Note 1 — LETTER TO THE PRESIDENT OF THE INDIA COUNCIL

As the ships which in the years 47 and 48 sailed from here to Acapulco were driven back to these islands, the letters which in those years I wrote to my brother could not be despatched. This obliges me to avail myself of a safer opportunity, that afforded by the voyage of the father procurators, Pedro Murillo1 and Bernardo Pazuengos, who for many and important reasons are going to Europe by way of the coast (that is, the Orient) in a French ship which is going from here to France. In the letters which I wrote in past years, I informed my brother of the enterprise of the missions in Joló and Mindanao, in which we were involved by the governor of these islands, Fray Juan de Arrechedera, by the hasty remittance of the letters despatched from Don Felipe (whom may God keep) to the sultans of Joló and Mindanao, and with his own energetic exhortations and promises to our provincial—so that he gave no opportunity to take any counsel, or to furnish means for avoiding the most serious difficulties. [The worst of these] was, as we soon perceived, that at the very time when he despatched with embassies the letters of our king to the said sultans, the said Governor Arrechedera sent an urgent invitation to the sultan of Joló to come to Manila, where he would be hospitably received and entertained. We all knew that the object of the governor was, that the sultan might bring here abundance of pearls and gold; and we also knew that with the departure of the sultan from his kingdom the mission would come to an end, as has actually happened.2 At the time we were only mistaken in one thing, and that was, to feel sure that the fathers would not leave Joló or Mindanao; for we reckoned that if the sultan should leave Joló the natives would kill the fathers of that mission, and the sultan would easily justify himself because the act had been committed in his absence, and he could even pretend great sorrow for the deaths of the fathers; and in Mindanao, when it was known that in Joló they had killed the fathers, they would do the same there to those engaged in the Mindanao mission.