Ferdinand Magellan led a fleet of four ships and a crew of more than 230 men on a journey to secure the Spice Islands in Indonesia, starting from Spain in 1519. Along the way he named the Pacific Ocean, quelled a major mutiny attempt and overcame obstacle after obstacle, he and his crew subsisting for a great deal of the time on leather boots and other tidly scraps. By the time he reached the Philippines, still alive after so much travesty, he felt that he was a divine tool of God, and subsequently invincible. He tested out his theory in an unnecessary battle with the natives, and wound up somewhere on the ocean floor in many, many pieces.
In the end only nineteen members aboard one remaining ship reached Spain, the only true original circumnavigators of the globe. Captain Juan Sebastian del Cano took most of the credit and virtually ignored any help on the part of Magellan. For several hundred years Cano was the famous man who circled the earth, but one of the surviving crew members, Antonio Pigafetta, had kept a detailed diary of the voyage. Because Spanish elites disliked Magellan, they suppressed the journal for as long as they lived, but the record eventually came out, and scholars began to look at Magellan in a different light, so that now he is credited with the incredible feat, though he died thousands of miles from the final point, and Juan Sebastian del Cano and eighteen other survivors receive absolutely no recognition.
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