Winds in the Age of Sail in the context of Cabotage

The European-Asian sea route, commonly known as the sea route to India or the Cape Route, is a shipping route from the European coast of the Atlantic Ocean to Asia's coast of the Indian Ocean passing by the Cape of Good Hope and Cape Agulhas at the southern edge of Africa. The first recorded completion of the route was made in 1498 by Portuguese explorer Vasco da Gama, the admiral of the first Portuguese Armadas bound eastwards to make the discovery. The route was important during the Age of Sail, but became partly obsolete as the Suez Canal opened in 1869.

The Brouwer Route was a 17th-century route used by ships sailing from the Cape of Good Hope to the Dutch East Indies, as the eastern leg of the Cape Route. The route took ships south from the Cape (which is at 34° latitude south) into the Roaring Forties, then east across the Indian Ocean, before turning northeast for Java. Thus it took advantage of the strong westerly winds for which the Roaring Forties are named, greatly increasing travel speed.

The problem with the route was lack of an accurate way, at the time, to determine longitude, and thereby to know how far east a vessel had travelled. A sighting of either Amsterdam Island or Saint Paul Island was the only cue for ships to change direction and head north. However, this was reliant on the captain's expertise. Consequently, many ships were damaged by or wrecked on rocks, reefs, or islands on the western continental shelf of Australia, which was virtually unknown to Europeans at the time.

Volta do mar, volta do mar largo, or volta do largo (the phrase in Portuguese means literally 'turn of the sea' but also 'return from the sea') is a navigational technique perfected by Portuguese navigators during the Age of Discovery in the late fifteenth century, using the dependable phenomenon of the great permanent wind circle, the North Atlantic Gyre. This was a major step in the history of navigation, when an understanding of winds in the age of sail was crucial to success: the European sea empires would not have been established without an understanding of the trade winds.