In 1686, the English astronomer Edmund Halley published in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society the first scientific map of the trade winds of the Atlantic and Indian Oceans, based on systematic observation of wind patterns across multiple sea voyages. This was the world's first meteorological chart, visually representing global wind circulation as a coherent physical system rather than a collection of local lore. Halley's wind map provided navigators with a rational basis for route planning and contributed to the emerging scientific understanding of Earth's atmosphere as a unified system governed by measurable laws.

Halley's wind map contributed to an eighteenth-century literary shift in which wind ceased to be primarily mythological and became also scientific — a change reflected in the poetry of James Thomson, whose long poem The Seasons (1726–1730) attempted to reconcile Newtonian natural philosophy with poetic description of meteorological phenomena including winds. The trade winds Halley charted were the very winds that filled the sails of the slave ships whose horrors later galvanised abolitionist poetry by William Cowper, Hannah More, and eventually Coleridge's Rime of the Ancient Mariner.