On October 21, 1520, the ships of Ferdinand Magellan entered a deep channel at the southern end of South America, and after a month of working through it the fleet came out into open water on the far side, which gave the expedition the passage between the Atlantic and the Pacific that it had been looking for. The strait was later named after him. He called the ocean beyond the Pacific, meaning peaceful. The name stuck.
The fleet had sailed from Spain in September 1519 with five ships and about 270 men, and it had spent the winter in a bay on the coast of Patagonia, where there was a mutiny and one ship was lost. Magellan had been looking for a way through the continent, and he had no map of one. The search was long. One of his captains, Esteban Gomez, deserted and took a ship back to Spain, and the remaining crews were short of food when they entered the strait.
The passage took more than a month, and the ships were separated at one point, and the weather was bad. Once through, the fleet sailed north along the coast and then struck out across the ocean, and the crossing took almost four months, during which the crews ate biscuit full of weevils and drank foul water, and several men died. The men suffered. Magellan reached the islands that are now the Philippines in March 1521 and was killed there in a fight on the island of Mactan.
Only one ship, the Victoria, completed the voyage and reached Spain in September 1522, with 18 men aboard, under Juan Sebastian Elcano, and the cargo of cloves it carried paid for the expedition. The voyage showed for the first time that the world could be sailed around and that the Americas were separate from Asia, and the strait remains a route for shipping, though it is difficult and its use is limited.