or so little is done that it never advances.  It really is a pity to see a cathedral church, in a city containing so great a concourse of heathen, where divine offices are celebrated in a church of straw, in which, on the coming of a storm, no one can remain.  Your Majesty will see what the condition of the rest of the churches must be.  It certainly is a pity to see the little care there is in this matter, and the scandal occasioned to the heathen and the recent converts by the little veneration that we who have so long been Christians bestow upon the temples in which we worship our God, for really many of them are not fit to serve as stables.  I have given your Majesty an account of this before now.  The two thousand ducats which your Majesty ordered paid from the treasury of Mexico for this work were not brought, because the governor could not bring the securities that were necessary to obtain that sum there, because of his hurried departure.  Moreover, it should be understood that it will be very difficult to collect the portions to be paid by Indians and encomenderos, because of their want and poverty.  And for this reason we do not dare to press them much, deeming it better that the work should be done slowly than to harass one who is unable to do more; and it has been the treasury of your Majesty which has aided us least.

Your Majesty’s command that the religious should not depart from the bishopric without license of your Majesty, or that of the governor and myself, is a very just thing, and therefore it will be carried out; because it also seems fitting to me not to let the religious depart from here, where they are so few and so many are needed.  Before this ship arrived the president and I had despatched two Dominican religious to Chincheo, which is the province of China nearest to this land, and the place whence all the Sangleys who come here to trade set forth.  In this departure there was a punctual observance of what your Majesty commands in this clause of your letter, although we had not then received it.  And owing to the fact that before we determined to send them, and at the time when we sent them, there occurred many notable things from which your Majesty should receive much satisfaction, I thought it better, in order not to make this letter so long, to place them by themselves in another, which will accompany this one, in order to give your Majesty a more detailed account of things so worthy to be heard.

With regard to what your Majesty orders concerning the remission of tithes for twenty years to those who now come to settle and who may come in the future, I would to God that the Spaniards were inclined to cultivate the land and to gather the fruits from it, rather than that we should ever afflict the natives by tithes.  But your Majesty should know that when a man comes to this country, even if he were a beggar in Spain, here he seeks to be a gentleman, and is not willing to work, but desires to have all serve him; and so no one will give himself to labor, but undertakes trafficking in merchandise, and for this reason military and all other kinds of training have been forgotten.  From this fact not a little damage will come to this land, if the governor does not regulate this.  In the letter which the cabildo of the church wrote to your Majesty a much longer account is given of this.