He named the Pacific—then died before the circle closed
Portuguese navigator Ferdinand Magellan (c.1480–27 April 1521) planned Spain’s 1519–22 East Indies voyage, found the strait that bears his name, and led the first European crossing of the Pacific. He was killed in the Philippines, and Juan Sebastián Elcano finished the first circumnavigation.
Son of Pedro de Magalhães, a minor noble and town mayor in northern Portugal, he grew up as a page to Queen Eleanor. In March 1505, aged about 25, he sailed with the 22-ship fleet carrying Francisco de Almeida out to be India’s first viceroy, and he stayed eight years around Goa, Cochin and Quilon, fighting at Cannanore in 1506. On the first Portuguese mission to Malacca he warned Diogo Lopes de Sequeira of a plot and risked his life to rescue his friend Francisco Serrão, then shared in Albuquerque’s conquest of the city in 1511.
He came home around 1512 with Enrique, a Malay he had baptised. A leg wound at Azemmour in Morocco in 1513 left him limping, and false charges of illegal trading cost him royal favour. With the cosmographer Rui Faleiro he studied charts for a western passage and argued that the Moluccas fell on Spain’s side of the Tordesillas line. When Manuel I kept saying no, he became a subject of Spain’s young Charles I, and Manuel reportedly had his family arms in Sabrosa defaced.
Five ships and roughly 270 men, about 60 percent of them Spaniards, left Spain on 20 September 1519. They made a friendly landfall among the Tupi near today’s Recife, lost the Santiago in a storm while wintering in Patagonia, and survived mutinies before finding the strait in October 1520. Magellan renamed the calm ocean beyond the Pacific.
On 6 March 1521 the starving crews reached Guam, where Chamorro islanders took rigging and a boat in what may have been a misunderstood trade. By 16 March they had sighted Samar and rested on Homonhon. Weeks later he died in battle in the Philippines. Because he had already reached the Malay Archipelago heading east, his own track came close to circling the globe.
Source: Ferdinand Magellan
