Order of Magellan Round the World Navy Circumnavigation Patch

Five ships sailed from Spain in 1519, and one came home. Victoria returned in 1522 with 18 survivors under Juan Sebastian Elcano, completing the first circumnavigation of the earth and finishing the voyage Ferdinand Magellan himself did not live to see through. The Navy keeps the memory of that passage in its own way, through the Order of Magellan, an unofficial certificate for sailors who circle the globe aboard ship. This patch is the wearable emblem of that order. It states a simple fact about a sailor: the whole way around, by sea.

The fleet maintains a shelf of these earned honors, and each one belongs to a line on the chart. The Shellback crosses the equator, the Golden Dragon crosses the 180th meridian, the Blue Nose crosses the Arctic Circle. The Order of Magellan asks for all of it, a complete circuit of the earth, which no single ceremony at a single line can confer. A deployment has to carry the ship the long way home. That requirement keeps the order among the least common of the Navy's unofficial certificates.

The design keeps to the point. A globe in blue and white fills the center, gridded with meridians and centered on the Americas, the whole world a sailor has to get around. A red ring carries Order of Magellan across the top and Round the World across the bottom in white lettering, and a blue merrowed border closes the edge. The patch measures four inches across, embroidered throughout, with an iron-on backing that sews on just as well. It reads cleanly at arm's length and cleaner still up close.

A circumnavigation is not a boast, it is a logbook fact, and sailors have always preferred emblems that state facts. The certificate marks the date and the ship. The patch travels better. Anyone who has taken a ship around the planet, through every time zone there is, knows exactly how much ocean that little globe stands for.

Iron it onto a jacket or cruise vest, or sew it beside the Shellback and Blue Nose patches it belongs with. It mounts just as naturally in a shadow box with the certificate and the cruise book. The long way around deserves a marker.