Magellan waded ashore with roughly 60 armored men to help a local ally subdue the chieftain Lapu-Lapu, only to be met by more than 1,500 warriors on the beach at Mactan. Struck by a bamboo spear and finished off by native fighters, Magellan died without completing the circumnavigation his expedition would eventually finish without him.
By April 1521, Ferdinand Magellan's expedition had already crossed the Atlantic, found a passage into the Pacific through the strait that now bears his name, and reached the islands he called the Philippines. Magellan, eager to convert local rulers to Christianity and assert Spanish authority, agreed to help Rajah Humabon of Cebu punish a rival chieftain, Lapu-Lapu, who ruled the small island of Mactan and refused to submit.
Magellan led about 60 men ashore at dawn on April 27, weighed down by armor that made them slow across the coral shallows. Lapu-Lapu's forces, numbering well over a thousand, met them on the beach and in the water with spears, arrows, and bamboo stakes. Magellan, refusing to retreat and trying to cover his men's withdrawal to the boats, was wounded in the leg by a poisoned arrow and then overwhelmed, struck through the face and finished off as his remaining men fled to the ships.
The expedition, reduced to a fraction of its original five ships and 270 men, limped on and eventually completed the first circumnavigation of the globe in 1522 under Juan Sebastián Elcano—without the man whose name is now most associated with the voyage. In the Philippines, Lapu-Lapu is remembered as the first native leader to resist European colonization.
Key people: Ferdinand Magellan, Lapu-Lapu, Rajah Humabon