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The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898: Volume 32, 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. cover

The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898: Volume 32, 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.

Chapter 20: Chapter IX The death of the three holy martyrs
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About This Book

This volume concludes a Dominican provincial history that chronicles missionary work in the Philippine archipelago and adjacent regions. It traces the lives and labors of several friars, describing conversions, reported miracles and visions, emergency baptisms amid epidemics, internal elections and administrative matters, and the physical and spiritual hardships of mission life. It records escalating persecutions in Japan, orders for clergy expulsion, clandestine ministry, and many instances of suffering and martyrdom. The text is accompanied by editorial annotations, bibliographical notes, and facsimiles of maps and signatures that help anchor the narrative in contemporaneous documentary sources.

Chapter IX

The death of the three holy martyrs

[From this island the three fathers were removed to another named Coguchi. They received with great joy the news that they were to die, and were carried to another island still more solitary. Here they showed great courtesy and kindness to those who were to slay them. They left letters for their provincials, desiring them to send religious to Japon at any cost. In spite of the care of the tyrant, some Christians were present at the execution. The two were beheaded on Thursday, the first of June, the octave of Corpus Christi. Their very executioners looked upon them at such men of virtue that they dipped their handkerchiefs and bits of paper in their sacred blood, to keep these as relics. The bodies of all the martyrs were put in coffins laden with stones, and cast into the sea. In spite of the danger, many Japanese went to the place of the martyrdom to venerate the relics of these saints; and the Confraternity of the Rosary offered continual prayers that they might recover the bodies of these holy martyrs. At the end of two months the bodies of the holy and blessed Fray Pedro de la Asumpcion and Fray Hernando were cast up on the shore.]