Brouwer Route
In 1510, Dutch mariner Hendrick Brouwer suggested to the VOC's Heeren XVII that ships bound for the East Indies should sail southeast from the Cape of Good Hope to between 35°S and 45°S, where they could exploit the strong westerly tailwinds ("the Roaring Forties") to cross the Southern Ocean before turning northward and using the southeast trade winds to carry them directly into the Sunda Strait. Previously, Dutch ships followed the Portuguese routes along the coast of Africa, passing through the Mozambique Channel or around Madagascar past Mauritius and on to Goa, Sri Lanka or the East Indies.
Brouwer pioneered this route, leaving the Texel in December 1610 in the Roode Leeuw met Pijlen, accompanied by the Gouda and Veere, completing the journey in under eight months, cutting several months off the usual sailing time. Remarkably, the longest leg, from the Cape of Good Hope's Table Bay, took two and a half months. The new route's advantages were obvious. Ships were less likely to encounter Indian Ocean cyclones, there was little risk of becoming becalmed in the Doldrums, temperatures would be cooler, and there was less chance of those on board developing scurvy, which tended to appear around the ninety-day mark. And, apart from an island or two, there were no navigational hazards on the route itself.
The only significant drawback involved the timing of the turn to the north, with no way to accurately determine longitude while ships were at sea. Given instructions to turn to the north after a thousand nautical miles, navigators relying on dead reckoning could easily overshoot the mark. While the islands of St. Paul and Amsterdam, at 38°S and 36°S, and seven hundred nautical miles east of the Cape, provided a reliable indication of the turning point, they were easily missed in the Southern Ocean's tempestuous vastness. Overshooting the turning point would take ships onto a coast with its share of hazards, but, as it turned out, only a handful of vessels out of several thousand encountered them.
In the Indies, Governor-General Coen quickly began to agitate for the route "by the south" to be made mandatory; the Heeren XVII decided accordingly in 1616, and one year later, the first official sailing instructions went into effect the following year. The new route's advantages were evident from the outset: six smaller ships which departed from the Texel at the beginning of 1617 reached Bantam in six to eight months, while two larger ones adhered to the Portuguese route across the Indian Ocean and took more than ten.
After that, the VOC's instructions were quite specific:
‘And all ships will, after having taken refreshments at the Cape de Bona Esperance or Tafelbay, put their course east in the latitude 35, 36, 40 to 44 degrees South so that they will find the best westerly winds, also because these winds blow not always at the latitude of 35 or 36 but often more southerly, they should be looked for there [Article
12]’.
‘Having found the westerly winds, the ships shall keep an easterly course at least for 1,000 miles before they move upwards or make their course northerly [Article 13]’.
Apart from providing the shortest distance between Europe and the East Indies (world maps using Mercator's projection deliver a vastly exaggerated impression of the distance involved), Brouwer's ingenious suggestion, which effectively became a nautical highway' resulted in the discovery of practically the whole coastline of Western Australia.
Brouwer's Route, a 'nautical highway', provided the shortest distance to the East Indies, expediting the sailing time by several months and allowing the ships to circumvent Portuguese territory in Asia.
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