ONE American historian, Kenneth Scott Latourette, wrote in a 1964 textbook we use in some colleges even today: “Before the coming of the Spaniards, as we have hinted, the Philippines were backward in civilization as compared with most of the rest of the Far East… The Filipinos were still but partly removed from the primitive stages of culture.”

Reading this made Filipinos believe that our ancestors were never great. That when the Europeans came here, they were all-powerful and were able to easily deceive our docile ancestors. But when explorer Ferdinand Magellan arrived here, his companion and chronicler Antonio Pigafetta actually described a different story. They had been on the journey to attempt to circumnavigate the world for the very first time for about a year and a half, about 90 days in the open ocean without seeing land. A few days back, they reached the Marianas and even before they could dock, the Chamorros had robbed them. They lacked clean water, they were hungry, tired and believed they could die anytime, when they saw an island in this part of the world later known as The Philippines on March 16, 1521.

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