When your Majesty, through your grace and condescension, sent me to serve you in these Filipinas Islands, you were pleased to give me your commands in one of your royal decrees, dated at Madrid, on the sixteenth of February in the past year, one thousand six hundred and thirty-five--issued on account of the information which you had from this royal Audiencia of the losses which these islands have suffered, during the past thirty years and more, from Cachil Corralat, king of the great island of Mindanao, from the kings of Jolo and Burney, and from the Camucones. They have plundered the islands, and taken captive the poor Christian Indians, selling them as their slaves from one country to another, seizing the religious and the ministers of the holy gospel, burning the villages, and devastating everything. The royal Audiencia has given your Majesty but scant information of the great and excessive injuries which these poor islands have experienced from these Moro enemies. For in the year when I arrived here, they did not content themselves with taking captive more than twenty-five or thirty thousand vassals of your Majesty; at this time which I mention they seized and carried away captive from the island of Calamianes Don Diego de Alabez, your Majesty's alcalde-mayor in that island and province, together with three religious, Recollects of the Order of St. Augustine, who in various places were furnishing instruction to the vassals of your Majesty. At the same time when they made this notable seizure, they sacked the churches, and afterward burned them, carrying away the monstrances with the most holy sacrament, the chalices, and other sacred vessels, with all the ornaments that they could find--even taking the bells. All together, this booty was worth more than two or three thousand pesos--which for churches so poor, and for poor Indians, was a considerable loss.