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In the last years, however, the newspapers sometimes have contained serious essays, but of late these appear extremely seldom. Vide Pigafetta. Cock-fighting is not alluded to in the "Ordinances of good government," collected by Hurtado Corcuera in the middle of the seventeenth century. In 1779 cock-fights were taxed for the first time.
"The oddest things which I have found in this island," says Pigafetta, "are the trees of which all the leaves are animated. These leaves resemble those of the mulberry, but are not so long; the stalk is short and pointed, and near the stalk on both sides there are two feet. If you touch the leaves, they escape; but when crushed no blood comes from them.
Pigafetta tells us of the abundance of foodstuffs in Paragua and of its inhabitants, who nearly all tilled their own fields. At this island the survivors of Magellan's expedition were well received and provisioned.
Brunai is celebrated for its brass cannon foundries and still produces handsome pieces of considerable size. PIGAFETTA describes cannon as being frequently discharged at Brunai during his visit there in 1521. The brass for the guns is chiefly furnished by the Chinese cash, which is current in the town.
Nearly every man keeps a fighting cock. Many are never seen out of doors without their favorite in their arms; they pay as much as $50 and upwards for these pets, and heap the tenderest caresses on them. In the eastern portion of the Philippines, cock-fighting was unknown in the days of Pigafetta. The first cock-fight he met with was at Palawan.
Pigafetta died at Venice about 1534, in a house in the Rue de la Lune, which in 1800 was still to be seen, and which bore the well-known device, "No rose without a thorn."
The products which they in exchange exported from the islands were crude wax, cotton, pearls, tortoise-shell, betel-nuts, dry-goods, etc. The first thing noticed by Pigafetta, who came with Magellan in 1521, on arriving at the first island of the Philippines, Samar, was the courtesy and kindness of the inhabitants and their commerce.
Il Viaggio fatto dagli Spanuoli attorno il Mondo, 1536. 4to. This is the first edition of the Voyages of Pigafetta, who sailed with Magellan in his celebrated Voyage round the World, but it is incomplete. The genuine and complete work was published for the first time from a MS. in the Ambrosian Library of Milan, with notes, by Amoretti, under the following title: 45.
Pigafetta originally estimated them at twelve feet. In the time of Commodore Byron, they had already grown downward; yet he said of them that they were "enormous goblins," seven feet high, every one of them.
There exists in Patagonia more than one tribe, and the description here given by Drake of the savages whom he met, does not at all resemble that given by Pigafetta of the Patagonians of Port St. Julian.
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