It was through divine inspiration, we may believe, that your Majesty appointed a president and auditors for this extremity or beginning of the world; for at the very time when Governor Don Gonzalo Ronquillo had just died or was about to die, in this city of Manila, the Council, more than four thousand leagues from here, resolved upon and decreed the foundation of the royal Audiencia in Manila, and we came hither--as president and governor, Doctor Santiago de Vera; I, who was living quite neglected in Mexico, as first auditor; the licentiate Rojas as second auditor, and the licentiate Ayala as fiscal. It is said that another auditor, the licentiate Bravo, remained in Castilla; all of us excepting him came here. We set sail from the port of Acapulco on the ninth of March, according to the new computation of time which your Majesty, by order of the supreme pontiff, commanded us to observe. I mention this point because we who came enjoyed an experience never known before--namely, that while at sea we kept Ascension day, Whitsunday, Trinity Sunday, and Corpus Christi day; when we landed we kept and celebrated the same feast-days in Manila, because the new reckoning was not yet in force there, and does not come into effect until the fifth of October of the present year. It is a memorable event that according to the said new reckoning we arrived here on the twenty-sixth of May, and according to the old on the sixteenth of the same month. [5] The Audiencia was established with all the authority and pomp possible. We found the city burned down, and no habitable houses except those of straw, rushes, and boards, which could easily burn down again any day. Concerning this and other matters, a report will be sent by the president. The officials of the royal exchequer not only refused to lend me money, but did not even pay me more than half of the three months' salary due me from the time when I left Acapulco. The others have drawn their salaries from the time when they left Castilla, the president since he left Mexico, and I only from the day when we set sail. I am not unworthy of favors, most potent sire; for I have spent forty years in continual study, thirty of which have given me much experience in matters of justice and legal pleading, and this is well known in Mexico. If the records of the past be examined in the Council, it will be seen that in the ten or twelve months while I was fiscal of that royal Audiencia I accomplished more than did my predecessors for twenty years. Besides all this, I am a man of good repute. I was an advocate for the Inquisition during more than eleven years, namely, from the time when your Majesty established it in Mexico. My uncles and the relatives of Doña Maria de Sandoval, my wife, won Nueva España, as can be seen by the records of the royal Council of the Yndias; and no one is more worthy to receive the remuneration for his services than are my wife and I. By virtue of a decree ordering me to remove my entire