the spiritual
conquest that had been happily commenced among the Zambales. The
vigilance employed by two commissaries to get the so desired subsidy
for his brothers was disappointed by death, and by the opposition
we have already related. Consequently, the few who were fighting
the devil in the enclosure did not desist, and sent the above-named
father--since he was the most fitting person that could be found for
the attainment of such an enterprise--to whom they consigned papers of
great moment, as a testimonial of the work and of the fruit which they
were gathering with the gain of souls. Our calced fathers themselves
affirmed it, to the confusion of those who here opposed father Fray
Francisco de la Madre de Dios, and their ministries and desires. The
father embarked with great haste, but as he was coming on an affair of
heaven, misfortunes were not wanting in the world, and he endured very
heavy ones. He himself mentioned them in a relation that he made to
Pope Urban Eighth at the latter's command, when he reached his feet,
as the ambassador of certain schismatic princes of the Orient (as we
shall relate in detail when we come to the year of that event). The
father declares, then, that having suffered a severe storm amid the
islands--during which the vessels anchored at Manila were wrecked--he
sailed immediately toward Japon. Thence, after suffering other
tempests, they finally sighted Cape Mendocino in forty-four degrees
of latitude. Then coasting along the shores of Nueva Espana (which
was composed of inaccessible mountains), and through unknown seas
(in which he saw great monsters), for the distance of one thousand
leguas, he sighted the cape of San Lucas. There the gulf of the
Californias begins. The father anchored in Acapulco, the best of the
ports known to the pilots, after having spent more than seven months
on the voyage. He went to Mexico and to Vera Cruz; and, continuing
his journey and encountering a new storm on the ocean, was driven to
the coasts of Terranova [_i.e._, Newfoundland] and of Labrador. As a
consequence so much shortness of food was experienced that only two
onzas of biscuit were given to each man, and about the same amount
of water. The ship began to leak, so that it was as if by a miracle
that it was able to put in at the Terceras. There they refitted, and
the father finished his navigation, by coming to Cadiz, after having
made to that point from Manila seven thousand one hundred and sixt