Friday Fact.

The Pacific Ocean is the largest of all our Oceans. Here's an interesting story on the naming of it.

"Wednesday, November 28, 1520, we debouched from that strait, engulfing ourselves in the Pacific Sea. We were three months and twenty days without getting any kind of fresh food. We ate biscuit, which was no longer biscuit, but powder biscuits swarming with worms, for they had eaten the good. It stank strongly of the urine of rats. We drank yellow water that had been putrid for many days. We also ate some ox hides that covered the top of the mainyard to prevent the yard from chaffing the shrouds, and which had become exceedingly hard because of the sun, rain and wind. We left them in the sea for four or five days and then placed them for a few moments on the top of the embers, and so ate them; and often we ate sawdust from boards. Rats were sold for one-half ducado apiece, and even then we could not get them. But above all the other misfortunes the following was the worst. The gums of both the lower and upper teeth of some of our men swelled, so that they could not eat under any circumstances and therefore died.... We sailed about four thousand leguas during those three months and twenty days through an open stretch in that Pacific Sea. In truth it is very pacific, for during that time we did not suffer any storm" .... from Magellan's Voyage Around the World, by Antonio Pigafetta.