# 237 men sailed with five ships. Eighteen came back to Seville

*Around the world with Pigafetta, 1519–1522*

That is Antonio Pigafetta's own count – a Venetian nobleman who paid his own way aboard – of the men who sailed down the Guadalquivir on Monday morning, 10 August 1519. Other sources give other figures, anywhere from 237 to 280 depending on who is counted, but 237 is his number, and he is the only witness who wrote down the whole voyage. Three years later, one ship out of five, *Victoria*, made it home with eighteen men aboard, most of them sick. The map below follows his journal chapter by chapter, in a projection that never splits the circumnavigation at an edge.

Marius Comper · 18 September 2026

## From Seville to Seville, the long way round

King Charles I of Spain funded the expedition to find a westward route to the Moluccas – the source of cloves and nutmeg – without sailing through waters Portugal controlled to the east. Magellan, a Portuguese captain in Spanish service, commanded five ships: *Trinidad*, *San Antonio*, *Concepción*, *Victoria* and *Santiago*. The map below follows their real route, drawn on a projection that never stops at an edge: longitude keeps decreasing westward, chapter after chapter, the way they actually sailed, instead of snapping back to the other side of the map.

The solid line runs through the places Pigafetta names, quoted from his own journal. The dashed line marks the stretches his journal leaves vague – an uncertainly identified island, a run of days adrift on open ocean. Distances are measured on the great circle, through the named points, so the real voyage, fighting headwinds and detours, covered far more sea.

Dates come from Pigafetta's journal wherever he gives them exactly – he kept count of the days with a discipline he would prove at Cape Verde, where he discovered he had lost an entire day. Where the journal is silent, the date is from later scholarship, and the page says so.

## I. Leaving Seville (10 August 1519)

- Distance on the map: 70 km (great-circle, through the named places)
- Where: Seville, Sanlúcar de Barrameda

The fleet sailed down the Guadalquivir from Seville to Sanlúcar de Barrameda, where it waited several more days to finish fitting out, before standing out to sea near the end of September 1519 – a date Pigafetta himself does not give.

“Monday morning, August 10, Saint Lawrence's day, in the year abovesaid, the fleet, having been supplied with all the things necessary for the sea, and counting those of every nationality, we were two hundred and thirty-seven men, made ready to leave the harbor of Siviglia,” Pigafetta writes at the very start of his journal. It is the only figure he gives for the departure, and the one this page uses: other sources – the Casa de Contratación's rosters, summarised by Robertson in 1906 – push the number toward 280, depending on who is counted at the dock and who joined later, at Tenerife.

The ships fired many rounds of artillery and dropped down the river Betis, as the Guadalquivir was then also called, passing a place where a collapsed old bridge left two columns under the water – a hazard the pilot had to know by heart to avoid striking them. They reached Sanlúcar de Barrameda, the Duke of Medina Sidonia's port, where the fleet stayed “many days” finishing preparations, as Pigafetta puts it, without giving the exact date it actually put out to open sea. Later scholarship places that day around 20 September 1519.

Five ships carried the fleet: *Trinidad*, Magellan's flagship; *San Antonio*; *Concepción*; *Victoria*; and *Santiago*, the smallest. Pigafetta, a Venetian nobleman who had asked for and won a place aboard at his own expense, would be the only one of them to write down the whole voyage, from this departure to the return, three years later.

> Monday morning, August 10, Saint Lawrence's day, in the year abovesaid, the fleet, having been supplied with all the things necessary for the sea, and counting those of every nationality, we were two hundred and thirty-seven men, made ready to leave the harbor of Siviglia.
>
> — The opening sentence of the journal

## II. The Atlantic and the Patagonian coast (August 1519 – October 1520)

- Distance on the map: 11,840 km (great-circle, through the named places), of which 240 km dashed
- Where: Verzin (Brazil), Port San Julián, the mouth of the Santa Cruz river

The route from “Verzin”, Pigafetta's name for Brazil, to Port San Julián, where the fleet wintered, with a dashed detour to the mouth of the Santa Cruz river, where the <em>Santiago</em> was lost.

