South of the equator, as southerly trade winds increasingly blew against his ships, progress became ever more difficult. Sometime during the eight-year hiatus between his return in 1489 and da Gama’s departure in 1497, a mariner unknown to history found the solution to this problem. As da Gama’s ships passed the coast of what is now Sierra Leone, they turned right, departed the coast for the open Atlantic, and headed almost due west for several hundred miles. Then, the ships gradually executed a counterclockwise semicircle thousands of miles wide, enabling them to tack across the wind blowing
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