Roger Crowley

But Magellan is out of favor with the Portuguese court.

So he hops across the frontier to Castile and persuades the young, very young king of Spain, Charles I.

to invest in a venture.

Now, he has to sail in the other direction because of a deal which was done in the end of the 15th century, dividing up spheres of influence.

along an imaginary line through the Atlantic Ocean, called the Tordesillas Line.

So Magellan has to sail west and find a route around the Americas.

Nobody knows if there is a way around the Americas, and this is one of the great mysteries, to compete for the spice trade.

So while the Portuguese are sailing east around India, the Spanish are sailing west around the Americas.

Magellan does find a way around the Americas.

We still don't know how this happens.

Around the bottom of America, what is now called the Magellan Straits, and then has to tackle the Pacific Ocean.

Nobody knows how big the Pacific Ocean is.

They thought that it would be a short hop till they got to the Spice Islands.

It's 9,500 miles.

And although it's an easy sail because the wind carries you across, it's also extremely dangerous because if you're out of land for three months,

and you haven't got any vitamin C, your crew are going to start dying of scurvy.

So it was kind of pretty tough.

But Magellan turns up in the Spice Islands.

In fact, he doesn't himself turn up because he's killed in the Philippines doing a kind of crazy fight with the locals.

But you want Sebastian Elcano