308. To continue; Don Sebastian Hurtado de Corcuèra, governor of Philipinas, thought that by building and garrisoning some strongholds in Tolò [i.e., Joló], an island which is given over to the perfidy of Mahomet and is the nesting place of the robbers of the whole archipelago, he could restrain its inhabitants by preventing them from going to our villages with their fleets as they had done until that time, with the sequel of innumerable depredations. He put that idea into practice in the year 1638, after the conclusion of the war with the koran, in the beginning of which when the sword was drawn the scabbard was thrown away. But neither his valor nor that diligence were sufficient for the attainment of his end. For in the year 1640, now by the Joloans themselves, and now by means of the Borneans their allies, and now by making use of their vassals who inhabited the adjacent islands, they tried to find in sea surprises some betterment of their fortune or some havoc by which to temper it. With that object they attacked missions belonging to our reformed order both boldly and treacherously in the districts of Calamiànes, Butuàn, and Cagayang; and it is a fact that we always had the worst of it in those wars. They committed depredations very much to their liking, with the boldness that their greed gave them and with the severity which their hatred to the evangelical law inspired in them. The captives who were taken in our villages on that occasion numbered three hundred and more. The churches were ruined, the holy images profaned, the evangelical ministers became fugitives in the mountains, the sheep were scattered as their shepherds could not attend to them with their watchful eye, the villages were reduced to ashes, and all of those fields of Christendom became the necessary object of the most bitter lamentation.