Getting our Philippine history right after 500 years – Part 15Last week, in Part 14 of this chronological review of Ferdinand Magellan’s 1521 anchorage in Mazaua and the holding of the first Holy Mass there, we saw that the Italian geographer and travel writer Giovanni Battista Ramusio—along with three other 16th century European history writers who had translated, abridged, or adapted Antonio Pigafetta’s longwinded eyewitness chronicles in French—evidently got misled in good faith that both landmark events took place “in the island of Butuan.” That awful misreading could have befallen any proud professional editor or translator who, by remaining unaware of the embarrassing factual gaffe long after it got published and circulated widely, would have suffered total loss of face, self-respect, and credibility by admitting it publicly.
That very serious garbling of the Magellanic Expedition narrative remained unchallenged for over 80 years until Antonio de Herrera y Tordesillas (1549-1625), Spain’s colonial historian and official chronicler of the Indies, affirmed in 1601 in his Spanish translation of Pigafetta’s chronicles that the site of the first Holy Mass in our shores was indeed Mazaua. Still, even long after the lifetime of those who had committed the very evident historical blunder, not one among them nor anybody for that matter took the trouble to point out and rectify it.
IMAGE CREDIT FOR FIRST MASS PAINTING: BOTONG FRANCISCO (1965)(Top photo) Modern-day artist’s rendition of the first Holy Mass officiated in Philippine shores on March 31, 1521. The landmark event was recorded by Magellanic voyage chronicler Antonio Pigafetta in his eyewitness account when it took place in the island of Mazaua, but sometime in the 1530s, the site through misreading of Pigafetta's French manuscript was inadvertently relocated to the nearby Butuan landmass by the history writer Giovanni Battista Ramusio. In the next century, that First Mass was further translocated to two islands in two written accounts by two Spanish Jesuit missionaries in the Philippine archipelago—first to an imagined off-Mindanao island of “Dimasawa” (not-“Mazaua”) in 1660 by Fr. Francisco Colin, S.J., then in 1665 or just five years later to an island off-Siargao Strait that was given the invented name “Limasawa” by Fr. Francisco Combes, S.J.Thus, what became known as the Butuan Tradition—Ramusio’s garbled version that the Magellanic fleet anchored in Butuan and had the first Holy Mass officiated there—became the predominant narrative among historians by the mid-17th century. Among those who unquestionably accepted this version was the 17th-century Spanish missionary priest Fr. Francisco Colín, S.J. (1592-1660), who tried to resolve the conflict between Pigafetta’s account of the Mazaua anchorage and first Holy Mass and Ramusio’s garbled version that both events took place in Butuan.
As pointed out in Part 14 of this chronological review, Fr. Colin’s sense of logic made him dismiss outright the idea of Ramusio’s “Messana”—the island where Magellan supposedly made a second stopover—because the word “Messana” had a religious connotation—
“missa” being Spanish for “mass,” and
“na” is Bisaya for “already.” This linguistic quirk would have made his story inconsistent, so he invented the word “Dimasaua”—meaning “not” Mazaua—so as to reconcile in good faith Ramusio’s and Herrera’s conflicting versions.
Having done this, Fr. Colin in his
“Labor Evangelica”—a treatise on his missionary work on the Philippine archipelago that was published in Madrid three years after his death in 1663—then came up with his own truncated narrative of Magellan’s anchorage in Butuan and the first Holy Mass, as follows:
"At the end of three months and twelve days during which they traversed 4,000 leagues, having crossed the Equator a second time, they climbed up to 15 degrees North Latitude where they came upon two islands which they named
Las Velas [the Sails]. At 12 degrees they saw the island of Ibabao [Samar] in this Archipelago. But the first island they touched at was Humunu [Homonhon], a small uninhabited island near Guiuan Point... To that and other islets they gave the name of
Buenas Senas [Good Omens] but to the entire Archipelago they gave the name San Lazaro, being the Saturday of Saint Lazarus' Sunday in Lent of the year 1521.
"On Easter Day, in the territory of Butuan, the first Mass ever offered in these parts was celebrated and a cross planted. Magellan then took formal possession of the Islands in the name of the Emperor and of the Crown of Castille.
"The man who gave the most signal service to our men was the chief of Dimasaua
[sic], a relative of the chief of Butuan and of that of Zebu, whither he led the armada, which entered that harbor at noon on the 7th of April, the Octave of Easter."
(English translation by the late educator Fr. Miguel Bernad, S.J., from the Spanish by Fr. Colin S.J. in his “Labor Evangelica”)Four years later, in 1664, Fr. Francisco Combes, S.J., (1620 –1665), another Spanish priest who did missionary work in the Philippine archipelago, further distorted the story of the Mazaua first Holy Mass in a brief history on the First Mass in his book on the evangelization of Mindanao. He came up with a different version of Ramusio’s narrative based on an English translation by Samuel Purchas in Glasgow in 1625. For his own version, Fr. Combes invented the name “Limasawa” in place of Fr. Colin’s “Dimasawa.”
We will take up next week this latest transmogrification of the authentic Mazaua story.
(Next:
Getting our Philippine history right after 500 years – Part 16) July 15, 2021
This essay, 2,053rd of the series, appeared in the column “English Plain and Simple” by Jose A. Carillo in the Campus Press section of the July 8, 2021 Internet edition of The Manila Times
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