He called it the Peaceful Sea, the Mare Pacifico.
Then he continued in a western direction. He sailed for
ninety-eight days without seeing land. His people almost
perished from hunger and thirst and ate the rats that infested
the ships, and when these were all gone they chewed pieces of
sail to still their gnawing hunger.
In March of the year 1521 they saw land. Magellan called
it the land of the Ladrones (which means robbers) because the
natives stole everything they could lay hands on. Then further
westward to the Spice Islands!
Again land was sighted. A group of lonely islands. Magellan
called them the Philippines, after Philip, the son of his
master Charles V, the Philip II of unpleasant historical memory.
At first Magellan was well received, but when he used
the guns of his ships to make Christian converts he was killed
by the aborigines, together with a number of his captains and
sailors. The survivors burned one of the three remaining ships
and continued their voyage. They found the Moluccas, the
famous Spice Islands; they sighted Borneo and reached Tidor.
There, one of the two ships, too leaky to be of further use,
remained behind with her crew. The ``Vittoria,'' under Sebastian
del Cano, crossed the Indian Ocean, missed seeing the
northern coast of Australia (which was not discovered until
the first half of the seventeenth century when ships of the
Dutch East India Company explored this flat and inhospitable
land), and after great hardships reached Spain.
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