During the three-month, twenty-day Pacific crossing of 1521 the crew ran out of food, eating biscuit powder swarming with worms, ox hides softened in seawater, sawdust, and rats sold for half a ducat; nineteen men died and the gums of many swelled over their teeth so they could not eat. Pigafetta, who kept a day-by-day record, reports he himself did not fall sick, an anomaly he could not explain.
On reaching the Cape Verde islands the survivors found the local calendar one day ahead of the one they had carefully kept at sea, despite never missing an entry. The book attributes this to having sailed continuously westward with the sun, concluding that a full circuit of the globe in that direction silently subtracts a day from the traveller's reckoning.
At each landfall Pigafetta systematically recorded word-lists of the local languages alongside descriptions of dress, diet, weapons, and customs, treating language as a collectible datum of a people rather than a barrier. This turned the chronicle into an ethnographic inventory in which naming and listing substitute for shared understanding.
At Cebu the expedition converted a local ruler and then fought his rival Lapu-Lapu on Mactan, where Magellan was killed in shallow water as his men retreated to the boats. The episode shows that entering a region as a powerful outsider makes one a party to pre-existing rivalries, so the foreigner's strength is spent on a quarrel that was never his own.