Did Magellan Circumnavigate the Globe?

For more than 500 years, Ferdinand Magellan has been famous for being the first person to circumnavigate the globe. 

Ferdinand Magellan did not actually circumnavigate the globe. 

What did he do?

On September 20, 1519, Magellan set sail from Sanlúcar de Barrameda, Spain, with five ships and a crew of about 260 men. His mission? Find a "backdoor" route to the East Indies (modern-day Indonesia). He was ambitious, determined, and—to be frank—a bit of a handful. Fast forward two years, and the expedition had reached Mactan Island in the Philippines. Magellan was roughly three-quarters of the way through his epic journey, but this is where the map ended for him. 

Magellan wasn't just exploring; he was also trying to spread Christianity. This didn't sit particularly well with the Indigenous peoples of Mactan. After a skirmish broke out on April 27, 1521, Magellan was struck by a poison arrow and killed. He died thousands of miles away from the finish line, leaving his dwindling crew to figure out how to get home without their leader. 

If you think your last long-haul flight was rough, consider the stats of this expedition:
Starting Crew: ~260 sailors
Total Ships: 5
Duration: 3 years
Survivors who made it home: 18 

On September 9, 1522, only 18 men limped back into Sanlúcar de Barrameda on a single ship. That’s a survival rate of about 7%. 

Victoria, the sole ship of Magellan's fleet to complete the circumnavigation.
Detail from a map by Ortelius, 1590.

If Magellan didn't make it, who was the actual first person to circle the globe? The answer depends on how you define "first." 

Juan Sebastián Elcano, after Magellan’s death, took command and navigated the final stretch back to Spain. He is the man historians usually point to if you're looking for the person who completed the full, continuous loop on one trip. 

Enrique of Malacca is an interesting contender. he was a Malay man that Magellan had captured and enslaved in the East Indies back in 1511. Enrique traveled from the East Indies to Europe, then accompanied Magellan on the 1519 expedition heading west. By the time the ships reached the Philippines, Enrique was essentially back in his home region. If he managed to slip away and make it back to Malacca after Magellan’s death, he would technically be the first person to complete a full circle of the planet, though in two separate stages. 

The first circumnavigation was less of a solo victory and more of a brutal, three-year survival horror story. Whether you give the "win" to the captain who finished the job or the enslaved interpreter who may have beaten everyone to the punch, one thing is true. Magellan really started it.

Finding Shackleton's Ship 'Endurance'

Bust of Sir Ernest Shackleton (by Anthony Smith) at the South Georgia Museum

Major Sir Ernest Henry Shackleton was an Anglo-Irish Antarctic explorer who led three British expeditions to the Antarctic. He was one of the principal figures of the period known as the Heroic Age of Antarctic Exploration.

In 1914, despite World War I, his ship, Endurance, departed from South Georgia for the Weddell Sea on December 5, heading for Vahsel Bay. As the ship moved southward navigating in ice, first-year ice was encountered, which slowed progress, but then deep in the Weddell Sea, conditions gradually grew worse until, on January 19, 1915, Endurance became frozen fast in an ice floe. Their state-of-the-art ship was 144 feet, with three towering masts, its hull ultra-reinforced to resist crumpling in the floating ice. 

Shackleton and 27 crewmen had sailed into the icy waters around Antarctica but would now need to travel by foot across the ice. 

Endurance stuck in the ice - Library of Congress

Endurance was slowly crushed by the floating ice despite its hull's design. The crew's journey is one of the most famous feats of survival in history. Unlike the Endurance, the men endured for over a year. They hunted penguins and seals as they crossed the ice. Finally, they reached an uninhabited island.

From there, Shackleton and a small party sailed 800 miles in a little boat they had rescued from the Endurance, and dragged with supplies across the ice. They made land on the island of South Georgia and hiked to a whaling station. They were then able to return by ship to pick up the rest of the crew.

Discovery in Antarctic waters 1923 - Public Domain, Link

The long-lost wreck of the Endurance was finally discovered using an underwater robot that went down almost 10,000 feet. With blasts of sonar, it uncovered the form of a ship. Switching to the robot’s cameras, the crew captured video of a stunningly well-preserved wooden vessel. 

Sir Francis Drake, Royal Pirate

Back in December 1577, Sir Francis Drake set off on a trip around the world.

He was a privateer of Queen Elizabeth . That's a fancy name for a royally sanctioned pirate. 

At that time he was already known for having raided Caribbean ports, and commandeering Spanish gold ships/ The Spaniards hated and feared him and some of them thought he was a dark wizard. 

Elizabeth commissioned him to sail the Atlantic Ocean in search of Terra Australis Incognita. According to Wikipedia Terra Australis (Latin for South Land) was a hypothetical continent first posited in antiquity and which appeared on maps between the 15th and 18th centuries. The existence of Terra Australis was not based on any survey or direct observation, but rather on the idea that continental land in the Northern Hemisphere should be balanced by land in the Southern Hemisphere. This theory of balancing land has been documented as early as the 5th century on maps by Macrobius, who uses the term Australis on his maps.

Drake left Plymouth with a fleet of five ships, but only one -his ship, the Golden Hind - ever completed the circumnavigation. It was quite the journey taking him from England to the Atlantic coast of North and South America, through the Strait of Magellan, and up the Pacific coast. He raided and pillaged for five and a half months but had a reputation as a "gentleman pirate." He kept violence to a minimum and no one was intentionally harmed in his raids. 

I didn't realize that he went as far as northern California, which he named “Nova Albion” and claimed for Elizabeth. 

Next, he sailed through the Indian Ocean, around the Cape of Good Hope, and home to Plymouth with a ship heavily laden with gold, silver, and spices.

Drake's journey

On a Clockwork Treasure Hunt

There is a Romantic (capital R) notion that I have had since childhood about discovering some kind of treasure. As a kid, I buried my own treasures, drew my own maps and then "discovered" them.

The treasure I'm writing about today is real. It was found off the coast of Greece, near the tiny island of Antikythera, where there was a shipwreck more than 2000 years ago. Around 65 B.C., Rome ruled the Mediterranean, but this was a Greek merchant going west across the Aegean Sea. It was a large ship for that time - 165 feet long - and it was loaded with luxury items, livestock and travelers who could only travel distances on merchant vessels. They found 36 marble statues of heroes, gods and horses, ceramics and personal belongings such as golden earrings, silver coins and jewelry.

The wreckage was discovered 117 years ago. The attention was first on life-size bronze and marble statues, but there was also a mysterious clockwork device.

National Archaeological Museum, Athens/Antikythera Mechanism Research Project/Kostas Xenikakis

I wrote about the Antikythera mechanism earlier here. Historians have been pondering what the interlocking gears did. The current theory is that it was used to track celestial movements - logical to have onboard a ship - and keep time.

It has been a long time since that ship went down, but beneath the ancient sands we are still detecting artifacts that remain trapped and protected in the sand.

But that clockwork was very sophisticated and the parts fit together with a great precision that was not to be seen again until clock manufacturing in 14th-century Europe were interlocking gears again used in a similar manner. It had front and back faceplates framed by a wooden case, about 60 gears, a circular dial with pointers tracking the movement of the sun, moon and five known planets across the sky during the calendar year.

The back plate had two large dials. One showed a Greek lunar month calendar while the other showed the biennial and quadrennial cycles of athletic competitions, including the Olympics. A crank on a side of the device turned the gears to set the front and back dials in motion.

Surprisingly, most scholars believe that the mechanism was not a marine navigation device, but possibly a device for education and amusement.