Ferdinand Magellan and the First Circumnavigation

Ferdinand Magellan’s expedition of 1519 to 1522 was, by any honest accounting, the most impressive single voyage of the Age of Exploration. It was also a near-total disaster. Of the roughly 270 men who set out in five ships in 1519, fewer than 20 returned on the Victoria in September 1522. The mortality rate exceeded 90 percent. Magellan himself was killed in the Philippines in April 1521, almost a year before the surviving ship limped home. The expedition is famous for two things that look contradictory: it opened the Pacific to European navigation, and it killed almost everyone who tried. The most useful way to read the voyage is as a feat of conception, a string of catastrophic mistakes, and an extraordinary survival by the smallest margin.

Early Life and Portuguese Service

Magellan (in Portuguese, Fernão de Magalhães) was born around 1480 in the Portuguese province of Trás-os-Montes, into a minor noble family. He entered the Portuguese royal household as a page, an experience that gave him access to the Portuguese court and to the network of explorers and mariners who had been probing the African and Asian sea routes for almost a century. He served in the Portuguese fleet in the Indian Ocean, taking part in Francisco de Almeida’s voyage to India in 1505, in operations along the East African coast, and in the conquest of Malacca in 1511. He was wounded at the Battle of Cannanore in 1506 and served in the embassy to the Sultan of Bengal. By 1513, when he returned to Lisbon, Magellan had spent eight years in Portuguese Asian service and had acquired an unusually deep knowledge of the geography of the eastern Atlantic and the western Pacific.

The Spanish Commission

Magellan felt under-rewarded by the Portuguese crown. He had long argued for an Atlantic-to-Pacific route to the Spice Islands, by sailing west and south, that would avoid Portuguese-controlled waters. Portugal, focused on the Indian Ocean route pioneered by da Gama, was not interested. In 1517 Magellan renounced his Portuguese citizenship, moved to Seville, and offered his services to the Spanish king, Charles I (later Charles V of the Holy Roman Empire). He proposed to reach the Moluccas (the Spice Islands of present-day Indonesia) by sailing west, on the assumption that the Moluccas fell within the Spanish hemisphere of the Treaty of Tordesillas (1494). The Spanish crown, eager to challenge Portuguese dominance of the spice trade, accepted. In 1518 Magellan signed an agreement granting him one-twentieth of the profits of the voyage and governorship of any lands discovered. He was naturalized as a Spanish subject. Stefan Zweig’s Conqueror of the Seas: The Story of Magellan (1938) is the readable older narrative; Laurence Bergreen’s Over the Edge of the World (2003) is the standard modern reconstruction.

The Fleet and the Plan

In August 1519 Magellan sailed from Sanlúcar de Barrameda with five ships and about 270 men. The ships were the Trinidad (flagship, 110 tons), the San Antonio (120 tons), the Concepción (90 tons), the Victoria (85 tons), and the Santiago (75 tons). The plan was to sail south along the South American coast, find a strait through to the Pacific, and continue west across the unknown ocean to the Spice Islands. The fleet was stocked with provisions for two years; the voyage lasted almost exactly that long.

The Atlantic Crossing and the Mutiny

The expedition first sailed to the Canary Islands, then crossed the Atlantic to Brazil, where it resupplied near Rio de Janeiro and again at the mouth of the Río de la Plata, which Magellan briefly considered as a possible strait. The fleet then sailed south along the coast of Patagonia. As winter approached, the expedition found a sheltered harbor on the coast of Argentina, which they called Puerto San Julián. The winter was harsh, supplies dwindled, and the crews grew restive. A serious mutiny broke out in April 1520, led by several of the Spanish captains. Magellan acted decisively, executing one of the mutineers and leaving another on shore when the fleet sailed. Other mutineers were pardoned but later punished.

The Santiago had been lost in a scouting expedition earlier, and the four remaining ships entered the Strait of Magellan on 21 October 1520. The passage took 38 days. The San Antonio deserted during the passage, sailing back to Spain under its mutinous officer. Only three ships emerged into the Pacific in late November 1520.

The Pacific Crossing

The crossing of the Pacific was the most hellish leg of the voyage. Magellan had assumed, like Columbus before him, that the Pacific was a relatively narrow ocean. The distance from the Strait of Magellan to the nearest inhabited lands in the western Pacific was more than 7,000 miles. The fleet sailed for 98 days without seeing land. The crews suffered from starvation, scurvy, and exhaustion. They ate soaked leather, rat droppings, sawdust, and the maggots from rotting wood. Most of the men who started the Pacific crossing did not survive it. By the time the fleet reached the Mariana Islands in March 1521, Magellan’s original 270 men had been reduced to fewer than 150, and only one of his original five ships was still in service.

