Meanwhile, on the 16th of May, the little Victoria, with starvation and scurvy already thinning the ranks, with foretopmast gone by the board and fore-yard badly sprung, cleared the Cape of Good Hope, and thence was borne on the strong and friendly current up to the equator, which she crossed on the 8th of June.  Only fifty years since Santarem and Escobar, first of Europeans, had crept down that coast and crossed it.  Into that glorious half-century what a world of suffering and achievement had been crowded!  Dire necessity compelled the Victoria to stop at the Cape Verde Islands.  Her people sought safety in deceiving the Portuguese with the story that they were returning from a voyage in Atlantic waters only, and thus they succeeded in buying food.  But while this was going on, as a boat-load of thirteen men had been sent ashore for rice, some silly tongue, loosened by wine, in the head of a sailor who had cloves to sell, babbled the perilous secret of Magellan and the Moluccas.  The thirteen were at once arrested, and a boat called upon the Victoria, with direful threats, to surrender; but she quickly stretched every inch of her canvas and got away.  This was on the 18th of July, and eight weeks of ocean remained.  At last, on the 6th of September—­the thirtieth anniversary of the day when Columbus weighed anchor for Cipango—­the Victoria sailed into the Guadalquivir, with eighteen gaunt and haggard survivors to tell the proud story of the first circumnavigation of the earth.

The voyage thus ended was doubtless the greatest feat of navigation that has ever been performed, and nothing can be imagined that would surpass it except a journey to some other planet.  It has not the unique historic position of the first voyage of Columbus, which brought together two streams of human life that had been disjoined since the glacial period.  But as an achievement in ocean navigation that voyage of Columbus sinks into insignificance by the side of it; and when the earth was a second time encompassed by the greatest English sailor of his age,[2] the advance in knowledge, as well as the different route chosen, had much reduced the difficulty of the performance.  When we consider the frailness of the ships, the immeasurable, extent of the unknown, the mutinies that were prevented or quelled, and the hardships that were endured, we can have no hesitation in speaking of Magellan as the prince of navigators.  Nor can we ever fail to admire the simplicity and purity of that devoted life, in which there is nothing that seeks to be hidden or explained away.

[1] From Fiske’s “Discovery of America.”  Copyright, 1892, by John Fiske.  Reprinted by arrangement with the publishers, Houghton, Mifflin Co.  Ferdinand Magellan was born at Saborosa in Portugal, about 1480, and died in the Philippines in 1521.  Before discovering the strait that bears his name he had served with the Portuguese in the East Indies and in Morocco.  Becoming