Note 2 — Relation of the Filipinas Islands

The islands called Filipinas, because of having been conquered during the reign of Felipe II, were discovered in the year 1521, by Hernando Magallanes, a famous Portuguese, who gave his name to the strait. That great pilot, after having forever perpetuated his name by a navigation so new and so difficult, landed on one of the Filipinas Islands—a very small one, named Matan—where he was treacherously killed by the Indians. Ruy Lopez de Villalobos sighted the islands again after him in the year 1539.2 Finally they were pacified in the year 1571 by the adelantado Miguel Lopez de Legaspi. It is a cause for surprise that the Portuguese, who had discovered the Malucas, China, and Japon, some years before, and had made their homes there, did not know anything about those islands until long afterward, although they are, as it were, the very center and middle part of their other discoveries. They knew well the island of Borneo, which is the last of those islands toward the south, but they had never stopped there while en route to the Malucas—urged, perhaps, by their too great greed for the spices and drugs which are produced so abundantly in those islands.