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Spains' Gift to the world, her intrepid Sailors

           circumnavigate the earth, & outline
           the earth for future generations

   Ferdinand Magellan & Juan Sebastian de Elcano
            both Spanish subjects

          Sail from Seville, Spain

Spain - the circumnavigation August 1519 to September 9, 1522:

The Spanish in search of an easier route westward.
 
 

Spain sends navigator Ferdinand Magellan a Spanish subject, and Commander
navigator Juan Sebastian de Elcano, also a Spaniard, with five ships
from Seville, Spain.

The Spaniards first went to the Cape Verde Islands, then to Brazil.

The Spaniards then sailed along the east coast of South America; the estuary of the Rio de la Plata was explored in the hope to be a strait leading to the Pacific Ocean. The Spanish ships then sailed south along the coast of Patagonia. The Gulf of St. George.

Winter quarters established at Port Julian, at 49degrees 15' S. September 1520 set a southward course again.

On October 21 the Spanish found a strait leading westward. A miricle that the Spanish ships got through its 325 mile length; proved to be difficult.

March 6, 1521 exhausted and scurvey-ridden, they landed at the island of Guam, and ten days later they reached the Philippines.

This is where the Spanish navigator Magellon died.

Spanish Commander Juan Sebastian de Elcano continued and sailed across the Indian Ocean and rounded the Cape of Good Hope, and arrived at Seville on September 9, 1522 with only 17 survivors of the Spaniards who had
set sail three years earlier.

Commander Juan Sebastian de Elcano was very puzzled to find that his carefully kept log was one day off; however he was happy to find out that the cargo that he had brought back more than paid for the voyage.

This first circumnavigation marks the close of the Age of Discovery.

Commander Juan Sebastian de Elcano and Magellan and their men had demonstrated that the Spanish Admiral Cristobal Colon had discovered a New World and not the route to China and that the Indies, the West Indies, were separated from the East Indies by a vast ocean.

At this point there remained unanswered questions.

1.   Were there northern passages between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, less dangerous than the Strait of Magellan to the south? and

2.   Was there a great landmass somewhere in the vast southern oceans that would balance the northern continents?

These were questions the Spaniards are asking upon the return of Commander Juan Sebastian de Elcano from his trip which changed the course of the world. e-mail Judy Baca Romero with 1stbooks @neta.com comments, information