Carlo Amoretti - Amoretti Name Unknown in The Philippines

Amoretti Name Unknown in The Philippines

Philippine historians and historiographers who have written on Magellan and the Mazaua episode are totally ignorant of Amoretti. This incredible phenomenon may be explained by the practice or non-practice of modern historiography which is marked by a strict if not reverential respect for authorship.

In the Philippines, Amoretti's dictum was completely accepted but his authorship unrecognized if not indeed appropriated. His assertion was reworked in such a manner as to make it look new and original. Instead of saying what Amoretti said that "Limasawa may be Mazaua" Philippine historiographers reframed it as "the site of the first mass" (Mazaua) is not Butuan (Gian Battista Ramusio's version) but Limasawa.

The framework finally blossomed to the classic question, "Where is the site of the first mass, Limasawa or Butuan?" This proposition forces the reader to choose between two false options, an isle that has no anchorage, Limasawa, and a place that is not an isle, Butuan.

Only with the discovery of the Ginés de Mafra account and by tracing the Limasawa=Mazaua dictum to Amoretti was it possible to see that Amoretti's assertion was based on ignorance of all the eyewitness accounts which he had not read and the accounts of Colín and Combés whose invented names did not point to Magellan's port. De Mafra described a port that was in the Genoese Pilot's 9°N; at this location, all the other's testimonies converged, harmonized to create a unified whole and a consistent truth.