Gatighan - Location of The Island

Location of The Island

If you look at Pigafetta's map, Gatighan is the only island mass that straddles between two huge islands, Bohol and Ceylon/Seilani (Panaon Island, the south most end of Leyte). It is almost exactly at the 10° N latitude, reference point of Albo for Gatighan. In 1663, a Spanish missionary, Fr. Francisco Colín, S.J. "christened" this isle, Pigafetta's Gatighan, with an invented name, Dimasawa to signify that this is not the Mazaua named by Antonio de Herrera as the port where Magellan and his men celebrated an Easter mass on March 31, 1521. Colín wrote, adopting the mangled account by Giovanni Battista Ramusio of Pigafetta, the port of March-April 1521 was Butuan, not Herrera's Mazaua. Five years after, another Jesuit historian, Fr. Francisco Combés, S.J. writing on the evangelization of Mindanao, "rechristened" the same island, giving it a coined word, Limasawa that does not exist in any account of the circumnavigation or in any of 100+ Philippine languages. His Limasawa had as reference point Herrera's Mazaua, and was meant to also indicate negation of Herrera's mention of a mass at that island. Combés does not mention any mass, but talks of the planting of a cross at Butuan. This isle, Dimasaua or Limasawa, was projected in a world famous map drawn in 1734 in the Philippines by the Jesuit mapmaker, Fr. Pedro Murillo Velarde, plagiarized by leading European cartographers of the time, and copied, a credit to his integrity, by the leading European mapmaker the French Jacques N. Bellin.