Note 52 — Chapter XLV

[The persecution in Japon was still increasing in intensity and cruelty. The authorities of Japon now offered a reward of a thousand taes (which amount to almost as many ducados of Castilla) to anyone who would reveal the place of hiding of a minister, in addition to full pardon for all offenses previously committed. Besides this, a new and dreadful method of execution was devised for the Christians, inasmuch as their crime was regarded as so vile that the ordinary methods of execution—decapitation, or burning alive over a slow fire—should not be used as a punishment for them. The condemned Christians were hung, head downward, in a pit, in such a manner that they could not move their bodies, and that the blood ran out of their mouths, noses, eyes, and ears until they bled to death in horrible torment.52 In this way father Fray Domingo de Erquicia was martyred. Father Fray Jacobo de Sancta Maria,53 a Japanese by nation, who had assumed the habit in our convent of Manila, August 15, 1624, was martyred in this year. He had returned to Japon in 1632. He went by way of the islands of the Lequios; and the champan in which he traveled with some Japanese fathers of the Society encountered storms, and was cast upon the shores of Coria. The sufferings of this voyage were such that his hair turned gray. At the end of five months he reached Satzuma, where he labored for about three months. His father, who was a Christian, was tortured by water until he revealed the place where his son was hidden; and on the seventeenth of August father Fray Jacobo died, after three days of torture, by the method of hanging described. In this year two preachers of our order made their way to Japon. One was the glorious martyr, father Fray Jacobo; the other was a Sicilian, a very thorough master of the Chinese language, who was called Fray Jordan de San Estevan. He had assumed the habit in Sicilia, after having studied arts and theology in Aragon and Castilla. He barely escaped capture immediately on his arrival; and the whole crew of Chinese who had been hired to bring him were executed for the crime of bringing a priest into the kingdom.