Detailed Accounts of Ferdinand Magellan's Death
It is written in the world history that Ferndinand Magellan circumnavigated the world, although he did not made his final westward voyage because he was killed in our country, the Phillpines.
Most of us new that he was killed by Lapu-Lapu but there's is no detailed accounts we knew how he died in the battle of Mactan.
Antionio Pigafetta, the a wealthy Venetian tourist who paid to be on the Magellan voyage provided the only extant eyewitness account of the events culminating in Magellan's death:
"When morning came, forty-nine of us leaped into the water up to our thighs, and walked through water for more than two cross-bow flights before we could reach the shore. The boats could not approach nearer because of certain rocks in the water. The other eleven men remained behind to guard the boats. When we reached land, [the natives] had formed in three divisions to the number of more than one thousand five hundred people. When they saw us, they charged down upon us with exceeding loud cries... The musketeers and crossbow-men shot from a distance for about a half-hour, but uselessly... Recognising the captain, so many turned upon him that they knocked his helmet off his head twice... A native hurled a bamboo spear into the captain's face, but the latter immediately killed him with his lance, which he left in the native's body. Then, trying to lay hand on sword, he could draw it out but halfway, because he had been wounded in the arm with a bamboo spear. When the natives saw that, they all hurled themselves upon him. One of them wounded him on the left leg with a large cutlass, which resembles a scimitar, only being larger. That caused the captain to fall face downward, when immediately they rushed upon him with iron and bamboo spears and with their cutlasses, until they killed our mirror, our light, our comfort, and our true guide. When they wounded him, he turned back many times to see whether we were all in the boats. Thereupon, beholding him dead, we, wounded, retreated, as best we could, to the boats, which were already pulling off"
Source: FreeDictionary
|
