36BRIDGEMANTrade winds and explorationPortugal’s port of call
A 16th-century panorama of Calicut (now Kozhikode),
on India’s south-west coast. After Vasco da Gama landed
here in 1498, the Portuguese established a trading postin 1822, their colonies endured for well over a century longer.
The enclaves of Goa, Daman and Diu became part of India in
1961; Portuguese Timor was relinquished in 1975, the same
year that Angola and Mozambique became independent; and
Macau was finally handed over to China in 1999. Even today,
Portuguese remains the primary official language of Brazil,
Angola, Mozambique and other former colo-
nies including Cape Verde, and the language
(or a form of Portuguese Creole) is spoken in
East Timor, Goa, Daman and Diu.Familiar patterns
In the early 16th century, Spanish navigators
found a route around the tip of South Amer-
ica and across the Pacific with the trade
winds to the Spice Islands – but they also
had to find a way to get their newly traded
goods home. They realised that the now-
familiar circular pattern of winds in the
Atlantic was replicated in the Pacific, and
navigators learned to sail first north from
the Philippines to Japan before picking up
the westerlies to carry them all the way east
to the Californian coast.
For 250 years, this Manila Galleon Route
bridged the vast Pacific Ocean with regular
round-trip shipping, running between theSpanish colonies in Acapulco (in present-day Mexico) and
Manila in the Philippines. Silver mined from the Americas was
traded with the Chinese for luxuries such as silk, porcelain and
spices. California thus became hugely important to the
Spanish simply because it was where the winds delivered them
after their transpacific crossing from Asia, and cities such San
Francisco, Los Angeles and San Diego were founded to resupply
Spanish ships after they had completed this
long voyage.
In 1610–11, the Dutch found a shortcut
bypassing part of the original Portuguese
route to the Spice Islands. Rather than
tracing the coast all the way around the
northern Indian Ocean, which forced ships
to wait for the correct monsoon winds to
reach their goal, Captain Hendrik Brouwer
of the Dutch East India Company recognised
that it was quicker to sail straight east from
the tip of South Africa before heading north at
the eastern edge of the Indian Ocean.
The westerly winds that flow around the
southern hemisphere are largely unobstructed
by continents or mountains, so they blow far
more strongly than their northern counter-
parts. These ‘Roaring Forties’ create what’s
effectively a fast-moving motorway in the
ocean, with the result that the time takenUp in smoke
An 18th-century tobacco label featuring
a sailing ship. Slaves transported across
the Atlantic were forced to work on
tobacco plantations in the AmericasИЗП
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