The ship Victoria returned to Sanlúcar de Barrameda in Spain after completing the first recorded circumnavigation of the Earth. The expedition had begun under Ferdinand Magellan, who was killed in the Philippines, and was completed under Juan Sebastián Elcano. Only eighteen of the original crew returned aboard the vessel.

Accounts of the voyage expanded Europe's geographical imagination and supplied poets with new images of oceans, islands and global distance. Renaissance writing increasingly presented the world as interconnected, navigable and vulnerable to imperial ambition.