After 38 grueling days navigating the treacherous strait at South America's southern tip, Magellan's three remaining ships emerged into open water so calm compared to the Atlantic that he christened it Mar Pacifico. The fleet had no idea the ocean spanned nearly a third of the globe, and the crossing would starve and kill many before landfall in the Philippines.
Magellan's fleet had begun the year before with five ships and roughly 270 men, and by the time they cleared the strait that now bears his name, mutiny, desertion, and shipwreck had already thinned their ranks. The passage through the strait itself took 38 days of fighting currents, fog, and unpredictable winds between towering, glacier-carved cliffs.
When the ships finally broke into open ocean on November 28, the calm waters after the strait's violence prompted Magellan to name it the Pacific — peaceful sea. It was a cruelly ironic christening: the crew had grossly underestimated its size, expecting a short hop to Asia. Instead they sailed for over three months without resupply, reduced to eating rat-infested biscuit dust, leather softened in seawater, and sawdust. Scurvy killed nineteen men before they sighted Guam in March 1521.
Magellan himself would never complete the circumnavigation — he died in the Philippines in April 1521, killed in a skirmish on Mactan Island. Only one ship, the Victoria, eventually limped back to Spain in 1522 with 18 survivors, having achieved the first circumnavigation of the globe almost by accident of necessity rather than design.