Fernão de Magalhães was born around 1480 in northern Portugal, served as a page at the royal court, and spent his twenties fighting in the Indian Ocean — at Cannanore, Diu, and the conquest of Malacca in 1511. Wounded at Azamor in 1513 (he limped for the rest of his life) and accused unjustly of trading with the Moors, he was dismissed by King Manuel I. So in 1517 he took his maps and his theory to Spain. He convinced the young Charles I — soon Holy Roman Emperor — that the Spice Islands lay on the Spanish side of the line drawn by the Treaty of Tordesillas, and could be reached by sailing west. On 20 September 1519 his five ships and 270 men left Sanlúcar de Barrameda. He crushed a mutiny off Patagonia, lost one ship to wreck and another to desertion, and after fourteen weeks of probing the south American coast found, on 21 October 1520, the strait that now bears his name. Thirty-eight days later he emerged into an ocean so calm after the Atlantic that he called it Mar Pacífico. The Pacific crossing — ninety-nine days without fresh food — killed nineteen of his men of scurvy. He reached the Philippines in March 1521 and was killed on 27 April on the beach at Mactan in a skirmish with the chieftain Lapu-Lapu. The expedition continued without him; Juan Sebastián Elcano brought the last surviving ship, the Victoria, home to Seville on 6 September 1522 with eighteen emaciated survivors. They had circled the Earth.
All Figures
Portuguese Navigator · Captain-General of the Armada de Molucca
Ferdinand Magellan
1,480 CE – 1,521 CE
The Portuguese captain who sailed in Spanish service, found a strait at the world's southern edge, named the Pacific — and whose surviving ship was the first to circle the planet.
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