[2][3][4] The expedition departed Spain in 1519 and returned there in 1522 led by Spanish navigator Juan Sebastián Elcano, who crossed the Indian Ocean after Magellan's death in the Philippines.

[3] It also marked the first crossing of the Pacific by a European expedition,[7] revealing the vast scale of that ocean, and proved that ships could sail around the world on a western sea route.

They reached an agreement with King Charles which granted them, among other things:[18] The expedition was funded largely by the Spanish Crown, which provided ships carrying supplies for two years of travel.

Several problems arose during the preparation of the trip, including lack of money, the king of Portugal trying to stop them, Magellan and other Portuguese incurring suspicion from the Spanish, and the difficult nature of Faleiro.

Crew members of other nations were also recorded, including 29 Italians, 17 French, and a smaller number of Flemish, German, Greek, Irish, English, Asian, and black sailors.

[48] Ruy Faleiro, who had initially been named co-captain with Magellan, developed mental health problems prior to departure (or, as other sources state, chose to remain behind after performing a horoscope reading indicating that the voyage would be fatal for him[49]) and was removed from the expedition by the king.

Juan de Cartagena, suspected illegitimate son of archbishop Fonseca, was named Inspector General of the expedition, responsible for its financial and trading operations.

During the ocean crossing, the Victoria's Sicilian master, Salomon Antón was caught in an act of sodomy with a Genoese apprentice sailor, António Varesa, off the coast of Guinea.

Antón was later executed on 20 December 1519, after the fleet's landfall in Brazil at Santa Lucia (present-day Rio de Janeiro), his strangled body being burnt.

The Armada carried a map of the Brazilian coastline, the Livro da Marinharia (the "Book of the Sea"), and also had a crew member, the Concepción's pilot, João Lopes Carvalho, who had previously visited Rio de Janeiro.

Carvalho was enlisted to lead the fleet's navigation down the Brazilian coastline to Rio, aboard the Trinidad, and also helped communicate with the locals, as he had some rudimentary knowledge of their Guarani language.

By the third week of March, weather conditions had become so desperate that Magellan decided they should find a safe harbour in which to wait out the winter before resuming the search for a passage in spring.

Around midnight of Easter Sunday, 1 April, Cartagena and Quesada covertly led thirty armed men, their faces covered with charcoal, aboard the San Antonio, where they ambushed Álvaro de Mezquita, the recently named captain of the ship.

The following morning (2 April), while the mutineers attempted to consolidate their forces aboard the San Antonio and the Victoria, a longboat of sailors drifted off course into the vicinity of the Trinidad.

More than forty[82] other conspirators, including Juan Sebastián Elcano,[83] were put in chains for much of the winter and made to perform the hard work of careening the ships, repairing their structure and scrubbing the bilge.

Three days later, the fleet was reunited, and the Concepción and San Antonio reported that the storm drew them through a narrow passage, not visible from sea, which continued for some distance.

[89] While the rest of the fleet waited for the return of the San Antonio, Gonzalo de Espinosa led a small ship to explore the further reaches of the strait.

Pigafetta reported that, of the 166 men[104][105][need quotation to verify] who embarked on the Pacific crossing, 19 died and "twenty-five or thirty fell ill of diverse sicknesses".

Instead, they dropped anchor thirty hours later on Guam, where they were met by native Chamorro people in proas, a type of outrigger canoe then unknown to Europeans.

[109] The next day, Magellan retaliated, sending a raiding party ashore which looted and burned forty or fifty Chamorro houses and killed seven men.

For the first time on the journey, Magellan's slave Enrique of Malacca found that he was able to communicate with the natives in Malay (an indication that they had indeed completed a circumnavigation, and were approaching familiar lands).

[114] On Sunday, 31 March, Easter Day, Magellan and fifty of his men came ashore to Limasawa to participate in the first Catholic Mass in the Philippines, given by the armada's chaplain.

Aganduru Moriz' account of the expedition[125] describes how Elcano's crew was attacked somewhere off the southeastern tip of Borneo by a Bruneian fleet commanded by one of the Luzones.

On 6 September 1522, Elcano and the remaining crew of Magellan's voyage arrived in Sanlúcar de Barrameda in Spain aboard Victoria, almost exactly three years after they departed.

[136] King Charles pressed for the release of the 12 men held captive by the Portuguese in Cape Verde, and they were eventually returned to Spain in small groups over the course of the following year.

[141] Antonio Pigafetta's journal, later published as Relazione del primo viaggio intorno al mondo, is the main primary source for much of what is known about Magellan's expedition.

Herrera's account is all the more accurate as he had access to Spanish and Portuguese sources that are nowhere to be found today, not least Andrés de San Martín's navigational notes and papers.

[146][147] In addition to Pigafetta's surviving journal, 11 other crew members kept written accounts of the voyage: Since there was not a set limit to the east, in 1524 both Portugal and Spain had tried to find the exact location of the antimeridian of Tordesillas, which would divide the world into two equal hemispheres and to resolve the "Moluccas issue".

Magellan's crew observed several animals that were entirely new to European science, including a "camel without humps", which was probably a guanaco, whose range extends to Tierra del Fuego.

[176] Although the Kurdish geographer Abu'l-Fida (1273–1331) had predicted that circumnavigators would accumulate a one-day offset,[177] Cardinal Gasparo Contarini was the first European to give a correct explanation of the discrepancy.