Editorial note — II. Industries at the Time of Discovery and Conquest

“As above stated, it will be necessary for Governor Don Alonso Fajardo to devise immediate means for building galleons and to repair the six at Manila. I regard the present building of ships in that country as impossible. For with the former ships and fleets and with the depredations and deaths caused by the enemy in those districts the natives are quite exhausted; for, as I said above, in the former years of six hundred and seventeen the Mindanao enemy captured four hundred native carpenters and killed more than two hundred others. The year before that, six hundred and sixteen, in the expedition made by Don Juan de Silva to the strait of Cincapura, where he died, it was found from lists that more than seven hundred Indians, of those taken as common seamen (of whom more than two hundred were carpenters), died on that expedition. Before that, in the year six hundred and fourteen, the said Mindanao enemy captured in the islands of Pintados nine hundred odd Indians, of whom but few have been ransomed. In the shipbuilding and in the hauling of wood many have died. Consequently, on account of all combined, there is a lack of natives for the above works. Therefore your Majesty must order the said Don Alonso Fajardo, governor and captain-general of the said islands, that in case galleons are to be built, it should not be in the islands—on the one hand, on account of the short time that those woods last, and on the other because of the lack in that land of natives (occurring through the above-mentioned causes, and because those natives in the islands are serving in the fleets as common seamen and carpenters).” (Ibid., pp. 182–183.)