I chose the voyage of Henry Hudson to Hudson Bay mainly because it felt personal and interesting to me. We share the same name, and I actually did a project in fourth grade where I imitated him and gave a speech as Hudson, so it was something I already had a connection to and thought would be fun to revisit.

My historical map really shows both the strengths and limits of geographic knowledge at the time. The map I used was created about 15 years after Hudson’s voyage, and while some regions like the west coast of South America are very inaccurate, the areas Hudson explored, like Hudson Strait, Hudson Bay, and James Bay, are surprisingly detailed. That says a lot about the navigational skill of explorers and the ability of cartographers to take their observations and turn them into fairly accurate maps. At the same time, it’s clear that knowledge was still incomplete, and even the better-mapped regions aren’t perfect.

Georeferencing a historical map and plotting the voyage with accurate modern coordinates makes the journey much easier to understand. Instead of just imagining a list of stops, you can actually see the distances and locations in relation to places we recognize today, which makes the scale of the voyage feel more real. It also highlights how impressive it was that Hudson and his crew were able to travel that far with the tools they had. However, this kind of digital presentation can also be misleading. The route often appears as straight lines between points, which ignores the reality that they would have drifted, changed course, and struggled with weather and navigation. That means the journey was likely longer, more complicated, and more difficult than it looks on a clean digital map.

I do think modern tools like GIS have changed how we see human interaction with the world in a way that actually connects really well to what Sara Caputo was getting at with “tracks on the ocean.” Those tracks weren’t just simple lines, they represented real movement, uncertainty, and experience. In the same way, when we plot Hudson’s route today, the straight lines on a digital map might look clean, but they actually stand for a much messier reality. The ship didn’t move in perfect lines, it drifted, got pushed by currents, and dealt with storms and mistakes. So while GIS helps us visualize and understand these journeys way better, it can also turn something complicated into something that looks simple.