The story of that voyage of wild adventure seems never to grow old by repeating. The narrative of that voyage is too long for this brief sketch, but a few items may not be out of place. After many months of sailing in strange seas, he at length discovered a new land to which he gave the name of Patagonia. Here he found giants clad in skins, one of whom was greatly terrified at seeing his own image in a looking-glass. {90} [Image: The Straits of Magellan.] His perseverance was at last rewarded, and after fifteen months of struggling and adventures he discovered Cape Horn, passed through the strait which now bears his name and entered the Great South Sea, on Nov. 28th, 1520. An eye-witness relates that he shed tears of joy when he recognized its great expanse, and that God had brought him where he might grapple with its unknown dangers. Admiring its placid {91} surface he courteously gave it the name it will ever bear, the "Pacific Ocean." Magellan was the first European to discover that when the nights are long in the northern hemisphere they are correspondingly short in the southern. When he passed through the straits the nights were only four hours long. At the same time in Spain they were nearly fifteen hours long. And now the great sailor having burst through the barrier of the great American continent steered for the north-west. For three months and fifteen days he sailed on and on, but saw no inhabited land. He and his crew were compelled by famine to soak old leather in the sea, then boil it and make of it a wretched food; and to drink water that had become putrid by keeping; yet he resolutely held his course, though his men were dying daily. He estimated that he sailed over this unknown sea more than twelve thousand miles. In the whole history of human undertakings there is nothing that exceeds, if indeed there is anything that equals, this voyage of Magellan. That of Columbus dwindles away in comparison. It is a display of super-human courage and perseverance, an exhibition of heroic resolution, not to be diverted from its purpose by any motive, or any suffering, but inflexibly persisting to its end. This unparalleled resolution met its reward at last. He reached the Ladrones, a group of islands north of the equator. Thence he sailed to the Spice Islands, where he met with European merchants. He had accomplished his object and proven that the earth was round. At an island called Zebu, or Mutan, he was murdered either by the natives or by his own men. In a few days more his crew learned that they were actually in the vicinity of their friends. On the morning of Nov. 8th, 1521, they entered Tidore, the capital of the Spice Islands, and the king swore upon the Koran alliance to the sovereign of Spain.