Ferdinand Magellan did not sail around the world; he died about halfway through, in the Philippines in 1521. The man who completed the first circumnavigation was Juan Sebastián Elcano, a Basque captain who joined the expedition as a fugitive after the Spanish crown failed to pay him for military service and then criminalized him for selling his own armed ship to foreign bankers to cover his debts.

This episode follows Elcano through the Patagonian mutiny that Magellan crushed, the months he spent in chains doing hard labor, and the democratic vote that made him captain of the Victoria after the leadership collapsed. It covers his decision to sail west through Portuguese-patrolled waters, the roughly 27,000-kilometer voyage without a port stop, scurvy dissolving the crew’s bodies, shipworms hollowing the hull, the Cape Verde escape that left 13 men behind, and the return of 18 survivors in September 1522. It then asks why Antonio Pigafetta’s famous chronicle never mentions him and how the Church and later Spanish nationalists preferred Magellan as a symbol.

• How the 1494 Treaty of Tordesillas turned navigation into an act of aggression
• Why Magellan refused to share charts with his Spanish captains
• The crew vote of 47 men that chose the westward route home
• Why paying locals with cloves blew the Victoria’s cover
• Elcano’s first letter home, asking the king to free his captured men