Magellan sighted the Philippines on 16 March, landed the 17th

Ferdinand Magellan’s fleet reached the Philippines on 16 March 1521, when lookouts sighted the islands after a Pacific crossing in which at least half the crew had died of scurvy. The men went ashore a day later, on 17 March, on the small island of Homonhon, now part of Eastern Samar province.

Why do two dates get confused?

Eastern Samar marks 16 March on Homonhon as a provincial holiday. A 2019 paper in the Philippine Journal of History argues that this rests on a garbled account, handed down since the 1970s, that merged the sighting and the landing into one day. The expedition’s chronicler, Antonio Pigafetta, kept them separate.

Even his dates are slightly off. Sailing west, following the Sun, the crew lost a day without noticing, and the survivors learned only on reaching Spain that their count was a day behind. Magellan’s log is lost, so nearly everything known comes from Pigafetta, an Italian volunteer. Four early manuscripts of his diary survive, one in Italian and three in French translation; the finest is at Yale’s Beinecke Library.

The first seven weeks in the islands:

When (1521)	Where	What happened
16 March	Off the Visayas	Islands sighted
17–25 March	Homonhon	Landing and a stay of about a week
April	Cebu	Magellan befriends Raja Humabon; Cebu’s chief and his wife are baptized
27 April	Mactan	Magellan and seven of his men are killed fighting Lapulapu’s warriors
Days later	Cebu	Humabon poisons senior officers at a feast
2 May	At sea	Survivors scuttle the Concepción and split between two ships

Magellan’s death on Mactan and the Cebu feast left the expedition with less than half its original crew.

The sources also disagree on how many finished. The fleet left Spain in 1519 with about 250–270 men. When the Victoria reached Spain in September 1522 under Juan Sebastián Elcano, most accounts count 18 men aboard, though the Oxford University Press blog gives 17. Magellan is sometimes called the first person to circle the globe, but only by joining two voyages: years earlier he had sailed east from Portugal to Southeast Asia.