The Philippines and Magellan’s Death

The fleet reached the Philippines in mid-March 1521, and Magellan made alliances with several local rulers. The most consequential was with Rajah Humabon of Cebu, who accepted nominal Christian conversion in exchange for Spanish support against his rival, Rajah Lapu-Lapu, of the island of Mactan. On 27 April 1521, Magellan led a small force of about 60 men ashore on Mactan to support Humabon’s forces. The expedition was disastrously outnumbered, and Magellan was wounded in the leg by a bamboo spear and cut down. The Spanish lost 8 men killed.

The death became, in the 20th century, a foundational event in Filipino national memory. The Magellan shrine at Mactan was the site of a 500th-anniversary commemoration in 2021 that included both Spanish and Filipino participation. The local history of Mactan celebrates the resistance of Rajah Lapu-Lapu as the symbolic origin of Filipino resistance to foreign invasion.

The Continuation Under Elcano

After Magellan’s death, command passed first to Duarte Barbosa, who was killed shortly thereafter, and then to the Basque officer Juan Sebastián Elcano. Elcano had actually been one of the mutineers of the San Antonio in 1520, but he had been pardoned and was now the most experienced captain available. The Concepción, no longer seaworthy, was abandoned. The two remaining ships, the Trinidad and the Victoria, sailed for the Moluccas and reached Tidore in November 1521, where they secured a load of cloves.

The Trinidad was by then in poor condition for a return across the Pacific to Panama, and the attempt failed; her crew was captured by the Portuguese. The Victoria alone, under Elcano, continued west. The route took her across the Indian Ocean, around the Cape of Good Hope, and up the West African coast. She reached Sanlúcar de Barrameda on 6 September 1522, with 18 European survivors of Magellan’s original crew of 270 and a small cargo of cloves worth more than the cost of the entire expedition. It was the first ship ever to circumnavigate the globe.

The Circumnavigation and Its Significance

The most important consequence of Magellan’s expedition was the empirical proof that the Earth could be sailed around. Combined with the earlier voyages of Columbus, da Gama, and Dias, the circumnavigation established the basic outlines of global geography. The size of the Pacific was finally understood. The existence of a southern strait around the Americas was confirmed. The location of the Spice Islands was fixed in European knowledge.

In practical terms, the voyage opened the Pacific to European navigation. The Strait of Magellan would remain a difficult and dangerous passage for centuries — Schouten and Le Maire’s Cape Horn rounding of 1616 would eventually offer an alternative — but it provided a working route for ships that wanted to reach the Pacific. The English and Dutch navigators of the late 16th and 17th centuries, including Drake and the various VOC expeditions, would follow in Magellan’s wake. O.H.K. Spate’s three-volume The Pacific Since Magellan (1979–1988) is the standard account of the Pacific opened to European navigation.

The circumnavigation also vindicated Magellan’s central political insight, that the Moluccas lay within the Spanish hemisphere of Tordesillas. The Spanish crown did successfully assert this claim in the Treaty of Zaragoza (1529), which adjusted the Tordesillas line in the Pacific. The Philippines would remain a Spanish possession until 1898.

The Malay Slave Enrique

The expedition also included at least one crew member, possibly more, who had personal experience of circumnavigation. The Malay slave Enrique of Sumatra (also called Enrique the Black), whom Magellan had purchased in Malacca in 1511, was in the Philippines at the time of Magellan’s death. There is some uncertainty about his later life, but had he survived to reach Spain, he would be the first person of Asian origin and the first person of African descent known to have circumnavigated the globe. The Malay-speaking chronicler Pigafetta notes that Enrique and he could not communicate, which makes the survival of any Malay-speaking person on the return trip less likely. The question is probably unanswerable on the existing evidence.

The Survivors and the Records

Of the 270 men who set out in 1519, 18 returned on the Victoria. Several others survived the voyage in Portuguese captivity, on the abandoned Trinidad, or stranded in the East Indies, so the total survivor count was higher, perhaps 30 to 50. The mortality rate exceeded 90 percent. The most important record of the voyage is the journal of Antonio Pigafetta, an Italian scholar who had joined the expedition and survived to return to Spain. Pigafetta’s Relazione del primo viaggio intorno al mondo is the principal primary source for the voyage and is a classic of Renaissance travel writing. It includes ethnographic observations of the peoples of Patagonia, Brazil, the Philippines, and the Moluccas that are still consulted by historians and anthropologists.