Ferdinand Magellan was born around 1480 in northern Portugal, into a family of minor nobility. His father, Pedro de Magalhães, served as the mayor of a small town, and his mother was Alda de Mezquita. Magellan's early years were spent in the aristocratic environment of the Portuguese royal court, where he served as a page to Queen Eleanor, the consort of King John II. When Manuel I succeeded John II in 1495, Magellan entered the new king's service and began the career at sea that would eventually make him the architect of the most audacious navigational enterprise of the Age of Exploration.
In March 1505, at the age of approximately twenty-five, Magellan enlisted in a fleet of twenty-two ships commanded by Francisco de Almeida, who was bound for the Indian Ocean to serve as the first viceroy of Portuguese India. Magellan spent the next several years in the service of the Portuguese Crown in Asia, stationed variously at Goa, Cochin, and Quilon on the western coast of India. He participated in the naval Battle of Cannanore in 1506, where he was wounded, and the Battle of Diu in 1509, a decisive engagement that established Portuguese dominance over the spice trade routes of the Indian Ocean. He also sailed with Diogo Lopes de Sequeira on the first Portuguese embassy to Malacca, accompanied by his friend and possibly distant cousin Francisco Serrão. The expedition encountered a local conspiracy and was forced to withdraw, but Magellan distinguished himself by warning the commander and risking his own life to rescue Serrão and other Portuguese who had gone ashore.
In 1511, under the new governor Afonso de Albuquerque, Magellan participated in the conquest of Malacca, the great emporium city at the tip of the Malay Peninsula through which an enormous share of Asian trade flowed. This campaign and his subsequent voyages gave Magellan a first-hand knowledge of the eastern approaches to the Spice Islands, the Moluccas, which were the source of the cloves, nutmeg, and mace that European merchants and monarchs coveted with near-obsessive intensity. By reaching the Moluccas from the east, Magellan had already completed the majority of a global circumnavigation without realizing it. The idea of completing the circuit by sailing westward would consume the rest of his life.
When Magellan returned to Portugal and proposed to King Manuel I a western route to the Spice Islands, sailing around the southern tip of the American continent, the king refused. The reasons for the rejection likely involved both personal animosity toward Magellan and political calculation: Portugal had established lucrative eastern routes to Asia and saw little strategic advantage in funding an alternative that might complicate its existing monopolies. Magellan renounced his Portuguese citizenship and presented his plan instead to the Spanish Crown, which was eager to compete with Portugal for access to the spice trade. King Charles I of Spain, who would later become Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, accepted the proposal enthusiastically. In Seville, Magellan married a Portuguese woman named Beatriz Barbosa, fathered two children, and organized the expedition with meticulous care. In 1518, he was formally appointed admiral and given command of the Armada of Molucca, a fleet of five ships.
The fleet departed from Sanlúcar de Barrameda on September 20, 1519, sailing southwest across the Atlantic Ocean. The crossing was relatively smooth, but tensions between Magellan and the Spanish captains under his command were evident almost immediately. The Spanish officers resented serving under a Portuguese commander and questioned his judgment and authority. By the time the fleet reached the coast of South America and began working southward in search of a passage through the continent, those tensions had erupted into mutiny. Three of the five captains rose against Magellan at the port of San Julián in Patagonia in April 1520. Magellan suppressed the mutiny with a combination of naval maneuver and decisive violence, executing one of the ringleaders and marooning another, then continuing the voyage with his authority somewhat restored.
The discovery of the passage that now bears his name came in October and November 1520. The Strait of Magellan, a tortuous channel of roughly 570 kilometers winding through the southern tip of South America between what is now Chilean Patagonia and the archipelago of Tierra del Fuego, was treacherous, cold, and narrow, its shores lined with glaciers and its waters churned by violent currents. The transit took thirty-eight days. One of the five original ships had already been wrecked earlier in the voyage, and a second deserted and turned back to Spain during the strait passage, leaving Magellan with only three vessels when he emerged into the ocean to the west.
He named the new ocean the Mar Pacifico, the Pacific Ocean, because its surface appeared deceptively calm compared to the stormy strait he had just navigated. The crossing that followed was one of the most harrowing ordeals in the history of exploration. Magellan had grossly underestimated the width of the Pacific, and for approximately ninety-eight days his crew sailed westward without sighting any land capable of supplying them with fresh food. Men died of scurvy, and the survivors were reduced to eating leather, sawdust mixed with water, and rats. The fleet finally reached Guam in the Mariana Islands in March 1521, restocked there, and then pressed on to the Philippine archipelago, which Magellan named the Islands of Saint Lazarus.
Magellan became deeply involved in the politics of the Philippine islands, forming an alliance with Rajah Humabon of Cebu and agreeing to assist him in subduing a rival chieftain named Lapu-Lapu on the neighboring island of Mactan. On April 27, 1521, Magellan led a small force of approximately sixty armored men in a nighttime crossing to Mactan. Lapu-Lapu's warriors, numbering perhaps fifteen hundred, met them in the shallows and engaged them with poisoned arrows and bamboo spears. Magellan was struck in the leg by a poisoned arrow and wounded in the face, then cut down in the water as his force retreated in disorder. He was forty or forty-one years old.
The expedition continued under a series of commanders, dwindling in crew and ships as the voyage proceeded. Captain Juan Sebastián Elcano eventually took command of the last surviving vessel, the Victoria. After reaching the Spice Islands and loading a cargo of cloves, the fleet's two remaining ships parted ways. One attempted to cross the Pacific eastward back to New Spain and failed. Elcano sailed west across the Indian Ocean, around the Cape of Good Hope, and north along the African coast, finally reaching Sanlúcar de Barrameda on September 6, 1522, three years after departure. Only eighteen men out of the original crew of approximately 270 completed the circumnavigation. They brought back enough spice to more than cover the expedition's costs, and they had proved beyond all doubt that the Earth was a globe that could be encircled by sea.
Magellan himself never completed the circumnavigation in a single continuous voyage, but because he had previously reached the Malay Archipelago traveling eastward during his earlier service in the Portuguese fleet, he had by the time of his death in the Philippines achieved a complete personal circuit of the globe. The strait that he discovered still carries his name on every map of the world, a permanent memorial to the navigator who conceived and launched the first voyage ever to sail around the Earth.
