Creator of Grand Geographical Illusion
Even while it is so poorly regarded Amoretti's work has left an enduring geographical puzzle—an invalid geographical assertion—which has only been recently detected.
In two footnotes on pages 66 and 72, Amoretti surmised that Magellan's port—which he named Massana and appears otherwise as Mazaua or Mazzaua in the clear calligraphic writing of the Beinecke-Yale codex, where the Armada de Molucca anchored from March 28 to April 4, 1521—may be the Limassava in a map of the Philippines by French cartographer Jacques N. Bellin.
Bellin's map is a perfect copy of a chart made by Fr. Pedro Murillo Velarde, S.J., of the Philippines in 1734. Murillo's map was such a brilliant and beautiful map many European mapmakers plagiarized it outright. To the credit of Bellin, he cites Murillo as his authority; he corrects Murillo's longitude which followed the erroneous entry of Pigafetta. The French Bellin was hydrographer to the king of France and one of the greatest and most important French cartographers of the mid-18th century. His works were of such excellence as to set a high standard and were widely copied throughout Europe. His map of the Philippines came out the same year that Murillo's map came out.
In any case, Amoretti offers one proof in support of his guess: the latitude of Limassava is at Pigafetta's latitude for Mazaua at 9°40' North. He was mistaken on two counts, Limasawa is at 9°56' North while Mazaua had three latitude readings by three members of the Armada, 9°40' N by Pigafetta, 9°20' N by Francisco Albo, and 9° N by the Genoese Pilot.
Mazaua was the port where Magellan's fleet anchored for one week. It was also the port where 22 years later, Ginés de Mafra, revisited, the only crewmember of the Armada to do so. There are other visits by Spanish and Portuguese during the entire Age of Sail, the last notable one a few months before the 1565 arrival of the Legazpi expedition being a Portuguese squadron that virtually wiped out the entire population of the isle except for one native who was able to hide.
Read more about this topic: Carlo Amoretti
Famous quotes containing the words creator of, creator, grand, geographical and/or illusion:
“Rhyme, that enslaved queen, that supreme charm of our poetry, that creator of our meter.”
—Victor Hugo (1802–1885)
“Since we are assured that the all-wise Creator has observed the most exact proportions of number, weight and measure in the make of all things, the most likely way therefore to get any insight into the nature of those parts of the Creation which come within our observation must in all reason be to number, weigh and measure.”
—Stephen Hales (1677–1761)
“It enhances our sense of the grand security and serenity of nature to observe the still undisturbed economy and content of the fishes of this century, their happiness a regular fruit of the summer.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Men’s private self-worlds are rather like our geographical world’s seasons, storm, and sun, deserts, oases, mountains and abysses, the endless-seeming plateaus, darkness and light, and always the sowing and the reaping.”
—Faith Baldwin (1893–1978)
“The motion picture is like a picture of a lady in a half- piece bathing suit. If she wore a few more clothes, you might be intrigued. If she wore no clothes at all, you might be shocked. But the way it is, you are occupied with noticing that her knees are too bony and that her toenails are too large. The modern film tries too hard to be real. Its techniques of illusion are so perfect that it requires no contribution from the audience but a mouthful of popcorn.”
—Raymond Chandler (1888–1959)