may be rendering themselves capable in the languages and ministries,
so that ready and intelligent laborers may never be lacking for the
instruction and teaching of the natives, and for the new conversions,
which our sovereigns the Catholic kings of Espana have so earnestly
striven to maintain and increase, sending religious every four or six
years, and sometimes every two years; without the ministries being
less than they are now, nor do fewer die now than then.

In order to provide those who should go, and to find the number for
whom your Majesty shall be pleased to grant permission, to obtain
information about them, to examine into their virtue and learning,
and to secure a judicious choice, the petitioner needs about a year,
in which time he can go personally to the convents of the three
provinces of Espana; for the importance of so delicate a matter will
not permit that it be entrusted to letters alone. Accordingly, he
should have at least the time until St. John's day next, or when the
first fleet shall be equipped; otherwise he cannot sail from Espana
and make a voyage to Filipinas with religious. To reach those islands,
two years are usually required, and at the very least more than one
year; and by that time eleven or twelve years will have passed since
the last permission [of that sort]. In that protracted course of time,
there must necessarily have occurred many deaths among the laborers
who work in that vineyard--of whose labor and conversion of souls
God has made watch-towers for our sovereigns the Catholic kings of
Espana, and for their royal and supreme Council of the Indias, upon
whom is laid this heavy weight of obligation--in fulfilling which they
have always made every exertion, giving permissions, orders, means,
and aid to the ministers who have gone thither to cultivate that field.

Therefore the said province, and the said Fray Francisco de Villalva
in its name, have recourse to the kindness and fervent zeal of your
Majesty, with which you have always striven for the preservation and
propagation of the Catholic faith; and prostrate at your royal feet
he entreats that your Majesty will be pleased to take pity on so many
souls and the conversions for which the religious of St. Dominic
are caring and in which they are laboring in the said Filipinas
Islands. They ask that you will grant to the said province forty
religious, [31] and a suitable number of lay brethren; and to the
petitioner permission