On Wednesday, the twenty-eighth of November, 1520, the three ships left the strait and entered the unexplored expanse of the Pacific. “In the course of three months and twenty days,” Pigafetta observes, “we traversed nearly four thousand leagues on the ocean called by us the Pacific, on account of our not having experienced during this period any tempestuous weather. In this long space of time we did not descry any land, except two desert islands. On these we saw nothing but birds and trees, therefore we named them, Isole Sfortunato[352] (The Unfortunate Islands).... The two islands are two hundred leagues apart. The first lies in fifteen degrees south latitude, the second in nine degrees. According to the measure which we made of the voyage with the chain at the poop, we ran daily about sixty to seventy leagues.[353] If God and the Holy Mother had not granted us a fortunate voyage we should all have perished from hunger on so vast a sea. I do not think that any one will hereafter venture on a similar voyage.[354] “If we had continued on a western course on the same parallel after leaving the strait we should have circumnavigated the globe without seeing any land except that extending from the Cape of the Eleven Thousand Virgins, at the eastern head of the strait, in the Ocean Sea (Mar oceano), to Cabo Deseado, at the western end, in the Pacific Sea (Mar pacifico). The two capes are in fifty-two degrees south latitude. “The antarctic pole has not as many stars as the arctic. At the former a large number of small stars cluster together which form two _nebulæ_. They are separated from each other and are somewhat dim. In these _nebulæ_ are two large and brilliant stars which move very little. These indicate the antarctic pole. Although the needle declined somewhat from the arctic pole it still oscillated toward it, but not with the same force as when in the northern hemisphere. When the captain-general out at sea directed the course in which the pilots should steer, he asked them in what direction they steered. All of them replied that they bore in the direction in which he had ordered them. He then informed them that their course was wrong and directed them to correct the needle, because, as they were in the southern hemisphere, it had not the same power to designate the true north as in the northern hemisphere. When we got out in the open sea, we saw, in the west, a cross of five very bright stars. “We steered northwest by west till we reached the equator in one hundred and twenty-two degrees of longitude, west of the line of demarkation.... After we crossed the equator we steered west by north. We then ran two hundred leagues toward the west, when, changing our course again, we ran west by south until we reached thirteen degrees of north latitude. We proposed by this course to reach Cape Catticara which geographers have placed in this latitude, but they are mistaken, for this cape lies twelve degrees more toward the north.”[355]