Sails of Fortune is a novel detailing the harrowing and heroic voyage of Ferdinand Magellan's fleet as he explored regions previously unknown to Europeans. Veteran novelist Christine Echeverria Bender's painstaking research and vivid prose reveals the horrors and hardship endured by the sixteenth century Spanish, Portuguese and Basque explorers who left their homes in 1519 to sail into the history books. Among the volunteers on the Magellan expedition was shipmaster Juan Sebastian de Elcano, for whom the voyage offered a chance to reclaim his stolen honor. Hopeful and determined as they set sail, Elcano could not foresee the twists of fate that would pit him against his commander in a struggle to save their threatened venture, or the heavy price the journey would demand from the men endeavoring to cross the Pacific Ocean for the first time. Echeverria Bender tells the story of Elcano's struggle to survive a voyage so far reaching that it forever altered man's vision of the world.