Note 39 — INSURRECTIONS BY FILIPINOS IN THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY

On the sixteenth day of December in the year 1660, the father preacher Fray Luís de la Fuente, prior of that district, having left the village of Bauang—to which he had gone to make his confession—to go to his village of Agoo, learned on the route of the insurrection in the province of Pangasinán, and the raid of the Zambals into that of Ilocos. He returned to Bauang with that information, and communicated it fully to the father preacher Fray Bernardino Márquez,39 prior of that convent and vicar-provincial of Ilocos; and at the same time asked permission to go up to Lamianán, which is the most northern district in that province. Father Fray Bernardino attempted to turn father Fray Luís from this purpose, telling him that it was not right to abandon one’s flock in time of tribulation—for which reason he was of opinion that Fray Luís should return to his ministry at Agoo; and in order to do so with safety he could go accompanied by an Indian chief named Don Pedro Hidalgo, who was much beloved by the Zambals. Father Fray Luís was as willing as prompt to comply with his superior’s wishes; but Don Pedro Hidalgo answered that it was not proper to expose father Fray Luís’s life to so evident a risk; and that it was better that he himself should first go to ascertain in what condition affairs were in the village of Agoo. This opinion of Don Pedro was approved by father Fray Bernardino, who thereupon gave permission to father Fray Luís to make his journey to Laminián. He set out for that place on the seventeenth of December, 1660, in company with a Spanish tax-collector named Juan de Silva, who had come [to Bauang] to escape the fury of the rebels in the province of Pangasinán.... On the sixteenth, father Fray Luís had warned Captain Aguerra and the alcalde-mayor of the province of Ilocos, Don Alonso de Peralta, of the disturbed condition in which those districts were; and on the same day a letter went by way of Bauang from Don Andrés Malóng, who styled himself king of Pangasinán. The letter was written to all the Indian chiefs of the provinces of Ilocos and Cagayán, and he advised them therein to take up arms and slay all the Spaniards, as he had done in his kingdom of Pangasinán; and declared that if they did not do so, he would go thither with his soldiers and punish them as disobedient.