Editorial policy
What this atlas will and will not publish, including about the parts of these voyages that are not an adventure.
The governing principle
Evidence, inference and reconstruction are three different things, and a reader is entitled to know which one they are looking at without having to guess from the tone. Where we do not know something, the page says so at the point where a reader would otherwise assume we did — not in a disclaimer at the bottom.
Colonial and Indigenous history
Most of these journeys survive because a European wrote them down, and those accounts record unequal power, selective observation, and the interests of the people paying for the voyage. That does not make them useless; it makes them evidence that has to be read for what it is.
So this atlas names colonisation, enslavement, coercion and violence where the record supports it, and it names Indigenous presence where explorer-centred sources erase it. It does not use "discovery" for inhabited places without qualification. Columbus did not discover an empty continent: people had lived in the Americas for millennia, and Norse voyagers had reached North America centuries earlier.
Content warnings are attached at the stop, not at the journey, so a reader meets them where the material is rather than being warned in general and then surprised in particular.
What we leave out
A gap in the record is published as a gap. We do not fill a stretch of ocean with an invented storm because it would read well, and we do not promote a plausible reconstruction to a documented fact because a dashed line looks unfinished.
A picture is held to the same standard as a sentence. Every plate names its maker, its date, the terms it is published under, and how it stands to the events it shows. Where no such picture can be found, the frame either stays empty or carries an illustration made for this atlas — and an illustration is labelled as imagined, never offered as a record of what happened.
Independence
No advertising network is connected, no analytics loads, and nothing about a reader is collected or sold — see the Privacy Notice. A fixed advertisement space is reserved in each ship's log and is presently empty. If a placement is ever sold it will not buy a change to a route, a certainty label or an editorial note.
Corrections
Corrections update the existing page and its review date rather than appearing somewhere new. A page's address never changes, so a link you saved still works and will show the corrected text. We do not quietly promote an approximate or disputed claim to a documented one — where evidence moves a claim up, the change is visible in that journey's editorial note. How to report one is on the Corrections page.