Ferdinand Magellan

Ferdinand Magellan was a Portuguese sailor who, in the service of Spain, led the expedition of 1519–1522 that became the first to sail around the world. He found the passage at the southern tip of South America that bears his name, crossed the Pacific, and reached the Philippines, where he was killed in battle in 1521. A single ship under Juan Sebastián Elcano completed the voyage home.

Magellan was born in northern Portugal, probably around 1480, the son of a minor nobleman, and served as a page at the court of King John II's queen. In March 1505 he sailed east with the fleet carrying Francisco de Almeida, the first Portuguese viceroy of India. He spent about eight years in Asia, was wounded at Cannanore in 1506, fought at Diu in 1509 and took part in the capture of Malacca in 1511 under Afonso de Albuquerque. His friend Francisco Serrão went on to the Moluccas, the "Spice Islands", and his letters later shaped Magellan's plans. Magellan was back in Portugal by 1512 or 1513, bringing Enrique, a Malay man he had bought and baptised, who would serve as his interpreter.

In 1513 Magellan was wounded at Azemmour in Morocco, leaving him with a permanent limp, and was accused, falsely, of illegal trading. King Manuel I repeatedly refused to back his plan to reach the Moluccas by sailing west, and in 1517 Magellan moved to Seville, where he married Beatriz Barbosa. He argued, with the cosmographer Rui Faleiro, that the Spice Islands might lie in the Spanish half of the world as divided by the Treaty of Tordesillas. The young King Charles I of Spain, later the emperor Charles V, agreed to sponsor him, to Manuel's fury.

The fleet of five ships and roughly 270 men, most of them Spaniards, left Spain on 20 September 1519. After stops on the coast of Brazil, it searched southwards for a passage and wintered at Port Saint Julian in Patagonia. There Spanish captains mutinied; Magellan regained control, one leader was killed in the fighting, another was executed and a third marooned. One ship was wrecked in a storm. In October 1520 the fleet entered the strait now named after him, during which the San Antonio deserted and sailed home. The remaining ships emerged into the ocean that Magellan called the Pacific at the end of November.

Expecting a short passage, the crew instead spent more than three months at sea, and about 30 men died, most from scurvy. On 6 March 1521 they reached Guam, where a dispute with the Chamorro people over goods taken from the ships led Magellan to send a raiding party that killed several islanders and burned houses. In mid-March they arrived in the Philippines. At Cebu the ruler, Rajah Humabon, and many of his people accepted baptism. Humabon's rival Lapulapu, chief of the nearby island of Mactan, refused to submit, and on 27 April 1521 Magellan attacked Mactan with a small force and was killed in the fighting.

After his death, Humabon turned on the Spaniards and killed many at a banquet. The survivors reached the Moluccas in November 1521 and loaded spices. Only the Victoria, under Elcano, was fit to sail home west across the Indian Ocean and around Africa, reaching Spain on 6 September 1522 with 18 or 19 of the original crew. Because Magellan had earlier sailed east as far as the Malay world, his own travels came close to circling the globe.

At first Magellan was poorly remembered: the Portuguese saw him as a traitor, and the surviving mutineers blamed him in Spain. The diary of the expedition's chronicler, the Venetian Antonio Pigafetta, published around 1524, did much to restore his name. The voyage proved the vast size of the Pacific and became a landmark of the age of exploration.

Our 1500 and 1530 maps bracket his career, showing Portugal's expansion in Asia and the Spanish Empire for which he sailed.