The First Voyage Around the World
Next: September 6, 2027
Home again, the long way round.
The story
Where it comes from
This Story marks the anniversary of 6 September 1522, when the battered ship Victoria moored at the Spanish port of Sanlúcar de Barrameda and completed the first known voyage around the world. Five ships had left Seville in August 1519 under Ferdinand Magellan, seeking a westward route to the Spice Islands. Magellan was killed in the Philippines in 1521, and the Basque navigator Juan Sebastián Elcano brought the last ship home across the Indian Ocean and around Africa. Of some 250 men, only 18 returned that day.
How it's celebrated
There is no formal observance, but the anniversary is a fine day to open an atlas and trace the route: across the Atlantic, around the tip of South America, over the Pacific to the Philippines and the Moluccas, then home around the Cape of Good Hope. The chronicle kept by Antonio Pigafetta, one of the 18 survivors, can be read free online in English translation.
Did you know
- At the Cape Verde Islands in July 1522, the crew found their calendar a day behind the one ashore: by sailing west with the sun all the way round, they had 'lost' a day.
- Pigafetta's journal includes a list of 426 Malay words, then the trading language of South-East Asian ports, and it is still studied as one of the oldest Malay word lists.
- Spain's king gave Elcano a coat of arms showing a globe and the Latin words Primus circumdedisti me, 'You were the first to encircle me'.
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