Having endured a brutal, months-long crossing of the Pacific with crews reduced to eating leather and sawdust, Magellan's remaining ships pressed toward Southeast Asia in early 1521. The expedition would reach the Philippines within weeks, a landfall that led directly to Magellan's death in battle at Mactan and, eventually, to the first circumnavigation of the Earth by the survivors under Juan Sebastián Elcano.
By February 1521, Ferdinand Magellan's fleet had already lost ships and men to mutiny, desertion, and the sheer hardship of rounding South America through the strait that now bears his name. The Pacific crossing that followed proved far longer and more brutal than Magellan anticipated—he had badly underestimated the ocean's size—and his surviving crews, reduced to a handful of ships, suffered severe scurvy and starvation, reportedly gnawing on ox hides stripped from the rigging.
As the fleet limped westward across the Pacific in the early months of 1521, officers and sailors alike faced dwindling supplies and rising desperation, with dozens dying before any sight of land. Their eventual arrival in the Philippine islands in March offered relief and fresh provisions, but also set in motion the events that would kill Magellan himself: a local political dispute drew him into the Battle of Mactan, where he died in April 1521, never completing the voyage he had launched.
Command passed to others, and it was Basque navigator Juan Sebastián Elcano who eventually brought a single surviving ship, the Victoria, back to Spain in 1522 with just 18 of the original 270 crew members, completing history's first circumnavigation of the globe and proving definitively that the Earth could be sailed around in one continuous voyage.
Key people: Ferdinand Magellan, Juan Sebastián Elcano