Magellan and Elcano: the first voyage round the world

In September 1519, five old ships sailed west from a port in Spain. Three years later, only one of them, the "Victoria", came back from the east, limping, with just 18 weary Europeans on board. It was the first complete voyage by sea around the earth in human history. The leader of the expedition, Ferdinand Magellan, was killed on the way. It was completed by a Basque sailor, Juan Sebastián Elcano.

A Portuguese under the Spanish flag

According to the Encyclopaedia Britannica, Magellan was born in Portugal in 1480 and from 1505 to 1513 served Portugal in the waters of India and Malacca. The King of Portugal rejected his petitions and told him to serve elsewhere, and he reached the Spanish city of Seville on 20 October 1517. His plan was to sail west, find a strait through South America and reach the Spice Islands, the Moluccas, by that route. On 22 March 1518 the Spanish king, Charles I, approved the plan.

According to Britannica, the expedition was given five ships: the flagship "Trinidad", together with the "San Antonio", the "Concepción", the "Victoria" and the "Santiago". The fleet left Sanlúcar de Barrameda on 20 September 1519. About 270 men were aboard, mostly from Spain and Portugal, but also from other parts of Europe and from North Africa.

The search for the strait

The fleet sailed via the Canary Islands, crossed the Atlantic and reached the bay of Rio de Janeiro on 13 December 1519. According to Britannica, Magellan then searched for a strait southwards along the coast. On 31 March 1520 he reached Port Saint Julian, in present-day Argentina, where the fleet spent the winter. Here some Spanish captains mutinied, and Magellan put the mutiny down harshly. Meanwhile the "Santiago" was wrecked while surveying.

On 21 October 1520 the fleet entered, at about 52 degrees south latitude, the passage later called the Strait of Magellan. In the strait the "San Antonio" deserted and returned to Spain, and only three ships reached the other end. According to Britannica, it is said that when word came that the open sea was in sight, the stern commander wept for joy.

An important eyewitness of the expedition was Antonio Pigafetta of Vicenza, who kept a daily record throughout the voyage. In 1874 the Hakluyt Society published an English translation by Lord Stanley of Alderley. Writing of the strait, Pigafetta says there were snow-covered mountains on both sides, the night in October lasted only three hours, and every half league there was good anchorage, fresh water, cedar wood and fish like sardines. Beside the springs grew a sweet herb which was their food for several days. In his words: "I believe that there is not in the world a more beautiful country, or a better strait than this one."

Three months and twenty days: a sea of hunger

On 28 November 1520 the three ships left the strait and entered the sea that Balboa had seen from a peak in Panama seven years earlier. According to Pigafetta, for the next three months and twenty days they could get no fresh food anywhere. He writes that they ate old biscuit crumbs, full of worms and fouled by rats, and drank yellow, foul-smelling water. When even that ran out, they took the ox hides wrapped round the yard, softened them by soaking them in the sea for four or five days, singed them slightly on the embers and ate them. Sawdust was eaten too, and a rat sold for half a ducat, and even that was hard to get.

The worst affliction was a disease in which the gums swelled so much that a man could not eat. According to the translator’s note, this was scurvy. According to Pigafetta, nineteen men died of it and twenty-five or thirty fell ill. Yet he writes that in all that time they met no storm, "and so the name Pacific, meaning peaceful, was very well given". On the way they found only two small uninhabited islands, with nothing but birds and trees; they named them the "Unfortunate Islands".

According to Britannica, on 6 March 1521 they made their first landfall, on Guam in the Mariana Islands, and fresh food was obtained after ninety-nine days.

Mactan and Elcano

In late March 1521 the fleet reached the islands later called the Philippines. According to Britannica, Magellan was killed on 27 April 1521 in a fight with the people of the island of Mactan.

After that, according to Britannica, only two ships, the "Trinidad" and the "Victoria", were able to reach the Spice Islands; by Pigafetta’s dates they arrived at the island of Tidore on 8 November 1521. The "Trinidad" was so worn out that it could not make a long voyage. The "Victoria" was commanded by Elcano. According to Britannica, Elcano was born around 1476 in the town of Guetaria in the Basque country of Spain and was master of the "Concepción" on this expedition. He decided that, rather than recross the Pacific, they should cross the Indian Ocean westwards and reach Spain by going round Africa. The "Victoria" left Tidore on 21 December 1521.

Where did a day go?

Despite scurvy, hunger and the threat of Portuguese ships, the "Victoria" rounded the Cape of Good Hope in May 1522. In July some men went ashore in the Cape Verde Islands to get rice. Pigafetta writes that they had been told to ask what day it was. The answer was Thursday, while by the ship’s reckoning it was Wednesday. Pigafetta, who had written down every day without a break, was the most astonished. Later they understood that by sailing continuously westwards with the sun, and so going right round the world, they had lost one day.

According to Pigafetta, on Saturday 6 September 1522 the "Victoria" entered the bay of San Lúcar. When it left the Moluccas there were sixty men aboard; now there were eighteen, most of them sick. By his reckoning they had covered more than fourteen thousand four hundred and sixty leagues. According to Britannica, the ship reached Seville on 8 September 1522, and Emperor Charles gave Elcano a emblem showing a globe, with the Latin words: "You first circled me."

According to Britannica, Elcano died at sea on 4 August 1526 during another expedition to the Moluccas. According to Britannica, this first circumnavigation confirmed the idea that the earth is round and showed how vast the Pacific is.

Next instalment: Hasan al-Wazzan, Leo Africanus: a description of Africa.