Ferdinand Magellan led the first expedition to sail around the world. The journey took three years and one ship survived out of five. What part of the round-the-world voyage did Magellan personally complete?
Magellan was killed on the island of Mactan (modern Philippines) on 27 April 1521, in a skirmish with the local chief Lapu-Lapu and his men. The expedition continued under his Basque second-in-command, Juan Sebastián Elcano, who brought the *Victoria* home to Seville on 6 September 1522 with seventeen survivors out of the original 270 crew. Strictly speaking, Elcano was the first person to complete the circumnavigation. Magellan's claim rests on the technicality that he had previously sailed east as far as the Philippines on a Portuguese voyage, so the segment he died on closed the loop.
Read the full facts →The Age of Exploration was the roughly two-century period from the early 15th to the mid-17th century during which European maritime powers — initially Portugal and Spain, then the Netherlands, England, and France — systematically explored and mapped the global ocean coastline, opened sustained European contact with East Asia, the Americas, Africa, and the Pacific, and established the first global trade and colonial systems.
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