SUCH DAY AS TODAY 498 YEARS AGO…

… the expedition commanded by Magallanes finished crossing the strait and ended at last in the great sea that he baptized as “Pacific”. They were 38 days of navigation through the labyrinthine marine corridor to which they had accessed by the Atlantic Ocean. They had already lost a ship, the San Antonio. He had deserted before reaching the strait and had returned to Seville. There were only four naos left. On November 28th 1520, almost a year and a half after the departure, Francisco Albo, the bosun of the nao Trinidad, described with these words in his Derrotero (name he put to the book he wrote) that important day:

“Leaving this strait, the coast returns to the North, and on the left we saw a cape with an island and we named it, Cabo Hermoso and Cabo Deseado, and it is at the height of the Cabo de las Vírgenes, which is the first embouchure . ”

Pigaffeta, chronicler of the expedition, did it like this:

“… Wednesday, the twenty-eighth of November, 1520, we came forth out of the said strait, and entered into the Pacific sea, where we remained three months and twenty days without taking in provisions or other refreshments, and we only ate old biscuit reduced to powder, and full of grubs, and stinking from the dirt which the rats had made on it when eating the good biscuit, and we drank water that was yellow and stinking. We also ate the ox hides which were under the main-yard,^[93] so that the yard should not break the rigging”