wing him honor and favor. That
favor that I petitioned your Majesty to show Admiral Rodrigo de
Guilleztegui last year, will be very well extended, for the reasons
then advanced. Don Fernando Centeno Maldonado, who is serving in
these galleys as commander of them, is a man who, by the honorable
rank of his birth, has personal merits and good qualities--so that
your Majesty may make use of him in his profession as soldier, or
in any other thing, even though it be a position of great labor. He
is the man for it, and one who will well use any honor that your
Majesty may be pleased to bestow upon him. Many judicial inquiries
[_informaciones_] are made here of merits and services; and although
there are some among them of men who have merits, and who have not
obtained their reward because of a lack in means to give it to them,
or in the failure of their said inquiry to obtain it, the majority
consist of the inquiries of men who are or could be ashamed. Of them
what they claim might be advanced as a reason for their not deserving
even what has been given them. Although it is always to be believed
that the auditors, to whom the inquiries are entrusted, ought to
make them, not only as judges, but as interested parties, so that
sinister inquiries should not be sent to your Majesty's royal Council
to defraud your royal treasury and the merits of those who have served
well, I assure your Majesty that I have heard that many inquiries have
been made with less justification than might be advisable. Moreover,
I am an eye-witness of the evidence taken so earnestly by Auditor Don
Albaro de Messa in the assembly in the case of one Juan de Herrera,
whose inquiry he had made. Because we did not detail so fully as he
wished regarding [the reward] that we informed your Majesty could be
given him, he refused to affix his signature after the opinion that
he there gave in favor of Captain Alonso Estever, a valiant man who
has served and serves very well. I do not know whether he has signed
in his opinion of Captain Antonio de Esquibel, which he also gave
to him at that time. In order that your Majesty may know with what
passions they proceed in this, and on what this was based, and may
see how little was the justification of this protege of Don Albaro,
namely, the said Juan de Herrera (who it is said came here as the
servant of the factor Juan Saenz de Quen [86]--of which I am not at
all certain, since he has been a soldier here, and even a colle