ENCYCLOPEDIA OF EXPLORATION, PART THREE, 1850 TO 1940; THE OCEANS, ISLANDS AND POLAR REGIONS
By Raymond John Howgego
Hordern House, $275
KEY POINTS:
For readers interested in history and the geographical settings in which it is played out this is the finest dip-in tome I've come across in years - a great time-consumer and informer.
The alphabetically ordered subjects range from Abruzzi, Luigi Amedeo, Duke of, to Zeppelin, Ferdinand von; and from Antarctica to Wallis and Futuna Islands.
There are more people than places listed but it is packed with information, not only in narrative form but as comprehensive bibliographies.
The selection is necessarily arbitrary in a volume which covers as much ground as this one does. You can get lost in the labyrinth of entries as surely as you can lose your way in the jungles of New Guinea - which, the author points out, had still only partially been explored by 1940 when this book comes to the end of its trail.
I enjoyed reading entries for countries and then following up on the explorers named, where they had separate entries.
Using this technique, I found out a lot about Micronesia I should have known before, and about Madagascar and the Maldives. In fact, I spent more time slogging my way through the Ms than was fair to the other letters.
These adventures taught me the author had managed to keep his story pretty well water-tight - until I read the entry for Antartica, a continent that has never much interested me: all that unrelieved whiteness, lots of shivering cold; no trees to whisper to you on summer evenings and no natives to swap life experiences with.
But under Antarctica I read that "in 1821 the sealer John Davis became probably the first to set foot on the Antarctic continent". A couple of hundred words further down, I read that American whaler Captain Mercator Cooper "in 1853 is known to have landed on the Antarctic mainland".
Now a piece of historical flotsam riding the high seas of my memory was that a New Zealand seaman, Alexander von Tunzelmann, plonked the first foot on the Antarctic mainland and not until 1895. There is no mention of Von Tunzelmann in this encyclopedia.
So I consulted The Complete Story of Antarctica by David McGonigal and Dr Lynn Woodworth (Random House, 2001, foreword by the late Sir Edmund H) and it says that the ship's boat from the whaler, Antarctic, carried its captain, Henryk Bull, to the shore at Cape Adare and "there is reason to believe New Zealand crew member A. H. F. von Tunzelmann, who maintained that he was in the bow of the boat and jumped out first to steady it so the captain could disembark" was thus the first.
Where this flotsam in my mind came from I'm not sure because the only Von Tunzelmann named in the 1966 Encyclopedia of New Zealand is N. von Tunzelmann who, in 1860, was one of the early explorers of Central Otago and a land claimant there. No von Tunzelmanns in the Dictionary of NZ Biography either.
Quick research put me in touch with a good-natured member of the present generation of Von Tunzelmanns who lives in Tauranga. She says the original immigrants were three brothers Nicholas, John and Alexander, and two sisters Elise and Marie.
They were Germanic by ethnicity, Russian by nationality and Estonian by residency before they came here in the middle of last century. Nicholas was the man who explored Central Otago and Alexander - she was adamant here - was the seaman who first landed on Antarctica.
The encyclopedia has no separate mention for John Davis who it claims was "probably" the first on to Antarctica, but it does for Mercator Cooper and suddenly the bold claim "is known to have landed on" becomes, coyly, "appears to have made a close approach".
So author Raymond John Howgego in his otherwise excellent book slipped up. Seventy years after Davis' "probable" landing, which lacks supporting evidence, and 40 after Cooper's "close approach", Alex von Tunzelmann did the deed.
I slogged into the evening on this voyage of discovery which led me through a number of entries for New Zealand (Otago during the gold rush, Westland, the Southern Alps, Fiordland after 1875, Stewart Island) and many familiar names.
And then, about to end the journey, I stumble upon an entry for Nellie Bly. Do they mean the one from the Stephen Foster song? In a way, yes. American Elizabeth Jane Cochrane was a roving investigative journalist who used Nellie Bly as a pseudonym and you have to read about her career to believe it.
In the 1880s and 1890s, she feigned madness to get into a lunatic asylum (not a big transformation for some journalists I have known) to expose maltreatment and travelled the Wild West on daring escapades.
She earned her place in the encyclopedia by breaking the record for travelling around the world in 72 days, six hours, 11 minutes and 14 seconds, in 1890.
She wore a specially made gown that would withstand three months of constant wear and took a "handbag" in which were packed writing materials, assorted clothing, including several changes of underwear, a set of toiletries and a jar of cold cream.
You can imagine how long it took her to fossick through that lot to find the money for a boat ticket.
By now I am exhausted after traversing this extraordinary book; so I put it aside for another expedition through its 725 pages on another day.
