Crossing Historic Routes

Today, as I round the north east corner of Brazil and prepare to head south to cross the equator, just two hundred miles away from entering the South Atlantic, I am aware that all of the great navigators of history have passed this way. I have already crossed the path of Columbus, as he journeyed to San Salvador thinking he was in India - hence the West Indies. But now I am crossing the paths of the circumnavigators – Magellan, the first to circumnavigate, although he personally died before the voyage ended, his ship and many of his crew made it. Then there was Sir Francis Drake, and the man who first set foot on New Zealand, the country of my birth, Sir James Cook. They blazed the way going west. I am going what we know to be the faster route - east with the winds.