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Originally Posted by tom hyle
In any event, both terms certainly can be rather confusing, even to the point of uselessness, and this is of course just the sort of thing one encounters in old writings...
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Thanks again Tom for the comments.
I guess that's what happens when somebody is confronted with a totally foreign object for the first time (i.e., in the case of Pigafetta first seeing a new type of sword as wielded by Lapulapu and his men, and in a very stressful condition at that). Words fail and so would the accurate recollection of the object.
It is amusing for instance to go over the depictions of medieval travelers of mammals they never saw before. In the images below, how many can you recognize? You'll be surprised as to what some of those drawings are referring to!
Most of the pics came from this
website.
Thus I agree that Pigafetta might just had been hallucinating
Yet on the other hand, he may have seen this Visayan sword (the one Spunjer is selling, below). And thus the 'scimitar' description might be on track after all??
