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Folks on the board treat it as pretty much inevitable that any European power sailing south around Africa would accidentally bump into Brazil because the best winds to go around the Cape of Good Hope are available in the the southwestern Atlantic. This wind catching maneuver is called the "Volta Do Mar".

However, does practice between the 1500s and 1700s really bear this out-

Did a majority of Portuguese voyages aiming for the Indian Ocean go along the coastal route ou thor Volta Do Mar?

How many of them involved *deliberate* reprovisioning stops in Brazil while heading round Africa?

Were there many unintended accidental Portuguese landings in Brazil after Cabral's over the next century, few or none?

If Portuguese mariners routinely used to Volta do Mar while getting to India, omitted deliberate stops in Brazil from their itinteraries, and if Portuguese ships intended for India hardly ever [let's measure it and say no more than one or two times a century) got forced to bail out around Brazil, then it is hard to say accidental discovery of Brazil was inevitable in the early 1500s.

However if trips bound for India in the 1500s and 1600s involved frequent (frequent would mean like once a decade or more) unplanned landings in Brazil, due to storms etc., it suggests the Brazilian hump was not only not missed, it was "hard to miss" and an early 1500s European encounter with Brazil was inevitable, regardless of whether the Spanish go to the Caribbean.

---Also, why in virtually all threads based on the PoD of no Columbus voyage, why do people assert that John Cabot's voyage from Bristol to Newfoundland was going to happen on schedule in 1497 regardless?

I mean, think of it this way: Henry VII could not be bothered to send further expeditions to North America after the Cabot voyage turned up nothing too exciting. He does not seem to have been an extravagant speculator. Don't you think the only reason Henry was willing to take a risk on Cabot's plan was that Colombus had undisputably found *something* already in that westward direction.

In short, It strikes me no Cabot in Newfoundland is direct knock-on from no Columbus in Caribbean. Whereas Cabral's trip to Brazil, if it was truly accidental, was not likely knock-ons, and might have been unrelated or at most a butterfly effect of the Columbus voyage.

----and another thing-

If Columbus was a minority of one regarding the size of the earth (and therefore the feasibility of reaching Asia by sailing west), with everybody else knowing better the world was way too big....then how come people kept looking for the northwest passage through Captain Cook's time? And why did French explorers going up the St. Lawrence talk about China being on the west side of Niagara Falls (hence the placename la chine, in Canada).
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