Question 1

Did Magellan sail around the world?

Accepted Answer

No. **Ferdinand Magellan died partway through the voyage** and never completed the circumnavigation his expedition is named for.

**What happened.** Magellan, a Portuguese navigator sailing for the Spanish crown, departed in 1519 with five ships and around 270 men, seeking a westward route to the Spice Islands. The expedition crossed the Atlantic, endured mutiny and the loss of ships, and eventually found the passage at the southern tip of South America now called the **Strait of Magellan** — a genuine achievement, navigated without charts through a maze of channels.

They crossed the Pacific, which proved vastly larger than anticipated. The crossing took over three months with severe starvation and scurvy.

**Magellan was killed in April 1521** in the Philippines, at the **Battle of Mactan**, fighting local forces led by **Lapulapu** after intervening in a local dispute. He had covered roughly half the distance.

**Who actually completed it.** **Juan Sebastián Elcano**, a Basque navigator and one of the mutineers Magellan had earlier pardoned, took command of the surviving ship **Victoria** and brought it back to Spain in September 1522 — three years after departure, with **18 of the original crew** aboard. A further group returned later after imprisonment.

Elcano, not Magellan, was the first captain to complete a circumnavigation, and he was honoured accordingly in Spain at the time.

**A stronger claim exists for someone else entirely.** **Enrique of Malacca**, Magellan's enslaved interpreter, had originally been taken from Southeast Asia to Europe. If he reached his homeland during the voyage — which is plausible but not firmly established — he would have been the first person to circle the globe, having completed the journey in two stages.

**Lapulapu is a national hero in the Philippines**, commemorated for resisting the expedition.

Question 2

Who was Zheng He?

Accepted Answer

A Chinese admiral who commanded seven enormous maritime expeditions across the Indian Ocean in the early fifteenth century — voyages substantially larger than anything Europe launched for another

Question 3

Was Amelia Earhart's disappearance ever explained?

Accepted Answer

Not definitively — but the most probable explanation has been consistent for decades, and it is far less exotic than the theories that circulate: she ran out of fuel and came down in the Pacific.

Question 4

Who was Ibn Battuta?

Accepted Answer

Ibn Battuta (1304 – c. 1369) was a Moroccan scholar and traveller whose journeys covered a distance far exceeding Marco Polo's, across some three decades — and whose account is one of the richest

Question 5

Was Columbus trying to prove the Earth was round?

Accepted Answer

No. That the Earth is a sphere had been established knowledge among educated Europeans for nearly two thousand years before Columbus sailed, and nobody he petitioned believed otherwise. The ancient

Question 6

Who was Ching Shih, the pirate commander?

Accepted Answer

Ching Shih — also known as Zheng Yi Sao — commanded what was probably the largest pirate fleet in recorded history, operating in the South China Sea in the early nineteenth century. She was born

Question 7

Who was Simón Bolívar?

Accepted Answer

The military and political leader central to the independence of six South American countries from Spanish rule — and a figure whose legacy is claimed by political movements with almost nothing in

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