Note 1 — LETTER FROM JUAN BAUTISTA ROMAN TO FELIPE II

Your Majesty will have heard from Nueva España of the depredations that the English pirates have committed, and that two extremely small ships—one of one hundred and fifty toneladas, and the other of one hundred, and carrying seventy men in both ships—captured your Majesty’s ship “Santa Ana”1 of six hundred tons’ burden, on the coast of Nueva España. It contained two thousand three hundred marcos of gold belonging to private persons and one million [ducados’] worth of merchandise with which it was laden. Then they burned the vessel. Inasmuch as your Majesty will have as definite information as that known here, I shall only relate what happened to the English later according to what has been learned from them themselves and what we have seen. After they had burned the ship, they sailed toward these islands, but the smaller vessel went adrift in the open sea. The other arrived in January of this year at the island of Capul, the first island of these Filipinas, which forms a strait with this large island of Luzon. The captain bought some food from the Indians at Capul, for which he paid them very liberally and did them no damage. He hanged a Spaniard whom he had brought from the ship “Santa Ana,” one Alonso de Valladolid, because he found on him a letter in which he advised the president of the royal Audiencia of all that had happened. The Indian who was to carry the letter and who was the servant of the said Spaniard, escaped by swimming and concealed himself so securely in the island that the English were unable to find him. They told the Indians of the island that they were hostile to the Spaniards, and that they had left their country for the sole purpose of harming us. They said that they would return with a fleet within three years, in order to colonize these islands and drive us out of them; and that they did not care for any tribute from the Indians, but only for their friendship and trade. After a stay of eleven days they set sail and went to another island called Panae, more distant from this settlement of Manila, and toward the south. There is a small city in that island called Arevalo of which Captain Don Juan Ronquillo is alcalde-mayor. A large ship was being built nearby at the expense of the royal treasury. The Englishmen arrived between the hamlet and the shipyard where the ship was building on the seventh of February, where he captured by means of his ship’s boat a sailor who was coasting along in a boat quite inapprehensive of any such danger. All the information that could he desired was learned from that sailor. Next day the Englishman landed the sailor with a letter for one Manuel Lorenço, who had the construction of the ship in charge. The letter contained some threats and arguments of little moment and was signed Tomas Candis of Trimbley, as your Majesty will see by the original in the papers sent by the president. At that time that sailor learned of the disaster to the “Santa Ana,” from one of the Portuguese who had been captured and from certain Flemish sailors whom he knew. It was also learned immediately from the Indian who had escaped in Capul. Both of them declared the captain to be a youth of twenty-two or twenty-three, and that the ship contained scarcely forty Englishmen. After having done that the English set sail and laid their course toward the island of Vindenao, the last one of these Filipinas lying toward Maluco. They will necessarily be forced to winter in some desert island near Maluco (as Francisco Draque did) until the month of December, for they can not make use of the brisas of this year for the voyage to, and the doubling of, the cape of Buena Hesperanza, as it is already very late. And especially since it would take all the rest of February and March to sail to the Javas, where one disembogues from this archipelago into the open sea, for that distance is more than four hundred leguas, and one can sail only by day because of the great labyrinth of the many shoals, channels, and doublings which are encountered, where one needs a small boat to go ahead especially to sound the shoals of this archipelago; it is therefore a foregone conclusion that they are now wintering in some one of the islands between here and the Javas.