On November 28, 1520, three battered wooden ships nosed out of a narrow, freezing channel at the bottom of South America and spilled into an enormous, peaceful sea. The fleet was led by a Portuguese explorer named Ferdinand Magellan, sailing for Spain, and they had just become the first Europeans known to sail from the Atlantic Ocean into the body of water Magellan would soon name the Pacific - meaning peaceful - because the waves there were so smooth compared to the storms they had just escaped.
Getting there had been brutal. Magellan had set off from Spain in September 1519 with five ships and about 270 men. They had crossed the Atlantic, sailed down the coast of South America in search of a passage, survived a mutiny by some of his own captains, and finally found a twisting, icy strait that took them 38 days to cross. One ship was wrecked, another deserted and turned back. Only three ships made it through what is now called the Strait of Magellan.
The Pacific turned out to be much bigger than anyone in Europe had guessed - about 12,000 miles across. The crew sailed for nearly four months without seeing a single resupply island, suffering terribly from hunger and thirst. Magellan himself was killed in a battle in the Philippines in April 1521 and never made it home. But one of his ships, the Victoria, kept going west and arrived back in Spain in September 1522 with only 18 survivors. They had become the first humans known to sail all the way around the world - and they had Magellan's stubborn courage to thank for it.
