Victoria Returns: First Ship Circles the Globe
The Victoria, a battered carrack crewed by eighteen emaciated survivors, limped into Sanlucar de Barrameda, Spain, on September 6, 1522, completing the first circumnavigation of the Earth. Ferdinand Magellan, who had organized and led the expedition, was dead, killed in a skirmish in the Philippines sixteen months earlier. Of the five ships and roughly 270 men who departed in September 1519, only one ship and eighteen men returned. Juan Sebastian Elcano, who navigated the Victoria home across the Indian Ocean and around the Cape of Good Hope, asked King Charles V for a coat of arms. He received one bearing a globe encircled by a ribbon reading "Primus circumdedisti me" (You first encircled me). Several of the crew had to be carried ashore.
September 6, 1522
504 years ago
Key Figures & Places
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