1541. The young monk, burning with missionary zeal, looked across the waters with a beating heart. He did not lack authority, temporal and spiritual, for he went out as Papal Nuncio to the new world, with full powers to propagate the faith of the Church of Rome in all the East, was recommended to the care of David, King of Ethiopia, and all the princes and governors were urged to pay him respect and service. But his heart’s desire was not dependent upon these. He came as one ready to suffer and bear trials, and to the end of his life these were bravely borne. The inner spirit and purpose of the man is best revealed in his letters, and when he arrived at Goa, and saw what awaited him, he wrote thus home to his friends: “I am persuaded that those who truly love the Cross of Christ esteem a life thus passed in affliction to be a happy one and regard an avoidance of the cross or an exemption from it as a kind of death. For what death is more bitter than to live without Christ when once we have tasted His preciousness; or to desert Him, that we may follow our own desires? Believe me, no cross is to be compared with this cross. On the other hand, how happy it is to live in dying daily and in mortifying our own will and in seeking not our own but the things that are Jesus Christ’s! I trust that through the merits and prayers of our holy mother the Church, in which is my chief confidence, and through the prayers of its living members, to which you belong, our Lord Jesus Christ will sow the Gospel seed in this heathen land by my instrumentality, though a worthless servant. Especially if He shall be pleased to use such a poor creature as I am for so great a work it may shame the men who are born for great achievements, and it may stir up the courage of the timid, when forsooth they see me, who am but dust and ashes and the most abject of men, a visible witness of the great want of labourers.”[3] With a spirit so brave and aims so high and self-renouncing, one cannot help wondering what he might not have done had he preached a purer creed and been less fettered and influenced by political association. His landing at Goa, with the whole heathen and Mohammedan millions to win for Christ, was rather a bad beginning, since being under the orders of the Viceroy he had to limit himself to the pearl fishers at Tuticorin. Here he had to make Christians in order to bring a valuable industry to Portuguese advantage, an arrangement having already been made whereby the fishermen were willing to change their religion if they might be protected against the Mohammedans.