Between 1519 and 1522, the Spanish-Portuguese expedition led by Ferdinand Magellan and completed by Juan Sebastián Elcano became the first to circumnavigate the globe, crossing the Pacific Ocean from South America to the Philippines by exploiting the southeast trade winds and equatorial calms. The Pacific crossing — the most perilous phase of the voyage, during which the fleet found no landfall for 98 days — demonstrated both the extraordinary reach of wind-powered sailing vessels and the terrifying scale of the world's largest ocean. One of the 270 men who set out from Seville in 1519, only 18 survived to return three years later.

Magellan's circumnavigation shattered European assumptions about the world's scale and the accessibility of wind routes, generating a century of geographical poetry celebrating the heroism of long-distance navigation. Antonio Pigafetta's account of the voyage, a prose narrative of extraordinary vividness, influenced subsequent travel writing and the Renaissance tradition of the voyage as a literary genre. The Pacific trade winds that enabled the circumnavigation appear in later poetry as symbols of the world's connectedness and the human compulsion to traverse its widths, a tradition culminating in Keats's sonnet On First Looking into Chapman's Homer.