The Atlantic crossing took several months, with a stop at Tenerife and another on the coast Pigafetta calls, using the Portuguese word for the red dyewood, “Verzin” – today's Brazil. From there the fleet worked down the South American coast looking for a passage to the other ocean, without finding one, until Port San Julián, where Magellan decided to winter, in March 1520.

The winter at San Julián brought the expedition's first serious crisis: several of the Spanish captains mutinied against the Portuguese commander. Magellan put down the revolt, had Gaspar de Quesada executed, and – at the Crown's request that Cartagena not be killed – marooned the ringleader Juan de Cartagena and a complicit priest on the Patagonian coast; their fate afterward is unknown.

From the same anchorage, Magellan sent the smallest ship, *Santiago*, to scout the coast further south. It broke apart on the rocks at the mouth of the Santa Cruz river. “All the men were saved as by a miracle, not even getting wet,” Pigafetta writes – two of them reached the ships after great hardship, and the rest had to be fed for four days on a nearly hundred-mile trek, finding only ice to drink.

> All the men were saved as by a miracle, not even getting wet.
>
> — On the wreck of the Santiago

## III. The strait (21 October – 28 November 1520)

- Distance on the map: 440 km (great-circle, through the named places)
- Where: Cape of the Eleven Thousand Virgins, Cape Deseado

From “Cape of the Eleven Thousand Virgins”, the Atlantic mouth of the strait, to “Cape Deseado”, where the fleet came out into the Pacific – both names are Pigafetta's own.

The fleet found the passage in October 1520 and spent more than a month working through its rocks – which Pigafetta names, at the Atlantic entrance, “the cape of the eleven thousand virgins”. Inside the strait, the captain of the *San Antonio*, Álvaro de Mesquita, was overthrown by his own crew, who turned the ship back toward Spain against Magellan's orders: “Sant Antonio turned back at night and fled,” Pigafetta writes, unable to say exactly why – the ship had carried a large share of the fleet's supplies.

With three ships left of five, the fleet came out of the strait on 28 November 1520, at the cape Pigafetta calls “Deseado” – Desired. “Had we sailed always to the west we would have gone completely round the world without finding any land except the cape of the eleven thousand virgins, which is the cape of this strait toward the ocean sea, and the desired cape of the Pacific sea,” he writes, noting the two capes lie at nearly the same latitude, 52 degrees toward the antarctic pole.

> Sant Antonio turned back at night and fled.
>
> — On the San Antonio's desertion, inside the strait

## IV. Crossing the Pacific (28 November 1520 – 6 March 1521)

- Distance on the map: 27,880 km (great-circle, through the named places), of which 10,960 km dashed
- Where: the Ladrones (Guam)

The two “Unfortunate Isles” are approximately identified, by later scholarship, with atolls in Polynesia – the line to them is dashed, since no identification is certain.

Three months and twenty days without any fresh food, on a sea they named Pacific because, Pigafetta writes, “we did not suffer any storm” – but also without sighting land, beyond two deserted islets, two hundred leagues apart. “We ate biscuit, which was no longer biscuit, but powder of biscuits swarming with worms, for they had eaten the good, and stank strongly of the urine of rats. We drank yellow water that had been putrid for many days. We also ate some ox hides that covered the top of the mainyard, to prevent the yard from chafing the shrouds, and which had become exceedingly hard because of the sun, rain, and wind; we left them in the sea for four or five days, and then placed them for a few moments on top of the embers, and so ate them; and often we ate sawdust from boards. Rats were sold for one-half ducado apiece, and even then we could not get them.”

