On September twentieth, 1519, five weather-proofed wooden caravels and carracks carrying roughly two hundred and seventy sailors from across Europe weighed anchor at the Spanish port of Sanlúcar de Barrameda and sailed southwest into the unknown. Commanded by a tough, limping thirty-nine-year-old Portuguese nobleman sailing under the flag of Spain—Ferdinand Magellan (Fernão de Magalhães)—this Armada de Molucca set out to accomplish what Christopher Columbus had failed to do twenty-seven years earlier: find a western sea passage around the Americas to the Spice Islands of Indonesia. When a single leaking, worm-eaten ship limped back into Spain three years later with just eighteen skeletal survivors—and without Magellan himself—they had completed the first circumnavigation of the Earth in human history.
Why a Portuguese Veteran Sailed for the King of Spain
Born around 1480 in northern Portugal, Ferdinand Magellan spent nearly a decade fighting and sailing for the Portuguese Crown in India, East Africa, and Malaysia—participating in the 1511 conquest of Malacca alongside his close friend Francisco Serrão, who subsequently sailed further east to settle in the Spice Islands (the Moluccas) and wrote letters back to Magellan describing islands where cloves and nutmeg grew worth more than their weight in gold, while a permanent battle hip wound in Morocco left Magellan with a lifelong limp.
Under the 1494 Treaty of Tordesillas, the Pope had divided the non-European world in half between Spain (everything to the west) and Portugal (everything to the east around Africa). When Portugal’s King Manuel I coldly rejected Magellan’s request for a tiny pension increase and refused to fund his proposal to reach the Spice Islands by sailing *west*, Magellan renounced his Portuguese allegiance, walked across the border into Spain in 1517, and laid a painted globe before the eighteen-year-old Spanish King Charles I (Emperor Charles V). Magellan convinced the young king that if he could find a strait cutting through the bottom of the South American continent, Spain could reach the Moluccas from the west without ever violating Portuguese waters.
Mutiny at Port San Julián and Navigating the Labyrinthine Strait
Sailing across the Atlantic with five ships—the flagship Trinidad, the San Antonio, the Concepción, the Victoria, and the small scouting caravel Santiago—Magellan faced hostility from his three proud Spanish ship captains, who hated taking orders from a grim Portuguese foreigner. After searching the wide estuary of the Río de la Plata in vain for a passage and sailing south into the freezing sub-Antarctic autumn of Patagonia, Magellan anchored for the winter at Port San Julián in March 1520.
On Easter Sunday night, April first, 1520, the Spanish captains seized control of three of the five ships in an armed mutiny, demanding that the fleet turn back to Spain. Magellan crushed the rebellion with ruthless speed: sending a boat party with a hidden dagger to stab the rebel captain Luis de Mendoza aboard the Victoria, blockading the harbor entrance with his remaining two loyal ships, executing Gaspar de Quesada, and marooning the third ring-leader, Juan de Cartagena, on the barren Patagonian shore.
In October 1520, after losing the small Santiago in a scouting shipwreck, Magellan rounded the Cape of the Eleven Thousand Virgins and entered the treacherous, 350-mile-long maze of freezing fjords, blind channels, screaming williwaw winds, and jagged rocks that now bears his name: the Strait of Magellan. Even after the largest ship in the fleet, the San Antonio, deserted in the fog and sailed back to Spain with a huge portion of the fleet’s food supplies, Magellan pressed forward for thirty-eight harrowing days. On November twenty-eighth, 1520, his three remaining ships sailed out of the Western mouth of the strait into a vast, calm, sunlit ocean—which Magellan tearfully christened the Mar Pacífico (the Pacific Ocean) because not a single storm struck them during the crossing.
99 Days of Starvation Across a Giant Pacific and Death at Mactan
Here Magellan’s geographical calculations suffered a near-fatal error: like all European cartographers of 1519, he thought the Earth was much smaller than it actually is, assuming the Spice Islands lay just a few days’ sail west of South America. Instead, the Pacific Ocean covers a third of the planet! For ninety-nine continuous days across twelve thousand miles of empty blue water without sighting a single inhabited island until Guam in March 1521, the crew endured one of the worst starvations in maritime history:
- The hardtack biscuit turned into worm-filled powder fouled with rat urine; drinking water turned yellow and putrid.
- To keep from starving, sailors soaked the tough ox-hide leather protective wrappings off the mainyard rigging in the sea for four days, roasted the leather over coals, and ate it alongside sawdust and ship rats (which sold among the starving men for half a gold ducat apiece) while twenty men died of scurvy.
Reaching the archipelago of the Philippines in March 1521—where Magellan’s enslaved Malay interpreter, Enrique of Malacca, was stunned to discover he could understand the local Austronesian dialect, arguably making Enrique the very first human being to complete a linguistic circle around the globe—Magellan formed an alliance with Rajah Humabon of Cebu and converted hundreds to Christianity. However, in his zeal to prove the invincible power of Christian armor to his new ally, Magellan foolishly offered to crush a rival chieftain on the neighboring island of Mactan named Lapulapu, who refused to submit to Spanish authority.
At dawn on April twenty-seventh, 1521, wading ashore at low tide over sharp coral reefs that kept his ships’ cannons out of range, Magellan and forty-nine armored Europeans were swarmed by fifteen hundred warriors under Lapulapu. Recognizing the captain, the islanders aimed their fire-hardened bamboo spears and poisoned arrows directly at Magellan’s unarmored legs; struck in the right leg by a poisoned arrow and twice having his helmet knocked off his head, Magellan fought knee-deep in the surf for an hour to cover his men’s retreat to the boats before being overwhelmed and cut down by bamboo lances and kampilan swords on the beach.
Juan Sebastián Elcano and the Return of the Victoria (1522)
Following Magellan’s death and the abandonment of the worm-eaten Concepción, the surviving two ships—the Trinidad and the Victoria—finally reached the Moluccas (Spice Islands) in November 1521, filling their holds to the brim with twenty-six tons of priceless cloves. When the leaking Trinidad proved unable to sail back across the Pacific, Basque navigator Juan Sebastián Elcano—who had ironically been pardoned by Magellan after participating in the 1520 Patagonian mutiny!—took command of the sole remaining eighty-five-foot carrack, the Victoria, and made a desperate dash westward across the Indian Ocean and around Africa’s Cape of Good Hope while hunted by Portuguese warships.
On September sixth, 1522—almost three years to the day after five ships and 270 men had departed—the tattered Victoria limped back into Sanlúcar de Barrameda carrying just eighteen European survivors (including the Italian chronicler Antonio Pigafetta, whose diary preserved the entire story) and three Moluccan islanders. Remarkably, the single cargo of cloves in the hold of the Victoria sold for enough gold to pay for the entire cost of the five-ship expedition with a profit left over—and by sailing continuously westward until they arrived back from the east (losing one full calendar day in their ship’s logbook because they had traveled with the sun around the spinning Earth), Magellan and Elcano proved once and for all the true, breathtaking scale of our planet.
