Note 7 — Ecclesiastical Survey of the Philippines

See Murillo Velarde’s description (Hist. Philipinas, fol. 198) of the Jesuit residence and college. It was planned by Father Juan Antonio Campion, and furnished commodious lodgings for fifty residents, besides the necessary offices; but part of the main building was afterward overthrown by earthquakes. In Murillo Velarde’s time, the college had become “an aggregation of buildings, added to the original edifice from time to time, forming a mass as bulky as architecturally irregular.... The library has no equal in the islands, in either the number or the select quality of the books, which include all branches of learning. In several of the apartments also are very respectable libraries.... In the printing-office are several presses, and various styles of type of different sizes; and there works are produced as accurate, well engraved, and neat as in España—and sometimes with errors that are less stupid and more endurable. The gallery (in which there is a truck [trucos, a game resembling billiards] table for the holidays) is a beautiful apartment, long, wide, and spacious; and so elevated that it overlooks on one side the city, and on the other the great bay of Manila. From it may be seen all the galleons, pataches, galliots, champans, and every other kind of vessels, which leave or enter the port, from America, China, Coromandel, Batavia, and other Oriental kingdoms, and from the provinces of these islands. It is adorned (as also are the corridors) with paintings, maps, landscapes, and other things curious and pleasant to the sight.... There is a school, for teaching reading, writing, and arithmetic to the boys from without.... In the orchard is a house, with its offices, for the Indian house-servants, and a church; they have their chapel, very fully equipped, in which they practice various devotions and receive the sacraments.... In charge of this, a sort of seminary, is a student brother; and in it the Indians learn the doctrine, virtue, good habits, the holy fear of God, civilized ways, polite manners, letters, and other accomplishments, according to their ability. The principal patio of the college is a right-angled quadrilateral; in it there is a garden bordered with rose-trees, which bear roses all the year round, with other flowers, and medicinal herbs. There are other gardens and orchards, and seven deep wells of running water (and some of it is very good) for drinking purposes. In the library is a round table made in one piece, almost forty common palmos in circumference—an adornment worthy of the king’s own library.”