March 16, 1521: Magellan arrives (Sabong News)
Author
Manila Bulletin
Date
MARCH 16 2022
Exactly 501 years ago, at daybreak on March 16, 1521, Spain first saw what it would soon name the Philippines after its king, Philip the Prudent.
Like hope on the horizon, the island of Zamal, now Samar, shimmered in the eyes of Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan and his crew. With them was Italian nobleman Antonio Pigafetta, who kept a record of the Spanish expedition that set out of Seville on Aug. 10, 1519 on a westerly route to the Moluccas.
At first sight of Zamal, they were afraid, having had an unpleasant experience just 10 days before at
“islands of thieves,” what is now the Marianas Islands, from which the inhabitants, as Pigafetta wrote in his journal, “entered the ships and stole whatever they could lay their hands on… The captain-general (Magellan) in wrath went ashore with 40 armed men, who burned some 40 or 50 houses together with many boats, and killed seven men.”
Prior to reaching the Marianas on March 6, 1521, the three ships left of Magellan’s fleet of four carracks and one caravel had been at sea without fresh provisions for three months and 20 days. On Nov. 28 the year before, they entered what Magellan called
, the calm Pacific, through a strait that would later be named after him.
Nearly half of the crew of 270 men had by this time either been lost at sea or succumbed to in-fighting, scurvy, or starvation. “We ate biscuit, which was no longer biscuit, but powder of biscuits swarming with worms,” wrote Pigafetta. “We drank yellow water that had been putrid for many days.”
So it was with desperate hope, albeit with wariness, that on March 16, 1521, Magellan and his men, by this time all skin and bones, approached Zamal, deciding instead to drop anchor at Suluan, east of the Leyte Gulf. It was on nearby Humunu, now Homonhon, however, that they first set foot on land, calling it
or the fountain of good signs on account of its clean, sparkling fresh water.
On uninhabited Humunu, they set up tents on the shore in which to rest and tend to the sick. Three days later, Magellan and his men watched with fear and agitation a boat approach. As the nine men from Suluan aboard it disembarked, “their chief,” wrote Pigafetta, who described the islanders as ornately adorned, “went immediately to the captain-general, giving signs of joy because of our arrival.”
That was how those early Filipinos welcomed the Spaniards—not only with open arms but also with what Pigafetta listed as “fish, a jar of palm wine, which they call uraca, figs more than one palmo long (bananas), and others, which were smaller and more delicate, and two
What Magellan found upon reaching the Philippines was not only untouched paradise but a thriving civilization as well as a welcoming, trusting, hospitable people no stranger to foreign encounters.
Thus Pigafetta wrote: “To honor our captain, they conducted him to their boats where they had their merchandise, which consisted of cloves, cinnamon, pepper, nutmegs, mace, gold and other things; and they made us understand by gestures that such articles were to be found in the islands to which we were going.”
