May our Lord guard the royal person of your Majesty, and preserve you many years.  At Manila, the twenty-fourth of June, one thousand five hundred and ninety.

Fray Domingo, Bishop of the Filipinas.

[Endorsed:  “To the king our lord, in his royal Council of the Indias.  Filipinas. 1590.  The bishop; June 24.”  “Received and read, June 19, of the year 1591.  It is unnecessary to respond thereto.”]

Sire: 

The letter which your Majesty ordered to be written to me from San Lorenco el Real [i.e., the Escorial], on the seventeenth of August of eighty-nine, I received by the hand of the secretary of the governor, Gomes Perez Dasmarinas, in the village of Tabuco, outside of this city, on the first of June of this year ninety.  And for one so beset with afflictions, labors, and difficulties as I am, the favor which your Majesty therein shows me was no little comfort; for I have been freed by it from the pains of conscience, which I continually bore in my soul, at seeing the course of affairs in this land.  I held myself obliged by conscience to go in person to inform your Majesty of these matters, as it appeared to me that my letters were accomplishing little, in accord with my hope that your Majesty would at once amend what you knew stood in need of betterment.  And this thought gave me more anxiety because, as at other times I have written your Majesty, among the calamities and misfortunes under which this land suffers, none the least is that your Majesty must get information of them through the very men who have destroyed this land, and who work for their private interests rather than for the common good.  As the reports are made by such persons, your Majesty can well see the result.  Therefore this land has come to its present misery; and the new governor will have no small task if he maintains it, and saves it from ruin, and it is even now all but lost.  I am emboldened to say this because hitherto there have been made to your Majesty many perverse reports; and by this ship we have received the decrees, by which it clearly appears that false reports were given your Majesty, because of the provisions made in these decrees, as I shall explain elsewhere.

The greater part of the religious and other principal persons of this land were of the same opinion as I, maintaining that I was in duty bound to go in person and give your Majesty an account of affairs here, because they see that everything here is going to ruin; and that this common expedient was of greater importance than the harm that might be done by my absence.  But thanks be to God, in whose hands are the hearts of kings, and who put into the heart of your Majesty what is provided, ordained, and commanded by this letter for the weal and betterment of all this land.  If this be executed as your Majesty has ordered, the country may be helped; but hitherto there has been so much sloth and carelessness in executing what your Majesty provides and orders for the good of this land, that thus it has come to its present extremity.  I trust in our Lord that this state of affairs will not continue, but that the principal aim of the governor and of all the rest will be to procure the good of these natives whom we have so afflicted.