On September 20, 1519, five wooden ships sailed out of the Spanish port of Sanlucar de Barrameda under the command of a Portuguese captain named Ferdinand Magellan. The crew of about 270 men waved goodbye to their families, not knowing that almost none of them would ever see home again. Their goal was to reach the Spice Islands by sailing west, all the way around the world, even though no one yet knew if that was possible.
Magellan had a brilliant plan and a stubborn personality. He had been turned down by his own king of Portugal, so he convinced the king of Spain to fund his trip instead. The fleet sailed across the Atlantic, hugged the coast of South America, and searched for months for a passage to the other side. Finally they found a twisting, freezing channel near the bottom of the continent that is now called the Strait of Magellan. After that they sailed into a vast new ocean so calm that Magellan named it the Pacifico, the peaceful one, even though it would soon nearly kill them with its huge distances. Magellan himself was killed in a battle in the Philippines, and command passed to a Spanish navigator named Juan Sebastian Elcano.
Three years after that grand departure, only one ship, the Victoria, made it home with 18 survivors. But they had proved that all the oceans connect into one big sea and that the world was much bigger than maps had shown. Every modern globe, every airline route, and every astronaut photo of Earth's curve owes something to the day five small ships pointed their bows west and dared to try.
