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 many noble examples of the opposite virtues and of other qualities of a very high order. His conduct on the occasion of the shipwreck near the Maldive  Islands has been already described; the clemency with  which he tempered justice when he put down the  mutiny in Port St. Julian—a mutiny which Sebastian  Alvarez, the King of Portugal's agent, would appear  to have been privy to, if indeed he did not prepare it,  shows great self-restraint, and the whole of his conduct in the islands of Sebu and Matan, where he fell,  defending the retreat of his companions, is more like  that of the knights errant of an earlier date, than that  of his contemporaries. Pigafetta, who was with him at his death, was deeply affected by it, and recounts  his many virtues and qualities in an appeal to the  Grand Master of Rhodes not to allow Magellan's  memory to be lost.

Most of the captains of ships at this time, and long afterwards, were soldiers put into naval commands;  but Magellan, besides being a military officer, was  also an experienced and learned navigator, and Pigafetta's Treatise of Navigation may be taken as the  result of Magellan's instruction in that art. The