Talk:Butuan City

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[edit] lacking

I find the information lacking. Would anyone please complete it?

[edit] Magellan did not visit Butuan

The notion Butuan was visited by Magellan and his fleet comes from a garbled translation of the Antonio Pigafetta account by Giovanni Battista Ramusio. Ramusio, in an act that can't be explained by logic or any rational reason, excised the word Mazaua and replaced it with Butuan. This error was never detected until 1800 the edition of the Italian Pigafetta account by Carlo Amoretti which was published on that year.

The Italian manuscript of Pigafetta which was later translated by James Alexander Robertson is universally known today as the Ambrosiana codex. Amoretti corrected the Butuan error but at the same time created an enduring myth which was turned into a hoax in 1998 by the National Historical Institute, the Philippines' official agency that deals with history.

Amoretti speculated in two footnotes that Mazaua, the port where Magellan's fleet was anchored from March 28 to April 4, 1521, may be the isle named "Limassava" in the 1734 map of the Philippines by Jacques N. Bellin. Amoretti did not know that the isle's name came from a history written by Fr. Francisco Combés who wrote that Magellan anchored at Butuan--Ramusio's erroneous entry--and from there sailed Cebu and made its first brief stop at an isle in southern Leyte named "Limasaua." The word "Limasaua" is an invention, it's not found in any primary or secondary account, it is not even found in a language within the Visayas and Mindanao area and probably in any of the over 100 languages of the Philippines.

"Limasaua" can be explained by how Combés solved a dilemma created by his three sources, first the Ramusio account, a different version from the original which does not talk of any mass being held in the Philippines on March 31, 1521. A second source was the secondhand account of the Mazaua episode by Antonio de Herrera y Tordesillas which was a faithful, quite exact reconstruction of the event. The third, a short epitome of the event by Fr. Francisco Colín, S.J., where the same Leyte isle, which is west of Panaon and east of Bohol, is named "Dimasaua", which signified "this is not the Mazagua (Hispanicized spelling of an indigenous word "masawa" found only in Butuanon and Tausog) of Herrera's story where he says an Easter Sunday mass was held on March 31, 1521 which I had earlier located at Butuan as told by Antonio Pigafetta as per Giovanni Battista Ramusio." Combés adopted the solution of Colín but not the name for the isle because his story, based on his edition of Ramusio, talks of no mass at all.

But historians uncritically adopted Amoretti's dictum that Limasaua was Mazaua, in effect negating what was being negated by the coined word. Today, "Limasaua" which was coined to negate an Easter Sunday mass is believed to be the site of the first mass. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Vicente Calibo de Jesus (talk • contribs) 22:08, 6 June 2008 (UTC)