Magellan-Elcano Circumnavigation of the Globe
The Victoria reached Seville on 8 September 1522 with eighteen men aboard, having sailed round the world. Five ships and about 270 men had left three years earlier. Ferdinand Magellan was Portuguese and sailed for Spain, having been refused by his own king. His argument was that the Moluccas — the world's only source of cloves — lay in Spain's half of the world under the Treaty of Tordesillas and could be reached by sailing west. Longitude could not be measured, so the claim could not be disproved, and it was wrong. The expedition was mutinous almost from the start. He suppressed a rising by three of his five captains at Port St Julian in Patagonia, executing one and marooning another; a ship deserted and sailed home during the search for a passage. He found the strait in October 1520 and took thirty-eight days to pass it. The Pacific crossing nearly killed them all. He had no idea of the ocean's size, and the fleet sailed for over three months without fresh food, eating leather stripped from the yards and sawdust, with the crew dying of scurvy. Magellan was killed at Mactan in the Philippines in April 1521, wading ashore in a fight he had picked to impress a local ally. Juan Sebastián Elcano brought the last ship home round the Cape of Good Hope. The cargo of cloves paid for the entire expedition. They also found they had lost a day, which nobody had predicted. Crossing the date line westward had cost them one, and it took a papal enquiry to establish that the log was not at fault.
- Year: 1519 CE
- Category: Political
