At the very beginning of his governorship, the said Don Sebastian Hurtado de Corcuera tried to change the inferior employees of the tribunal of your royal officials. Among the others whom he appointed was the weigher of coins, notwithstanding that we opposed that. For your Majesty has been pleased to honor us with your special decrees, in which you order that we ourselves choose our employees, so that they may be to our satisfaction; and that your governors give their titles to those whom we should thus propose to them. [We also opposed it] because the said governor ordered us to admit the said weigher to the enjoyment and exercise of his office without bonds, although all those who had thus far exercised that office had given bonds in the sum of four thousand pesos for the security of your royal estate, as it is an office that requires great faithfulness because of the many and continually-recurring opportunities that present themselves for him to make considerable thefts without your royal officials being able to put a stop to it. That has been proved to us by experience, for, notwithstanding all our efforts in watching him, at the end of a year and slightly more (for so long a time did he hold the said office) we found that he had stolen more than three thousand five hundred pesos from your royal treasury. We began a prosecution in your royal Audiencia. The said governor, seeing that the weigher was proved to be a criminal by what was enacted, and by his confession and deposition, in order that he might not be completely exposed, had a memorial presented [to the Audiencia] through a father of the Society of Jesus--in which it is stated that a man had declared in confession that he was the thief, and that the said weigher was not guilty; and had given him a certain number of pay-warrants with which to satisfy, by way of restitution, the [claim for] three thousand five hundred pesos. The said governor ordered that this reparation should be accepted; and although the pay-warrants had no justification--as their owners had been dead for many years, and the papers contained no cessions or powers by virtue of which receipts should be given and signed--we had to receive them, because, as they had been examined before the auditor of accounts, and attested by him, they were [technically] entirely sufficient, and could and ought to be received. Thereupon, the said weigher went scot free from prison. The said governor immediately sent him to Macan, in order to remove him from the danger that might meet him at any time in this city. In this manner, Sire, was so serious a crime as the aforesaid punished; and in this wise does the governor protect his henchmen, for there is no human strength which can oppose his. This is a consideration that causes not a little sorrow to your Majesty's servants and ministers; for only that name is left us, for we have been stripped, for the sole purpose of being able to depreciate