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| Magellan (Source). |
Ferdinand Magellan (1480 – 1521, Portuguese). Ferdinand Magellan served the Portuguese crown around the Indian Ocean for seven years from 1505 to 1512, and in 1519 he led the Armada de Molucca as captain-general of the fleet and captain of the flagship Trinidad. The venture was backed by Spain’s new king (and Holy Roman Emperor), Charles V. Magellan’s expedition was the first to locate the strait that bears his name and cross the Pacific Ocean, which Magellan named for the calm waters (Pacifico) he found at first. But his underestimate of the size of the recently discovered "South Sea" proved deadly: More than twenty men died of starvation and scurvy during (and after) the three months it took the fleet to reach Guam in March 1521. Magellan was killed in battle shortly after at the island of Mactan, in the Philippines, but two of his five ships went on to reach their destination, the Moluccas (Spice Islands). One of those, the Victoria under the command of Juan Sebastián Elcano, was sailed west straight across the southern Indian Ocean and back to Spain, making it the first ship to sail around the world—a feat associated globally with Magellan. Although he was killed halfway through the famed circumnavigation, along with distance covered in his earlier voyages, Magellan came within 2,600 kilometers of a full circuit of the globe, beginning in Malacca and ending on Mactan.
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| Map of Enrique of Malacca's circumnavigation: Malacca, Lisbon, Seville, Rio de Janeiro, Puerto San Julián, Guam, Limasawa, Cebu.[1] |
On March 28, 1521, Enrique of Malacca became the first person to complete a linguistic circumnavigation of the globe—he traveled so far in one direction that he reached a point where his own language was spoken. Enrique’s journey began a decade earlier following the sack of Malacca, when he was taken as a slave by Ferdinand Magellan. A teenager, he accompanied Magellan back to Portugal, then to Spain, and finally on the Armada de Molucca to locate a westward route to the Spice Islands. More about Enrique of Malacca.