e here. We set sail from the port of
Acapulco on the ninth of March, according to the new computation of
time which your Majesty, by order of the supreme pontiff, commanded
us to observe. I mention this point because we who came enjoyed an
experience never known before--namely, that while at sea we kept
Ascension day, Whitsunday, Trinity Sunday, and Corpus Christi day;
when we landed we kept and celebrated the same feast-days in Manila,
because the new reckoning was not yet in force there, and does not come
into effect until the fifth of October of the present year. It is a
memorable event that according to the said new reckoning we arrived
here on the twenty-sixth of May, and according to the old on the
sixteenth of the same month. [5] The Audiencia was established with
all the authority and pomp possible. We found the city burned down,
and no habitable houses except those of straw, rushes, and boards,
which could easily burn down again any day. Concerning this and other
matters, a report will be sent by the president. The officials of
the royal exchequer not only refused to lend me money, but did not
even pay me more than half of the three months' salary due me from
the time when I left Acapulco. The others have drawn their salaries
from the time when they left Castilla, the president since he left
Mexico, and I only from the day when we set sail. I am not unworthy of
favors, most potent sire; for I have spent forty years in continual
study, thirty of which have given me much experience in matters of
justice and legal pleading, and this is well known in Mexico. If
the records of the past be examined in the Council, it will be seen
that in the ten or twelve months while I was fiscal of that royal
Audiencia I accomplished more than did my predecessors for twenty
years. Besides all this, I am a man of good repute. I was an advocate
for the Inquisition during more than eleven years, namely, from the
time when your Majesty established it in Mexico. My uncles and the
relatives of Dona Maria de Sandoval, my wife, won Nueva Espana, as can
be seen by the records of the royal Council of the Yndias; and no one
is more worthy to receive the remuneration for his services than are
my wife and I. By virtue of a decree ordering me to remove my entire
family and household, the royal exchequer of Mexico lent me for the
space of two years two thousand pesos to aid me on my voyage. This
assistance was not sufficient, and, not being able t