Everyone knows about the Mactan ruler defeating the Spanish explorer despite the superior technology of the Europeans. Lost in history is the contribution of visiting Chinese, as recorded by Antonio Pigafetta, who chronicled the Magellan expedition’s circumnavigation of the world:
“When we reached land, [the natives] had formed in three divisions to the number of more than one thousand five hundred persons. 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. We were told that
the natives learned from visiting merchants that our muskets were of no use over a cross-bow flight…”
The “visiting merchants” were of course Chinese, who had regularly frequented Mactan Island for trade long before Magellan and his crew ever saw the Philippines. It’s quite possible, coming from a society that had developed firearms over three hundred years earlier, the Chinese knew about the lack of accuracy and effectiveness of gunpowder-based weapons over long range.
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