After more than a year he discovered the strait which now bears his name, and, as Pigafetti, an Italian, who was with him, relates, he shed fears of joy when he found that it had pleased God at length to bring him where he might grapple with the unknown dangers of the South Sea, "the Great and Pacific Ocean." Driven by famine to eat scraps of skin and leather with which his rigging was here and there bound, to drink water that had gone putrid, his crew dying of hunger and scurvy, this man, firm in his belief of the globular figure of the earth, steered steadily to the northwest, and for nearly four months never saw inhabited land.

He estimated that he had sailed over the Pacific not less than twelve thousand miles.

He crossed the equator, saw once more the pole-star, and at length made land--the Ladrones.

Here he met with adventurers from Sumatra.

Among these islands he was killed, either by the savages or by his own men.