Magellan Begins Circumnavigation

In September 1519, the Portuguese navigator Ferdinand Magellan led a fleet of five ships out of Spain in the service of the Spanish crown, hoping to reach the Spice Islands by sailing west. Magellan never completed the voyage, but one ship and a small remnant of the crew did, returning in 1522 and making the expedition the first to circumnavigate the globe. It demonstrated in practice how vast the Pacific was and how the world's oceans were connected.

The background lay in the rivalry between Spain and Portugal over access to the lucrative spice trade of Asia. Portugal controlled the eastern route around Africa, and the Treaty of Tordesillas of 1494 had divided the non-European world between the two powers along a north-south line in the Atlantic. Magellan, who had served Portugal in the Indian Ocean and Morocco, fell out with King Manuel I and offered his plan to the young Charles I of Spain, later the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V. He argued that a westward passage around South America would lead to the Spice Islands, and that they lay within Spain's half of the world. Historians still debate how accurately he understood the distances involved.

The fleet left Sanlúcar de Barrameda in September 1519 with roughly 270 men, though estimates vary. The voyage was plagued by trouble. During the winter on the Patagian coast, several captains mutinied, and Magellan suppressed the revolt harshly. One ship was wrecked in a scouting mission, and another deserted and sailed home. In late 1520 the remaining ships found the strait at South America's southern tip that now bears his name and entered the ocean he called the Pacific. The crossing took months, with food and water running low and scurvy killing many.

The fleet reached the Philippines in 1521. There Magellan became involved in local rivalries and was killed in battle on Mactan in April 1521. Command passed among surviving officers, and one ship, the Victoria, under Juan Sebastián Elcano, continued west through the Indian Ocean and around Africa. It reached Spain in September 1522 with only a few dozen survivors, carrying a cargo of cloves.

The voyage proved that the Americas were separated from Asia by a great ocean and that the Earth could be circled by sea, though the route was too long and dangerous to rival the Portuguese one commercially. It did strengthen Spanish claims in the Pacific and led to later Spanish expeditions and eventually colonization of the Philippines. Elcano received honors, while Magellan's reputation as the expedition's visionary leader endured, though the credit for completing the journey belongs to his crew.