1520 Magellan circumnavigates the globe
On Wednesday the twenty-eighth of November, one thousand five hundred and twenty, we issued forth from the said strait and entered the Pacific Sea, where we remained three months and twenty days without taking on board provisions or any other refreshments, and we ate only old biscuits turned to powder, all full of worms and stinking of the urine which the rats had made on it, having eaten the good. And we drank water impure and yellow. We ate also ox hides which were very hard because of the sun, rain, and wind. And we left them...days in the sea, then laid them for a short time on embers, and so we ate them. And of the rats, which were sold for half an ecu apiece, some of us could not get enough.
Besides the aforesaid troubles, this malady [scurvy] was the worst, namely that the gums of most part of our men swelled above and met below so that they could not eat. And in this way they died, inasmuch as twenty-nine of us died...But besides those who died, twenty-five or thirty fell sick of divers maladies, whether of the arms or of the legs and other parts of the body [also effects of scurvy], so that there remained very few healthy men. Yet by the grace of our Lord I had no illness.
During these three months and twenty days, we sailed in a gulf where we made a good four thousand leagues across the Pacific Sea, which was rightly so named. For during this time we had no storm, and we saw no land except two small uninhabited islands, where we found only birds and trees. Wherefore we called them the Isles of Misfortune....
On Friday the twenty-sixth of April Zzula, lord of the aforesaid island of Mattan, sent one of his sons to present to the captain-general two goats, saying that he would keep all his promises to him, but because of the lord...Cilapulapu (who refused to obey the King of Spain) he had not been able to...And he begged that on the following night he [Magellan] would send but one boat with some of his men to fight.
The captain-general resolved to go there with three boats. And however strongly we besought him not to come, yet...at midnight we set forth, sixty men armed with corselets and helmets...and we so manage that we arrived at Mattan three hours before daylight. The captain would not fight at this hour, but sent...to tell the lord of the place [Cilapulapu] and his people that, if they agreed to obey the King of Spain, and recognize the Christian king as their lord, and give us tribute, they should all be friends. Bur if they acted otherwise they should learn by experience how our lances pierced. They replied that they had lances of bamboo hardened in the fire and stakes dried of the fire, and that we were to attack them when we would....
Having thus reached land we attacked them.. Those people had formed three divisions, of more than one thousand and fifty persons....and thus we began to fight....They fired at us so many arrows, and lances of bamboo tipped with iron, and pointed stakes hardened by fire, and stones, that we could hardly defend ourselves...They came so furiously against us that they sent a poisoned arrow through the captain's leg. Wherefore he ordered us to withdraw slowly, but the men fled while six or eight of us remained with the captain....as a good captain and a knight he still stood fast with some others, fighting thus for more than an hour. And as he refused to retire further, and Indian threw a bamboo lance in his face, and the captain immediately killed him with his lance, leaving it in his body. Then, trying to lay hand on his sword, he could draw it out but halfway, because of a wound from a bamboo lance that he had in his arm. Which seeing, all those people threw themselves on him, and one of them with a large javelin...thrust it into his left leg, whereby he fell face downward. On this all at once rushed upon him with lances of iron and of bamboo and...they slew our mirror, our light, our comfort, and our true guide.
Ferdinand Magellan, 1480-1521: Sailing westward, he sought to prove that the Spice Islands lay to the west of the Papal Line of Demarcation established in 1494, and thus could be claimed by Spain. After a harrowing passage through the straights at the southern tip of South America that now bear his name, Magellan traversed the Pacific. Although he lost his life in the Philippines, the expedition went on to become the first to circumnavigate the globe.
Pigafetta, Antonio, journal, quoted in Skelton, R.A., Magellan's Voyage--A narrative Account of the First Circumnavigation, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1969, pp. 723, 733, 739, 742.
