MARCH 17, 1521: The expedition of Ferdinand Magellan anchored at a deep harbor now aptly called Cantelado, south of the uninhabited small island of Homonhon, a day after it had sighted Samar Island while sailing west of the Ladrones Islands.

The first recorded trans-Pacific voyage in history had just been completed.

As reported by chronicler Antonio Pigafetta, the first order of the day was the setting up of two tents on the shore of Homonhon to shelter the sick members of the expedition who were to recuperate on land. A pig was also butchered to feed them.

Unmentioned by Pigafetta, some Portuguese sailors loitered at the edge of the forest, some 200 meters from the shore. They were probably members of groups tasked to gather firewood and to fetch drinking water for the three remaining ships of the expedition.

After months at sea, these Portuguese sailors did not hurry with their first task on land. Instead, they probably frolicked in the clear rapids of two nearby freshwater streams, away from the hot tropical sun. This was a luxury they had missed for long.

Soon they did what every excited vandal would do. They took fancy of the flat and almost vertical wall of a large, hard rock, locally known as bantiles, at the edge of one stream. Here they laboriously chiseled in deep, six-inch capital letters the Portuguese name of the expedition's leader and the date of their landing in Homonhon.

This landmark, not reported by Pigafetta, would escape human notice for more than 400 years.

In 1932, Ceferino Baguinon, an unschooled woodcutter and rattan gatherer from Barrio Culasi on the west coast of Homonhon, noticed signs chiseled into a rock in a forested area facing Cantelado (i.e., deep water). He told his friends about it; otherwise, he did not give special interest in what he found.

A year later, a large fire destroyed much of Homonhon's forest. In searching for a superstitious cause of the mysterious fire, some blame probably fell on the quizzical text of Baguinon's find the year before.

Unfortunately, the text was beyond the comprehension of most Homonhon residents. But they probably suspected it was a potent oracion (magical chants) carrying a curse or a parallel of the biblical rock tablets with the Ten Commandments.

Word about the Homonhon rock inscription spread and soon reached the literate population in the poblacion of Guiuan. The curious among them traveled to the island to see the artifact themselves.

Great local interest in Baguinon's discovery was soon generated. But it took another 20 years before official action on the rock inscription would be taken.

Jose Balein, a Manila journalist who had seen the Homonhon rock inscription in its original state in 1952, quoted the text as ''FERNSO MAGALHAES'' with a date he only described as the arrival of the Magellan expedition, presumably March 17, 1521.

With the exception of the ''S'' in the word FERNSO, the text corresponded to the Portuguese version of Magellan's name--Fernao Magalhaes, with a tilde (~) on top of the ''a'' after the letters ''n'' and ''h,'' respectively.

Balein covered for a national Sunday magazine the visit to Homonhon of Samar Gov. Decoroso Rosales in June 1952, which put an official stamp on Baguinon's discovery.

A concrete monument with a bronze plaque was erected on higher ground behind the rock with the inscription during this trip.

The message on the plaque read:

''Homonhon.

“On this island Ferdinand Magellan's expedition to the Spice Islands landed, 17 March 1521, the day of Saint Lazarus whose name was given to the whole archipelago. Nearby islanders came the next day to meet the visitors with Magellan's servant Enrique from Malacca as interpreter. The great navigator extended to them the message of goodwill from the King of Spain, which was reciprocated. A feast was held and gifts exchanged. Eight days later, on March 25, the crew sailed to Limasawa, where the First Mass in the Philippines was held, 31 March 1521.''

Unfortunately, the bronze plaque, provided by the Philippine Historical Committee in 1952, has disappeared, together with the rock inscribed with the Portuguese name of Magellan.

Dr. Jean-Yves Blot, a Portuguese historian, has provided new details about the Magellan expedition in the Philippines. These are found in his monograph titled ''Magellan in the Visayas, March-April 1521. A Possible Landmark in Homonhon Island,'' published in 1997 by the Academia de Marinha in Lisbon, Portugal.

The monograph was the product of a decade-long research into Magellan's itinerary in the Philippines, which included four trips to the country to survey possible material and archaeological traces of the 1521 voyage.

Blot admitted his field notes about the Homonhon rock inscription were done halfheartedly, and clouded by a hazy conviction that this piece of evidence was probably a fraud or a hoax.

After all, he only heard oral reports of the name ''Magallanes,'' a rather familiar word, chiseled on a rock. Also, he did not find the plaque and the rock during his 1991 visit to Homonhon, on his third trip to the country. Instead, what he saw, took note of, and photographed were modern inscriptions on rocks that, to him, looked softer and of coral origin.

