Volume 32 — Chapter LXXV
Reading edition
The election as provincial of father Fray Miguel de San Jacintho, and the condition of the province and Japon.
On the thirteenth of May, 1612, father Fray Miguel de San Jacintho was a second time elected as provincial, not because there was any lack of religious of much virtue, knowledge, and prudence to take the place of father Fray Baltasar Fort—who had just completed his term, and had governed like an angel—but because father Fray Miguel had left all the religious of the province so devoted to his good government that they finally determined to elect him again. They regarded it as more prudent to select one whom they knew by experience to be of great skill in the government of the province, than to try the government of others who, though they gave good hopes, could not offer so much certainty.
[At this time the bishop of Macan, Don Fray Juan de la Piedad, was in Manila. He was a religious of our order; and when he saw the interest of our religious here in the conversion of the Chinese, he was desirous that some of the fathers of the order who understood the Chinese language might be given to him to enter the kingdom by way of Macan. Two fathers, Thomas Mayor—a very successful minister among the Chinese race, and excellent in their language—and Bartolome Martinez, were assigned for this purpose; but they met with so much opposition at Macan from the religious of another order that they were unable to carry out their purpose. Father Fray Thomas went to España, and father Fray Bartholome returned to the Philippinas. Their voyage was not entirely without fruit, inasmuch as it resulted in the conversion of one Chinaman from Chincheo.