Sources and credits
Where the geography, the typefaces, the code and the quoted texts come from, and what each of them permits.
Historical sources
Every journey rests on a named register of sources. Each is listed in full — edition, publisher, URL, the date we last checked it, and a note on its reliability — in the Archive tab of the journey that cites it. They are not repeated here, because the right place to meet a source is beside the claim it supports.
The underlying texts are in the public domain. The digitisations are a separate question: the Library of Congress, Cornell, Darwin Online and Project Gutenberg each attach their own terms to their scans and transcriptions, and a public-domain text does not make a particular digital edition freely reusable. Check the rights statement on the source itself before reusing anything.
Geography
Coastlines and borders come from Natural Earth, a public-domain map dataset, at its medium level of detail. The coarser level leaves small islands out altogether, which had ten landfalls — Guanahaní and the Galápagos among them — drawn in open water.
The engraved chart is not a scanned antique map. It is drawn by the site from that modern data and styled to look old. It shows present-day coastlines and present-day borders. It is there to help you find your bearings, and it is not evidence of any period's cartography or any period's politics.
With thanks to
The moving globe is drawn with the help of three freely licensed pieces of open-source software: three.js, d3 and topojson-client. They are fetched only when you open the map, and not at all on a metered connection until you ask for it. Our thanks to the people who wrote and maintain them.
Typefaces
IM Fell English and IM Fell English SC, digitised by Igino Marini from the seventeenth-century types of John Fell, and Caveat by Pablo Impallari. All three are served from Google Fonts under the SIL Open Font License.
Images
Every plate is out of copyright, and every one is credited beside the picture with its maker, its date, and how it stands to the events it shows — whether it was drawn by someone who was there, made in the period by someone who was not, or imagined centuries later. The frame crops the picture; the picture links to the full original.
Adding one means supplying its maker, the terms it is published under, the credit its holder asks for, a description for readers who cannot see it, and the date it was made. A picture without those is refused.
Where no such picture exists, a stop may instead carry an illustration made for this atlas. Those are labelled as imagined: they show how a place or a moment might have looked, and they are never offered as a record of it. A frame may also simply stay empty, which is the honest state until there is something worth showing.
Reusing this
The editorial writing is offered under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 — reuse it with credit and a link to Charted Voyages. The code is MIT licensed. Quoted material is governed by whichever archive it came from, and the note beside each source says so.