The Ship That Came Back: Magellan, Elcano and the First Voyage Around the World

Five ships and some two hundred and forty men sailed in 1519. Three years later one ship returned, and the map of the world had to be redrawn

On 20 September 1519 five ships worked their way down the Guadalquivir and out past Sanlucar de Barrameda: the Trinidad, the San Antonio, the Concepcion, the Victoria and the Santiago. Aboard them were about two hundred and forty men, and at their head a Portuguese captain in Spanish service, Fernao de Magalhaes, who had fought at Malacca, been refused by his own king, and carried to Seville a proposition that the Spice Islands could be reached by sailing west.

The plan rested on the calculations of the cosmographer Ruy Faleiro, who was to have sailed and did not. The money came in good part from the merchant Christopher de Haro. The crown sent Juan de Cartagena as inspector, which is to say as a check on a foreign commander. And among the passengers was a Venetian gentleman, Antonio Pigafetta, who had asked for a place simply to see what was there. It is to him that we owe almost everything we know of what followed.

The first crisis came at Port San Julian on the Patagonian coast at Easter 1520. Cartagena, Gaspar de Quesada and Luis de Mendoza seized three of the five ships. Mendoza was killed, Quesada executed, Cartagena put ashore with a priest and never heard of again. Among the pardoned mutineers was a Basque master named Juan Sebastian Elcano, whose name would end up on the coat of arms of the whole enterprise. The Santiago was lost soon after while scouting to the south.

On 21 October 1520 they found the entrance to the strait. It took thirty eight days to work through it. Partway along, Estevao Gomes turned the San Antonio around and sailed for Spain with the greater part of the stores, leaving the rest to go on with what they had. When they came out into open water the ocean lay so quiet before them that Magellan called it the Pacific.

The crossing took three months and twenty days without fresh provisions. Pigafetta recorded the biscuit reduced to powder and worms, the water gone yellow, the ox hides softened in the sea and chewed, the rats that changed hands for half a ducat, and the men whose gums swelled over their teeth until they could not eat. Nineteen died.

In the islands that Spain would later call the Philippines, something remarkable happened. Enrique of Malacca, whom Magellan had brought back from the East years before and who now served as interpreter, spoke and was understood. If he was born in these waters, then he, and not any European, may have been the first man to close a circle around the earth.

Then the expedition lost its head. Magellan had accepted the baptism of Humabon, the ruler of Cebu, and with it the quarrels of his new ally. On 27 April 1521 he waded ashore at Mactan against the chief Lapulapu with a small party and was killed in the shallows. Days later Humabon's people fell on the officers at a banquet, and Duarte Barbosa, Magellan's brother in law, died with some two dozen others.

What was left could no longer man three ships. The Concepcion was burned. The Trinidad and the Victoria reached the Moluccas at last and loaded cloves at Tidore. The Trinidad, under Gonzalo Gomez de Espinosa, tried to carry her cargo back east across the Pacific, failed against the winds, and was taken by the Portuguese.

That left Elcano and the Victoria. He chose the forbidden route, west across the Indian Ocean and round the Cape of Good Hope through waters Spain had no right to sail, with a leaking ship and no charts of his own. On 6 September 1522 the Victoria came back into Sanlucar with eighteen men aboard. The cloves in her hold covered the cost of the entire expedition. Charles V gave Elcano a globe for his arms and the motto Primus circumdedisti me, you were the first to encircle me.

For the collector, the interest lies in what happened next, in print. The first published account was not Pigafetta's. It was a letter by Maximilianus Transylvanus, secretary to the Emperor, who interviewed the survivors within weeks and whose De Moluccis Insulis appeared at Cologne and at Rome in 1523. Pigafetta's own narrative circulated in manuscript and reached a wide readership only when Giovanni Battista Ramusio printed it in the first volume of the Navigationi et Viaggi in 1550.

One detail from those pages outlasted all the rest. The survivors had kept a careful daily record, and on reaching the Cape Verde islands they found their calendar one day behind everyone else's. Sailing steadily west, they had lost a day out of their lives. It was the first practical demonstration of what we now call the date line, noticed by Pigafetta and reported to Europe by Transylvanus.

The cartographers did the rest. The strait entered the atlases and stayed there, and when Abraham Ortelius engraved his Maris Pacifici in 1589, the first printed map devoted to the Pacific, he put the Victoria in the middle of that vast ocean under full sail, the small ship that had proved the world could be gone all the way around.