The Volta Do Mar is a phrase that means ‘turn of the sea’ and was used back in the 1400s and 1500s to describe what was needed to be done to get back to port in the Mediterranean after sailing south past the Canary Islands off the west coast of Africa.
In which case, rather than sailing straight back north and taking the direct route as you would expect, you had to counterintuitively sail due west into the Atlantic on the tradewinds and let yourself get carried almost halfway to the Caribbean and then sail north, sometimes as far up as Nova Scotia, before picking up the Mediterranean bound eastward currents to get back home.
That’s a heck of a round trip journey just to go a few hundred miles north but that’s what needed to be done.
We feel that’s a very very instructive way of looking at a certain long standing pervasive problem and we hope you do too.