The Explorer's Atlas,
seventeen voyages on an antique globe.
An interactive atlas of seventeen great voyages — from the wanderings of Odysseus and Kupe's crossing of Te Moana-nui-a-Kiwa to Shackleton's Endurance — traced stop by stop across a 3D globe styled as an antique printed plate.
The idea
§ 01Most map visualisations look like dashboards. I wanted the opposite: the feeling of opening a nineteenth-century atlas — parchment, ink and gold leaf, engraved rules, 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 clatter and the creak of ship's timbers fade between ports.
The content
§ 02 — researched, not decoratedEvery voyage is researched and fact-checked: routes follow real sailing tracks (waypointed so no leg crosses land), dates are verified against the records, and each explorer carries a full illustrated biography.
The artwork is entirely public domain: Turner, Waterhouse, Hodges, Hurley's Antarctic photographs, Ming woodblocks, expedition engravings — around eighty plates, credited in full.
The register stays honest
Drake is “part explorer, part licensed pirate.” Columbus's page carries what his arrival cost the Taíno.
Two plates are deliberately different: Odysseus is flagged as pure legend, and Kupe's voyage is framed as living oral tradition — one widely told telling, with the differences between iwi named as taonga, not errors.
A look at it
§ 03
How it's built
§ 04 — the stackA single self-contained HTML file — no framework, no build step. Three.js and globe.gl drive the globe, with a NASA Blue Marble texture recoloured into a sepia duotone. The routes are self-sampled great circles rendered as surface-hugging dotted paths; markers, tooltips, the meridian ring and the globe's shadow are DOM elements tracked to the 3D scene per frame.
Ambient audio is a layered Web Audio graph that crossfades by location. Fully responsive — on a phone it becomes a swipeable story with a slim scrubber — and deployed as a Cloudflare Worker.
Built in an AI-paired workflow with Claude Code: every feature verified in a real browser before it shipped. It's the same approach I bring to client AI work — if you've got something in that shape, get in touch.