His hopes of professional success were better founded than he knew. Almost at once he stepped into a large practice. This is not the usual experience of new physicians in a new field, but his fame as an oculist had gone before him. For the first time in his life he had unpledged money in his purse. He sent to the Philippines for his sister Lucia, who happened then not to be in jail nor exiled nor pinioned to the miseries of procrastinating law-courts, and in her company he tasted something of the novelty of ease. The project he had half formed about the rescue of his harassed relatives took him in the following spring to Borneo. As it seemed to him virtually certain that his enemies would continue to pursue any one known to be near or dear to him, and there was no career for them in Hong-Kong, he purposed to found a new homestead for them under another flag. They were a numerous family, and inasmuch as the peculiar ideas of revenge we have found to be current in the Spanish colony made his second cousin or his great-grandmother a quite feasible substitute for himself in the way of vicarious atonement, it was necessary to remove them all. In North Borneo the British authorities offered him on attractive terms an area of fertile land adapted to his purposes. He went to look at it, found it in all respects suitable, and resolved to carry out his plan of a Rizal family refuge. [160] From his happy country of those days not a soul could depart without the sanction of the Government. To secure this for anybody connected with him would be hard enough; even for an individual and a temporary absence like Lucia’s it was hard. How much harder it would be to rescue a whole tribe, and all so hated! Revenge was not so to be cheated, nor the account of “Noli Me Tangere” left unsettled. If passports were to be had at all, a personal explanation and appeal offered the best chance. This he determined to attempt, if he could have some reasonable promise of safety, being more inclined to go because thereby he might again see his father and mother. It was the Philippines in one of the recurrent spasms of reform that he must now approach—sure sign in itself that a storm was brewing. A new governor-general, one Eulogio Despujol, expert, as was afterward proved, in the unctuous shaking of hands and the agile escape from promises, had arrived with much éclat and promulgated a liberal program. Rizal wrote to him, asking for permission and a safe-conduct to visit Manila. In reply he received through the Spanish consul at Hong-Kong a passport and an unequivocal assurance of his safety in the Philippine Islands. So equipped, he sailed with his sister Lucia, June 26, 1892. [161]