The Magellanic fleet’s sojourn in our archipelago in 1521 was chronicled in great detail by Antonio Pigafetta as part of his
“Primo Viaggio Intorno al Mondo” (First Circumnavigation of the World), which he started finalizing when he got back to Spain on September 6, 1522 on board the lone returning ship
Victoria. He was one of the only 18 survivors of the original five-ship, 270-man expedition of Ferdinand Magellan to the Moluccas to establish a foothold in the spice trade for the Spanish crown.
Pigafetta's Magellanic chronicles could not be published in his
lifetime and was suppressed for posterity likely because they
told in sordid detail several acts of terrorism and forcible
faith conversion by the Captain-General Ferdinand Magellan
and his men during the fleet’s Philippine sojourn in 1521.
Today, over 500 years later, many of us in the Philippines and elsewhere in the world still don’t know what decisive turn of events might have turned history on its head during that 135-day sojourn in our archipelago. This was because Pigafetta’s complete manuscript in French drew very lukewarm interest from King Charles V himself and the financial sponsors of Magellan’s voyage. Pigafetta could not even get a publisher interested enough to print it with him as the author.
On the other hand, through their strong royal connections and ecclesiastic patrons, four noted 15th century European writers—Maximilianus Transylvanus, Giovanni Battista Ramusio, Peter Martyr d’Anghiera, and Richard Eden—got copies of abridgments and adaptations of Pigafetta’s manuscript and individually translated it into Latin, French, Italian, or English, each making unilateral changes in the narrative to the point of sometimes seriously garbling it.
Pigafetta’s original manuscript did contain highly incriminating narratives about the questionable and revolting conduct abroad of Ferdinand Magellan and some of his lieutenants in the Magellanic voyage—behavior that could have put both the Spanish and Portuguese monarchs who were devout Christians in a very bad light. This is perhaps one major reason why Pigafetta never got his manuscript published in his lifetime. Worse, it completely vanished for almost 400 years until it was found entirely by accident in 1797 by the Augustinian priest Carlo Amoretti while doing his routine job as conservator of the Ambrosian Library in Milan.
It was no surprise that upon his return from the Magellanic voyage in 1522, the Venetian citizen Pigafetta got a less than lukewarm welcome in Spain, and neither was his
“Primo Viaggio Intorno al Mondo” received with enthusiasm in royal, ecclesiastical, and publishing circles. King Charles V had been in war footing against Francis I of France since 1521 over territorial matters. To win that war against the French and the Venetians, King Charles V had allied Spain with England and Pope Leo X.
Pigafetta had earlier felt King Charles V’s strong antipathy towards him when he summoned the returning captain-general Juan Sebastián Elcano to the royal palace in Valladolid. The King had asked Elcano to bring with him two guests from among the voyage returnees, but Elcano conspicuously excluded Pigafetta despite his being the expedition’s official chronicler.
Instead, Elcano chose Francisco Albo, the ship Victoria’s last pilot, and the fleet’s barber-surgeon Hernándo de Bustamante. Both of them gave damaging testimony in the royal court that it was Magellan’s disobedience to King Charles V’s orders that triggered the violent mutiny by three Spanish captains (Elcano himself among them) in San Julian on March 31, 1520, that Magellan played favorites with his relatives among the crewmembers, and that Magellan was partial against the ship captains who were Spanish.
This was when Pigafetta realized how low he had fallen in King Charles V’s esteem because of his much-talked-about loyalty and devotion to Magellan who, despite being acclaimed with Elcano for their joint feat of the first circumnavigation of the globe, was widely descredited and reviled both in Spain as Magellan’s adopted country and in Portugal as the native country he had renounced.
We will look next into key passages in Pigafetta’s original manuscript that must have made the 15th century royals and ecclesiastic leaders recoil and want to suppress it.
(Next:
Getting our history right after 500 years – Part 11) June 10, 2021
This essay, 2,048th of the series, appeared in the column “English Plain and Simple” by Jose A. Carillo in the Campus Press section of the June 3, 2021 Internet edition of The Manila Times
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