avan--besides many others which are less known, although populated,
all of which will reach forty or more in number. This is excluding
other small uninhabited islands and some of fair size. Among those
islands that I have mentioned there are some much larger than Espana,
as, for example, Manila and Burnei; and others which are certainly
no smaller, as Mindanao and Calamianes. Some are somewhat smaller,
as Mindoro, Ibabao, and that of Negros; others very much smaller,
as Leite, Sebu, and Panai, but all of them are well peopled, fertile,
and rich, and not far distant from one another, and not one so small
that it is not in reality large.

The island of Sebu, one of the smallest, would have, if we were to
credit the statement of a certain author, a circumference of twelve
leguas; but I myself have sailed along the coast of two-thirds of the
island (it is triangular in shape), and assert that its circumference
is more than fifty Spanish leguas.

Of the division and distribution of bishoprics and provinces in the
Filipinas. Chapter VII.

At the instance of the first bishop, Don Fray Domingo de Salazar,
and with the information which he gave to the Catholic king Don
Felipe Second, of glorious memory, his Majesty divided those islands
into four dioceses, beseeching the Holiness of our most Holy Father,
Clement Eighth, to establish the aforesaid bishop as the metropolitan
archbishop of the city of Manila, with three suffragan bishops. [56]
Two of these were in that same island, one in the eastern part,
and one in the western; one, the bishop of Nueva Segovia (which by
sea is but sixty leguas distant from Great China); his bishopric
extends as far as the Ilocos, more than a hundred leguas distant,
being conterminous with the archbishopric of Manila. The other is the
bishop of Camarines whose bishopric is but little smaller, reaching
from the lagoon of Manila to the channel-mouth through which we enter
the islands on the way thither from Espana. The third bishopric is
even larger, for it embraces almost all the islands of the Pintados
(the proper name for which is Bisayas)--beginning with the islands
of Panay, Bantayan, Leite, Ibabao, and Capul, and extending to the
great island of Mindanao and the more southern islands. Its cathedral
and see are in the city of Santissimo Nombre de Jesus, so named from
the discovery of [an image of] the Child Jesus which was found there,
as we have related.

The people of the Bisayas are