Ferdinand Magellan (c. 1480 - 1521) was a Portuguese navigator who, sailing in the service of the Crown of Castile, commanded the expedition that achieved the first circumnavigation of the Earth. Setting out from Spain in 1519 with five ships, he found the passage at the southern tip of South America now called the Strait of Magellan and crossed the ocean he named the Pacific. [1] He was killed in April 1521 in a battle on the island of Mactan in the Philippines; a single ship under Juan Sebastián Elcano completed the voyage in 1522. [2]
Early life and Portuguese service
Fernão de Magalhães was born in northern Portugal around 1480 into the minor nobility and was raised as a page at the Portuguese royal court. He first sailed east in 1505 with the fleet of Francisco de Almeida to India. [1]
He spent several years in Portuguese Asia, taking part in campaigns at Cannanore, Goa and in the capture of Malacca in 1511, and was wounded in Morocco in 1513. Accused of trading illegally with the Moors and refused an increase in his allowance by King Manuel I, he renounced his Portuguese nationality and offered his services to Spain. [2]
The expedition
Magellan argued that the Spice Islands of the Moluccas lay within the Spanish half of the world as divided by the Treaty of Tordesillas, and that they could be reached by sailing west. King Charles I approved his plan, and on 20 September 1519 he sailed from Sanlúcar de Barrameda with five ships, the Trinidad, San Antonio, Concepción, Victoria and Santiago, and roughly 270 men. [1]
After crossing the Atlantic and following the South American coast, the fleet wintered in Patagonia, where Magellan suppressed a mutiny by several of his Spanish captains and lost the Santiago in a storm. In October 1520 he entered the strait at the southern end of the continent, a passage of some 570 kilometres that took more than a month to navigate; the San Antonio deserted and returned to Spain. [3]
Emerging into an ocean he called the Mar Pacífico for its calm, the remaining ships crossed it in 99 days without fresh provisions. Many of the crew died of starvation and scurvy before the fleet reached Guam and then the islands of the Philippine archipelago in March 1521. [2]
Death at Mactan
In the central Philippines Magellan secured an alliance with the ruler of Cebu and encouraged conversions to Christianity. He then intervened in a local dispute and led an assault on the island of Mactan, whose chief Lapulapu refused to submit. On 27 April 1521 Magellan was killed in the fighting on the shore along with several of his men. [1]
Completion of the voyage
The survivors burned the Concepción for lack of crew and continued to the Moluccas, where they loaded spices. The Trinidad attempted to return east across the Pacific and was captured by the Portuguese, while the Victoria under Juan Sebastián Elcano sailed west across the Indian Ocean and around the Cape of Good Hope. [3]
She reached Sanlúcar de Barrameda on 6 September 1522 with eighteen survivors of the original complement, having completed the first circumnavigation of the globe. The Italian chronicler Antonio Pigafetta, one of those who returned, wrote the fullest surviving account of the voyage. [2]
Legacy
The expedition demonstrated the true extent of the Earth's oceans, established the existence of a western sea route to Asia, and produced the first practical evidence of the need for a date line when the survivors found their calendar a day behind on their return. [1]
Magellan's name is attached to the strait he navigated, to the Magellanic Clouds, and to a spacecraft sent to Venus. In the Philippines the battle of Mactan is commemorated as an early instance of resistance to European incursion, and Lapulapu is honoured as a national figure. [1]
