In this short excerpt from our documentary "Kingdom of Kongo: Slaver Kings, Amazon Queens and the Brazilian Spartacus" we discuss Prince Henry the Navigator's obsessive desire to penetrate deeper along the Eastern South Atlantic Coast to reach the lucrative sub Saharan trading empires. He began by acquiring maps and charts, and some believe that he developed a kind of naval academy that focussed on improving navigation, chart making and ship design, drawing from the innovations of both Muslim and Christian sailing traditions. He sponsored the exploration of the Atlantic ocean in re-designed shallow bottom caravel ships with lateen sails that were highly manoeuvrable, and whose arrangement allowed them to sail into headwinds as well as enable them to hug the coast closely. Portuguese sailors had by now discovered huge oceanic air-current gyres and ocean currents that actually made it more efficient (if counterintuitive) to sail out to sea, perpendicular to the winds we now call the North Easterly Trades, and then ride the clockwise turn of the winds as they became the South Westerlies that would be at their backs as they approached the Iberian coast. This turn of the breeze was known as the Volta do Mar and it enabled the Portuguese Navy to strike out with confidence across vast expanses of ocean and predict the likely wind direction based on their latitude. Using this revolutionary new knowledge, intrepid Portuguese explorers discovered the Madeiran islands, the Azores and even the Sargasso Sea. Some evidence also suggests that by the 1420’s they probably also ran into the Caribbean, and possibly even the mainland of both North and South America, and that Christopher Columbus had availed himself of both maps and knowledge he extracted from dying Portuguese sailors on Madeira.
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