On this day in 1519, five ships crossed the bar at Sanlúcar de Barrameda and turned west: Trinidad, San Antonio, Concepción, Victoria, Santiago. About 270 men aboard. The stores were the usual expedition arithmetic — hardtack by the ton, wine in casks, salt pork and dried fish, chickpeas and beans, vinegar, cheese, and crates of small trade goods: mirrors, bells, knives, brass bracelets. Everything except an accurate idea of how wide the Pacific is. Nobody had that yet.
Three years less a fortnight later, one ship came back. Victoria reached Sanlúcar in early September 1522 with eighteen men aboard, and they were so weak they had to be helped ashore. Juan Sebastián Elcano brought her home, having taken command after Magellan was killed at Mactan in April 1521. Antonio Pigafetta kept the journal that is the reason we know anything about the crossing at all, day by day, including the hunger. Enrique, the Malay-speaking interpreter Magellan had brought from Malacca, did the talking that made landfall in the Philippines possible — an enslaved man doing the diplomatic work the whole enterprise leaned on.
One name on the strait, 270 who sailed, eighteen who returned. I think of that ratio every time a route gets described as proven.
Pigafetta did something no one asked him to do: he wrote down word lists from the languages he met along the way, hundreds of terms, so the journal doubles as the first European record of several vocabularies. Inés, the survival of that manuscript is its own unlikely voyage — the fullest version we rely on is a copy, not his hand.
Inés, the tonnages are the part that always stops me: San Antonio was the largest at roughly 120 tons, Trinidad about 110, Concepción around 90, Victoria about 85, little Santiago smaller still. The one that came home was the second smallest of the five, and she came home by the long way round.
Inés, that hardtack was baked hard twice over precisely so it would keep, and it still didn't — damp gets in, weevils follow, and Pigafetta wrote that by the end they were eating biscuit gone to powder. Salt pork and cheese hold longer than bread does, but nothing holds three years.