However, Blot reconsidered his position weeks later during a visit to Bishop Vicente Ataviado in Maasin, Southern Leyte. The bishop had investigated the nautical circumstances of Magellan's presence in the Visayas.

Bishop Ataviado wrote on paper FERNSO MAGALHAES, the text he had seen in the Homonhon rock inscription, and showed it to Blot and his wife, another Portuguese historian and linguist.

It finally dawned on Blot that Magellan's name in Portuguese was virtually unknown in the available Spanish or English bibliography in the Philippines. This could explain why the inscription could not be deciphered immediately by the first literate persons who saw it in the early 1930s.

Ataviado also mentioned about a picture of the Homonhon rock with the inscription in a national magazine published years ago.

Days later, Blot got a copy of the article mentioned by the bishop. It was given to him by Valentin Loyola, a Manila-based writer and photographer who had also researched and written articles about Homonhon, his birthplace.

The article, titled ''Homonhon,'' was authored by Jose Balein and published in the Weekend magazine in 1980. In it, Balein recalled his 1952 visit to Homonhon and narrated his second visit after nearly 30 years. He noted the loss of the bronze plaque and feared the original rock inscription had been destroyed by modern vandals.

In 1995, Blot returned to Homonhon, this time bringing with him prints of pictures copied from related articles of Balein in various publications. This time, the local memory had become as blurred as the old pictures.

Fortunately, Blot was shown a clearer black-and-white picture with the Cantelado plaque and rock still intact by a Guiuan resident named C.C. Somoray. This picture showed a group of Filipino excursionists posing before the Cantelado landmarks sometime in 1968.

Blot photographed this old picture for the academic community and for posterity.

He discussed the historical significance of the Homonhon rock inscription in his monograph, supported by citations from other documents and information from his contacts at the international level.

From detailed studies of Lourdes Diaz-Trechuelo on the organization of the Magellan expedition, Blot cited that the crew was largely composed of Spaniards, followed by Italians, French, Portuguese, Greeks, Flemish, two Germans and an Englishman.

Four of the five pilots attached to the expedition were Portuguese.

From Rodrigo Laguarda Trias, an Uruguayan historian, Blot learned that 37 Portuguese joined the Magellan expedition, five of whom were able to return. The others died during the voyage.

It was a common practice among Portuguese sailors during the Age of Discovery to inscribe permanent messages to memorialize their presence in remote land. At first they did this on barks of trees in the visited shores. Later, they carved messages on rocks.

The oldest known Portuguese inscriptions chiseled on rocks were revealed to the academic world in 1900. Known today as the ''Ielala inscriptions,'' these dated back to the 1480s and were found on the left bank of the Congo River in Africa, some 170 kilometers from the sea.

The inscriptions were attributed to the companions of Portuguese explorer Diogo Cao during his voyage up the Congo River in 1485.

A molding of these inscriptions is prominently displayed at the Lisbon Maritime Museum.

In concluding his monograph, Blot recommended a method to discard the fraud or hoax hypothesis surrounding the Homonhon rock inscription. This could be done by epigraphical evaluation of experts, using either a molding or a sharper picture of the original rock inscription in Cantelado.

A positive evaluation result could establish the Homonhon rock inscription as a major archaeological document in Philippine history.

Blot was rather pessimistic about the possibility of his recommendation becoming a reality in the absence of the real artifact.

But there are reasons to be hopeful. A closer look at the photographs in Blot's monograph showed the recent rock inscriptions in Cantelado were carved on softer rocks of coral origin, and not on hard bantiles rock noticeable in the 1968 photograph and even in the fuzzy 1951 and 1952 photographs.

The Homonhon rock with the inscription of Magellan's Portuguese name may still be intact somewhere.

Tax Rosaldo, who had served as assistant parish priest of Guiuan when he was still in the ministry (Rosaldo is now the president of the Leyte-Samar Association of Married Priests), said the disappearance of the bronze marker from the Homonhon monument was associated with the presence on that island of a colony of religious cultists from Surigao sometime in the 1970s.

It is probable these cultists also extracted the hard rock with the Portuguese inscription and took it with them in their boats. To hide their deception, they might have substituted a lighter rock of coral origin, complete with new inscriptions, on the site of the original rock.

After all, the religious symbolism of the Homonhon rock inscription has not disappeared from the folk mind. Who knows? This folk parallel of Moses' biblical rock tablets is probably worshipped inside some cult's shrine somewhere in northeastern Mindanao.

The academic community is not interested in repossessing the lost Homonhon rock. They are mainly interested in a clearer photograph or a plaster molding or a video footage that could help prove beyond reasonable doubt that the inscription was indeed made by Magellan's men.

This should not be an impossible wish to grant by the probable keepers of the artifact.

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