The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898, Volume 30 of 55, 1640 / Explorations by early navigators, descriptions of the islands and their peoples, their history and records of the Catholic missions, as related in contemporaneous books and manuscripts, showing the political, economic, commercial and religious conditions of those islands from their earliest relations with European nations to the close of the nineteenth century

[The three brethren destined for China set sail from the port of Acapulco for Macan, in a vessel called the “San Martin.” The other fifteen religious began their voyage on the Sunday called Quasimodo, the Sunday after Easter, April 6, in the year 1587. It was very late in the year, so that there was danger of storms; for the time of the vendabals had come—stormy and contrary winds, which are feared greatly by the best pilots. They had the misfortune to lose their ship-stores by fire, and were obliged to live on beans and chick-peas (garbanzos) for all the rest of the voyage, which lasted three months and a half. But a much more severe affliction was the narrowness of their quarters in the ship; for two factions broke out among the crew, one party fortifying itself in the forecastle, the other in the poop; and they were about to give battle to each other, as if the one party had been Moors and the other Christians. Fortunately, the fathers succeeded in reconciling them. The carelessness of the navigators almost caused the ship to be lost on one occasion; on another, the vessel was almost lost on some islands inhabited by cannibals. On the eve of St. Magdalen’s day they reached port; and they took this saint to be patron of that province.]