Establishing “facts”

By Virginia Jasmin Pasalo

 

IN 1997, during his professorial lecture at the City College of Manila, Ambeth Ocampo, former Chairperson of the National Historical Commission (NHCP) said “Personally, I think this controversy like that of the site of the first mass — Limasawa, Leyte or Masao, Butuan — belongs in the basura (trash). But then, textbooks and quiz shows require definite answers. People want “facts” not lessons or perspectives.”  Vicente Calibo de Jesus, a relentless researcher on the subject of the first “mass” disagrees. He said, “A historian has a moral obligation to Truth, and an ethical responsibility to his readers, domestic and global.”

There is also a claim that the first “mass” was actually in Bolinao, Pangasinan celebrated in 1324 by Odoric of Pordenone, OFM, also known as Odorico Mattiussi or Mattiuzzi, an Italian late-medieval Franciscan friar and missionary explorer, predating the mass held in 1521 by Ferdinand Magellan, which is generally regarded as the first mass in the Philippines. This claim presupposes that a mass was always celebrated upon landing by missionaries.

It is now 2018, and there are other disciplines that can collaborate the establishment of “facts” aside from Ambeth Ocampo, NHCP, or history books prescribed in Philippine schools. Land masses and geographical features do not change drastically, so it is possible to actually pinpoint exact locations of places mentioned in historical accounts. Institutions involved in map-making, geography and other disciplines can corroborate or totally debunk “facts” in history.

One of these institutions is the National Mapping and Resource Information Authority (NAMRIA), an attached agency of the Philippine government under the Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR) mandated to provide the public with map-making services and serves as the central mapping agency, depository, and distribution facility of natural resources data in the form of maps, charts, texts, and statistics. NAMRIA mapping vis-à-vis the coordinates given in the accounts of those who first recorded the “mass”, with due diligence in the review of other references, can identify with certainty, what happened, where and who did what.

Who killed Magellan?  There is a full account of the battle in The Voyage of Magellan, the Journal of Antonio Pigafetta (1969) translated by Paula Paige and other sources. According to this account:

“So many of them charged down upon us that they shot the captain through the right leg with a poisoned arrow….   Recognizing the captain, so many turned upon him that they knocked his helmet off his head twice, but he always stood firmly like a good knight, together with some others… An Indian hurled a bamboo spear into the captain’s face, but the latter immediately killed him with his lance, which he left in the Indian’s body. Then, trying to lay hand on sword, he could draw it out but halfway, because he had been wounded in the arm with a bamboo spear. When the natives saw that, they all hurled themselves upon him. One of them wounded him on the left leg with a large cutlass, which resembles a scimitar, only being larger. That caused the captain to fall face downward, when immediately they rushed upon him with iron and bamboo spears and with their cutlasses, until they killed our mirror, our light, our comfort, and our true guide. When they wounded him, he turned back many times to see whether we were all in the boats. Thereupon, beholding him dead, we, wounded, retreated, as best we could, to the boats, which were already pulling off.”

This account says, “they” and not one person. Historians must be open to the revision of “facts”, as other sources come to the fore, and as technology continues to advance and make available tools that can be used to inform prescribed “facts” peddled as truth by those who decide which “facts” will be taught in schools.

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