Sixteenth-century Europe was heavily dependent on spices, and cloves and black pepper so when Spain's eastern route to the Spice Islands was blocked by the Portuguese, the Spaniards luckily had me who, as any history teacher will tell you, led the first expedition to sail all the way around the world. I set out to find a western route to the Spice Islands, and obviously they succeeded, because there are like 300 varieties of spices on your supermarket shelves and i reckon you don't even know what half of them are, Asafoetida anyone?
Technically i did sail around the World, or at least my body did because i went and got himself speared in the leg, arm, neck and face while attempting to introduce Christ to the lives of locals in the Philippines who it turned out, didn't want me to.
So the first person to complete a circumnavigation of the globe was actually the 18 members of my crew left alive out of the 237 who started who remained on Victoria after my death, Victoria being the only ship left out of the five that left Spain, and arrived back in Spain over a year later.
Three years at sea can do a strange thing to a man, living together for many months on the open seas with women just a fading memory, you end up with a ship full of horny sailors who either start looking at skates mouth alluringly or you take matters in hand to find another way to relieve your sexual frustrations or they drank themselves into a stupour and it seemed there was a lack of skates on my journey because everywhere i went on deck, i was stepping over seamen and if that isn't bad enough, there was also the drunk sailors to avoid stepping on also.
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