your royal service.  In what I have experienced hitherto, I am under obligations to them to confess it, and of especial indebtedness and gratefulness to the provincial, namely, Fray Alonso Barahona, [88] and to the definitors; and inasmuch as it is a matter that concerns the service of your Majesty, I have wished in this letter to mention it to you.  I shall close at this point, acknowledging the receipt of only one letter that has come to me from your Majesty in these vessels that have just arrived.  It is dated El Pardo, November twenty, one thousand six hundred and seventeen.  Consequently with what I have written, I have nothing more to reply to it than that I shall do all in my power, as I ought and as I am obliged to do in fulfilment of its commands, and in all that concerns your Majesty’s service.  May God preserve the Catholic and royal person of your Majesty, as is needed by Christendom.  Manila, August 10, 1619.

Don Alonso Faxardo de Tenca

[Appended to this letter is the following, to which the clause of the letter speaking of the fleet to be sent from Spain evidently refers.]

On August third, one thousand six hundred and nineteen, Secretary Juan Ruiz de Contreras ordered that Licentiate Antonio Moreno, cosmographer, and Captain Juan Media, be summoned to confer with Pedro Miguel, alias Dubal, a pilot, sent by his Highness, the most serene Archduke Alberto, [89] to make a voyage to the Filipinas Islands in his Majesty’s service by way of the cape of Buena Esperanza or by the new strait of Mayre. [90] In the presence of Don Lorenzo de Cracola, commander of the fleet, he was asked which of the two routes seemed the most suitable for the voyage of which they were conferring.  He answered that that by the cape of Buena Esperanza was most suitable, if the voyage were to be made at the end of this year, because it could not be made by the new strait, as it was now very late in the year.  He said that the season most suitable for that was any time in May; and that although, in accordance with the voyages that he has made, the Dutch sail from their country during any time of the year, he thought that this fleet should sail during the month of March, notwithstanding that he offered to make the voyage by sailing the last of November or the first of December, as above stated.  He supposes that by making a way-station in the regions, and in the manner that the Dutch do, they would spend thirteen or fourteen months; and they would not make the time at all shorter by not having made the voyage by the open sea.  He asserts that the voyage by way of the new strait is much longer, by at least one thousand leguas.  He knows this as one who has made the voyage by both routes, and the last time by that of Magallanes, although not by that newly-discovered way called the strait of Mayre; and because he has gone to Filipinas and Terrenate twice by way of the cape of Buena Esperanza.  He affixed his signature in presence of the above-mentioned persons and of Cornelio Smout (who came to Espana with the said pilot, having been sent by his Highness), and by Henrrique Serbaer, an inhabitant of this city of Sevilla, who served him as interpreter.