Terms of Use
The conditions on which this atlas is offered, and the honest limits of what it claims to know.
What this is
Charted Voyages is a work of historical presentation for general readers. It is offered free of charge, as it stands, without warranty of any kind. Use it to read, to teach, to plan a lesson or to settle an argument — but not to navigate anything.
On the accuracy of the charts
The routes drawn here are reconstructions. Where the surviving logs give positions we follow them; where they do not, we interpolate between recorded landfalls, which is not what any of these vessels actually sailed. Every route leg carries a certainty label, and the legend on each journey explains what each line style admits to. Legendary and disputed positions are flagged in the entry that carries them, not in a footnote.
The maps are decorative drawings built on modern Natural Earth data and styled to resemble period engraving. They are not period maps, and they are unfit for navigation, survey, boundary determination or any purpose where being wrong has consequences.
Quotations and sources
Passages attributed to Darwin and others are drawn from public-domain texts and standard English translations, quoted in short extract with the exact edition and locator given. Where an entry summarises a source rather than quoting it, it is labelled as editorial paraphrase or context and never dressed as the author's own words.
Where a source is contested — Polo's absence from Yuan records, the lost original of Columbus's diario, the disputed landfall at Guanahaní — the ledger says so rather than smoothing it over. Every journey lists what it rests on. If you are writing something that matters, go to those sources and not to us.
Historical respect
These voyages carried consequences that the voyagers' own accounts do not record fairly: enslavement, dispossession, violence on first contact, and peoples whose names survive only as European misreadings. Where the record permits, we name what happened from more than one shore, and entries that describe violence carry a content note. We do not present any of it as adventure without cost.
What you may do with it
You may read, link to, quote briefly with attribution, and use this atlas in a classroom without asking. You may not republish the written entries wholesale, present them as your own, or scrape the site to train a model. The underlying geographic data is public domain and yours to use freely; archival plates carry their own licences, noted with each plate.
Advertising and links
Advertisements are marked as such, and no advertising is presently carried. We do not endorse what an advertisement offers, and a placement never buys a change to an entry. Links to outside catalogues, archives and booksellers are given for convenience; those sites are not ours and are governed by their own terms.
Availability and change
The atlas may be altered, corrected, expanded or taken down at any time. Corrections are welcome and we would rather be told than be wrong: support.chartedvoyages@gmail.com.
Nothing here limits liability for anything that cannot lawfully be limited. Otherwise, to the extent the law allows, we are not liable for loss arising from reliance on these pages.