[p. 568:] All the ten years of the government of the prudent and magnanimous governor Don Sabiniano Manrique de Lara were a melancholy period of troubles and misfortunes, greater and more continual than these islands had ever before suffered; and without doubt they would have been more painful and intolerable if they had not been ameliorated and diminished by the discretion, affable behavior, and clemency of this great governor--so that it seems as if divine Providence (or, in heathen phrase, Fortune) had trained Don Sabiniano for a governor in such times. [Diaz then enumerates several of these disasters, notably the losses of richly-laden galleons.] [p. 571 et seq.] So frequent were these losses that Don Juan Grau de Monfalcón, procurator in Madrid for the city of Manila, in a curious treatise which he presented to the royal and supreme Council of Indias makes a computation of them for sixty-five years, and finds that only fifteen of these were exempt from such misfortunes. But they were almost continual in this calamitous term of office, although Don Sabiniano met all these disasters with serenity and steadfastness, and apparently with cheerfulness; this he did through prudence, in order that the sorrow [of the people] might not extend to despair.... But no art could long veil so much misery. The more warlike provinces of these islands ascertained the unusual events which had caused our forces to be so small, however much prudence dissimulated these; and they sought to avail themselves of so good an opportunity, deeming it a suitable time for recovering their liberty, a gift of priceless value. Subjugation is always a matter of coercion, and this in turn needs other and greater violence that it may repress this natural inclination; and in natives whose condition makes them abject this desire increases more vehemently. They did not realize that the Spaniards had freed them from the harsh captivity of their barbarous tyranny, transferring them to an honorable subjection which made them more the masters of their liberty, because these rebels had not endured that tyranny. They came to know our lack of strength, and from that passed to despising it; they presumed more on their own strength than they ought, and rashly went on, without consideration, looking only at the end and forgetting the means [to attain it].