The Atlantic crossing (Carrera de Indias)

Assembled from 22 blocks · 2 evidence · 26 related

1. Story
2. The westward passage from Iberia to the Caribbean and back, which within a generation of 1492 hardened from a gamble into a scheduled convoy system. The outbound leg exploited the north-east trades: south to the Canaries to pick up the wind, then west on a near-constant heading, a passage of about five weeks in a good year. The return could not retrace it. Homebound ships worked north through the Florida Straits and the Bahama Channel, riding the Gulf Stream up the North American coast until they reached the westerlies near the latitude of Bermuda, and only then turned east for the Azores and Spain. Spain formalised the pattern into the flota system, with escorted fleets sailing on fixed dates and returning through Havana, administered from Seville. The shape of the route is dictated entirely by the wind: the Atlantic is not crossed, it is circulated.
3. Knowledge
4. Volta do mar (the return by sea)
5. The Atlantic crossing (Carrera de Indias)
6. Connections
7. The Atlantic wind and current system
8. Volta do mar (the return by sea)
9. Seville
10. Casa de Contratación (House of Trade), Seville
11. The Columbian Exchange
12. Columbus makes landfall in the Bahamas
13. The Treaty of Tordesillas divides the ocean
14. The Casa de Contratación is established at Seville
15. The Atlantic wind and current system
16. The Cape route (Carreira da Índia)
17. The Atlantic crossing (Carrera de Indias)
18. Gil Eanes passes Cape Bojador
19. Cabral sights the coast of Brazil
20. Evidence
21. The documentary basis for the administered structure of the Atlantic trade: licensing, registration, taxation of bullion and the examination of pilots. V55 verification basis: NOT consulted in this session, and cited deliberately at the level of the FONDS rather than of any document, because no legajo or bundle reference could be checked and inventing one would be exactly the failure this pack is written to avoid.
22. The standard single-volume account of Portuguese expansion: Ceuta, the African coast, the Cape route, the carreira da Índia, the Estado da Índia and the institutions that ran them. V55 verification basis: NOT consulted in this session. Boxer is a mid-twentieth-century imperial history and its framing has been substantially revised by later work, particularly on Asian agency and on the limits of Portuguese control; this pack uses it for structure, not for interpretation.