Thus resuscitated, it diligently collected the pamphlets and periodicals and verses of the revolutionary period, and molested their authors as far as it could. In fact, under the Restoration, except the occasional prosecution of a wise-woman, its functions, as in Spain, were mainly political, liberalism being equivalent to heresy and, except when it had some political end in view, its efforts were ridiculed by both the civil and military authorities, which regarded it with no respect and encroached upon it from all sides. When the Revolution of 1820 broke out, news of Fernando VII’s oath to the Constitution and decree of March 9th suppressing the Holy Office reached Santa Cruz de Tenerife April 29th and Las Palmas some days later. Amid popular rejoicings, the Inquisition closed its doors, delivered up its archives and the inquisitors sailed for Spain. No care was taken of the archives, which were pillaged by curiosity hunters and those whose interests led them to acquire documents concerning limpieza or old law-suits. What remained were stored in a damp, unventilated place; when removed, they were carried off by cartloads, without keeping them in any order and, in 1874, Millares describes them as forming a pile of chaotic, mutilated and illegible papers in a room of the City Hall.[370] The reader may reasonably ask what, in its labor of three centuries, the tribunal of the Canaries accomplished to justify its existence. CHAPTER VI. MEXICO. The ostensible object of the Spanish conquests in the New World was the propagation of the faith. This was the sole motive alleged by Alexander VI, in the celebrated bull of 1493, conferring on the Spanish sovereigns domination over the territories discovered by Columbus; it was asserted in the codicil to Queen Isabella’s will, urging her husband and children to keep it ever in view, and it was put forward in all the commissions and instructions issued to the adventurers who converted the shores of the Caribbean into scenes of oppression and carnage.[371] If Philip II was solicitous to preserve the purity of the faith in his own dominions, he was no less anxious to spread it beyond the seas; he prescribed this as one of the chief duties of his officers, describing it as the principal object of Spanish rule, to which all questions of profit and advantage were to be regarded as subordinate.[372]