Last week, Part 13 of this chronological review established with great certainty that as recorded by Antonio Pigafetta, it was in an island in Mindanao where the Magellanic Fleet had anchored and had the first Holy Mass officiated in our archipelago on March 31, 1521. On the other hand, it was evident that four leading 16th century European history writers had been misled into concluding that both events took place “in the island of Butuan” instead.
IMAGE CREDIT: FROM THE FACEBOOK PAGE OF OLD PHILIPPINESTELLTALE PROOF OF THE TRUE SITE OF THE FIRST HOLY MASS. Above are four of the 35 maps drawn by Antonio Pigafetta himself in the extant manuscripts of his eyewitness account of the Magellan Fleet’s anchorage in Mindanao where the First Holy Mass was officiated on March 31, 1521. The surviving manuscripts and the Pigafetta maps above are (from left) the Ambrosiana copy in the Milan Library; second is from Manuscript 5650, the Belgian scholar J. Denuce’s edition of Pigafetta’s French manuscript; third is from the Nancy-Libri-Phillipps-Beinecke-Yale codex kept at Yale University; and fourth is from the unpublished French codex called Manuscript 24224.With the characteristic longwinded narrative and expository style of Pigafetta’s chronicles—particularly his vigorous but overdetailed descriptions of all the new sights, sounds, smells, touch, and other sensations he encountered in so many strange places—any serious editor, translator, or even plain reader could have been confused and dazed as well.
(Check this out with Pigafetta’s chronicles yourself by clicking this link to Google Drive: https://tinyurl.com/avay8v9e)In his account of the Mazaua sojourn, in particular, Pigafetta remembered to identify where the nonstop action was taking place only after more than 3,000 words of narrative (in the English translation of his long-lost-and-ultimately-found French manuscript). It is not difficult to imagine that the geographer Giovanni Battista Ramusio got so flustered that he decided to scribble ahead of the unseen narrator that the action was taking place “in the island of Butuan” and thus missed altogether what Pigafetta finally said for last: “It is 25 leagues from Acquada and is called Mazaua.”
Without being facetious about it, something like this must have happened in 1536, or two years after Pigafetta died in 1534. At about that time an anonymous translator rendered a French text of Pigafetta into Italian, wrongly replacing “Mazaua” with “the island of Butuan.” That translation for a travel story in an anthology later got republished twice with no translator credit—in 1550 and 1554. But in 1563, an edition entitled
“Primo Volume delle Navigationi et Viaggi...” got published with Ramusio’s name finally appearing as the translator.
This garbling of the First Mass narrative obviously had enormous impact not only on how Philippine history was looked upon by historians but on how it developed in the Philippines itself in the ensuing 500 years.
Practically all of the other European history writers followed the confused timeline of Ramusio’s. Peter Martyr d’Anghiera in
The Decades of the Newe Worlde had the Magellan fleet sail off for Cebu right after the First Mass in the “island of Butuan.” Here is Richard Eden’s English rendering of Martyr’s garbled version: “Dpartynge frome hense, they came to the Ilandes of Zeilon, Zubuth, Messana, and Calaghan, by the conducte of certeyne pylottes of the sayde kynges…”
This distortion of the first Mass sequence of events thus became a dilemma for the 17th-century Spanish missionary Fr. Francisco Colín, S.J. (1592-1660), a historian and educator who spent many years in the Philippines and wrote several accounts of his missionary experience, particularly his
“Labor Evangelica.” He looked for a way to resolve the conflict between Ramusio’s account of the First Mass that it was held in Butuan, which he believed to be based on Pigafetta’s authentic account, and that of Antonio de Herrera y Tordesillas (1549-1625), Spain’s colonial historian and official chronicler of the Indies, who affirmed in 1601 in his Spanish translation of Pigafetta’s chronicles that the true site was indeed Mazaua.
Believing that Pigafetta’s eyewitness testimony as told by Ramusio was superior to Herrera’s second-hand account (he had no way of knowing Ramusio had garbled it), Colin reasoned out that Butuan certainly was the port where the Easter Mass was held. His sense of logic told him it was also wrong to use Ramusio’s “Messana”—the island where Magellan made a second stopover—because the word “Messana” has a religious connotation—“missa” being Spanish for “mass,” and
“na” is Bisaya for “already.” This linguistic quirk would have made his story inconsistent.
Colín thus invented the word “Dimasaua”—“not” Mazaua—just to settle Ramusio’s and Herrera’s conflicting versions.
(Next:
Getting our Philippine history right after 500 years – Part 15) July 8, 2021
This essay, 2,052nd of the series, appeared in the column “English Plain and Simple” by Jose A. Carillo in the Campus Press section of the July 1, 2021 Internet edition of The Manila Times
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