One day today, on November 28, 1520, Ferdinand Magellan and his three remaining ships found themselves in a new ocean. The sun was blazing endlessly, the spring weather was warm, and the sea was calm and untroubled; what other name could the great navigator from the Pacific Ocean have given it?
Magellan, a noble Portuguese explorer who had fallen out of favor with the king and had defected to Spain, wanted to complete the work begun by Christopher Columbus: to sail west and find the islands of the Eastern Baharians. They had departed in September 1519 and had wintered in what is now southern Patagonia. There he was forced to kill some of his captains who had rebelled. Decades later Sir Francis Drake found their sun-bleached bones sticking out of the sand.
In late October he has begun crossing the nearly 350 miles of the pass that today bears the name of the Strait of Magellan.
One of his ships raised its sterns and sailed back to Spain where the captain was imprisoned as soon as he set foot in port. On November 28, the crews of the three remaining ships became the first Europeans to sail the eastern Pacific Ocean.
The locals jumped on him and chopped him up
Magellan would never see Europe again. After crossing the Pacific they arrived with their men in the Philippines. There during a battle with the natives he was hit (others say in the face) with a bamboo spear and then the natives jumped on him and cut him up. Magellan's place was taken by Juan Sebastian Elcano and under his heroic leadership a single ship, the "Victoria", managed to return to Seville. They had completed the first circumnavigation of the Earth! Of the 237 men aboard Magellan's ships when the journey began three years earlier, only 18 survived.
The account of those who survived
Those who survived told how in the far south, where the land opens up and the oceans embrace, Indians build huge fires day and night to keep from freezing to death. These Indians are true giants. The head of the Europeans, they said, only came up to their waist.
Magellan, the leader of the expedition, caught two of them and chained them hand and foot. But later one died of scurvy and the other of heat!
It was told that they were forced to drink stagnant water by holding their noses and to eat sawdust and hides and rat meat from those mice who also claimed those last wormy dry cuts in the hold. Those who died of starvation were thrown into the sea, and as they had no stones to tie on them, the corpses floated in the water. The white men with their faces turned to the sky and the Indians looking at the bottom...
When they reached the Moluccas, one sailor exchanged a card of the King of Hearts for six birds, but his gums were so swollen that he could not eat a mouthful.
They had seen Magellan crying. They had seen tears in the eyes of the cruel Portuguese explorer when the ships entered the ocean that no other European had ever crossed, and they had known his merciless rage when he beheaded and cut to pieces two captains who had mutinied and when he abandoned other rebels in the desert. Magellan is now the prey of predators and the trophy of the natives of the Philippines who stabbed him in the leg with a poisoned arrow.
Of the 237 sailors who left Seville three years ago, 18 returned! They arrived in a single crippled ship with a broken keel that was taking on water from all sides, and those who survived, these skeletons in rags, were the first to make it around the world!
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