For the world was not so large but that the spice islands, three thousand miles east of Calicut, must be in Spanish waters. Firm in this belief, the Portuguese Fernam Magalhaes, who had been with Albuquerque at Malacca, offered to King Charles of Spain his services in search of the western passage. It was in 1519 that this man, "small in stature, who did not appear in himself to be much," yet withal a "man of courage and valiant in his thoughts," set out in five worn-out ships, manned by Spanish officers and a treacherous crew, to achieve the greatest feat of navigation ever recorded in the world's annals. Undaunted by an almost fatal mutiny or the terrors of an Antarctic winter, he pushed on through the dangerous straits which bear his name, north and west over that sea which, pacific as it was found to be, he would scarcely have attempted had he known its vast extent. Sailing on month after month, the crew depleted by sickness and death, living at last on rats and biscuit worms and roasted soaked leather thongs, the little expedition finally reached the Philippine Islands. Here the heroic commander lost his life; and but few of those who left Spain ever returned. One ship only out of five, the Victoria, crossed the Indian Ocean and at last, September 7, 1522, three years out from Spain, sailed with eighteen survivors into the port of St. Lucar. [Illustration: SCHOeNER'S GLOBE with Magellan's Route and Demarcation Line DRAWN 1523. From Bourne's _Spain in America_, p. 117. Harper and Brothers.] For the first time a single ship had circled the round earth. And through all the vicissitudes of that notable voyage, the object which during fifty years had inspired so many fruitless ventures was not forgotten. The little Victoria had shipped at Moluccas, and now deposited at St. Lucar, twenty-six tons of cloves. Yet few ships would ever again, in the way of trade, sail west from Spain for the spice islands; for between the Indies of Columbus and the Indies which he had hoped to find lay an uncharted and boundless ocean which reduced the Atlantic to the measure of familiar inland waters; and between the two seas, dimly perceived as yet, stretched the continent which was indeed a _Mondo Novo_--the New World of America. BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE