Juan Sebastian Elcano example essay topic

385 words
Juan Sebastian Elcano was born in Guetaria, Spain in 1476. He was a navigator. Trying to find an excuse from the King (Charles the fifth, Holy Roman Emperor), he signs on as a lower class general to Ferdinand Magellan's expedition to sail around the world. He and five other ships sailed to find another faster way from Spain's western side.

On the way there the commander of the expedition died in the Philippines in April 1521, due to that Juan Sebastian Elcano to over of the expedition and started to sail. During that time he was half way done and almost all of the food was gone, they lowered the amount that everyone would get and because of that people started to die out of starvation but the higher class people got more then everyone else to make sure the will stay health and alive to keep the voyage alive. Out of about 265 some odd people only 235 was alive that time. Since more people started die ing everyone would get more food, because there was a lot less people alive. Out of the five ships only one was still sailing and it was the Victoria the ship that Juan was on. There was no more food left and no one knew what to do, so they started to eat material mostly leather and that is what they survived on thru the voyage.

They ate the leather off of the sails and because of that people started to die and it quickly went from 235 to 150 and from 100 to 50 until There was only 18 people it was Juan and his 17 crew members. On September 6, 1522, Elcano sailed into Sanl'u car de Barra meda, Spain, on the Victoria, along with 17 other survivors of the 265 man expedition. The profits of the spices they carried made them rich though. The king conceded him a coat of arms picturing a globe with the saying: Primus mi hi (which means in Spanish, 'You went around me the first'). Truly, it was an East Asian native who was a servant of Magellan, that became the first man to circumnavigate the world when the fleet arrived to his home country.