Getting our history right after 500 years - Part 1This is admittedly not some pedigreed historian’s self-claimed infallible dissertation but simply a layman’s clear-eyed, objective chronological look into why Mazaua got displaced in history as the true site of the first Holy Mass in Philippine shores. Comments pro or con are welcome in the Forum but are requested to be stated in civil and temperate language.The Philippines marks on March 31 the Quincentenary or 500th year of its birth as a Christian nation. That event took place when the Magellanic Expedition, after island-hopping for food and respite from their grueling 99-day trans-Pacific voyage, found hospitable anchorage in an island called Mazaua and there held the first Holy Mass in our shores.
The 1521 map Pigafetta drew of Mazaua and his illustration of the island
as site of the first Holy Mass
My reading of Fr. Joesilo Amalla’s 644-page
An Island They Called Mazaua left no doubt in my non-historian’s mind that Mazaua was indeed that first Mass site. I got even more convinced of this last March 16 when I watched the recorded video of the UP History Department’s
online forum on “The Confusion and Contention over Mazua.” Its main resource speaker, Dr. Antonio Sanchez de Mora, chief archivist and historian of Spain’s
Archivo General de Indias, presented virtually the same eyewitness accounts, documentation, and maps that Fr. Amalla had studied years ago while doing research for his book. But then Dr. Mora later took note of the uncertainty that began to shroud the first Mass site by the year 1563. That was when some history writers, clerics, and mapmakers started taking liberties with Mazaua, reshaping, relocating, even renaming her in whichever way their predisposition or fancy led them.
This is why today or 500 years later, the unlikely island of Limasawa at 9º 55’ North latitude in the Visayas has already been thrice officially affirmed as the site of that first Holy Mass.
How did this most unfortunate aberration in both Philippine and world history happen?
Let’s review the incontrovertible and undisputed facts about that event:
1521 March 31: The first Holy Mass took place in the island of Mazaua at 9
o 00 North latitude beside the port-kingdom of Butuan in the Mindanao landmass.
Antonio Pigafetta, Magellan’s official chronicler, wrote in his travel diary: “After the conclusion of Mass, some of our men took communion...Then we descended through their cultivated field and went to the place where the balanghai was… that island of his was called Butuan and Calagan. The name of the first king is Raia Colambu and the second Raia Siaui… It is 25 leagues from Acquada [Homonhon Island] and is called Mazaua.”
Another key eyewitness was crewmember Ginēz de Mafra who, along with 17 other survivors of the ill-fated Magellan expedition, got back to Spain in 1522 on board the only returning ship Victoria.
1525: Printer Simon de Colines published Pigafetta’s long travel diary in Paris, and Pigafetta gifted the Queen Regent of France a copy. She commissioned Jacques Antoine Fabre to translate it into French, but Fabre did only a summary, leaving out the details of the Magellanic Expedition. This abridgment and its translation errors planted doubts about Mazaua’s location and claim as the first Mass site.
1543 February 17: Ginēz de Mafra came back to Mazaua as royal pilot for the Villalobos expedition. In his travel memoir, he corroborated Pigafetta’s account: “… (A)nd sailing on his way arrived at another island 3 or 4
leguas in circumference. This island has a good harbor on its western side, and is inhabited. He anchored the fleet in this port…They ran on to another island 20 leagues from which they sailed, which is named Maçangor, which is 9 degrees; and in this island they were well-received and they placed a Cross in it.”
1550: Giovanni Batistta Ramusio retranslated into Italian Jacques Fabre’s 1525 French translation of Pigafetta’s travel diary. Ramusio had identified “Buthuam” instead of “Messana” (Mazaua) 14 years earlier as the first Mass site, and in that new Italian translation of Pigafetta’s diary he added that Magellan went to Butuan. This new Ramusian translation in Italian became the standard citation among authors and historians, so Butuan rather than Mazaua became better known as the site of that Mass.
(Next:
Getting our history right after 500 years - 2) April 1, 2021
This essay, 2,038th of the series, appeared in the column “English Plain and Simple” by Jose A. Carillo in the Campus Press section of the March 25, 2021 Internet edition of The Manila Times
,© 2021 by the Manila Times Publishing Corp. All rights reserved.
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“Getting our history right after 500 years - 1”To listen to the audio version of this article, click the encircled double triangle logo in its online posting in
The Manila Times.
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PART 2 OF THIS HISTORY SERIES:1.
Getting our Philippine history right after 500 years - Part 2
