For several more days the two caravels plugged past a desolate coast of low hills. Then the pilots took a startling decision. At about twenty-nine degrees south, they gave up the attritional battle with the adverse winds and currents. Instead they turned their ships away from the shore, lowered their sails to half-mast, and flung themselves out into the void of the westerly ocean with the counterintuitive aim of sailing east. No one knows exactly why this happened; it may have been a maneuver worked out in advance, or it may have been a moment of genius, an intuition about the Atlantic winds
...more
“For several more days the two caravels plugged past a desolate coast of low hills. Then the pilots took a startling decision. At about twenty-nine degrees south, they gave up the attritional battle with the adverse winds and currents. Instead they turned their ships away from the shore, lowered their sails to half-mast, and flung themselves out into the void of the westerly ocean with the counterintuitive aim of sailing east. No one knows exactly why this happened; it may have been a maneuver worked out in advance, or it may have been a moment of genius, an intuition about the Atlantic winds based on previous experience of sailing home from the Guinea coast. This involved a tack to the west away from the African coast, taking the ships out in a wide loop into the central Atlantic, where they picked up westerly winds that carried them east back to Portugal. Maybe, they reasoned, the same rhythm applied in the southern Atlantic. Whatever the logic, this was a decisive moment in the history of the world.”
Reference
Crowley, Roger (2015, Sep.). “Conquerors: How Portugal Forged the First Global Empire.” Kindle Edition. Chapter 2 The Race, p 19 of 351, 7%.
