structural:scholar_edition, stylistic:tone
Pacific crossing

Magellan (along with contemporary geographers) had no conception of the vastness of the Pacific Ocean. He imagined that South America was separated from the Spice Islands by a small sea, which he expected to cross in as little as three or four days. In fact, they spent three months and twenty days at sea, before reaching Guam and then the Philippines.

The fleet entered the Pacific from the Strait of Magellan on 28 November 1520 and initially sailed north, following the coast of Chile. By mid-December, they altered their course to west-north-west. They were unfortunate in that, had their course differed slightly, they might have encountered a number of Pacific islands which would have offered fresh food and water, such as the Marshall Islands, the Society Islands, the Solomon Islands or the Marquesas Islands. As it was, they encountered only two small uninhabited islands during the crossing, at which they were unable to land, the reason why they named them Islas Infortunadas. The first, sighted 24 January, they named San Pablo (Saint Paul in Spanish) – likely Puka-Puka. The second, sighted 21 February, they named Tiburones (Sharks in Spanish) – likely Caroline Island or Flint Island. They crossed the equator on 13 February.

Not expecting such a long journey, the ships were not stocked with adequate food and water, and much of the seal meat they had stocked putrefied in the equatorial heat. Pigafetta described the desperate conditions in his journal:

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, so that the yard should not break the rigging: they were very hard on account of the sun, rain, and wind, and we left them for four or five days in the sea, and then we put them a little on the embers, and so ate them; also the sawdust of wood, and rats which cost half-a-crown each, moreover enough of them were not to be got.

Moreover, most of the men suffered from symptoms of scurvy, whose cause was not understood at the time. Pigafetta reported that, of the 166 men who embarked on the Pacific crossing, 19 died and "twenty-five or thirty fell ill of diverse sicknesses". Magellan, Pigafetta, and other officers were not afflicted with scorbutic symptoms, which may have been because they ate preserved quince which (unbeknownst to them) contained the vitamin C necessary to protect against scurvy.