Ferdinand Magellan

1480-1521

Portuguese Explorer

Ferdinand Magellan initiated, organized and led what was to become the first circumnavigation of the globe. Under his leadership, five ships set sail from Spain in 1519. Although Magellan died during the three-year voyage—the victim of a conflict between warring island nations—and only one of the five ships completed the expedition and returned to Spain, Magellan is credited as the man behind the first trip around the world.

Magellan was born Ferñao de Magalhaes into Portuguese nobility in 1480. Following a youth spent as a page in the home of the queen of Portugal, he took a position with the nation's fleet, which sought to expand the spice trade—often by way of bloody battles. Through these trips, including his first in 1505 to the East Indies, he learned how to sail and how to fight. It was during a skirmish in Morocco nearly a decade later that he sustained a leg wound, which affected him for the rest of his life.

Despite his years of service to his country, Magellan met a disappointing reception in his homeland. He not only fell under suspicion for corruption, a charge that was proven false, butreceived notice from the Portuguese crown to begin looking for work elsewhere. In 1517, he and friend Ruy de Falero (Faleiro), an astronomer, left together to seek opportunities in Spain, a longtime enemy of Portugal. In Seville, Magellan approached the Spanish court, the advisors of King Charles V, and finally the king with a proposition to explore uncharted waters and search for spice-rich islands in East Asia. King Charles approved the expedition. In exchange Magellan and Falero received decade-long, exclusive rights to the new trade routes they developed.

Ferdinand Magellan.

Falero eventually bowed out of the expedition, but Magellan pressed forward during the next year by planning the voyage and outfitting the five ships the king had allotted for the trip. The expedition set sail on September 8, 1519, with a crew of 560 men aboard the Trinidad, San Antonio, Concepción, Victoria, and Santiago. The ships took a southwesterly route from Seville across the Atlantic to Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, where they arrived on December 13. From there, the five ships continued on along the coast of South America, spending time to investigate coves and inlets for a possible shortcut across the continent to the waters on the other side. Without luck, they sailed down the coast.

Magellan decided to overwinter in the Bay of San Julían before continuing the journey.While there for four months, the captains of four of the five ships tried to organize a mutiny. Magellan and those loyal to him quashed the attempt and killed at least three of the opposing captains. The expedition also lost one of its ships to heavy damage over the winter.

After the expedition again set sail, Magellan led three of the four ships through what became known as the Strait of Magellan at the southern tip of South America and into the Pacific Ocean. The captain of the fourth ship broke ranks while in the strait, turned around and left for home. Magellan and his remaining fleet went on, heading north to Guam and then to the Philippines, where they landed at Cebu. There, Magellan made the fatal mistake of taking sides in a local war and died in battle on April 27, 1521.

More than a year later, the voyage that Magellan had initiated finally ended when one of the original five ships completed the worldwide circuit. The battered Victoria, carrying 18 adventure-weary, sick, and starving crew members, made shore in Spain on September 8, 1522.

In 1519 Ferdinand Magellan started what was to become the first circumnavigation of the world. Leaving Spain with a small fleet of five ships on August 10, Magellan would not survive the journey. In fact, only one ship and nineteen men returned to Spain after more than three years at sea. Upon their return, the acting captain, Juan Sebastián de Elcano, was surprised to find his calendar off by a day. Through storms, battles, overhauls, and all other adversity, the ship's log had been meticulously maintained, as had the expedition's calendar. In spite of everything, however, there was no denying the discrepancy in dates; the expedition's logs showed they had returned to Spain on September 6, 1522, when in fact they returned on September 7. What had happened, of course, was that the fleet unknowingly crossed what is now the International Date Line on their voyage. This line is more than an abstraction or a simple line on the map. In traveling around the world, the voyagers crossed from time zone to time zone, always moving back by an hour. Upon their return to Spain, they had traveled through all 24 time zones, rolling back their clocks by a whole day. Since they did not advance their calendar by a day when they crossed the date line, they effectively "lost" 24 hours, one for each time zone they crossed in their travels.

P. ANDREW KARAM