In the year fourteen-hundred ninety-two Columbus sailed the Ocean blue and began
the Age of European Exploration. Over the next few decades explorers from lots of
European countries (though mostly Portugal and Spain) sailed west to the Americas and
East to the Indies in search of valuables to bring back home to Europe. But one man,
Ferdinand Magellan, and his crew, sailed in both directions and he became the first
to circumnavigate the Earth. Or at least he did in our popular imaginations. In reality,
Magellan was killed in the Philippines long before his famous voyage was completed and
before his crew managed to return to Europe and finish the first circumnavigation. Still,
the popular history, in this case, is actually, almost right. Despite his death only halfway
through the first circumnavigation, thousands of miles away from Europe, Magellan still came within
only a few hundred miles of being the first person to go all the way around the globe, but how?
Well when Magellan was a young man his home country, Portugal, and the nation which he
would eventually sail almost all the way around the world for, Spain, had just started to build
their overseas empires. The Spanish had gone west, focusing on building a land empire in the Americas
by conquering the native civilizations of the New World, while the Portuguese had primarily gone
east, creating a trade empire (meaning that they built outposts and took ports, but didn’t actually
conquer the native peoples of an area) along the African, Indian, and the East Indian coastlines.
Magellan first sailed for Portugal in 1505 when he accompanied the first Viceroy of Portuguese
India on a mission to subjugate the Islamic and African powers of the Indian Ocean, which went
quite well for the Portuguese by the way and they developed a near-complete monopoly on Indian Ocean
trade. By 1509 or 1510, after getting up to some exploits in India, Magellan reached the city of
Malacca in modern-day Malaysia, near Singapore, marking the farthest he ever sailed, eastwards.
In 1513 he returned to Portugal and fought for the Portuguese in Morocco,
sustaining a leg wound that caused him to limp for the rest of his life in the process,
but when King Manuel I refused to increase his pay as compensation, Magellan took his
talents elsewhere. And who else wanted skilled navigators in the early 16th century? Well
Portugal’s rival Spain, and that’s exactly who Ferdinand Magellan turned his service over to.
In 1494 Spain and Portugal rather humbly divided the entire non-Christian world between themselves,
but as much of the land they were divvying up hadn’t even been properly explored by them yet,
there was a little bit of fuzziness. Importantly over who owned the East Indies,
which of course Magellan was quite familiar with. The other issue was how to get there.
Previously Europeans had sailed around the Cape of Good Hope at the southern tip of Africa to
reach the Indian Ocean but the Cape was very much under Portuguese control so the Spanish
needed another way in. And they would find it in Spanish-controlled (mostly) South America.
In 1519, with the consent and, importantly, funding of the King of Spain, Magellan set
out with five ships and a goal to reach the East Indies by sailing west. He was
hardly the first to have that idea though, even Columbus was trying to reach the East Indies,
but Magellan had something that Columbus did not. He knew the America’s existed and so he
sailed south to go around them, discovering the Strait of Magellan and the Pacific Ocean,
named so because the sea was clear when Magellan first entered it. But then he sailed on to the
Philippines (which weren’t named that yet) and got himself killed in a dispute with the Filipinos.
A Basque sailor named Juan Sebastián Elcano completed the voyage, though only one ship
and 18 sailors, out of an original 270 returned to Spain to complete the first
circumnavigation. The King, Charles I, even augmented Elcano’s coat of arms as a reward,
adding a globe and the words “Primus Circumdedisti Me” or “You were the first to encircle me.” But
if Magellan died in the Philippines how is it that he almost circumnavigated the globe?
Well he did it in a roundabout manner. You see Malacca, the farthest east Magellan ever sailed,
and the Philippines, the farthest west he ever sailed, really aren’t all that far apart, on a
global scale anyway. Had Magellan made it just a bit farther in either direction, east or west,
he really would have been the first man to, at least indirectly, circumnavigate the globe.
If you want to know more about Columbus in the Caribbean find out why the US owns Puerto
Rico in the video to the left or check out more videos in this series, History Myths,
through the links in the description. If you enjoyed this video don’t forget to
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and as always, I’ve been James and thank you for watching Look Back History.