Scurvy killed nineteen men and the captive Patagonian giant, along with an Indian from Verzin; twenty-five or thirty more fell ill. “I, by the grace of God, suffered no sickness,” Pigafetta writes – he speaks only for himself, not claiming to be the only well man aboard. They sailed nearly four thousand leagues across that open sea, seeing nothing but sky and water, until, on 6 March 1521, they sighted the islands they called the Ladrones – Thieves – today's Guam and its neighbours.

> We ate biscuit, which was no longer biscuit, but powder of biscuits swarming with worms... Rats were sold for one-half ducado apiece, and even then we could not get them.
>
> — On the hunger of the Pacific crossing

## V. The Philippines: Cebu and Mactan (16 March – 1 May 1521)

- Distance on the map: 2,410 km (great-circle, through the named places)
- Where: Homonhon, Limasawa, Cebu, Mactan, Bohol

From Homonhon, the first Philippine landfall, to Cebu, where the king was baptised, to Mactan, where Magellan died, and back to Cebu for the banquet that killed two more commanders.

From the Ladrones, the fleet reached the archipelago later named the Philippines, at Homonhon, then Cebu, where the local king, Humabon, was baptised along with hundreds of his subjects – a diplomatic win Magellan wanted to back with force, attacking the neighbouring island of Mactan, whose ruler, Lapu-Lapu, had refused submission.

“The captain desired to fight on Saturday, because it was the day especially holy to him,” Pigafetta writes of 27 April 1521. Eight of Magellan's men died with him in the battle, along with four baptised islanders killed by mistake by their own boats' mortars; “of the enemy, only fifteen were killed, while many of us were wounded.” Cebu's king offered any price for the captain's body; Mactan refused, wanting to keep it “as a memorial.”

A few days later, on 1 May 1521, a banquet offered by Cebu's king turned out to be a trap: at least two of the fleet's new commanders, Duarte Barbosa and João Serrão, were killed. The fleet's interpreter, Magellan's slave Enrique – freed, by the captain's will, upon his death, but threatened back into slavery by the new commander Barbosa – is suspected of having betrayed the plan, an episode Pigafetta's journal leaves to be inferred rather than states outright.

> The captain desired to fight on Saturday, because it was the day especially holy to him. Eight of our men were killed with him in that battle... of the enemy, only fifteen were killed.
>
> — On Magellan's death at Mactan, 27 April 1521

## VI. To the Moluccas (November – December 1521)

- Distance on the map: 2,780 km (great-circle, through the named places)
- Where: Palawan, Brunei, Tidore

From Bohol, where the <em>Concepción</em> was burned, through Palawan and Brunei, to Tidore, where the fleet finally found the cloves it had come for.

With too few men left to crew three ships, the survivors burned the *Concepción* near the island of Bohol, moving anything of value onto the remaining two. The rest of the way to the Moluccas ran through Palawan and the sultanate of Brunei, with detours and small skirmishes, until, in November 1521, the two remaining ships, *Trinidad* and *Victoria*, reached Tidore, one of the clove islands King Charles had wanted from the start.

The kings of Tidore, Jailolo, Bacán, and the son of the king of Ternate escorted the ships out – but the *Trinidad* suddenly began taking on water at the bottom, just as it tried to weigh anchor. “The water was rushing in as through a pipe, but we were unable to find where it was coming in,” Pigafetta writes. The local king sent divers to search for the leak underwater, without success; the fleet's captain, Gonzalo Gómez de Espinosa, then decided *Victoria* would sail home alone while *Trinidad* stayed behind for repairs – a decision that would cost nearly everyone left aboard it.

> The water was rushing in as through a pipe, but we were unable to find where it was coming in.
>
> — On the Trinidad's leak, at Tidore

## VII. The Indian Ocean and the lost day (December 1521 – 9 July 1522)

- Distance on the map: 19,200 km (great-circle, through the named places)
- Where: Timor, the Cape of Good Hope, Cape Verde (Santiago island)

The lone route of the <em>Victoria</em>, past Timor, round the Cape of Good Hope, to Cape Verde – where the crew discovered they had lost an entire day of reckoning.

