The Explorer Who Died On A Foreign Beach

On the morning of 27 April 1521 on the beach at Mactan Island in the Philippines, Ferdinand Magellan — who had already sailed three-quarters of the way around the world, who had found the strait at the tip of South America that no one believed existed, who had wept when he saw the Pacific Ocean for the first time — waded ashore through chest-deep water with fewer than sixty men to attack a chieftain named Lapulapu who had refused to convert to Christianity, and the reef between the beach and his ships was too wide for his cannons to reach, and Lapulapu’s warriors numbered in the hundreds, and Magellan’s men retreated into the water and left him, and he was hit by a spear in the leg and then surrounded, and his chronicler Antonio Pigafetta watched from the ship and wrote that Magellan turned back several times to see if his men were following, and they were not, and he was killed on the beach, and his body was never recovered, and his crew completed the circumnavigation of the earth without him.

Interesting Fact: The reason Magellan attacked Mactan at all was not for Spain. The chief of Cebu, Rajah Humabon, whom Magellan had converted to Christianity weeks earlier, asked him to use his firepower to destroy a personal rival on a neighbouring island. Magellan agreed — and walked into a fight the chief had engineered for his own advantage. After Magellan died, Humabon invited the surviving Spanish officers to a banquet on Cebu. Most of them were poisoned at the table. The expedition left the Philippines with its fleet reduced to two ships and eventually one. On 6 September 1522, the Victoria limped into the port of Sanlúcar de Barrameda with 18 survivors from the original 270. They had circumnavigated the earth. Magellan had been dead for over a year.

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