The Onas, separated from neighbours by the vast, nasty waters of what is today the Magellan Straight at the southern tip of South America, used fire to communicate home to home. They could tell a cousin that a grandmother was ill by smoke, or warn the nearest healer of intruders by high-reaching flames.

Imagine the fires that burned along the Beagle Channel when they first sited Magellen’s shipsf docking just east of the great passageway around the bottom of the Americas.

Ferdinand Magellan, also and perhaps more properly known as Fernando de Magallanes, was a Portuguese mariner and visionary. Inspired by great explorers like Vasco da Gama (the first European to cross the Americas in Panama and lay his eyes on another unknown sea), Magellan was determined to make his mark in the history books.

His plan was show that it was indeed possible to travel to the other side of the world.

He believed in a direct passage to the Spice Islands of Indonesia. Getting their via the North Sea had already been ruled out because of ice and snow; the Orinoco, Rio de la Plata and the Amazon had also been ruled out as simple rivers, not great passageways.

Magellan put his faith in the south.

The Portuguese were reluctant to fund the adventure of their inspired native son. They’d already secured the Cape of Good Hope (originally named Cape Storm, but changed for ‘marketing purposes’) and had little interest in pursuing another southern passage.

So Ferdinand went next door to Spain. Reluctant to fund archrival captains from Portugal, Ferdinand took on Spanish nationality to prove his loyalty and King Carlos V eventually agreed to put his pesos behind the “Armada de Molucas”, five ships carrying more than 200 people that Magellen would lead west into the horizon.

After relaxing and refueling at Brazil, the Armada sailed south towards adventure and glory. At present-day Puerto San Julian, a wide bay on the Patagonian coast, the capitan survived an attempted mutiny, and sent the two court-martialed traitors to shore with two bottles of wine and two bases of crackers - these were the first Europeans to touch Patagonian soil. Marooned at the end of the world, their bones were later found by Sir Frances Drake.

Shortly thereafter, the Armada arrived at yet another wide opening. There, they saw ‘camels without humps’ (guanacos) and a black ‘goose’ that had to be skinned instead of plucked (penguins).

One of Magellan’s right-hand-men, Pigafetta returned from a 20-day exploration to confirm this bay was indeed a passageway to the South Pacific. On November 1, 1520, All Saints’ day, Magellan christened the “Passage of Todo Santos”.

He lead his armada through the passage and when they finally arrived at the other side, they found 60 days of pure calm, so unusual that Magellan named this new sea “Pacific”.

He later sailed to Asia and was murdered in the Philippines only months after entering the Pacific Ocean. But Magellen’s Armada became the first to circumnavigate the globe. All in all, only one of his five ships, and only 18 of the 200 crew members, survived the journey.

Besides the earth-shattering journey, the Armada recorded sightings of rare animals, celestial galaxies, and laid the groundwork for the establishment of the International Dateline.