the Filipinas Islands, father Fray Pedro de Alfaro,[1] appointed custodian of that province, with fourteen religious of the same order. They were sent by his Catholic Majesty, King Don Felipe, our sovereign, and his royal Council of the Indies, as helpers to the Augustinian fathers—who, until then, had been occupied alone in the islands in the conversion of the natives, and had been the first preachers of the gospel therein, which they had preached with much zeal and to the great good of the natives. The said fathers had baptized, when the Franciscans arrived, more than one hundred thousand of the natives, besides preparing and catechizing the others for baptism; and, in addition, preparing themselves so that at the first opportunity they might enter the kingdom of China to preach the holy gospel. After the Franciscans had lived in the islands for the space of one year, busying themselves in helping the Augustinians, and in the conversion and instruction of the natives, learning during this time through the reports of the Augustinian fathers themselves, and from many Chinese merchants who were constantly coming to the islands with merchandise, of the many wonderful things of that great kingdom and the countless number of souls, whom the devil held in his service, deceived with false idolatry—they were filled
- ↑ Pedro de Alfaro was at the head of the first band of Franciscan missionaries who came to the Philippine Islands, and was the first custodian and superior of that order in the ecclesiastical province of the Philippines. In the autumn of 1579 he went to China, where he founded a mission at Macao. While on a voyage to India, in June of the following year, the ship was wrecked, and Alfaro perished. See account of his life and labors in Santa Inés's Crónica, i, pp. 113, 120, 130–140, 160–178. As that writer distinctly states (p. 124), the Franciscans reached Manila in June, 1577—not in 1578, as in our text.
