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Updated: June 13, 2025
The other three passed through into a vast sea called the Pacific; where they found no inhabited land till they arrived in lat. 13° N. when they came to certain islands named Los Jardines. They sailed thence to the archipelago of St Lazarus, where, in an island named Matan, Magellanes was slain and his ship burnt.
The mass of building now known by the name of Matan, or Marttand, consists of one lofty central edifice, with a small detached wing on each side of the entrance, the whole standing on a large quadrangle surrounded by a colonnade of fluted pillars, with intervening trefoil-headed recesses. The central building is sixty-three feet in length, by thirty-six in width.
In the Matan districts there is an extensive and most valuable iron-mine, producing pure metal without any admixture of ore: it is fully equal in quality to the best Swedish iron. They run it into shot, and much of it is exported; but the gold-mines in its vicinity, and the want of a proper government, are obstacles to its further productiveness and utility.
It is utterly abandoned: that it has not been rebuilt is owing to the Rajah of Pontiana, at whose suggestion it was destroyed, and whose interest it was to keep it down, having himself risen upon its ashes. There are no towns of any importance between Matan and Pontiana.
By various dealings with the natives Legazpi discovered that they were deceiving him in regard to other natives of Cebú and the island of Matan; they had said that these men would make peace and friendship, but they never appeared. The inhabitants of Matan had always been hostile to the Spaniards, "saying that they would kill us, or at least would drive us away by hunger."
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