After months hunting the coastline of South America for a route westward, Magellan's expedition neared the entrance to what became known as the Strait of Magellan around this time in 1520. The discovery would let his surviving ships become the first to sail from the Atlantic into the Pacific, a passage that reshaped global navigation for four centuries until the Panama Canal opened.
By June 1520 Magellan's fleet had already survived mutiny, a shipwreck, and a brutal winter anchored at Puerto San Julian, where he'd executed one conspirator and marooned others on the desolate Patagonian shore. Morale was in tatters and food was rotting when lookouts spotted a narrow opening in the coastline near 52 degrees south latitude.
The crews didn't yet know whether this inlet was another dead-end bay or the long-sought passage to the Spice Islands. Magellan sent two ships ahead to probe its twists before committing the whole fleet, wary after so many false hopes along thousands of miles of coast.
What they eventually confirmed was a 350-mile channel threading between the mainland and Tierra del Fuego, an island so named because the fires of native peoples burned along its shores at night. Sailing it took over a month of tacking through freezing, unpredictable winds. Only three of Magellan's original five ships would emerge into the Pacific, and Magellan himself would be dead in the Philippines within a year. But the strait he found became the era's essential maritime shortcut, prized and fought over by empires for generations.
Key people: Ferdinand Magellan