Published in the ‘Atlas maritimus & commercialis: or, a General View of the World, so far as Relates to Trade & Navigation’. The Atlas maritius can be used as an index of English trading activity at this period, since detailed insets and harbour plans emphasise those areas of greatest commercial significance. Although the author of the text is anonymous, Daniel Defoe is thought to have contributed to it, and Halley, the Astronomer-Royal, added a prefatory note discussing the use of the charts; it is therefore sometimes catalogued under his name. It has also been attributed to Harris, Senex and Wilson, those name appears on one chart. Senex was certainly responsible for one of the atlas’s innovations, the globular chart of Western Europe whose projection according to the title-page was “authorizedby letters patent”.
The atlas was purely commercial and was not a real rival to the ‘English Pilot’: unlike the Pilot it compressed global coverage into one book, as well as describing the the south and west coast of America, omitted by the former.