The Faber Book of Exploration by Benedict Allen (editor)

Hugh Thomson discovers a glorious landscape of adventure - with one strange exception

Explorers have always needed to write well. Unless they could beguile emperors or patrons back home with tales of their exploits, they were unlikely ever to get another commission, or to achieve any fame. Who now remembers Ney Alias, the British civil servant who travelled across 4,800 miles of largely unexplored territory between Peking and Nijni Novogorod in 1872, but left not a word behind?

The modern need to appease commercial sponsors is just as urgent. At the beginning of the 20th century, Shackleton was already complaining about the pressure to seek publicity. Many a recent explorer has been caught up in the self-generating cycle of "explore, print, fund-raise, explore", and this explains the impressive literary output of Eric Shipton, Bonnington – or indeed Benedict Allen himself.

His compilation of other explorers' tales shows them at their best. Ranging from Xenophon to the great Muslim adventurer Ibn Battuta and, more recently, Wilfred Thesiger and Wally Herbert, the range is catholic and the selection intelligent. Typical is the moving description by the early Arctic explorer William Scoresby of the death of a mother whale who sacrifices herself to save her cub. Nor has Allen been afraid to include the obvious – Columbus in America, Scott's last letters – and the collection is the stronger.

In describing adventures, explorers often fell back on literary models. Cortes and his conquistadors used the language of courtly romances to describe the wonders of the New World to Charles V, while Hiram Bingham's account of the discovery of Machu Picchu in 1911 is straight out of an Edwardian Boys' Own tale, with its trusty companions, unreliable natives and clues given by some ancient chronicle. Some explorers crossed the line between fiction and fact: both Cook and Peary's claims to have reached the North Pole feature here, despite having been discredited since.

In a way, explorers always needed to write journeys before they made them, as the proposals had to form a clear narrative. Sponsors needed a plot: a lost city or continent to be found, preferably with gold, even though the reality of many an expedition has been a vague hunch there may be something over the horizon and an urge to get lost from civilisation for a while.

Allen usefully makes the distinction between explorers who genuinely go into the unknown and travellers who report back freshly from the familiar, before ignoring it so that he can include seductive excerpts from writers like Chatwin and Sara Wheeler. A more rigorous application of his own principles might have paid off in a book that weighs in at 800 pages (not one for the knapsack).

Now that nearly all mountains have been climbed, going into the unknown has required ever greater ingenuity, with postmodern variants like climbing the highest peaks of each continent, or rowing oceans single-handedly. Since the time of Scott, explorers have also felt compelled to include a vague scientific objective, although it is clear from the accounts here that they haven't let such scientific needs stop them from the death-and-glory stuff. Boys just want to have fun.

And boys they largely were. Allen makes a valiant effort to include as many female explorers as possible, but there is a limited range. While endlessly perceptive as travellers, "they were generally less concerned with planting flags and breaking records". Isabella Bird is a welcome exception. The first female member of the RGS, she describes a Pacific volcano: "To stand there was 'to snatch a fearful joy', out of a pain and terror which were unendurable".

One error disfigures an otherwise excellent book. There is an account by Eric Shipton of climbing Nanda Devi. This would be fine, given that Shipton was an accomplished writer and Nanda Devi the most romantic and elusive of summits. But Shipton never climbed it. What Allen has done is to take an account by Shipton of a failed attempt and splice it together with a separate account by a later, successful expedition.

Aside from this curious lapse, this is a superb collection of the finest moments of discovery, when explorers had the courage to step off the edge of the known. At their best one gets that sense of vertigo, when the writer is confronted by something so far outside the scale of recognisable experience that he has to reconfigure the language to convey it.