Limasawa or Butuan?

On Easter Sunday, 31 March 1521, Magellan’s chaplain said Mass on an island that Antonio Pigafetta called Mazaua, and that afternoon Magellan raised a cross on its highest hill. For about three hundred years most writers placed it at Butuan, in northern Mindanao. Today historians, the National Historical Commission of the Philippines and the Catholic bishops agree that Mazaua was Limasawa, in Southern Leyte. Here is the evidence on both sides.

The short answer

Limasawa, a small island off the southern tip of Leyte, now a town in the province of Southern Leyte

The date

Easter Sunday, 31 March 1521

Who wrote it down

Antonio Pigafetta, who was there; the pilot Francisco Albo, in his log; and an unnamed Genoese pilot

The official position

Limasawa, upheld by government panels in 1995, 2008 and 2020; the site is a national shrine under Republic Act No. 2733 of 1960

Its name today

The National Historical Commission and the Catholic bishops call it the 1521 Easter Sunday Mass

What the eyewitnesses wrote

Three men who sailed with Magellan left accounts that mention the island. None of them puts the Mass at Butuan.

Antonio Pigafetta

Pigafetta met two kings on Mazaua: Rajah Kolambu, whom he calls the king of Mazaua, and Kolambu’s brother Rajah Siaui. He is clear that Butuan was the brother’s land, not the island where the fleet lay.

That island of his was called Butuan and Calagan. When those kings wished to see one another, they both went to hunt in that island where we were.

Pigafetta, on Rajah Siaui

The interpreter asked the king why there was so little to eat there. The latter replied that he did not live in that place except when he went hunting and to see his brother, but that he lived in another island where all his family were.

Pigafetta, on Rajah Kolambu

Early on the morning of Sunday, the last of March, and Easter-day, the captain-general sent the priest with some men to prepare the place where mass was to be said … We went in marching order to the place consecrated, which was not far from the shore.

Pigafetta, on the Mass

It lies in a latitude of nine and two-thirds degrees toward the Arctic Pole … It is twenty-five [leguas] from the Acquada, and is called Mazaua.

Pigafetta, on where Mazaua lies; the Acquada is his name for Homonhon

We remained there seven days, after which we laid our course toward the northwest, passing among five islands, namely, Ceylon, Bohol, Canighan, Baybai, and Gatighan.

Pigafetta, leaving for Cebu

Francisco Albo, pilot

From here we departed and sailed W., and fell in with a large island called Seilani, which is inhabited, and contains gold; we coasted it, and went to W.S.W., to a small inhabited island called Mazaba. The people are very good, and there we placed a cross upon a mountain … and this island is in 9⅓° N. latitude.

Albo’s log; Seilani is Leyte

The Genoese pilot

… came to anchor at another island, which is named Macangor, which is in nine degrees; and in this island they were very well received, and they placed a cross in it.

The Genoese pilot’s account

The case for Limasawa

• Butuan was somewhere else. Pigafetta names Butuan and Calagan as the second king’s own land, and says the two kings came to Mazaua to hunt. Mazaua was a different place.
• A small island with little food. The king of Mazaua said he stayed there only to hunt and to see his brother, and Albo calls it a small inhabited island. Limasawa is a small island; Butuan was a busy port on the mainland of Mindanao.
• The distance. Pigafetta puts Mazaua twenty-five leagues from Homonhon. The 2020 panel measured Limasawa at about 24 leagues (134 km) from Homonhon, and Butuan at about 36 (198 km).
• The way on to Cebu. From Mazaua the fleet went north along Leyte and then west to Cebu, which fits an island off Leyte’s southern tip.
• Pigafetta’s latitude. His nine and two-thirds degrees, 9°40′ north, is about a quarter of a degree from Limasawa (9°54′) and three-quarters of a degree from Butuan (8°56′).

The case for Butuan

• Three hundred years of tradition. The idea that the Mass was at Butuan was in print by 1550, in an Italian retelling of the voyage published by Giovanni Battista Ramusio, and the Jesuit chroniclers Francisco Colín (1663) and Francisco Combés (1667) repeated it. In 1872 the Spanish put up a monument to the first Mass near the mouth of the Agusan River, in what is now Magallanes, Agusan del Norte.
• The name. Masao, on the coast of Butuan City, sounds like Pigafetta’s Mazaua. Supporters argue that it was once an island, since joined to the mainland by silt from the Agusan River.
• The pilots’ latitudes. Albo gives nine and one-third degrees and the Genoese pilot nine. Both figures are nearer Butuan than Limasawa.
• Butuan’s importance. Butuan was a rich trading town, with gold and great boats like the balangays dug up there since the 1970s, which makes it a likely place for the king Pigafetta describes.

How historians weighed it

Historians give the most weight to accounts written at the time by people who were there. Ramusio, Colín and Combés were not on the voyage and wrote decades or more than a century later. Pigafetta, Albo and the Genoese pilot were there, and the only one of them who mentions Butuan, Pigafetta, says it was somewhere else. The latitudes disagree with one another by more than half a degree, so they cannot settle the question on their own; the distance from Homonhon and Pigafetta’s description of the two kings carry more weight.

The Jesuit historian Pablo Pastells corrected Colín’s account in a new edition of his chronicle in the early 1900s, and in 1921, for the four hundredth anniversary, the historian Trinidad Pardo de Tavera made the case for Limasawa, which the government has recognised ever since. The National Historical Institute heard the question again in 1995, in a panel led by the former Supreme Court justice Emilio Gancayco, and in 2008, in a panel led by the historian Benito Legarda; both found for Limasawa.

Before the five hundredth anniversary, the National Historical Commission of the Philippines looked at it once more. A panel led by the historian Resil Mojares gathered the surviving manuscripts of Pigafetta, visited the sites claimed in Butuan and on Limasawa, and consulted geologists and map experts. On 15 July 2020 the Commission adopted its finding that the case for Butuan was “not sufficient and convincing enough to warrant the repeal or reversal” of the earlier ruling. The Catholic Bishops’ Conference of the Philippines endorsed it that September.

If you are writing about it

• Start with the eyewitnesses: quote what Pigafetta, Albo and the Genoese pilot actually wrote.
• Say which sources come from people who were there, and which were written later by people who were not.
• Be fair to the evidence that does not fit: two of the three latitudes are nearer Butuan.
• Give the official position and when it was reached: Limasawa, most recently upheld in 2020.

Read the Mazaua chapter →

See also the landing on Homonhon, the study guide to Pigafetta in the Philippines and the words Pigafetta wrote down in Cebu. The quotations are from James Alexander Robertson’s English translation of Pigafetta (1906) and Lord Stanley’s translations of Albo’s log and the Genoese pilot (1874).