place, and it had to be repaired.  Another day they were all but wrecked on the reefs of La Plata.  On another occasion they lost their rudder completely, and they had to steer the ship with the sheets of the mizzenmast; on another, they lost their anchors while quite near Macan.  They grounded in two and one-half brazas of water, and had not the bottom been sandy they would have been smashed into a thousand pieces.  They cut down the mainmast and lightened the ship, and got it out of the sand after the greatest of toil, for it was almost buried.  The other galleon had its troubles too, but it was fortunate in making port at Sanchuan on the Chinese coast, where our father St. Francis Javier died, about thirty leguas from Macan.  The galliots entered the latter place safely, for the Dutch ships were no longer in the strait, as I shall recount later in order not to interrupt at present the thread of our history of our galleons and their adventures.  The latter were very ill received by the Portuguese because of the twenty thousand pesos which they cost, and because it was seen that the Dutch had deserted the strait.  They judged the matter by the effect and not by what might have happened had the enemy captured their galliots with so great a sum of silver.  Our galleons stayed more than three months at that place refitting, stepping a mast and replacing the rudder, and getting food in Macan.  They bought a patache, of which they had great need.  On the eighteenth of February the two galleons and patache sailed out to pursue their voyage.  The latter was sent by the commander, Don Juan Alcarazo, to take its station in the bay of the kingdom of Tonquin and Cochinchina, in order to await a ship from Siam of which it should make a prize; and then to go with it in search of the two galleons.  The fact is that they had an order from Governor Don Juan Nino de Tabora to capture all the Siamese vessels for reprisal, inasmuch as five years ago a ship was taken from us in that kingdom, although it was friendly to us.  The ship was said to be valued at one million in merchandise, and was on its way from Macan to Manila.  Several Spaniards were killed.  An embassy having been sent under Father Pedro de Morejon, as I wrote in another relation, the Siamese returned to us only the value of ten thousand pesos.

That patache, whose captain was Diego Lopez Lobo, a Portuguese, and which carried thirty Spaniards, waited two months in the said place, sailing about hither and thither.  When the king of Cochinchina saw it, fearing lest it capture some vessels that he was expecting in his kingdom, he sent a father of the Society (one of those who reside in his court and other places, who I think are sixteen in number) in a small ship to tell the captain not to do any harm to anything belonging to his kingdom, and that he had always been a friend to us.  Answer was returned that the presence of the ship in that region was not to do harm to Cochinchina, but to attain certain