A skilled Portuguese captain and navigator in Spanish service, Magellan is famous for leading the first expedition to circumnavigate the planet, although he himself came to a violent end before the journey's end.

Born in 1480 to a noble Portuguese family, he briefly served as a court page. He sailed to India as part of a contingent installing the Portuguese viceroy, and lived there for almost a decade before being dismissed from Portuguese service for running an unauthorized side trade business. The Treaty of Tordesillas had recently divided the world between Spain and Portugal, and offered the enterprising Magellan opportunities to serve as an explorer in Spanish service. In March 1518, Charles I of Spain gave Magellan a sizeable grant to find a route to the Spice Islands by travelling west, and in September 1519 Magellan departed with five ships and 270 men.

The expedition was a fraught affair. Crossing the Atlantic took longer than expected, and nearly resulted in a mutiny. One ship was lost looking for a sea path through Patagonia, and another simply abandoned the expedition. Once a strait through the tip of South America was discovered and charted, and the expedition entered the Pacific, Magellan assumed that the Spice Islands were only a few day's sail away, utterly failing to anticipate the size of the Pacific.

Magellan was killed in a skirmish on the island of Mactan in the Philippines, after getting embroiled in a local war between tribes. On September 6th, 1522, only 18 surviving crew and one ship (the smallest in the original flotilla) returned to Spain. The survivors were never paid their full wages.

The expedition yielded a number of scientific discoveries (including verifying the proper size of the planet), but moreover, it proved the possibility of circumnavigating the planet. The European Age of Discovery was now in full flourish.