The First Circumnavigation of the Globe (1519–1522)

In March 1518 Ferdinand Magellan, a Portuguese navigator serving the Spanish crown, won royal backing for a voyage to reach the Spice Islands by sailing west. The agreement named him captain-general and promised a share of profits and governorship of lands found. Portugal regarded the venture as an intrusion on its own eastern routes. The capitulation signed at Valladolid granted Magellan a fifth of any profits and the governorship of lands he discovered. Magellan had served the Portuguese crown in India and Malacca, and brought navigational experience the Spanish crown lacked on its western routes. Portugal worked actively to disrupt the venture's recruitment, and Magellan sailed under a Spanish flag as much by exclusion as by choice.

Location: Valladolid, Spain

Five ships carrying about 270 men left Seville on 10 August 1519 and departed Sanlúcar de Barrameda on 20 September. The crew was mostly Spanish under a Portuguese commander, and included the Italian chronicler Antonio Pigafetta, whose account is the principal eyewitness record. The fleet sailed first to Brazil and then south along the South American coast. The five ships were the Trinidad, San Antonio, Concepción, Victoria and Santiago, all small carracks barely suited to the oceans ahead. Provisions included wine, salt meat and live animals; the crew's later suffering made the diet part of the voyage's legend. Pigafetta's journal, kept with care throughout, is the principal source for nearly every detail of the circumnavigation.

Location: Seville, Spain

In April 1520, while the fleet overwintered at Puerto San Julián in Patagonia, several Spanish captains mutinied against Magellan. Magellan suppressed the rising: Captain Luis Mendoza was killed, Gaspar de Quesada was executed, and Juan de Cartagena was marooned. The harsh response consolidated Magellan's control but deepened mistrust among the Spanish officers. The mutiny broke out during the winter layover among captains who doubted Magellan's uncharted route and resented serving under a Portuguese commander. Shortly after the rising, the Santiago was wrecked on a scouting mission along the coast. The executions, killing and maroonings that suppressed the mutiny left the fleet short of experienced officers for the rest of the voyage.

Location: Puerto San Julián, Patagonia

On 1 November 1520 the fleet entered the strait that Magellan named for the Holy Cross and that now bears his name; the 570-kilometer (350-mile) passage carried them to the open ocean by 28 November. One ship, the San Antonio, deserted during the crossing and returned to Spain. Magellan named the ocean the Pacific for its calm waters. The passage took thirty-eight days of difficult piloting through shifting channels; the deserted San Antonio carried the first news of the voyage back to Spain. No ship successfully repeated the passage for many decades. Magellan's naming of the ocean the Pacific for its apparent calm stuck, despite the crossing that followed being the worst ordeal of the voyage.

Location: Strait of Magellan, South America

The fleet spent 98 days crossing the Pacific without charting a single island until Guam, arriving on 6 March 1521. The crews ran out of food and fresh water and suffered scurvy; Pigafetta recorded the deaths and the eating of rats and sawdust. The crossing revealed the true scale of the ocean to European navigation. The ninety-eight-day crossing was among the longest open-ocean passages recorded to that date; by its end the crews were eating leather, sawdust and rats to survive scurvy and hunger. Guam, where they finally landed, was named the Isle of Ladrones after a clash with islanders over theft. The crossing proved the immense breadth of the single ocean separating Asia from the Americas, a fact no European map had shown.

Location: Guam

In April 1521 the fleet reached Cebu, where the ruler Humabon accepted baptism along with hundreds of his subjects after Magellan's campaign of conversion. Magellan used his cannon to demonstrate Spanish power and pressured neighboring chiefs to submit and pay tribute to the Spanish king. The alliance rested on local politics as much as on religious change. The mass baptisms at Cebu were accompanied by the destruction of local shrines and a pact of tribute between Humabon and the Spanish king. Magellan's intervention in local rivalries, supporting Cebu against the defiant island of Mactan, decided his fate. Pigafetta recorded both the enthusiasm of the conversions and the coercion that underwrote them, making the episode one of the earliest detailed accounts of Spanish contact in the Philippines.

Location: Cebu, Philippines

On 27 April 1521 Magellan led a raid against the island of Mactan, whose chief Lapu-Lapu refused to recognize Spanish authority, and was killed in the fighting. The defeat ended the conversion campaign; within days Humabon turned against the Spaniards and the fleet sailed away with fewer men. Pigafetta recorded both Magellan's death and the islanders' resistance. Wading through shallows under fire from a large force of islanders, the Spanish raiders were routed, and Magellan's body was never recovered. Pigafetta attributed the battle to Lapu-Lapu's refusal of tribute and recorded the islanders' resistance without embellishment. The defeat ended the conversion campaign, and within days Humabon turned on the Spaniards; the fleet sailed away decimated and leaderless.

Location: Mactan, Philippines

In November 1521 the surviving ships reached the Moluccas, the Spice Islands, and loaded cargoes of cloves at Tidore. By then the Concepción was too rotten to continue and was burned, and the crews were much reduced. The voyage had achieved its commercial goal, but only the return route remained. At Tidore the crews filled the Victoria with cloves whose sale later helped offset the expedition's heavy costs. The Portuguese dominated the surrounding waters, so the homeward route was a strategic problem as much as a navigational one. The fleet stayed about six weeks before the two surviving ships departed in December 1521.

Location: Tidore, Maluku Islands

In December 1521 the two remaining ships split up: the leaky Trinidad stayed behind for repairs and was later seized by the Portuguese, while Victoria, under Juan Sebastián Elcano, began the westward run home through Portuguese-controlled waters. Elcano's choice of route risked interception but avoided a longer eastern passage. Victoria was the only ship of the five to complete the voyage. The leaky Trinidad attempted an eastward return across the Pacific but was seized by the Portuguese after months of hardship, and most of its crew died in Portuguese custody. Victoria under Elcano ran southwest through the Indian Ocean and around the Cape to avoid Portuguese patrols. The two attempted routes defined the strategic map of the spice trade that the Treaty of Zaragoza would formalize eight years later.

Location: Maluku Islands

On 6 September 1522 Victoria reached Sanlúcar de Barrameda with 18 surviving crewmen, completing the first circumnavigation of the Earth; the fleet had departed with about 270 men. Pigafetta's chronicle and the ship's log supplied the first empirical measurement of the globe's size at sea. Charles I granted Elcano a coat of arms bearing the motto "Primus circumdedisti me" (You first encircled me). Only eighteen Europeans and a handful of East Indians reached Spain aboard Victoria, from a fleet that had departed with about 270 men. The circumnavigation was achieved almost by accident, the plan having been to return through the Portuguese sphere. Pigafetta's chronicle and the ship's log gave Europe its first empirical measurements of the globe's true scale at sea and settled the debate over the western route to the Indies.

Location: Sanlúcar de Barrameda, Spain

In 1529 Charles V, needing funds for European wars, sold Spain's claim to the Moluccas to Portugal in the Treaty of Zaragoza for 350,000 ducats. The treaty settled the ownership dispute between the two powers by drawing a new demarcation line in the Pacific. The first circumnavigation had proved the western route to the Indies, but its immediate commercial fruits passed to Portugal. The line drawn in the treaty supplemented the earlier Treaty of Tordesillas, giving Portugal the Moluccas while Spain retained its claim to the Philippines. Spanish colonization of the Philippines began only a few years later, making Magellan's landfall a hinge between the two Iberian empires. The navigational lessons of the first circumnavigation fed directly into Spanish Pacific charts for the next century.

Location: Zaragoza, Spain