evail. Even
if I should not attain and enjoy the benefit of this improvement, I
beseech your Majesty that, if more auditors are to be sent, they may
be persons of tried experience in Audiencia duties--to whom it would
be well to give senior rank therein, for those who are in it now are
totally ignorant of its procedure, never having had any experience
in so responsible positions, so that they could know how to act. If
they had only been able to learn from the licentiate Alcaraz, who
was experienced and very prudent! but they were estranged from him,
or rather they estranged themselves with their singular behavior--so
that, a long time before he died, he took an oath not to return to
the Audiencia, and kept it. And I myself, if I could, would do the
same, for the reasons I have given and for many others, which make me
desire to merit that your Majesty would be pleased to use me in some
other way, away from this country. To such a point has it gone, that
if this country were not involved in the perils of war as it has been,
and as they are still threatening it, I should beseech your Majesty to
place it in charge of some other person, who would be more interested
in documents. But may God not choose that I should be relieved from
the service of your Majesty, in which from the age of fifteen years I
have been engaged; and I offer this so heartily that if your Majesty
were pleased to send another governor who should labor somewhat,
and I might aid and assist him some little time, I would do so with
the greatest good-will. It would be no little pleasure to me to be
employed in naval and military affairs, and other things in which,
with my counsel and my personal aid, I might be able to help; and to
know that the matter of auditors and their demands, their rivalries,
and their faultfinding, should concern another, and that he would have
to oppose and resist those things, which would be not a little. Nor
would there be overmuch time to satisfy, quiet, and render content the
many religious--which is another labor and servitude, with which there
is no way to deal; for it is without remedy, since each one wishes
to be the sole distributer of goods and favors, the moderator and
judge of punishments, and the governor of the governor, or else his
persecutor. [_In the margin_: "Not to be read in the Junta. Join with
it the letters which the auditors write against Don Alonzo Faxardo."]

In so far as concerns the Indians, no more help c