Ferdinand Magellan was killed in the Philippines in April 1521 and never saw Spain again; the one ship of his five that made it home anchored on September 6, 1522, carrying eighteen starving men and enough cloves to cover what the whole fleet had cost

Ferdinand Magellan never sailed around the world. He got about two-thirds of the way and died in waist-deep water off a small island in the central Philippines, sixteen months before the expedition he had talked a Spanish king into paying for came home without him.

Who actually finished the first voyage around the world?

Juan Sebastián Elcano, a shipmaster from the Basque fishing town of Getaria, who had spent part of the voyage in disgrace.

Elcano was among the officers who rose against Magellan at Port San Julián on the coast of Patagonia in Holy Week 1520, during the southern winter the fleet spent waiting on that shore. Magellan put the mutiny down hard. Luis de Mendoza was stabbed in the throat aboard his own ship, Gaspar de Quesada was beheaded and quartered on April 7, and Juan de Cartagena was set ashore that August on an empty stretch of coast with a priest for company and never heard from again. Elcano was spared and stripped of his post.

Two and a half years later he was the officer signing the report to Charles V. It is dated at Sanlúcar de Barrameda, September 6, 1522, and it tells the emperor that the ship had discovered and rounded the entire circumference of the earth, setting out to the west and returning from the east. The original is lost. Five copies surfaced in European archives three centuries afterward.

What happened to the other four ships?

Five sailed from Sanlúcar on September 20, 1519. One came back.

The Santiago was wrecked scouting the Patagonian coast in a squall. The San Antonio, the biggest ship in the fleet, turned around inside the strait that November and ran for Spain, where her officers spent the next two years explaining to anyone who would listen that Magellan was a traitor. The Concepción was stripped and burned in the Philippines once the killings at Cebu left too few men to work three hulls. The Trinidad, Magellan's flagship, tried to recross the Pacific eastward from the Moluccas and could not do it; the Portuguese seized her, and a storm broke her up at anchor.

That left the Victoria: an 85-ton carrack built at Ondarroa, about 59 feet long, meant for a crew of roughly 45.

What did the crew eat crossing the Pacific?

Antonio Pigafetta was a young man from Vicenza, in the Venetian Republic, who had signed on as a supernumerary so that he could keep notes, and his journal is the only sustained eyewitness account of the voyage that survives. His description of the Pacific is the part everyone remembers.

Ninety-eight days without resupply. The biscuit had gone to powder, full of grubs and fouled by the rats that got to it first, and the water was yellow and stinking. The men cut down the ox hides nailed along the mainyard (they were there to stop the spar from chafing through the rigging) and soaked them in seawater for four or five days until they were soft enough to chew. Sawdust went the same way. A rat, when someone caught one, sold for half a ducat. Nineteen men died before the ships raised Guam in March 1521, most of them of scurvy.

Magellan had named the ocean for how calm it was.

Why did the crew come home a day behind everyone else?

They raised the Cape Verde islands on July 9, 1522, by their own reckoning, out of food and with the hull leaking badly enough that the pumps ran through the night. Ashore, it was July 10.

Pigafetta had kept the calendar himself for three years without missing an entry, and he could not account for the missing day. The cause is that they had followed the sun westward the whole way around, so every solar day ran a few minutes long; the surplus added up to a full turn of the earth, and they had counted one day too few. Gasparo Contarini, Venice's ambassador to Charles V and later a cardinal, was in Spain when the ship returned and appears to have been the first European to explain it correctly. An agreed international date line was still three and a half centuries away.

Cape Verde was Portuguese, so Elcano's men bought provisions with a cover story about coming back from the Americas. It held until one of them offered cloves in payment. Thirteen men ashore were seized, and the Victoria cut her cable and ran.

Did the cargo pay for the voyage?

It did, which is why the venture was counted a success at the time. The Victoria came in with roughly 26 tons of cloves and cinnamon, and the sale brought more than the crown and its backers had spent fitting out all five ships in 1519.

The eighteen survivors worked their way upriver to Seville on September 8. On the Tuesday they walked to the shrine of Santa María de la Victoria and to the chapel of Santa María de la Antigua in shirts and bare feet, each man carrying a candle, and gave thanks. Charles V granted Elcano a pension of 500 gold ducats a year and a coat of arms: a castle, two Malay kings holding spice branches, crossed cinnamon sticks with nutmegs and cloves, and above it all a globe carrying the motto Primus circumdedisti me — you were the first to encircle me.

How much of this can we actually check?

Less than the retelling suggests. Pigafetta is close to the only continuous witness, and he was Magellan's admirer, wounded at Mactan trying to defend him; his account barely acknowledges the man who brought the ship home. The voyage reaches us mostly through the eyes of someone with a side in it.

The numbers wobble as well. How many men sailed in 1519 is given as 237, 240, 245, 260, 270 or 285 depending on which source you open, because the surviving musters disagree and men were swapped in at the Canaries. Even the count of who went around the world is arguable. Eighteen came home on the Victoria. Most of the thirteen held at Cape Verde were released and shipped back to Spain the following year, and a few of the Trinidad's men got there in 1525 and 1526 after long stretches in Portuguese custody.

What the voyage is remembered for now

Spain did not keep the Moluccas. In 1529, short of money for his wars in Europe, Charles V sold every Spanish claim to the Spice Islands to Portugal for 350,000 ducats under the Treaty of Zaragoza. Elcano never saw that; he died of scurvy in the middle of the Pacific in 1526, on a follow-up expedition that also failed to come back.

The Philippines tells the story from the other end. In 2021 the country marked the five hundredth anniversary not as a discovery but as the Victory at Mactan. Lapulapu, the chief whose warriors killed Magellan in the surf, went onto a banknote, and a memorial museum broke ground on the island where he stopped the fleet.

The lost day has aged better than any of it. Elcano's men found the shape of the earth by keeping a careful log and being wrong anyway, and every passenger who crosses the date line today and mislays a Tuesday is repeating their arithmetic on a timetable.

Sources

• Wikipedia, "Magellan expedition"
• Wikipedia, "Victoria (ship)"
• Wikipedia, "Antonio Pigafetta"
• Wikipedia, "Battle of Mactan"
• Wikipedia, "Treaty of Zaragoza"
• National Geographic History, "Magellan got the credit, but this man was first to sail around the world"