In 1519, Ferdinand Magellan, leading an expedition of five ships and over 270 men, set sail from Spain in search of the Spice Islands. Three years later, one ship returned to port with just 18 men. Magellan was not among the survivors, having been killed in the Philippines. But the remainder of his party, quite inadvertently, had been first to circumnavigate the world.
One of the survivors of the voyage was Antonio Pigafetta, a young Italian nobleman...