*Victoria* sailed on alone, with a much-reduced crew, past Timor – where, it would later emerge, some deserters would die of hunger or be killed for their own crimes – and on through the Indian Ocean, toward “the cape of Bonna Speranza,” which they rounded without landing, to avoid the Portuguese, from whom King Charles was taking the Moluccas trade.

Forced by hunger, they landed anyway at the Cape Verde islands, a Portuguese colony, lying that they had lost their foremast at the equator rather than at the Cape of Good Hope, and that the rest of the fleet had already sailed for Spain. With that story they got two boatloads of rice. Sending men ashore to ask the date, they learned the Portuguese counted Thursday, while aboard ship, where Pigafetta “had always kept well” and “set down every day without any interruption,” it was Wednesday. “It was no error,” he would learn, “but as the voyage had been made continually toward the west and we had returned to the same place as does the sun, we had made that gain of twenty-four hours.” On the second boat sent for rice, the Portuguese detained thirteen men, having learned that the captain's death had been concealed; the rest fled in haste, fearing they too would be seized.

> It was no error, but as the voyage had been made continually toward the west and we had returned to the same place as does the sun, we had made that gain of twenty-four hours.
>
> — On the lost day, at Cape Verde, 9 July 1522

## VIII. Home to Seville (6 – 8 September 1522)

- Distance on the map: 3,100 km (great-circle, through the named places)
- Where: Sanlúcar de Barrameda, Seville

The <em>Victoria</em>'s last leg, from Cape Verde to Sanlúcar and Seville – the same harbour the whole fleet had left, three years before.

“On Saturday, September six, 1522, we entered the bay of San Lucar with only eighteen men, the greater part of them sick” – the rest of the sixty who had left the Moluccas had died of hunger, fled to the island of Timor, or been killed for their own crimes. From the day they left that bay, they reckoned, they had sailed fourteen thousand four hundred and sixty leagues and completed the circuit of the world from east to west.

Two days later, Monday, September 8, *Victoria* anchored by the mole of Seville and unloaded all the artillery. Pigafetta writes that they went, “all of us in shirt and barefoot, each with a torch in hand,” to pray at the churches of Santa Maria della Vittoria and Santa Maria dell'Antigua – a vow made, most likely, at one of the voyage's darkest moments.

Pigafetta himself went further still: to the court at Valladolid, where he gave the Emperor Charles not gold or silver but a journal written in his own hand; then to Portugal, to France, and finally to his native Italy, where he wrote his account for Philippe de Villers l'Isle-Adam, Grand Master of the Knights of Rhodes. It is his last certain appearance in history.

> On Saturday, September six, 1522, we entered the bay of San Lucar with only eighteen men, the greater part of them sick.
>
> — The journal's last major entry

## The five ships that left, and what became of them

Five names leave Seville in August 1519. Pigafetta's journal follows each to its end – wreck, desertion, burning, abandonment, or return – and only one makes it home.

### Santiago (lost, May 1520)

The smallest ship, sent to scout the coast below Port San Julián. It broke apart at the mouth of the Santa Cruz river; the whole crew was saved, but the ship could not be repaired.

### San Antonio (deserted, November 1520)

The fleet's largest supply ship. Its crew overthrew the captain Magellan had appointed, Álvaro de Mesquita, and turned the ship back to Spain through the strait, against the commander's orders.

### Concepción (burned, May 1521)

Too few men were left to crew three ships after Mactan and the Cebu banquet. The survivors burned it near Bohol and moved anything of value onto the two remaining ships.

### Trinidad (abandoned, December 1521)

Magellan's flagship. It sprang a leak at Tidore just as it tried to sail for home; it stayed behind for repairs, with most of the fleet's remaining men, and never brought them back to Spain whole.

### Victoria (home, 6 September 1522)

The only ship to complete the circumnavigation. It sailed alone from Tidore and kept going without stopping at a Portuguese port, all the way to Sanlúcar, with eighteen men aboard.

