Ferdinand Magellan
Portuguese explorer (1480–1521)
Ferdinand Magellan was a Portuguese explorer best known for planning and leading the 1519–1522 Spanish expedition to the East Indies. During this expedition, he became the first European to encounter the Strait of Magellan, performed the first European crossing of the Pacific Ocean, and made the first known European contact with the Philippines. Magellan was killed in battle in the Philippines in 1521, but his crew, commanded by Spanish navigator Juan Sebastián Elcano, completed the return trip to Spain in 1522, achieving the first circumnavigation of Earth in history.
“Ferdinand Magellan” enters the record as portuguese explorer (1480–1521). Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Ferdinand, Magellan and Portuguese can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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“Ferdinand Magellan” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Ferdinand, Magellan and Portuguese provides the most credible route into that argument.
The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 23, 2026. The first chronological checks are 1519, 1522 and 1521.
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This entry incorporates text from “Ferdinand Magellan” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.