or 1539 were captive survivors of Magellan's fleet, and none of them were either priests or bishops." Scott notes that these dates could not simply be errors of Malang Balagtas when he executed the will, because the Certificate of Death, an official Spanish document, was attached to the document and bore the same dates. Scott notes that these historical inconsistencies: "... may be simple mistakes on the part of a senile illiterate on his deathbead, but similar details in an official death certificate appended to the will cannot be dismissed so lightly." Furthermore, Scott notes that the death certificate was supposedly sworn by a church official who never existed historically:"The death certificate purports to have been sworn, in the first-person singular, by Augustinian Procurator Fray Juan de Jesus in the Mission of San Carlos on March 21 of the year "mil quinientos treinta y nueve." Aside from the curious date and the even more curious circumstance of the testator's death having preceded the execution of the will by four days, both Isabelo (de Los Reyes) and the othrs who examined the documents were aware that there had been no Augustinian Friar by the name of Juan de Jesus in the Philippines in the 16th century, nor had there been any mission or town of San Carlos at that time. As a topnothcer in graduate courses in paleography, and the theory and practice of editing public documents, Isabelo wisely refrained from attributing authenticity to either document." 25 March 1539 v. 25 March 1589 The occasional reference to the Will of Pansomun can be traced to the September 1919 issue of Philippine Historical Quarterly, which published a copy of the will with the date "25 March 1589" instead of 1539. A large part of this text was recently requoted by historian Luis Camara Dery in his 2001 book "A History of the Inarticulate." Despite the somewhat more palatable 1589 date, this 1919 printing of the will still contains the anachronistic 1524 date of the baptism. Purported Content The will claims to document seven generations of the family of Fernando Malang Balagtas, whose name before his baptism into Catholicism had been "Pansomun." It places Malang Balagtas in the 5th generation of that family tree, which means that the will purportedly documents two generations of relatives younger than him, and four generations of relatives older than him. The first two generations of the family