While the useful foundation of that convent was being directed in Philippinas, father Fray Rodrigo de San Miguel was in España, working carefully and diligently in order to get the necessary despatches to conduct helpers suitable for the prosecution of the spiritual conquest that had been happily commenced among the Zambàles. The vigilance employed by two commissaries to get the so desired subsidy for his brothers was disappointed by death, and by the opposition we have already related. Consequently, the few who were fighting the devil in the enclosure did not desist, and sent the above-named father--since he was the most fitting person that could be found for the attainment of such an enterprise--to whom they consigned papers of great moment, as a testimonial of the work and of the fruit which they were gathering with the gain of souls. Our calced fathers themselves affirmed it, to the confusion of those who here opposed father Fray Francisco de la Madre de Dios, and their ministries and desires. The father embarked with great haste, but as he was coming on an affair of heaven, misfortunes were not wanting in the world, and he endured very heavy ones. He himself mentioned them in a relation that he made to Pope Urban Eighth at the latter's command, when he reached his feet, as the ambassador of certain schismatic princes of the Orient (as we shall relate in detail when we come to the year of that event). The father declares, then, that having suffered a severe storm amid the islands--during which the vessels anchored at Manila were wrecked--he sailed immediately toward Japòn. Thence, after suffering other tempests, they finally sighted Cape Mendocino in forty-four degrees of latitude. Then coasting along the shores of Nueva España (which was composed of inaccessible mountains), and through unknown seas (in which he saw great monsters), for the distance of one thousand leguas, he sighted the cape of San Lucas. There the gulf of the Californias begins. The father anchored in Acapulco, the best of the ports known to the pilots, after having spent more than seven months on the voyage. He went to Mexico and to Vera Cruz; and, continuing his journey and encountering a new storm on the ocean, was driven to the coasts of Terranova [_i.e._, Newfoundland] and of Labrador. As a consequence so much shortness of food was experienced that only two onzas of biscuit were given to each man, and about the same amount of water. The ship began to leak, so that it was as if by a miracle that it was able to put in at the Terceras. There they refitted, and the father finished his navigation, by coming to Cadiz, after having made to that point from Manila seven thousand one hundred and sixty leguas, in the manner that we have seen. Thence he went to Madrid, and was given favorable audience; and everything that he petitioned was conceded to him. But when twenty religious had been assembled, although they were even about ready to sail in the fleet that was