Last week, in Part 14 of this chronological review of Ferdinand Magellan's 1521 anchorage in Mazaua and the holding of the first Holy Mass there, we saw that the Italian geographer and travel writer Giovanni Battista Ramusio - along with three other 16th century European history writers who had translated, abridged, or adapted Antonio Pigafetta's longwinded eyewitness chronicles in French - evidently got misled in good faith that both landmark events took place "in the island of Butuan." The awful misreading could have befallen any proud professional editor or translator who, remaining unaware of the embarrassing factual gaffe long after it got published and circulated, would have suffered total loss of face, self-respect, and credibility by admitting it publicly.
That very serious garbling of the Magellanic Expedition narrative remained unchallenged for over 80 years until Antonio de Herrera y Tordesillas (1549-1625), Spain's colonial historian and official chronicler of the Indies, affirmed in 1601 in his Spanish translation of Pigafetta's chronicles that the site of the first Holy Mass in our shores was indeed Mazaua. Still, even long after the lifetime of those who had committed the very evident historical blunder, no one took the trouble to point out and rectify it.
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