To find out how the Niowra of New Guinea see their mosquito-infested world, Benedict Allen took part in a gruelling initiation ceremony. For six weeks, he was incarcerated with a group of young men in what was called the crocodiles’ nest, and every day until his release, he allowed himself to be physically beaten. At the end of the ordeal, he qualified as a real man, fit in the eyes of the village elders to take his place in Niowra society should he so wish.

But Allen had no intention of cashing in his scars and spending the rest of his life as a member of an isolated crocodile cult. As an explorer, his job was to come back and tell the rest of us what he had learned about life in the swamplands.

Whether their motive be to spread the Gospel, to acquire new territory or to gain scientific knowledge, explorers live to break new ground. But they also share an urge to pass on information. This may explain why several of the men and women whose writings appear in this great 800-page anthology come from teaching backgrounds.

Explorers, says Allen in his introduction, “are the hands, eyes and ears of the rest of society: those without the time, specialised skills or, frankly, the desire to go themselves”. And since ancient times, they have reported back, describing not only the sights and sounds that greeted their senses but also the thoughts and feelings that filled their heads.

Open this book at random and you will be at once fascinated and moved, not just by the usual suspects (Cortes, Cook, Heyerdahl, Shackleton, Van de Post, BonningtonI) but also by lesser known writers such as the whale-boat captain William Scoresby (“though a cub is of little value, seldom producing above a ton of oilI it is sometimes struck as a snare for its mother”), or the Scottish schoolmaster William Laird McKinlay (“When you’re sick, hungry, and freezing in the middle of the Arctic, it’s no time to put on airsI”) Frequently, explorers tell us as much about the worlds they have left behind as about their discoveries. “The inhabitants could be made slaves,” Columbus wrote back, having just claimed the Caribbean for his European sponsors. And shortly before he froze to death, Scott wrote in a letter intended for JM Barrie: “We are showing that Englishmen can still die with a bold spirit, fighting it out to the end.”

Faced with far too many candidates for inclusion in this collection, Allen might have been forgiven for adopting an exclusive approach. In fact, he has cast his net far and wide, including an early “discoverer” of Britain, one Gaius Julius Caesar (“By far the most civilised inhabitants are those living in Kent”) and Tim Severin, who used emails and videos to give schoolchildren a taste of life in a leather boat.

Although “the odds were stacked against women from the start”, Allen has sought out female travellers such as Freya Stark, who began her unaccompanied explorations of the Middle East at the age of 25 and continued into her sixties. “Again and again,” he says of women, “they seemed the first really to glean the essence of places that European men had trampled through.”

When it came to representing non-Europeans (the Chinese and Arabs conducted widespread trade throughout the east), Allen’s all-inclusive aims were largely defeated by the inaccessibility of texts. But he has included the writings of Luther Standing Bear, a Sioux who travelled with “Buffalo” Bill Cody’s circus, as an example of the natives whose lands were frequently taken over by Europeans.

Having asked several explorers how they would define “exploration”, he says he received as many answers (“If I’d gone across by camel when I could have gone by car, it would have been a stunt,” Wilfred Thesiger, the author of Arabian Sands, once told him). Allen believes anybody who immerses himself or herself in a world that has not hitherto been described is, in a sense, an explorer, and with that in mind he makes room here for the pioneering naturalist Gilbert White, who ventured no further than his Hampshire parish of Selbourne.

While his excellent commentaries and biographical notes make this more than just a collection of extracts, Allen’s fresh and imaginative approach to selection makes it more than just another history of exploration. It must have been a daunting task, even for a man who spent six weeks in the crocodiles’ nest.