Magellan - at the service of Spain, attempted to find a westward route to the Spice Islands of Indonesia.
On September 20, 1520, Magellan led a flotilla of five ships with a crew of 250 out of the Spanish port of Sancar de Barrameda. Their goal was to find a water passage around the Americas and continue on to the East Indies. This was a true journey into the unknown
This voyage became known as the first successful attempt at world circumnavigation. (He did not complete his final westward voyage; he was killed during the Battle of Mactan in the Philippines. )
Because of the calm seas and favorable winds he found in the waters to the west of South America, Magellan named the ocean the "Pacific."
Magellan's expedition was the first to circumnavigate the globe and the first to navigate the strait in South America connecting the Atlantic and Pacific oceans.
Magellan's crew observed several animals that were entirely new to European science. These included the "camel without humps", which could have been the llama, guanaco, vicuña, or alpaca.
The crew described a black "goose" that had to be skinned instead of plucked - a penguin.
Two of the closest galaxies, the Magellanic Clouds, were discovered by crew members in the Southern Hemisphere.
The full extent of the Earth was also realised, since their voyage was 14,460 leagues (69,800 km or 43,400 mi).
Upon their return they observed a mismatch of one day between their calendars and those who did not travel, even though they faithfully maintained their ship's log. Led to the international date line - This phenomenon caused great excitement at the time, to the extent that a special delegation was sent to the Pope to explain this oddity to him.
He became one of the first individuals to cross all the meridians of the globe.
He was the first person to lead an expedition sailing westward from Europe to Asia and to cross the Pacific Ocean.
Magellan should also be recognised as the first European explorer to enter the Pacific from the Strait of Magellan, which he discovered.
He is also remembered as the first European to reach the archipelago of what is now known as the Philippines, which was unknown to the western world before its discovery.
Magellan didn't live to reach his goal - he lost his life while battling natives on an island in the Philippines. Reduced to two ships, the remainder of his crew pressed on with their mission, successfully reaching the Moluccas - the Spice Islands. Loaded with cloves, the two ships continued homeward. Along the way, the Portuguese captured one vessel reducing the original fleet of five ships to one. Finally, on September 6, 1522, almost exactly three years after its departure, the Victoria with nineteen crew aboard returned to Spain.
The sale of the cargo of the one ship that returned to Spain more than paid for the expenses of the expedition - however since only a fraction of the original crew (Four crewmen of the original fifty- five on the Trinidad finally returned to Spain in 1525. Fifty-one of them had died in war or from disease.) the wages cannot be claimed to be paid in full.