RALEIGH, N.C. – First to sail around the world, Ferdinand Magellan endured scurvy, mutiny, cannibals, shipwreck and a diet of rats.

But he drifted easily across the Pacific Ocean, carried by a freak weather pattern that still baffles scientists 500 years later: El Nino.

So says a new paper co-authored by Scott Fitzpatrick, assistant professor of sociology/anthropology at North Carolina State University.

Seeking a western route to the riches of the Spice Islands, Magellan navigated the narrow straits at the tip of South America that now bear his name.

He should have nosed out into the Pacific and been hammered toward Chile by winds too strong for his 16th century ship to buck. English explorer Sir Francis Drake took just such a buffeting not many years after on his own Pacific journey.

“It’s just notorious for being stormy,” Fitzpatrick said Thursday. “But when Magellan gets around there, it’s extremely calm. They just cruised right up there. That’s how the Pacific got its name.”

As far as Fitzpatrick knows, he and University of Calgary geographer Richard Callaghan are the only researchers to examine the role of weather in the explorer’s epic journey.

Magellan’s trip is so soaked with drama, he said, that historians tend to overlook the slow cruise across calm seas.

Though Portuguese, Magellan sailed for the Spanish, convincing boy-king Charles I that the Spice Islands in modern-day Indonesia were Spanish territory and ripe for plunder.

He sailed with five ships in 1520, losing two of them before he even reached the Straits of Magellan, and by some accounts, having a band of mutineers drawn, quartered and impaled on a South American beach.

Once he reached Pacific islands, the voyage is just as ripe with lore. Tropical orgies. Starvation so severe the men ate bread crumbs soaked with rats’ urine, then the rats themselves.

To bolster their theory, the two researchers used 50 years of modern ocean and wind data compiled by the U.S. Navy and Coast Guard. Though Magellan’s trip precedes that data by four centuries, they believe the numbers form patterns that hold up over time.

When Fitzpatrick and Callaghan looked at the data for the southern tip of Chile, it showed his craft should have been mercilessly battered against the coast.

Only the weakened winds associated with El Nino – first described in the early 20th century – would have allowed quick passage.

“If they had encountered these stormy conditions, they might not have made it,” Fitzpatrick said. “I think he kind of caught it at the right time.”

In a cruel twist, the same lucky weather also doomed the Portuguese mariner, both researchers believe.

Starvation had severely gripped Magellan’s crew as they crossed the Pacific. But rather than head for the Spice Island, which he knew to be near the equator, Magellan sailed far north to Guam.

The only explanation that survives from crewmen is that Magellan suspected the Spice Islands would have scant food. And in El Nino conditions, droughts are common in the South Pacific.

Once further north, Magellan got entangled in a skirmish between island chieftains in the Philippines. He befriended one and attacked another, fighting more than 1,000 natives with roughly 50 men, all clad in heavy armor and clanking about in the water.

Hacked, run through with spears, Magellan died in the Philippines before his voyage was finished. Only 18 men returned to Spain out of more than 200.

A condensed version of the paper appears in the journal Science on Friday and in the Journal of Pacific History in August.

It is ironic, Fitzpatrick said, that Magellan would find a small sliver of meteorological fortune amid all the catastrophe his voyage endured, then perish by that same sliver.

Somewhere Magellan’s remains, which were never recovered, commingle with the sand and sea through centuries of fickle weather.