In conformity with what your Excellency desires, and satisfying the private order sent me, asking a report and true statement of affairs under the Governor Don Francisco Morales Sanchez. To assure myself from a responsibility devoid of all partiality, and to the truth of the excesses perpetrated by this Governor and a few other private individuals and priests, of which that Garrison wrote you a complaint, asking that you immediatly depose the Governor and name some one in his place, _pro tem._, so that your Majesty being informed, may place some one who looks more to your interests. For this purpose you sent me a blank dispatch, that in time, I might fill out with the names of the subject elected and the investigation I had made in this affair. I must say, that they are so strange and extraordinary, and such divers means used in their performance--that the accounts I hear in this garrison chill the soul and congeal the blood in one’s veins. There is no way of hiding the misery and misfortune to which this Garrison is exposed. With the same truthfulness I must expose the fact, that I am positively certain from the reports of the Engineer Don Antonio Arredondo, as an eye-witness, that all the excesses committed by this Governor are strictly true as written you and certified to in a report from this Garrison. The few Indians of our faith represent and express their lamentable sentiments on a paper written you, and sent through the Rev. Bishop of Micale. Other certificates of priests, military men, and private individuals of that Garrison, which I enclose add such scandalous excesses in the manner of living of that Governor that I cannot find decent words in which to express it. Some of these are signed by the same priests who wrote to Don Antonio Benavides, and there are others, citing what the Governor has perpetrated on the Captain of Grenadiers, Don Felipe Iturricta, whom I sent there. Forgetting his merits and that he was a person of implicit confidence, whom I trusted for his unimpeachable conduct, they have placed him in prison under scandalous circumstances, intending to take from him the management of the troops over whom I placed him. He has been under the most rigorous guard, searching even his food, depriving him of the privilege of writing to ask for a hearing, accusing him of crimes and lack of obedience. They have no other course, in my opinion, than a pretext, as this Officer has fulfilled his duty with promptness and rectitude, showing only the ordinary precautions observed in the regiments for infinite reasons. The guards cannot be excused from the Barracks where the troop is stationed--which is one of the principal rudiments of military tactics--as well for safety as anything which might occur. The Captain insisted on maintaining these principles from which has arisen this trouble, and the assigning of the wrong conception of duty and want of obedience preferred against him. Of the same nature is the other charge: