Colín identified his principal source for his reconstruction of the above episode as Antonio Pigafetta as edited by Giovanni Battista Ramusio.
Ramusio was the foremost travel writer of the Renaissance who retranslated back to Italian a French text of Antonio Pigafetta's account of Magellan's voyage.
Ramusio's work is entitled Viaggio attorno il mondo scritto per M. Antonio Pigafetta...tradotto di lingua francese nella Italiana and is found in a compendium of travel stories, Primo Volume delle Navigationi et Viaggi...Venetia, gli heredi di Luc Antonio Giunti, 1563.
This same translation came out earlier in 1536, anonymously, in book form entitled Il viaggio fatto da gli Spagniuoli a torno a'l mondo without the name of the printer and place of publication.
"Messana" because of its familiarity to Europeans—it's the name of the Italian port where the bubonic plague started—had for a long time supplanted the true name, Mazaua, so that even as late as 1894 when the Italian scholar Andrea da Mosto had expertly transcribed Pigafetta's Ambrosiana codex, which work fully established the text of that manuscript that has essentially been adopted by succeeding historiographers, even then da Mosto used Transylvanus' "Mazana."
Then from Butuan, they sailed for Cebu but all of a sudden are found at "Messana" which in the real story is "Mazaua" where the fleet did in fact anchor on those dates.
It's important to remember this mix-up to have a clear view of which island in the true story Colín's Dimasaua is pointing to.
The precise story, as told by Antonio Pigafetta and the other witnesses, is the fleet had anchored at a tiny — about 3,930 hectares according to Ginés de Mafra - island-port named Mazaua which The Genoese Pilot said was at latitude 9° north, locating the skerry in Mindanao.
From Mazaua the Armada sailed for Cebu in the Visayas in central Philippines passing first at a little island called Gatighan.
He talks of the fleet's anchoring at the isle whose name he spells "Mazagua" which is phonetically the exact equivalent of the Butuanon word "masawa."
His account also refers to a cross being planted atop the tallest hill which Magellan, his men and the chiefs or kings of Mazagua and Butuan participated in.
Thinking Ramusio's was the authentic Pigafetta account—an eyewitness testimony that therefore supersedes in importance Herrera's second-hand account—Colín wrote that Butuan was the port where the Easter mass was held.
The word consists of the Bisaya prefix "di" which means not and Herrera's name for the port where an Easter mass was held, "Mazagua."
Combés had a different version of Ramusio, one that did not refer to a mass being held at Butuan on March 31, 1521 although a cross being planted at a hill is mentioned.
He comes up with a different prefix, a syllable, that is unheard of in any Philippine language, and is not of French, Spanish, Italian or Portuguese provenience.
Following the route earlier traced, the placename points to Pigafetta's Gatighan which is located by Francisco Albo, the pilot who brought Victoria back to Seville, at 10° north latitude just one nautical mile (1.9 km) above the tip of today's Limasawa.
He had a revised edition later where in the cartouche Murillo relates Magellan's visit to Butuan where an Easter mass was held on March 31, 1521.
This map became a sensation among European cartographers and was shamelessly plagiarized by them except Jacques N. Bellin who had the intellectual honesty to cite Murillo as his authority.
In 1798, paleographer-conservator Carlo Amoretti of Ambrosiana library in Milan discovered the lost Italian manuscript of Antonio Pigafetta which was written in Renaissance longhand.
Western navigation historians and Magellan scholars started a tradition of repeating Amoretti's assertion, e.g., Lord Stanley of Alderley (1874), F.H.H.
Guillemard (1890), Jose Toribio Medina (1888), Andrea da Mosto (1894), James Alexander Robertson (1906), J. Denuce (1911), and on down the line including Laurence Bergreen (2003).
Religious chroniclers in the Philippines went along with the spirit of invention started by Colín and Combés and gave the isle other names: Limasaba (Fr.
In Le premier tour du monde de Magellan: France, 1991, his transcription with notes and editorial treatment of an extant Pigafetta manuscript, Ms f. 5650, Peillard in footnote 118 on page 314 and footnote 154 on page 317 assert Mazaua is in the latitude calculated by The Genoese Pilot at 9° north and that Mazaua was in fact part of Mindanao ("Elle en fait partie, en realite".
In the Philippines itself, historians obscured the issue by failing—either deliberately or unintentionally—to cite Amoretti as authority for the Limasaua=Mazaua notion, and reframing the way they looked at the incident back to its religious context as Colín and Combés viewed it.
The critical role of Herrera's "Mazagua" has not been heretofore analyzed except in the paper of Vicente Calibo de Jesus which he read on October 13, 2007 at the annual conference of The Society for the History of Discoveries held at the U.S. Library of Congress, Washington D.C. John N. Schumacher, S.J.
References are found on pages 20, 27 and 78 of the paper as revised and published on the site of Italian nuclear scientist Dr. Vasco Caini at http://www.xeniaeditrice.it.
In a decision promulgated in March 1998, NHI dismissed the Ginés de Mafra account as fake, knowing fully that it is genuine.
De Mafra in his account located the isle of Mazaua south of 1521 Butuan some 45 nautical miles (83 km) below, placing it at 9° north, the exact latitude for Magellan's port given by one of the eyewitnesses, one known to history as The Genoese Pilot.
The Institute with full knowledge of its erroneous method of reaching a reconstruction of the past has transformed an honest mistake into what we might call the Limasawa hoax.
Primo viaggio intorno al globo terracqueo, ossia ragguaglio della navigazione...fatta dal cavaliere Antonio Pigafetta...ora publicato per la prima volta, tratto da un codice MS. Della biblioteca Ambrosiana di Milano e corredato di note da Carlo Amoretti.