e island of Dinagat,
Baybayon, and Sandegan requested ministers, and five hundred were
baptized. Besides such occasions, which are generally quite common,
Ours have served in divers fleets that have been prepared to oppose
the Dutch who were infesting the shores. Lastly, in two expeditions
made by Don Sebastian Hurtado de Corcuera--one to the kingdom of
Jolo, and the other to that of Mindanao--he took, in the first,
fathers Fray Joan de San Nicolas, and Fray Miguel de la Concepcion;
and in the second, father Fray Lorenco de San Facundo and father
Fray Joan de San Joseph. The last-named religious was very useful,
for he served as ambassador to the Moro king, to whom he was a friend,
as he had been his captive in former times.

Returning to our narration, and the relation of the security of
Ours, now comes Don Fray Hernando Guerrero, archbishop of Manila,
in a letter to the Congregation of the Propaganda of the Faith,
[40] and he confirms the work of the same, while he says:

"The discalced Augustinian religious who live in these Philippinas
Islands are gathering a very large harvest here in the conversion of
souls. Not less known are the advances that Christianity is making
in the kingdoms of Japan by their preaching and teaching, where in
the years one thousand six hundred and twenty-nine and thirty, six
religious of the same institute suffered martyrdom, together with
many others, members of the third order, [41] or _Mantellatos_, and
confriars of the girdle [_correa_] of our father St. Augustine, all
converted to the faith and instructed by the same discalced religious
who are in those regions. Now, to relate the news that we have just
received, two of the same religious are suffering the most exquisite
torments that can be imagined, after two years of the hardest kind of
imprisonment. They are suffering also, in the ministries and convents
which they maintain in these islands, great discomfort and hardship;
for the Indians in their charge are the most unbridled and fierce of
all those known in this archipelago, as experience of last year proved,
when the Indians killed four religious. Their death and the evident
danger of their lives did not frighten the others, and therefore
other missionaries did not hesitate to go."

While that prelate was bishop of Nueva Segovia, he also wrote two
letters, one to the Catholic king of Espana, and the other to the
above congregation, of the following tenor:

"The Order of the