The Philippine Islands, 1493-1803; explorations by early navigators, descriptions of the islands and their peoples, their history and records of the Catholic missions, as related in contemporaneous books and manuscripts, showing the political, economic, commericial and religious conditions of those islands from their earliest relations with European nations to the beginning of the nineteenth century; [Vol. 1, no. 36]

1649-1666] RECOLLECT MISSIONS, I646-60

I77

formably with right in resisting any change with all
their strength, as long as their individual parish
priests are also, as stated, engaged as missionaries.
740. More force is given to this argument if one
considers that, even in carrying on missions in infidel
lands, our religious could not suffer greater hardships than those which they endure in the said
ministries. That it may be seen that this is not imagination, I shall give a rough outline of what happened recently from the year I720 until the present.
I shall do it as briefly as possible, for those regrettable
tragedies will occasion great extension to this history
in due time. It is well known that our villages are
the most exposed to the invasions of the Moros;
consequently, they always serve as the theater of war
and as the object of disasters. In the said year, then,
they attacked the province of Calamianes with a
powerful fleet. Landing on the island of Linacapan
they burned the village, convent, and church; outraged the sacred images; and killed with lancethrusts the venerable father, Fray Manuel de Jesus
Maria, a native of Lupiana in Alcarria -while another religious who was there was able to escape
miraculously, at the cost of incredible hardships that
he suffered, by hiding in the mountain. In the year
1721 they did the same thing in the village and island
of La-Agutaya,35 and in Manaol, which is located in
the island of Mind6ro. The evangelical ministers
fled thence in a small boat and thus saved their lives,
although after very prolonged hardships; and from
there they took refuge in the mountains, in order to
endure, without other relief than that of God, the
35 Agutaya is the principal island of the northern Cuyos group,
and contains a town of the same name.