Longest haul flights, longest rivers, longest tall ships routes & bonus map

This follows on a series of maps posted here, in desktop & map or poster but not web format as explained here & here. Sit back folks, relax & enjoy the map story time...

I repost a cool map on long haul flights: I grew up taking earlier ones over 50 yrs. ago; one of the carriers I used, Qantas just announced here jets that can fly Sydney to New York or London direct! Next is a new map of the longest rivers from a website priding itself of its visualisations: I used previous techniques and cannot decide which works best; perhaps you the reader can help?

Update: added a long section on longest sailing routes by 18-19 c. tall ships (think Cutty Sark here).

Update 2: this post here follows on this series of offline maps

Ten Longest Haul Flights

From my Story Map portfolio here, my second 30DayMapChallenge here during COVID, and an extra on "Day 15b: Connections": Inspired by  @pheebely  tweet "Ten Longest Haul Flights" here, which I remapped in Spilhaus projection... Why? Because it's ocean-centric! Long-haul flights tend to go over oceans, not only to follow "great circles" (shortest distance over a globe), but also for safety (less risk of ground damage in the unlikely case of an accident). In Esri ArcGIS Pro with publicly available fight path data.

Note: thanks ESRI UK Ian Bailey for the perpetual license, and ESRI Inc. John Nelson for the ongoing inspiration.

click to enlarge, full size here

Hello folks: this is an unusual projection, so do take a moment to orient yourself: the North Pole is at top left, and Antarctica at the centre, Australia side-on to its immediate right, Africa above left, and Greenland top left are all recognisable; Europe, Asia and the Americas are however smeared along the edges... can you recognise any other features?

15 Longest Rivers

Inspired by Visual Capitalist here, let's map those rivers in Spilhaus ocean-centric projection as above - rivers empty into oceans after all, don't they? -  as well as in Equal Earth projection centred on the date line. Like Spilhaus' uninterrupted oceans, this keeps continents where rivers lie uninterrupted (see various Equal Earth & Spilhaus projection variants in YouTube playlist here). Natural Earth has 10m resolution world rivers here: I simply selected the ones in Visual Capitalist's list.

Spilhaus projection - click to enlarge, full size here

Natural Earth - click to enlarge, full size here

Note: in Africa, El Bahr & el Abyad are also the White Nile, & Lualaba is also the Congo, and in Asia Far East, Heilong Jiang is also the Amur.

Listen up, folks: I can't decide which of Spilhaus or Equal Earth is the more telling projection to appreciate river lengths. Or which of the Spilhaus map displays,  with mask or neat with borders, is more appealing. Can you? If so, please leave a comment below...

Longest tall ship routes

CLIWOC (CLImate data for World OCeans here) have long interested me as a ¼M point dataset last discussed a decade ago here c/w video here. They were the only climate data for that period at the time, also discussed here in a modern context: Global harmonization of climate & temperature data since 1850 picks up where CLIWOC dropped off, and overland in addition.

This post is about long distances, so I extracted the Pacific routes and post them here by decade. Note in the full CLIWOC color-coding below that Portuguese, albeit renowned long-distance sailors, are absent... Why? Because the Great Lisbon Earthquake of 1755 destroyed their library & captains' ship logs with it! They were the early explorers, and you'll notice that the Spanish orange, followed by British & French purple & green, give way to Dutch cyan.

turn Captions on in full size here

(cogwheel upper right-hand corner) 

This must be taken with a grain of salt: it was a 5 yr. EU project in the 90s; when data were too hard & took too long to digitize, they were simply left off. Navy reporting was actually pretty stringent and complete: but for example, Capt. Cook was notoriously lax; his Botany Bay landing in Australia's south-central East Coast, or his demise in Hawaii just above centre below, simply don't show...

Note: thanks Ke(vi)n Greenwood(?) of the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, early noughties, for unpublished details about CLIWOC.

L: Captain Cook, Endeavour & Resolution, 1768-1774
R: LaPerouse, La Boussole, 1785-1788 (no Astrolabe)

LaPerouse tracks on the other hand show his incredible voyage you never heard of... Did you know that on the scaffolding, Louis XVI's last words were not for Marie Antoinette, but "has laPerouse returned?" He was sent to claim Australia for the French crown... Or that he nearly sent a young surveyor by the name of Napoleon... Imagine history, had they not perished offshore Australia! More here in Meissner's German book.

Or when the French tall ship, the Hermione did a historic crossing here, it didn't show on CLIWOC either! Did you also know it took part in the Yorktown blockade? It's an ill-heralded turning point of the American Revolutionary War: it blocked British supplies and led to Washington's ultimate victory; that isn't taught in schools on either side of the Atlantic, and you have to read McCullough's "1776" here to learn that it hung by a thread, and tha it could've gone either way...

Note: see here the American Revolution shrouded in mystery, also Ken Burns PBS documentary here.

That's all folks! Clap! Clap! End of story time!

Bonus

Re: Spilhaus projection, a text-book case for ocean-centricity is @FlorianNeukirchen's beautiful map of sea-floor spreading (here):

click to enlarge, full size here