Another instance:  an affair characterized by covetousness, wrongs, and injustice, which are being perpetrated before the sight of God and all the world.  This is the affair.  There is here a vessel which is called “Sancta Margarita” which belonged to Captain Stevan Rodriguez.  This boat he despatched this year to convey cloth and merchandise from this city to Mexico.  There is a record of what this same ship took last time; and according to the register (which is here and in Mexico) the vessel loaded two hundred and fifty to three hundred toneladas; but this year there was not allotted among the citizens of the islands more than a hundred and sixty toneladas.  All the rest, up to the said number of two hundred and fifty or three hundred, he has seized upon.  This injustice and robbery is terrible, but the circumstance makes it even more remarkable that sin and greed and vices so blind a man that he considers everyone else blind; and thinks that they will not look at this ship and see its size, when it is present here; nor remember that, in this same ship, the same persons with the same merchandise laded ten times as large a cargo; nor does he consider that, at any rate, the registry of this same ship exists.

On the day on which I write this, which is the last of June, when the ships should have sailed days ago for Mexico, because they might encounter a wind which would make it impossible for them to leave this bay for a long time, and the voyage would be lost, or undertaken when the ships would be wrecked—­during this time he is entertaining guests and making feasts and gambling.  Certainly, Sire, considering the injustice and grievance which he is inflicting on the poor subjects and vassals of your Majesty, and considering him so taken up with these feasts, there occurs to me the history of Nero, when he set fire to Rome, and stood rejoicing while the street was burning and being consumed; or, as a learned and pious man said, it seems parallel with the idea which Nabuchodonosor carried out when he desired that the people should adore his image, and ordered that thenceforth there should be much music and feasting, so that the people, thus deluded, should not even think of him without at once committing an act of idolatry.  Just so here all is feasting, so that in this way the people may be prevented from thinking; and that, thus deluded, they should busy themselves with this until the evil record be finished, and the ships depart.

How can I tell your Majesty of the affairs of war?  Although we are every moment fearing some movement from Japon, this man will not build a single turret to finish the wall.  He considers himself safe with a dark retreat which he built to retire to if the enemy should take the city; but if the enemy should take a single house of the city, he is as well fortified there as are the Spaniards in their retreat.  For, with the cheap labor of Chinamen, they have built here so that every house is a fortress.  God has granted