The Portuguese Navigator Who Was Killed on a Philippine Beach in 1521 Before His Fleet Completed the First Circumnavigation of the Globe Under His Deputy

Ferdinand Magellan (born Fernão de Magalhães in northern Portugal around 1480) had served in the Portuguese spice trade in the Indian Ocean from 1505 to 1513 and had been wounded in the 1511 Portuguese capture of Malacca. By 1517 he had quarrelled with the Portuguese king Manuel I over compensation and defected to Spain. In March 1518 the Spanish king Charles I (the future Holy Roman Emperor Charles V) approved Magellan’s proposal for a westward voyage to the Spice Islands — modern Maluku — that would bypass the Portuguese-controlled eastward route around Africa.

The fleet of five ships — Trinidad (Magellan’s flagship), San Antonio, Concepción, Victoria, and Santiago — left Sanlúcar de Barrameda on 20 September 1519 with approximately 270 men, including the Italian Venetian observer Antonio Pigafetta, whose journal became the principal contemporary source.

The strait

The fleet crossed the Atlantic to Brazil, then worked south along the South American coast through 1520. After putting down a mutiny by three of the Spanish captains at Patagonia in April 1520 (Magellan executed one, marooned two), and after losing the Santiago in a winter storm, he discovered the southern Atlantic-Pacific passage that now bears his name — the Strait of Magellan — in October-November 1520. The 600-km strait took 38 days to navigate.

The San Antonio deserted in the strait and returned to Spain. The remaining three ships emerged into the Pacific on 28 November 1520. Magellan named the new ocean Mar Pacífico (“peaceful sea”) because the weather on emergence was calm.

The Pacific crossing was much longer than Magellan had anticipated. He had been working from contemporary geographical estimates that understated the Pacific’s width. The crossing from the Strait to Guam took 98 days without intermediate landfall. The fleet ran out of food and water; approximately 19 men died of scurvy; the survivors ate leather strips from the ships’ rigging.

The fleet reached Guam in March 1521 and the Philippine archipelago in mid-March. Magellan made landfall on the small island of Homonhon on 16 March 1521 — the first documented European arrival in the Philippines.

27 April 1521

Magellan baptised the chief of the larger island of Cebu, Rajah Humabon, as Christian on 14 April 1521 and extracted formal submission to the Spanish crown from the surrounding chiefs. One chief refused — Lapu-Lapu of the adjacent small island of Mactan.

Magellan decided to enforce submission militarily. He landed on Mactan on the morning of 27 April 1521 with approximately 49 Spanish soldiers in heavy armour, leaving the rest of the crews aboard the ships. Lapu-Lapu’s forces met him on the beach with approximately 1,500 fighters armed with bamboo spears, kris swords, and bamboo bows. The shallow water at the landing point prevented the ships’ artillery from supporting the landing party at effective range.

The fight lasted approximately an hour. Magellan was wounded by a poisoned arrow in the leg, then by a bamboo spear in the face, then by a kris blow that severed the leg. He died on the beach in shallow water. Approximately eight other Spaniards were killed; the rest retreated to the boats. Lapu-Lapu refused to return Magellan’s body for ransom. The body has never been recovered.

Magellan was about 41 years old.

The return

Command devolved through a series of deputies. By the time the fleet reached the Maluku Spice Islands in early November 1521, the Concepción had been burned (too few men remaining to crew her) and the Trinidad was leaking badly. The Trinidad attempted to return east across the Pacific in early 1522 and failed; she limped back to the Spice Islands and was captured by the Portuguese, with her surviving crew imprisoned in Indian Ocean garrisons. Most of them died.

The Victoria — under the Basque master Juan Sebastián Elcano, who had been one of the mutineers Magellan had spared at Patagonia in 1520 — sailed west from Tidore in late November 1521 with about 60 men and a hold full of cloves. She crossed the Indian Ocean, rounded the Cape of Good Hope in May 1522, and limped up the West African coast on starvation rations.

The Victoria reached Sanlúcar de Barrameda on 6 September 1522. Of the original 270 men, 18 were aboard. The cloves she carried were sold at Seville for a sum sufficient to repay the entire expedition’s initial cost despite the loss of four out of five ships.

Elcano had completed the first circumnavigation of Earth. Charles V granted him a coat of arms featuring a globe with the inscription Primus circumdedisti me (“You first encircled me”). Elcano died of malnutrition in the Pacific on a second 1525-1526 expedition, aged about 41.

Antonio Pigafetta — one of the 18 Victoria survivors — produced the principal published account of the voyage. It was the foundational text of European knowledge of the Pacific and the Philippines for the following century.

The International Date Line problem was first identified during the voyage. The Victoria’s crew, on arriving in the Cape Verde Islands in July 1522, found that their on-board log calendar was one day behind the local calendar. They had circumnavigated the planet westward and had effectively gained an extra day relative to a stationary observer. The discrepancy — physically inevitable once the geographical implications were worked out — was reported to Charles V in a 1522 letter by the contemporary humanist Maximilianus Transylvanus and entered European geographical understanding from 1524 onwards.