographical data. It includes a catalogue of all known expeditions, voyages and travels, as well as biographical information on the travellers themselves, which places them in their historical context. The Encyclopedia of Exploration to 1800 is a massive undertaking resulting in a work that extends to 1.2 million words in almost 1200 pages. The 2327 major articles have generated index entries totalling more than 7500 names of persons or ships mentioned in the text. Within the text itself there are about 4000 cross-references between articles. Altogether nearly 20,000 bibliographical citations accompany the articles. A considerable quantity of information in this book is presented here for the first time in English.

Raymond Howgego is an independent researcher, scholar and traveller, who has been researching the history of exploration for much of his adult life. His travels have followed in the footsteps of the explorers to most parts of the world - Europe, the Middle East, Central Asia, India, West Africa, South America, the Cape Verde Islands, Uganda and Ethiopia; and more recently overland from China to Tibet and across the length and breadth of Australia. His numerous excursions in search of local sources of information have afforded the opportunity to add to a lifetime's accumulation of travel literature. He has recently been appointed to the Council of the Hakluyt Society. Brian Turner noted in a recent article on the Encyclopedia that 'The soft-spoken physicist turned travel-scholar speaks and speed-reads every European language (except Basque and Finnish) plus Arabic, and has translated into English many travel narratives himself. Howgego is also a great serial traveller; he has stood at the same spot as Speke at the source of the Nile, sailed through the Straits of Magellan, and followed the tracks of the Conquistadors through Bolivia. In 1994 Howgego and his companions were the first Europeans to cross the Torugart Pass from Kyrgyzstan into China since the Russian Revolution. Minutes after his jeep had crossed an unstable section of Pakistan's precipitous Karakoram Highway, the road collapsed into the Indus. Ray has also voyaged down most of the world's great rivers, including the Niger in flood, when neither bank was visible. His favourite destination? 'Kashgar is my centre of the universe', And favourite country? 'Iran';'Zoroastrian monasteries of central Iran fascinate me and the Islamic architecture of Esfahan is heart-stoppingly beautiful'.