Last Voyage of Magellan

Five ships left Sanlúcar de Barrameda on September 20, 1519. One ship came back. It arrived on September 6, 1522, three years and sixteen days after the departure, with eighteen men aboard out of the two hundred and seventy who had left. The man who had organized the expedition — who had given his name to the strait and the ocean — was not among the eighteen. He had been killed in the Philippines on April 27, 1521, in a battle he should not have fought, on a beach he should not have been on, for a cause that had nothing to do with the circumnavigation that his death interrupted and that the surviving crew completed without him.He is Ferdinand Magellan. He organized the first circumnavigation of the Earth. He did not survive to complete it.The Last Voyage of Magellan is a literary novel about the difference between organizing a discovery and surviving long enough to see it completed — about the Portuguese navigator who believed in the western route to the Spice Islands when the maps could not confirm it and the captains doubted it, who found the Strait at the southern tip of South America after thirty-eight days of navigating waters no European had entered, who named the Pacific and crossed it in three months and twenty days that nearly killed the fleet with scurvy and starvation, and who died on a beach in the Philippines six months before the expedition he had organized reached its destination.The novel follows the progressive reduction of the fleet from five ships to one. The Santiago wrecked on the Patagonian coast. The San Antonio deserted in the Strait and sailed back to Spain. The Concepción burned in the Philippines when there were not enough surviving men to crew three ships. The Trinidad captured by the Portuguese in the Moluccas. The Victoria — the single ship that completed the circuit — arriving back at Sanlúcar de Barrameda with eighteen men and twenty-six tons of cloves and the proof that the Earth could be sailed around.The Easter mutiny at Port San Julián, where the three Spanish captains who resented the Portuguese commander organized the conspiracy that Magellan suppressed with the stratagem that recovered the Victoria before the mutineers understood what was happening. The Pacific crossing that was supposed to take a few weeks and took three months and twenty days. Pigafetta — the Italian chronicler who signed on to record the voyage and who was one of the eighteen who came back and who wrote the account that the world received as the record of the first circumnavigation. Lapu-Lapu — the Philippine chief who refused to submit, who organized the warriors on the beach, who kept Magellan's body when the Spanish tried to ransom it.The Last Voyage of Magellan is the sixth book in The Legend Series by I. Ioakim.