30ALAMYT
hroughout the Middle Ages, Europe was
something of a backwater. Essentially
no more than a peninsula stuck on the
very end of the great continent of Asia,
Europe languished on the extremity of
the sprawling trade networks stretching
right across Asia – the overland trade
routes of the Silk Roads as well as mari-
time links along the southern margin of the continent
and across the Indian Ocean.
That status began to change in the early 15th century.
The Age of Exploration started on the Iberian peninsula, when
sailors from Portugal began venturing out into the Atlantic
Ocean to seek new lands and riches, followed by mariners
from Spain. The ensuing process of establishing long-
range maritime trade routes, founding remote colonies and
outposts, and forging vast overseas empires relied on the
patterns of prevailing winds around the planet. This very first
stage of globalisation and the building of the modern world
was directed by the fundamental circulation systems in the
Earth’s atmosphere.
Portugal began its programme of exploration down the west
African coastline in the early 15th century. The initial aim of
those navigators was to locate the source of the gold that was
then being brought across the Sahara by camel caravans; later,
their efforts were directed at circumventing the Islamic world
and establishing a maritime route to India and the lucrative
trade in spices. The Atlantic islands – such as the Canaries,
Madeira and the Azores – served as stepping stones through the
tempestuous ocean waters. Sailing to and from those islands
gave these early European navigators the first inklings of the
grand-scale patterns of circulation in the planet’s atmosphere
and oceans, which they soon came to understand more deeply
and began to exploit.
The Portuguese spent the best part of a century working
their way down the coast of Africa before they finally found
its southern tip and the gateway into the Indian Ocean. The
captain who first made the voyage from the cape across the
Indian Ocean was Vasco da Gama, in 1497–98. He realisedthat, in order to cross the south Atlantic and round the tip of
Africa, his best option would be to navigate a huge loop through
the deep ocean in order to keep with the favourable winds and
currents. This route took over three months and covered
around 6,000 miles at sea – by far the longest voyage through
open ocean undertaken by that time.
Even before da Gama’s pioneering voyage, Christopher
Columbus had secured sponsorship from Spain for a westward
voyage, and in 1492 sailed across the Atlantic to find a sea route
to the riches of the Orient. Setting off from the Canary Islands,
his fleet sailed with the easterly trade winds and unexpectedly
ran into a whole new continental land mass – though, famous-
ly, he didn’t grasp that fact at the time. After mapping Caribbe-
an islands for a few months, Columbus turned for home, first
sailing north to pick up the band of westerly winds that blows
through the Azores and which carried him back to Europe.
Within a generation of that first voyage around the tip of
South Africa, and of Columbus’s ‘discovery’ of the Americas,
European sailors ventured across all the world’s oceans and
completed the first circumnavigation of the Earth. This was
a revolution that heralded the birth of today’s global economy.Perceiving patterns
This leap forward in long-distance exploration was possible be-
cause mariners came to understand the patterns of reliable
winds and ocean currents around the globe, which now deter-
mined the trade routes that brought great riches to Europe.
It was realised, for example, that the band of prevailing winds
blowing to the west in the North Atlantic has a mirror-image
counterpart in the southern hemisphere, and that the band
of winds that enabled the return voyage back to Europe across
the Atlantic Ocean are also present in the Pacific. There is
a global pattern to the winds, caused by the fundamental circu-
lation systems of the planet’s atmosphere. (For an introduction
to the geography and physics behind these wind systems, see
the box on page 32).
Essentially, prevailing winds blow from the north-east in the
zone between the equator and 30°N, and from the south-east
between 30°S and the equator. Above 30°N and below 30°S,Use the force
A ship enjoys a favourable wind, c1700. By that time, European
sailors had learned how to utilise prevailing trade windsИЗП
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