## In Pigafetta or not?

Pigafetta's journal is the near-sole source for much of what is known about the voyage, but it does not contain everything believed about it today. Eight claims; each is checked directly against his text, in research/raw/.

1. **The departure count.** Pigafetta himself writes that 237 men left Seville. *In his journal, yes: “counting those of every nationality, we were two hundred and thirty-seven men.” Other sources – the port's own rosters – give figures up to 280, but this one is his.*
2. **The wreck of the Santiago.** The Santiago sank with its whole crew, scouting the Patagonian coast. *No: Pigafetta writes explicitly that “all the men were saved as by a miracle, not even getting wet.” The ship was lost; the men were not.*
3. **The day Magellan died.** Magellan chose Saturday for the Mactan attack because it was his holy day. *Yes: “the captain desired to fight on Saturday, because it was the day especially holy to him,” writes Pigafetta, who was there.*
4. **The losses at Mactan.** Only fifteen men died on the enemy's side at Mactan. *Yes, that is Pigafetta's own count – the contrast with the eight Europeans killed, plus the captain, is his own point: a local force beat a better-armed one.*
5. **Elcano's name.** Pigafetta names Juan Sebastián Elcano as the man who brought the Victoria home. *No: Pigafetta's journal never mentions Elcano at all, as the 1906 edition's editor himself notes. His name comes only from the expedition's other documents.*
6. **The price of rats.** On the Pacific crossing, rats caught aboard were sold for money, as food. *Yes: “rats were sold for one-half ducado apiece, and even then we could not get them,” Pigafetta writes of the crossing's hunger.*
7. **The lost day.** At Cape Verde, the crew discovered they had lost an entire day from their calendar. *Yes: the Portuguese there counted Thursday, the ship counted Wednesday – the gap came from sailing continually west, “to the same place as does the sun.”*
8. **Health on arrival.** All eighteen survivors who reached Sanlúcar were healthy. *No: Pigafetta writes explicitly “the greater part of them sick” about the eighteen who entered the bay of San Lucar.*

## Who came back: the numbers that don't agree

### How many left

Pigafetta gives 237 in the journal's very first sentence. Seville's port rosters, kept at the Archivo General de Indias and summarised by Robertson in 1906, push the figure toward 280, because they count men added at Tenerife or supercargoes Pigafetta doesn't count as part of “the sea.” There is no single correct number: each source counts something different. This page uses 237, the direct witness's own figure, and says where every other number comes from.

### How many returned

Eighteen on the *Victoria*, at Sanlúcar, on 6 September 1522 – Pigafetta's own figure, “the greater part of them sick.” It is not, though, the final tally of survivors: a few men from the *Trinidad*, captured by the Portuguese in the Moluccas, reached home years later, and the thirteen detained at Cape Verde were released and repatriated soon after. It depends what is counted – those home by 1522, or those who ever made it.

### Why Elcano is missing

Juan Sebastián Elcano, the captain who brought *Victoria* home on its last leg, never appears in Pigafetta's journal at all – an absence the 1906 edition's editor notes directly. His name comes from the expedition's other documents, not from the Venetian's account, which keeps talking about Magellan even after his death.

## One journal, four manuscripts

Pigafetta never published the complete journal. He gave a handwritten copy, now lost, to the Emperor Charles at Valladolid in October 1522, then wrote out, from memory or from notes, a version for the Grand Master of the Knights of Rhodes, Philippe de Villers l'Isle-Adam. Four old manuscripts of his work survive – one Italian, at the Biblioteca Ambrosiana in Milan, and three French, in Paris – no two of them identical.

James Alexander Robertson, editor of the 1906 edition this page reads, compared all four and translated the Italian (Ambrosiana) manuscript for the main text, noting the important variants from the other three. His edition is the first in English to publish the complete Italian text alongside the translation, with the maps Pigafetta himself drew.

