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I'm checking a map of Ocean currents thinking about alternate colonial points of departure.

- How bad was crossing the Romanche Trench from Cape Verde? Could Brazil be contested easily or were the Dutch and the French just rather lucky and obsessive? Most of the currents in the area between Brazil and West Africa seem to be slow ones?
- How hard would reaching the Azores from France or Britain be? How hard was it from Portugal; it seems to be counter-current from Europe.
- Cabot, Verrazano and Cartier did their trips across the north Atlantic more or less directly; would going through the (OTL Spanish dominated) Antilles current have been faster?
- France and Britain seem to have been sailing against the gulf stream to reach their north American colonies, how much of an issue was it? I see reported travel times going down to as low as three or four weeks by the 18th century, compared to two months early on, I figure shipbuilding advances helped in that regard?
- Would an early modern fleet seriously have been in a position to entirely block naval access to a colony on the Rio de la Plata from Brazil?
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