Getting our Philippine history right after 500 years - 3

[Joe Carillo]

Getting our Philippine history right after 500 years - Part 3

The second part last week of our chronological review of the undisputed facts about the first Holy Mass in Mazaua left off in the year 1555. That year Richard Eden’s English translation of Antonio Pigafetta’s chronicles of the Magellanic Expedition was published in London. In Eden’s translation, Pigafetta narrated that Magellan’s Fleet anchored in Butuan on March 28, 1521 where, three days later, an Easter Sunday Mass was officiated.

Eden’s English translation was actually based on “Le voyage et nauigation,” an anonymous 1536 abridged Italian translation of an earlier abridged French translation of Pigafetta’s account of the Magellanic voyage. That abridged French translation, “Il Viaggio fatto dagli Spagnivoli,” came out in Paris in 1525 or 11 years earlier (https://tinyurl.com/bvucsax7). No formal credit was given to its translator, but he was commonly assumed to be Jacques Antoine Fabre.

              IMAGE CREDIT: HATHITRUST.COM  (PUBLIC DOMAIN)

Two pages from the 1525 Simon de Colines printing of an abridged French translation
of Pigafetta's chronicles of the Magellanic Expedition to the Philippine archipelago

Whether or not it was Fabre who translated it, that edition printed by Simon de Colines was just a summary that knocked off huge chunks of narrative detail of the Magellanic voyage, thus planting doubts about Mazaua as the first Mass site. However, that French translation was the very first printed version of Pigafetta’s chronicles, so the translation and its subsequent editions became the authoritative text of Magellan’s voyage to the Philippine archipelago for almost 285 years until the end of the 18th century.

But apart from distractions that allow some details to get lost or garbled in translation from one language to another and still to another, Maximilianus Transylvanus, a courtier of the Roman Emperor Charles V, violated something so fundamental to historiography in his retelling of Pigafetta’s account of the Magellanic voyage.

In Pigafetta’s own travelogue, the Magellanic fleet clearly first dropped anchor in the island of Mazaua near Butuan in the Mindanao landmass, had the first Holy Mass officiated there on March 31, 1521, then sailed northward to the island of Cebu where its captain Ferdinand Magellan was slain by the native chief Lapulapu’s fighters in the Battle of Mactan.

But “De Moluccis Insulis” was an overly enthusiastic political and religious harangue in Latin that Transylvanus presented to the Spanish court at Valladolid in the fall of 1522. Ever enterprising and aiming for fame as a writer, Transylvanus “outscooped” everyone by freely appropriating Pigafetta’s chronicles of Magellan’s voyage for that harangue, barely 45 days after the return to Spain of the Magellanic Expedition’s lone surviving ship Victoria on September 8, 1522 with captain Sebastian Elcano (who replaced the slain Magellan), Pigafetta, and 16 surviving crewmembers on board.

Addressed as a letter to the powerful Cardinal-Archbishop of Salzburg, Matthäus Lang von Wellenburg, Transylvanus garbled and chronologically warped his retelling of Pigafetta’s account of the Magellanic sojourn: “Our men, having taken in water in Acaca, sailed towards Selani; here a storm took them, so that they could not bring the ships to that island, but were driven to another island called Massaus (sic), where lives a king of …three islands, after that they arrived at Subuth (Cebu). This is an excellent and large island, and, having made a treaty with its chieftain, they landed immediately to perform divine service…” (https://tinyurl.com/pf7h45du)

Title page and first part of the introductory paragraph of the 1522 letter of Maximilianus Transylvanus, courtier of Roman Emperor Charles V, to the Cardinal-Archbishop of Salzburg about the Magellanic
expedition to the East Indies. It is an English translation of Transylvanus’ original text in Latin.

 

This letter formed the first edition of “De Moluccis Insulis.” It was printed in Cologne in January 1523, then got reprinted in Paris in July and in Rome in November that same year.

There should be little room for doubt that the indiscriminate departures of Transylvanus’s “De Moluccis Insulis” from Pigafetta’s chronicles of the Magellan’s sojourn in the archipelago was what prompted Ramusio in 1650 to retranslate back into Italian his 1525 French translation of Pigafetta’s travel diary. In that retranslation, Ramusio replaced “Messana” (Mazaua) with “Buthuam” (Butuan) as the first Mass site.

This made Butuan the unchallenged site of that first Mass until 1601 when Spanish historian Antonio de Herrera y Tordesillas, translating Pigafetta’s account into Spanish, affirmed that the true site was indeed Mazaua.

(Next: Getting our history right after 500 years - 4)    April 15, 2021

This essay, 2,040th of the series, appeared in the column “English Plain and Simple” by Jose A. Carillo in the Campus Press section of the April 8, 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 - 3”

To listen to the audio version of this article, click the encircled double triangle logo in its online posting in The Manila Times.

ALL PARTS OF THIS  HISTORY SERIES:
1. Getting our Philippine history right after 500 years - Part 1
2. Getting our Philippine history right after 500 years - Part 2
3. Getting our Philippine history right after 500 years - Part 3      THIS POST
4. Getting our Philippine history right after 500 years - Part 4      
5. Getting our Philippine history right after 500 years - Part 5
6. Getting our Philippine history right after 500 years - Part 6
TO BE CONTINUED