Juan Sebastián Elcano

person · earth · Global

The Basque master who brought the Victoria home and therefore completed the first circumnavigation, a fact routinely displaced by Magellan's name. Elcano had been among the mutineers in Patagonia and was pardoned into hard labour; after Magellan's death and the collapse of the expedition's command, he took the Victoria west from the Moluccas across the Indian Ocean, avoiding Portuguese ports he had no right to enter, rounding the Cape and running north to reach Sanlúcar de Barrameda on 6 September 1522. Eighteen men landed from a fleet of five ships and some 270 who had sailed three years earlier. The single cargo of cloves the Victoria carried is generally said to have covered the cost of the entire expedition, which is the most eloquent available statement of what spices were worth and what the voyage cost in lives to obtain them.