Getting our history right after 500 years - Part 2Let’s resume our plain layman’s chronological review of the undisputed facts about the first Holy Mass on March 31, 1521 in the now lost island of Mazaua, based on the first-hand account of Antonio Pigafetta, the Magellanic Expedition’s official chronicler.
Our review last week left off in 1550 with Giovanni Batistta Ramusio’s retranslation into Italian of Jacques Fabre’s 1525 French translation of Pigafetta’s travel diary. In that retranslation, Ramusio replaced “Messana” (Mazaua) with “Buthuam” as the first Mass site, then added that Magellan had sojourned in Butuan.
Ramusio attributed having to retranslate his first Italian translation of the Pigafetta text to his having worked on Fabre's translation in French that was just a brief summary in Italian of the Magellanic voyage story. However, others who had similarly worked on Pigafetta’s text believe that Fabre worked on a complete Pigafetta text in Italian but simply did a far from perfect French abridgment and translation job.
Now let’s proceed…
Front cover, left: Maximilianus Transylvanus's Latin translation of Pigafetta's chronica (1523).
Front cover, right: Ramusio's retranslation into Italian (1550) of Pigafetta's chronica.
1554: That year, or four years after Ramusio published his Italian retranslation of Pigafetta’s
chronica from Fabre’s 1525 French translation, another Italian translation of that travel narrative came out. This was
“Primo Volume et Terza Volume Della Navigationi et Viaggi…” by Maximilianus Transylvanus, wealthy courtier of Emperor Charles V, to whom he personally presented a copy of the translated work.
Its Latin original,
“De Moluccis Insulis,” was published by Transylvanus 31 years before in Cologne, Germany. Its narrative cited the testimony of three of the surviving 18 crewmembers of the Magellanic Expedition. They recounted to him that they were among those who went from Mazaua to Butuan in 1521 to harvest the rice the native chieftains had offered to Magellan for his fleet’s food provisions.
The demand for Transylvanus’ Italian translation was strong. A second edition of it was printed in Paris in July of 1554 and a third edition was printed in Rome in November that same year. Subsequent reprints came out in 1563 and 1588 all the way to 1606 and 1613.
1555: In London that year, the first known rendering in English of the Magellanic Expedition story was published. This was
The Decades of the Newe Worlde, an English translation by Cambridge-educated cosmologist Richard Eden of Pigafetta’s text of the Magellanic Expedition; it was based on Jacques Fabre’s 1525 French translation of Pigafetta’s travel diary. Eden also included in this volume his English translation of the Italian historian Peter Martyr d’Anghiera’s narrative accounts in Latin of the voyages of other notables in the Age of Exploration.
Front cover of Richard Eden's English translation of Peter Martyr d’Anghiera’s narrative accounts
in Latin of the voyages of eight notables in the Age of Exploration, where Eden included
his English translation of Jacques Fabre’s 1525 French translation
of Pigafetta’s travel diary in its original Italian.
Here, in today’s English, are crucial passages in Eden’s rendering in Tudor English of Pigafetta’s account (
https://tinyurl.com/sk9vhpps) of how the first Mass in Butuan came to pass:
“The 28th day of March, they came to the island of Butuan where they were honorably entertained by the King and the Prince his son who gave them much gold and spices... The last day of March near unto Easter, the captain caused his priest to say Mass…When the priest was at mid-Mass at the offertory, the kings proferred themselves to go to kiss the Cross with the captain, but offered nothing. At the time of the Sacrament when the priest lifted the body of Christ, and the Christians kneeled down and held up their hands joined together, the kings did likewise also with great reverence…”
Even granting that some details got lost, substituted, or suppressed in the long chain of translations and retranslations, by the year 1555 these facts had become indubitable: the Magellanic Fleet sojourned in Butuan-Masaua and the first Holy Mass took place there, not in Limasawa, on March 31, 1521 (
https://tinyurl.com/f7ynb4d7).
So why are the Church Historians Association of the Philippines (CHAP) and the pro-Limasawans, against all evidence, still aggressively defending the misfit Limasawa as the site of that first Mass?
(Next:
Getting our history right after 500 years - 3) April 8, 2021
This essay, 2,039th of the series, appeared in the column “English Plain and Simple” by Jose A. Carillo in the Campus Press section of the April 1, 2021 Internet edition of The Manila Times
,© 2021 by the Manila Times Publishing Corp. All rights reserved. Read this article online in
The Manila Times:
“Getting our history right after 500 years - 2”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 1 AND PART 3 OF THIS SERIES:1.
Getting our history right after 500 years - Part 1 April 1, 2021
2.
Getting our history right after 500 years - Part 3 April 8, 2021
