Circumnavigate

Circumnavigation means to travel all the way around the entire planet, or an island, or continent. This article is concerned with circumnavigation of the Earth. The first known circumnavigation of Earth was the Magellan-Elcano expedition, which sailed from Seville, Spain, in 1519 and returned in 1522 after crossing the Atlantic, Pacific and Indian oceans.

The word circumnavigation is a noun formed from the verb circumnavigate, from the past participle of the Latin verb , from circum "around" + navigare "to sail" (see further Navigation § Etymology).

If a person walks completely around either Pole, they cross all meridians, but this is not generally considered a "circumnavigation." The trajectory of a true (global) circumnavigation forms a continuous loop on the surface of Earth separating two halves of comparable area. A basic definition of a global circumnavigation would be a route which covers roughly a great circle, and in particular one which passes through at least one pair of points antipodal to each other. In practice, people use different definitions of world circumnavigation to accommodate practical constraints, depending on the method of travel. Since the planet is quasispheroidal, a trip from one Pole to the other, and back again on the other side, would technically be a circumnavigation, but practical difficulties generally preclude such a voyage although it was successfully undertaken in the early 1980s by Ranulph Fiennes.

The first single voyage of global circumnavigation was that of the ship Victoria, between 1519 and 1522, known as the Magellan–Elcano expedition. It was a Castilian (Spanish) voyage of discovery, led initially by Ferdinand Magellan between 1519 and 1521, and then by the Basque Juan Sebastián Elcano from 1521 to 1522. The voyage started in Seville, crossed the Atlantic Ocean, and after several stopovers rounded the southern tip of South America where the expedition discovered the Strait of Magellan, named after the fleet's captain. It then continued across the Pacific discovering a number of islands on its way, including Guam before arriving in the Philippines. After Magellan's death in the Philippines in 1521, Elcano took command of the expedition and continued the journey across the Indian Ocean, round the Cape of Good Hope, north along the Atlantic Ocean, and back to Spain in 1522. Elcano and a small group of 18 men were actually the only members of the expedition to make the full circumnavigation.

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