Considering what your Majesty had commanded me in your royal decree, and the blasphemies which these Moros had uttered--saying that by carrying away the monstrances with the most holy sacrament they were carrying the God of the Christians captive, trampling upon them, and mocking them in other ways; spitting in the chalices; and using the patens as receptacles for the saliva from their buyo-chewing--all these things obliged me, Sire, [to go on this quest]. After having sent to Terrenate two galleons well armed, two pataches, and six champans, with two hundred infantry and two hundred mariners, to carry supplies to those forts, together with one new galley which the governor of those forts, Don Pedro de Mendiola, had requested from me that it might accompany the one which he maintained there (of which enterprise and of those islands I will give your Majesty an account in a separate letter), I embarked with eleven champans--vessels which were indeed frail and weak, but the other galley had not been completed. I had my own company of infantry, of one hundred and fifty soldiers; another, of a hundred Pampango Indians; and that of Captain Lorenco de Orella y Ugalde, containing another hundred men, mariners. With these two hundred and fifty Spaniards and one hundred Pampango Indians, I sailed as far as the fort of Camboanga, which (as I wrote to your Majesty last year) Don Juan Cereco de Salamanca had begun, or had ordered to be built, in that very island of Mindanao; by way of this port sail the ships which go to Terrenate for the relief of those forts. I made the decision which I have stated to your Majesty, in order to see if that port was of so much importance as they were all assuring me it was, and whether the expenses which that fort has caused your Majesty were being checked; I also went in order to visit the rest of the islands, which lie on that route, and to repair the wrongs which certain persons are inflicting on the poor Indians. A few months before, I had sent to that fort a new governor and a new commander, judging that those officers who had until then been stationed there had accomplished nothing of importance with their flotilla. After Sargento-mayor Bartolome Diaz Barrera arrived as governor, and Sargento-mayor Nicolas Gomez as captain of both companies, those Moros withdrawing [to their own country] with the rich prize of those religious and the consecrated vessels which I have mentioned to your Majesty, and a friendly Moro having informed us that the pirates had passed, two leguas from there, by the island of Basilan (or Taguima, for the island has both names), Bartolome Diaz Barrera sent Sargento-mayor [Gomez] with five caracoas and his company of soldiers. They encountered the Moros in the middle of their voyage, with their booty, and fought with them. One of our own balls, strangely, struck one of the missionary fathers, who tried to see how the Spaniards were fighting; and he was killed.