Why NHI sees Limasawa, the negation of Mazaua, as identical to the
isle it (Limasawa) repudiates

If you go back to the 3-paragraphs of the inventor of Limasawa—Fr.
Francisco Combes, S.J.—one sees the ff.:

1. He had not read a single primary/eyewitness account of Magellan's
voyage;
2. He repudiated the story of Antonio de Herrera that said the port
was Mazaua where an Easter mass was held and a cross planted;
3. He affirmed what Gian B. Ramusio wrote—erroneously—that the port
was Butuan;
4. He did not write that an Easter mass was celebrated anywhere;
5. He said, following one version of the story of Ramusio—which again
I must emphasize is wrong—that a cross was planted at Butuan on 31
March 1521;
6. He had no personal knowledge of the Mazaua episode otherwise he
would not have repudiated the Mazaua story of De Herrera;
7. He had not heard of any oral tradition about the episode otherwise
he would have affirmed De Herrera's version of the episode.

In other words, Combes' Limasawa has no association whatsoever with an
Easter mass, is in fact a total repudiation of Mazaua, and is the
product of complete ignorance of the real story of Mazaua.

Why then does the National Historical Institute insist still that
Limasawa is identical to Mazaua?

In a letter just this May 2006, incumbent Chair Ambeth Ocampo wrote a
member of the Agusan del Norte government that NHI stands on its
finding that Mazaua and Limasawa are one and the same.

As far as I can tell, NHI has come out only twice with a stand on the
issue. The first time was in 1953.

That year the National Historical Committee, precursor of the National
Historical Institute, affirmed the "study" of its secretary, a Mr.
O.D. Opiana, who invoked in a memorandum as supreme proof a statement
of Jayme de Veyra paraphrasing a remark of H. Trinidad Pardo de
Tavera, "En Limasawa y no en Butuan fue en donde se celebro la primera
Misa en estas regions." ("In Limasawa, not in Butuan, the first Mass
in these regions was celebrated." Miguel Bernad's translation)

One need not be a genius to see that de Veyra's quote of Tavera's
assertion proves anything. That was the highest form of historical
thinking emanating from that body then.

The next attempt by NHI was in 1998. It came up with an opinion that
distilled the combined thinking of Dr. Serafin Quiazon, Dr. Samuel K.
Tan, Dr. Ma. Luisa Camagay, chair of U.P. Dept. of History, retired
Associate Justice Emilio Gancayco, Atty. Bartolome C. Fernandez Jr.,
legal officer of the National Commission for Culture and Arts, Dr.
Augusto de Viana of NHI, and NHI Asst. Dir. Emelita V. Almosara.

I have called its opinion the product of casuistry, ignorance, and
total lack of integrity. In Dec. 17, 1996 the panel accepted the Gines
de Mafra account, admitted all evidence and arguments I presented
which discredited the Limasawa hypothesis, repudiated the idea that
Masao, Butuan is Mazaua, and suggested Mazaua was somewhere else in
latitude 9 degrees North.

In 1998, NHI's panel went back on everything, dismissed Gines de Mafra
as fake, ignored the other Pigafetta accounts (Manuscript 5,650 and
the Nancy-Libri-Phillipps-Beinecke-Yale codex), ignored the Genoese
Pilot account, and all other eyewitness accounts save the Ambrosiana.

This panel's findings violates canons of logic, evidence, and
integrity. Mr. Ambeth Ocampo, as incumbent NHI Chair, and the entire
Board of Directors of NHI, had to repudiate it in 2005—thanks to my
outcry that I made sure was on the Internet and in other for a
involving historians. Otherwise NHI would be party to a hoax. But it
has not announced this repudiation in all the media whereas it gave
the Gancayco opinion wide publicity in 1998.

So, when Ambeth Ocampo says the NHI affirms Limasawa, he is therefore
falling back on the Opiana opinion, a product that is at least honest
but never quite rises beyond mediocrity and its total lack of
scholarly merit.

When the Gancayco opinion came out, I then saw NHI is not qualified to
resolve an issue that ought to be presented to Magellan scholars and
experts of Renaissance navigation history, geography, cartography,
exploration and discovery history. There are no such experts in the
Philippines.

I decided to raise the issue before the world's leading experts when
they met at the annual conference of The Society for the History of
Discoveries in October 2000 at the U.S. Library of Congress in
Washington DC. The SHD has counted among its membership the foremost
American Magellan historiographer, Dr. Martin Torodash, and other
notable minds such as Dr. Tim Joyner, Donald F. Lach and R.A. Skelton.
In the Discoverer Web eGroup where Torodash and I are subscribers,
Torodash kept his silence when I said point blank that his dismissal
of the Gines de Mafra account as nothing more than De Mafra's
recollection of Andres de San Martin's papers which are nowhere to be
found, was unprovable, was not meaningful, and quite irrelevant to
Mazaua historiography.

A revised edition of my paper is published on several sites on the
Internet and recently in Answer.com supposedly
at
http://www.answers.com/topic/mazaua-magellan-s-port-the-great-geographical-enigm\
a.

Hopefully, given this exposure the discussion on Mazaua will be global
in scale and the process of peer review will engage the world's
greatest minds.

From this global playing field, where does NHI stand? What are its
bona fides? What credentials will it present to the world of Magellan
scholarship and Renaissance navigation history? Opiana's mediocrity?
Or Gancayco's casuistry?

Does it even have any right anymore to participate in this globalized
discussion?