The idea
Most map visualisations look like dashboards. I wanted the opposite: the feeling of opening a nineteenth-century atlas, with parchment, ink and gold leaf, engraved rules and entries written like an encyclopedia, but alive.
Choose an explorer and the globe swings to their departure port. Press play and the voyage sails itself, the dotted track drawing in stop by stop while gulls, harbour noise and creaking timbers fade between ports.
The content
Every voyage is researched and checked: routes follow real sailing tracks, waypointed so no leg crosses land, dates are verified against the records, and each explorer has a full illustrated biography. The artwork is all public domain: Turner, Waterhouse, Hodges, Hurley's Antarctic photographs, Ming woodblocks and expedition engravings, about eighty plates, credited in full.
The tone stays honest. Drake is “part explorer, part licensed pirate.” Columbus's page includes what his arrival cost the Taíno. Odysseus is flagged as legend, and Kupe's voyage is presented as living oral tradition, with the differences between iwi treated as taonga, not errors.
How it's built
It's one self-contained HTML file, with no framework and no build step. Three.js and globe.gl drive the globe, using a NASA Blue Marble texture recoloured to sepia. The routes are great circles drawn as dotted paths that hug the surface. The ambient sound is a layered Web Audio graph that crossfades as you move between places. On a phone it becomes a swipeable story with a slim scrubber.
I built it with Claude Code, and checked every feature in a real browser before it shipped.
- Framework
- None, one HTML file
- Globe
- Three.js · globe.gl
- Audio
- Web Audio
- Hosting
- Cloudflare Worker
- Workflow
- Claude Code