Three years later their number was increased.  The Catholic king sent his royal Audiencia to the islands in the year 1583; and as its president, the governor of the islands and the representative of his Majesty, Doctor Santiago de Vera, who was a member of his council, and judge in the royal Chancilleria of Mexico. [51] He, at the time of his departure from Mexico, requested of the Father Doctor Juan de la Placa, who was then provincial in Nueva Espana, permission to take with him to the islands some of the fathers.  Not only did he himself urge this, but also other personages, even the king’s ministers, who all insisted that he should in no case go without them.  Under this influence the father provincial was constrained to draw from the few members then in his province four individuals:  these were Father Ramon de Prado, a Catalan; Father Francisco Almerique, an Italian; Padre Hernan Suarez, a Castilian; and, as coadjutor, the brother Gaspar Gomez—­all of whom, as we shall later see, were of great benefit to those regions.  So great was the satisfaction of this most Christian man, upon receiving the message of our provincial (who had given him two of Ours, and those other four on his own responsibility), that he immediately fell on his knees before them, and gave thanks to our Lord that he had obtained the ministers whom His Divine Majesty employs for the conversion of peoples, as he has so said.  They reached the Filipinas in May or June of the year 1584, and afforded great companionship, comfort, and aid to those who were in the islands.  Father Hernan Suarez was especially useful, for God had endowed him with special grace in winning hearts and bringing them to His service—­and this, in familiar conversation and ordinary discourse, as well as in the pulpit and the confessional.  In this way the whole community was dependent on him; he settled all matters that might give rise to discord, and no one took any step without his opinion and counsel.  He ministered to his flock jointly and severally in public and in private, with much charity on his part and satisfaction on theirs.  But this very thing was the cause, in a short time, of his death.  Exhausted by so much toil, but especially by the fierce heat of the sun—­to which he was exposed at every hour, in journeying on foot from Laguio to Manila and back again—­and wearied and often perspiring from the sermons which he so frequently preached, he died a holy death within two or three years, to the universal sorrow of his entire congregation which celebrated his obsequies as those of a true father.

For this reason and at the order of Father Antonio de Mendoca, provincial of Nueva Espana, who did not wish that our members should dwell so far from Manila, they were obliged to change their abode and come within the city.  Many devout persons and friends of our Society helped them greatly to this end with offerings, some giving them pieces of land, on which was a wooden house of moderate size; others offerings of money,