Ferdinand Magellan, born around 1480 into minor Portuguese nobility, spent eight years fighting in India and Southeast Asia, where at Malacca he uncovered a plot and saved his friend Francisco Serrao. Serrao’s letters from the Moluccas described the spice wealth there. A leg wound in Morocco left Magellan with a limp, false charges of trading with the enemy ruined him, and King Manuel I rejected his plan for a western route. In 1517 he took it to Seville and King Charles I, arguing with help from his enslaved interpreter Enrique that no one could fix the 1494 Treaty of Tordesillas line in Asia because longitude could not be measured. Portugal reportedly had his family home vandalized and sent a fleet to hunt him. In September 1519 he sailed with five ships and about 270 men, many under resentful Spanish captains.

At Puerto San Julian, captains Juan de Cartagena, Gaspar de Quesada, and Luis de Mendoza rebelled. Mendoza was killed, Quesada beheaded, and Cartagena marooned. The Santiago was wrecked, and the San Antonio deserted in the strait now named for Magellan. Trusting Ptolemy’s undersized Earth, he expected a short crossing of the ocean he called the Pacific, but it took three months and 20 days, with men chewing leather and 30 dying of scurvy while quince jelly kept him healthy. In the Philippines he converted Rajah Humabon of Cebu, then attacked Lapulapu on Mactan on April 27, 1521, where roughly 50 men faced about 1,500 warriors who speared their unarmored legs. Magellan was killed in the surf, and Juan Sebastian Elcano, a former mutineer, brought the Victoria home with 18 or 19 survivors in September 1522.

• Magellan gave Humabon’s queen the Santo Nino image after holding the first Catholic Mass in the Philippines.
• Humabon later poisoned surviving officers at a banquet.
• San Antonio deserters smeared Magellan, and his wife was placed under house arrest and died in poverty with their two children.
• Antonio Pigafetta’s daily diary, shared with the kings of Spain, Portugal, and France, restored Magellan’s reputation.
• His earlier travels east to the Malay Archipelago meant he had nearly circled the globe over his lifetime.