Note 7 — Chapter XXXIII

Not only in that mission of Zambales did the province labor in that time, but also in another of not less fruit in the ends and confines of Cagayan. There were formerly four villages there, namely, Batavag, Pilitan, Bolo, and Abuatan. They comprised about two thousand houses. Those villages in the seventh year of their foundation, when although many of their inhabitants were heathens, notwithstanding that more of them were already Christians, were abandoned on the day of the Ascension of the Lord in the year 1615, by their dwellers, who retired into the interior, deceived by their aniteras or priestesses, who did not look with favor upon their Christianity, because of the profit that they lost thereby in their sacrifices and diabolical functions. And so much were those priestesses able to say to induce them to make that retirement, that at last they resolved to do it, apostatizing from the faith which they had received, as is mentioned in the first part of this history, book 2, chapter 3.7 That apostasy caused great pain, especially to the fathers of Cagayan, who had charge of those four villages which they had founded amid severe labors, drawing their inhabitants from heathenism and luring them to the faith of Christ. When they saw now that all that they had obtained by their labor in many years was lost in one single day, they were caused great pain and disconsolation, and they saw that the fruit of their labors had been ill obtained. Therefore those fathers made a few efforts on various occasions to reduce those Indians to a settlement, but they obtained from them no further fruit than the obtaining of a few souls whom God had predestined for His glory. But since the zeal of the religious was directed to much more, namely, the reduction of all that people, they lost no opportunity for that enterprise, to solicit it with might and main.