The arithmetic of this one is brutal and worth doing slowly. Five ships left Seville in August 1519 with roughly 270 men aboard. On this day in 1522, one ship came up the Guadalquivir to Seville: Victoria, eighteen men walking ashore, three years and about a month after they had left. The distance sailed came to something near 60,000 km. Nobody had planned it as a circumnavigation. It became one because going back the way they had come was no longer possible.

The famous name on the voyage is Ferdinand Magellan, who died in the Philippines in April 1521. The name on the last leg is Juan Sebast\u00e1n Elcano, a Basque master who took Victoria west across the Indian Ocean and up the Atlantic, keeping clear of Portuguese ports, which meant no reprovisioning worth the word. With him was the pilot Francisco Albo, whose logbook survived and gave later navigators their positions, and Antonio Pigafetta of Vicenza, who wrote the voyage down day by day and is the reason we know what the crossing of the Pacific felt like from the inside.

What came home in the hold: cloves. Enough of them, by most accounts, to cover the cost of the whole expedition. What did not come home: four ships and the great majority of the men, including Magellan, and I would not let the cargo figure do their eulogy. Harold would tell you the ship itself was small even by 1519 standards. That is rather the point.

A short list of what they actually had at the end: one hull, a set of sails much mended, Albo's log, and eighteen people who could still stand.