In accordance with what your Majesty orders me in his royal
instruction, we, the archbishop and myself, made a visitation
of the cathedral church, which is greatly lacking in all
necessaries, and particularly in chaplains, which is noticeable
on feast-days. Accordingly it seemed advisable to institute two
prebendaries, each with a stipend of two hundred pesos per year; and
two half-prebendaries, with a hundred and fifty pesos of stipend each
per year--to be paid in the same manner as the other canons. I beg your
Majesty to have this approved, since it has been done in conformity
with your Majesty's order to provide whatever was necessary. We are
considering from what source the other necessaries can be provided, as,
outside of the royal exchequer of your Majesty, there is at present
no other fund; and the royal treasury is in great need, between the
mortality of the natives and the taxations of Don Luis Perez de las
Marinas; the yearly income has diminished by more than fifteen thousand
pesos. We shall try our best to order affairs in the best possible
way. May our Lord protect the Catholic person of your Majesty, as we
your servants and vassals have need. Manila, the twelfth of July, 1598.

[_Francisco Tello_]

_Statement of the accounts received from the director of the hospital
for the natives. Cited in clause 8 of the letter of the governor of
July 12, 1599._

The accounts which the lord president, governor, and captain-general of
these islands, Don Francisco Tello, knight of the habit of Santiago,
ordered me, the accountant Bartolome de Rrenteria, to audit from the
seventeenth of September of the year ninety-eight, when the said lord
president was at the royal hospital for natives of these islands. He
inspected and took possession thereof in the name of your Majesty;
and ordered me, the said accountant, to make in his presence an
inventory of the income and property belonging to the said hospital,
and I did so, as follows:

It was found that the said hospital has, through the bounty of
your Majesty, five hundred ducats each year, paid from the fund set
aside for such purposes by the royal exchequer; one thousand five
hundred fanegas of rice in the hull, one thousand five hundred fowls,
and two hundred pieces of cloth from Ylocos; and a further grant of
four toneladas, to be sent each year in the ships of your Majesty or
others, without duties or freight charges. Likewise there was found, as
property of the sai