Elizabeth Wood of Hamilton has a very short question: what is meant by the horse latitudes?
The Earth is circled by bands of winds that generally blow in the same direction. North of the equator there is a zone of steady winds blowing from the northeast called the trade winds; and in our latitudes, the prevailing winds are called the westerlies. Between the trades and the westerlies, there is a large subtropical high pressure area centred over the oceans at about 30 north latitude [near Bermuda]. Since the air is generally descending to the Earth in these zones, the air is warming, there is little cloud, and it’s very dry. In fact, most of the world’s great deserts – Gobi, Sahara, Arabian – are found along this latitude belt. These latitudes also experience long periods of weak, or sometimes completely dead wind. Before the days of steam, Spanish sailing vessels, carrying horses to the New World were occasionally stalled for weeks by the calms under a blistering sun in these low latitudes. When a ship’s food and water supplies ran short, crews threw the starving horses overbo
