🇵🇹 Ferdinand Magellan

Fernao de Magalhaes was born around 1480 into the minor Portuguese nobility, traditionally in Sabrosa in the northern province of Tras-os-Montes. Orphaned young, he was sent to Lisbon as a page in the royal household, where he absorbed the geography, astronomy and navigation that obsessed the Portuguese court. As a young man he sailed east, serving in the campaigns that built Portugal's empire in the Indian Ocean, fighting at the conquest of Malacca in 1511 and reaching the edge of the Spice Islands, the Moluccas, the source of the cloves and nutmeg that Europe craved.

Wounded in North Africa and accused, unfairly, of trading with the enemy, Magellan fell out of favor with King Manuel I, who refused to back his plan to reach the Spice Islands by sailing west around the Americas. So Magellan did what was then considered close to treason: he renounced his Portuguese nationality and offered his scheme to Portugal's great rival, the young King Charles I of Spain. The idea was bold and politically explosive. If a westward route to the Moluccas existed, the islands might fall on the Spanish side of the line that the Treaty of Tordesillas had drawn across the unknown world.

On 20 September 1519, Magellan sailed from Sanlucar de Barrameda with five ships and about 270 men. From the start the voyage was shadowed by distrust; the Spanish captains resented serving under a Portuguese commander. After crossing the Atlantic and probing the South American coast for a passage, the fleet wintered in the bleak harbor of San Julian in Patagonia, where the resentment exploded into open mutiny. Magellan crushed it with ruthless decisiveness, executing one captain and marooning another.

The discovery of the strait at the continent's southern tip in late 1520 was the expedition's supreme achievement, a navigational feat of patience and courage through one of the most treacherous waterways on earth. But the ocean beyond proved almost unimaginably vast. The crossing of the Pacific lasted three months and twenty days with no fresh food. Men died of scurvy; they ate sawdust, leather and rats. Magellan's own account, recorded by the chronicler Antonio Pigafetta, describes the suffering in unflinching detail.

In March 1521 the fleet reached the islands that would later be named the Philippines. Magellan, a devout Catholic, threw himself into converting local rulers to Christianity. It proved his undoing. Drawn into a local conflict, he led a small force ashore on the island of Mactan on 27 April 1521 against the warriors of the chief Lapulapu. Outnumbered and fighting in shallow water, Magellan was cut down on the beach. He was roughly forty-one years old.

The expedition staggered on without him. Of the five ships that had left Spain, only one, the Victoria, completed the journey, commanded by the Basque navigator Juan Sebastian Elcano. On 6 September 1522, the Victoria limped back into harbor with just eighteen emaciated survivors aboard. They had sailed around the entire planet, the first human beings ever to do so, a voyage of nearly three years.

Pigafetta's journal of the voyage became one of the great documents of the age, a vivid eyewitness record of peoples, animals and places no European had ever described. The survivors also brought back a strange discovery: their ship's calendar was a full day behind the date in Spain, the first practical proof of what crossing the globe does to time, and an early hint of the need for an international date line.

Magellan never circumnavigated the world himself, and credit for completing the voyage belongs to Elcano and the eighteen survivors. But the conception, the daring and the discovery of the strait were Magellan's. The expedition proved, beyond any argument, that the earth was a single connected globe of ocean, that the Americas were a continent distinct from Asia, and that the Pacific was unthinkably wide. It stands as perhaps the most ambitious voyage in the history of exploration.