About Charted Voyages
An atlas of the great voyages, drawn so that the difference between what is recorded and what is inferred stays visible on the page.
What this is for
Most maps of a famous voyage draw one confident line. That line is usually a guess wearing the costume of a fact: the ports are known, the dates are known, and the water in between has been filled in by whoever drew the map. Charted Voyages draws the same voyages, but it marks which parts are which.
It is built for three readers at once — someone spinning a globe out of curiosity, a student or teacher who needs the citation, and a search engine that will only ever read the words. The globe is the memorable part. The written record underneath it is the durable part, and it is complete on its own.
This edition
The journeys: the Magellan–Elcano expedition, Columbus's first voyage, Marco Polo across Eurasia, Darwin aboard HMS Beagle, and — explicitly as fiction — Odysseus. Every stop in them is tied to a named source, and every source is listed with what it is good for and where it is weak.
The collection grows slowly, and by the same rule each time. It is easier to publish fewer stops that each carry a source than to fill a map with plausible detail, and the site's own checks will not let us do the second thing even if we wanted to: see Method.
Why the Odyssey is in an atlas of real voyages
Because the alternative is worse. Odysseus is mapped constantly, and the maps rarely say that Aeaea and Ogygia are literary places that cannot responsibly be fixed to a modern coordinate. Including the Odyssey under the label it deserves — fictional reconstruction, ordered by book rather than by date — makes the labelling on the other four journeys mean something.
The distinction is enforced rather than merely intended: a date given as a point in a story is not allowed to carry a calendar date, so no part of this atlas can quietly turn a poem into a chronology.
Nothing running behind it
This is a website made of ordinary pages. There is nothing running behind it — no accounts, no logins, no database, nothing that remembers you from one visit to the next. Every voyage is a real page with its own address, so you can bookmark it, send it to someone, or print it, and it will still be there and still make sense.
The moving globe is an extra. If it cannot load — an old browser, a slow connection, a phone saving data, or scripts switched off — you keep everything that matters: every stop, every date, every source, every certainty label and every editorial note. That is not a hope; it is checked automatically each time the site is rebuilt, so it cannot quietly stop being true.
Reuse
You are welcome to reuse the writing here, with credit and a link. The code behind the site is free to reuse as well. Quoted source material keeps whatever rights the archive that digitised it attaches to it, which is often not the same as the rights on the underlying text. The terms are set out in Sources and credits.