A first, heavily abridged printed version had circulated in French since the sixteenth century; only Carlo Amoretti's edition of 1800 brought the fuller Italian text to light. Robertson, a century later, was the first to publish everything now known of the journal.

## How far they sailed

Distances are measured on the map, on the Earth's great circle, through the points the journal names. Real wind, currents and detours added far more sea than a straight line shows.

| Chapter | Km on the map | When | What Pigafetta counts |
| --- | ---: | --- | --- |
| Leaving Seville | 70 | 10 August 1519 | 237 men, five ships |
| The Atlantic and the Patagonian coast | 11,840 | August 1519 – October 1520 | wintering at San Julián from March 1520 |
| The strait | 440 | 21 October – 28 November 1520 | “52 degrees toward the antarctic pole” at both mouths of the strait |
| Crossing the Pacific | 27,880 | 28 November 1520 – 6 March 1521 | three months and twenty days, nearly four thousand leagues |
| The Philippines: Cebu and Mactan | 2,410 | 16 March – 1 May 1521 | eight dead with Magellan, fifteen of the enemy |
| To the Moluccas | 2,780 | November – December 1521 | two ships left of five |
| The Indian Ocean and the lost day | 19,200 | December 1521 – 9 July 1522 | thirteen men detained at Cape Verde |
| Home to Seville | 3,100 | 6 – 8 September 1522 | 14,460 leagues from Seville to Seville |

The eight chapters add up to 67,720 kilometres on the map, of which 56,510 kilometres run through places the journal names directly. Pigafetta himself counts 14,460 leagues – an old navigational unit, reckoned from speed and time at sea, which usually overstates the great-circle distance.

## Sources and method

The text is read in James Alexander Robertson's 1906 English translation, published alongside the Italian original of the Ambrosiana manuscript, both public domain. Quotations on the page are Robertson's own English, checked where possible against the facing Italian. Every quotation is located to its line in the raw files (research/raw/) before it reaches the page.

The route runs through the places the journal names, at their modern positions. Where a place's identification is uncertain – the two “Unfortunate Isles” in the Pacific, for instance – the page says so and draws that segment dashed. Distances are sums of great-circle arcs, rounded to the nearest ten kilometres; the map projection is explained in scripts/geo.py.

The number of men who left and the number who returned vary by source, as the “Who came back” section shows: the page always uses Pigafetta's own figure and says explicitly when another source gives a different number.

### The text

- [Antonio Pigafetta, *Magellan's Voyage Around the World*, ed. James Alexander Robertson, vol. I (Cleveland, Arthur H. Clark Co., 1906) – the Italian text and the English translation](https://archive.org/details/magellansvoyagea01piga)
- [Idem, vol. II (1906) – the rest of the narrative, the appended documents, and Robertson's notes](https://archive.org/details/magellansvoyagea02piga)
- [Idem, vol. III (1906) – the bibliography and index](https://archive.org/details/magellansvoyagea03piga)

### The crew and the numbers

- The Casa de Contratación registers (Seville) and the Archivo General de Indias, with the crew rosters, as summarised in Robertson's 1906 notes and in Tim Joyner, *Magellan* (International Marine, 1992)
- Laurence Bergreen, *Over the Edge of the World* (William Morrow, 2003), for the cross-checked chronology of the surviving logs

### What still stands

- [The Strait of Magellan: still an active shipping route, with dozens of large-vessel transits a year](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strait_of_Magellan)
- [The Lapu-Lapu shrine on Mactan, raised on the traditional site of the 1521 battle](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mactan_Shrine)
- [Torre del Oro, Seville: the tower on the Guadalquivir bank, built 1220–1221, that the fleet passed both leaving and returning](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torre_del_Oro)

### The map

- [Natural Earth, 1:10m layers (land, lakes, rivers) and 1:50m (regions), public domain](https://www.naturalearthdata.com/)

---

Text, map and data: [Marius Comper](https://mariuscomper.uk/en/) · https://mariuscomper.uk/in-jurul-lumii-pigafetta/en/