In December 1577, Francis Drake set sail from Plymouth, England, with five ships and about 160 men. Nearly three years later, he returned with one ship and 59 surviving crew members. He had sailed all the way around the globe -- a journey of roughly 36,000 miles. On April 4, 1581, Queen Elizabeth I knighted Drake aboard his ship, the Golden Hind, making him Sir Francis Drake. Drake's route took him south through the Atlantic Ocean. He sailed around the tip of South America and into the Pacific Ocean. He sailed up the west coast of the Americas, possibly as far north as Oregon. Then he crossed the Pacific to the Spice Islands of Southeast Asia. From there, he sailed across the Indian Ocean, around the southern tip of Africa, and back to England. Drake was not the first person to circumnavigate the globe. Ferdinand Magellan's expedition did it in the 1520s, though Magellan himself died along the way. But Drake was the first captain to complete the entire journey and survive to tell about it. The voyage proved something important about world geography: the Pacific Ocean was much larger than Europeans had imagined. Drake spent months crossing it. The vast distances showed that the world's oceans covered far more area than its land. His journey also revealed new coastlines that European mapmakers had never charted. It changed how people understood the shape of the world.