Brouwer Route

Background

Selected excerpts from Wikipedia. This is general background, not Angle's reporting, and it may have changed since the stories above were published.

The Brouwer Route was a 17th-century route used by ships sailing from the Cape of Good Hope to the Dutch East Indies, as the eastern leg of the Cape Route. The route took ships south from the Cape (which is at 34° latitude south) into the Roaring Forties, then east across the Indian Ocean, before turning northeast for Java. Thus it took advantage of the strong westerly winds for which the Roaring Forties are named, greatly increasing travel speed.

The problem with the route was lack of an accurate way, at the time, to determine longitude, and thereby to know how far east a vessel had travelled. A sighting of either Amsterdam Island or Saint Paul Island was the only cue for ships to change direction and head north. However, this was reliant on the captain's expertise. Consequently, many ships were damaged by or wrecked on rocks, reefs, or islands on the western continental shelf of Australia, which was virtually unknown to Europeans at the time.

The route was devised by the Dutch explorer Hendrik Brouwer in 1611, and found to halve the duration of the journey from Europe to Java, compared to the previous Arab and Portuguese monsoon route, which involved following the coast of East Africa northwards, sailing through the Mozambique Channel round Madagascar and then across the Indian Ocean, sometimes via India. By 1616 the Brouwer Route was compulsory for ship captains of the Dutch East India Company headed to Java.

From the Wikipedia article Brouwer Route (revision of Oct 10, 2026). Wikipedia contributors; selected plain-text excerpts from this revision. Formatting, reference markers and non-prose material removed. Available under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0. Identity from Wikidata (CC0).