a, son of Don Pedro Corcuera and Dona Maria
de Francia. The same year the governor received news of the death of
his brother, Don Inigo Hurtado de Corcuera. His entire government was
fatal and unfortunate; and later, in his residencia for it, he suffered
many troubles, for he was kept prisoner for five years in a castle,
and all his property was confiscated. Misfortune followed him into
all parts, for having returned to Espana, where he was corregidor
of Cordoba, they tried to kill him, and he got out of it by the
skin of his teeth. Finally, when he was governor of the Canarias,
it is said that he died suddenly. I write here only the results;
I shall not consider what so many disasters together demonstrate. I
leave the generally-known things which these islands still bewail,
since the universal knowledge of them frees me from it; and in the
following chapter, another and better pen [will take it up.] [46]

But it does not seem to me fitting to neglect to mention in this place
a testimony of what, it seems, Divine justice must have executed;
so that we may conjecture from it how great an offense to the divine
Majesty was the scandalous manner in which the exile of Archbishop
Don Hernando Guerrero was carried out; so that we may know that if He
displayed his temporal punishment in regard to what was pardonable
and not guilty, how great will be the punishment which His Divine
Majesty will mete out in His just tribunal to those men who were the
cause and instrument of so sacrilegious and scandalous a desecration,
unless they first hastened to atone for it by works of true penitence,
in order to be deserving of His infinite mercy.

The many and horrifying earthquakes from which the city of Manila
has suffered from its beginning until the present, have resulted in
almost its destruction and depopulation--especially in those of 1645
and 1658, as we shall see later. But in the midst of these ruins, the
houses which suffered most always preserved the principal walls, some
even the first floor, and others more--although these were stripped
of their covering, and, as it were, the skulls and shapeless skeleton
which indicate the robust symmetry of that building's corpse. Only in
the area and place where this lamentable tragedy occurred (namely,
the archiepiscopal palace of that time) has there remained not
only no wall, nor a vestige of its building, but not even the
foundations. Neither were any stones found there, which tell tha