commanded us to observe.  I mention this point because we who came enjoyed an experience never known before—­namely, that while at sea we kept Ascension day, Whitsunday, Trinity Sunday, and Corpus Christi day; when we landed we kept and celebrated the same feast-days in Manila, because the new reckoning was not yet in force there, and does not come into effect until the fifth of October of the present year.  It is a memorable event that according to the said new reckoning we arrived here on the twenty-sixth of May, and according to the old on the sixteenth of the same month. [5] The Audiencia was established with all the authority and pomp possible.  We found the city burned down, and no habitable houses except those of straw, rushes, and boards, which could easily burn down again any day.  Concerning this and other matters, a report will be sent by the president.  The officials of the royal exchequer not only refused to lend me money, but did not even pay me more than half of the three months’ salary due me from the time when I left Acapulco.  The others have drawn their salaries from the time when they left Castilla, the president since he left Mexico, and I only from the day when we set sail.  I am not unworthy of favors, most potent sire; for I have spent forty years in continual study, thirty of which have given me much experience in matters of justice and legal pleading, and this is well known in Mexico.  If the records of the past be examined in the Council, it will be seen that in the ten or twelve months while I was fiscal of that royal Audiencia I accomplished more than did my predecessors for twenty years.  Besides all this, I am a man of good repute.  I was an advocate for the Inquisition during more than eleven years, namely, from the time when your Majesty established it in Mexico.  My uncles and the relatives of Dona Maria de Sandoval, my wife, won Nueva Espana, as can be seen by the records of the royal Council of the Yndias; and no one is more worthy to receive the remuneration for his services than are my wife and I. By virtue of a decree ordering me to remove my entire family and household, the royal exchequer of Mexico lent me for the space of two years two thousand pesos to aid me on my voyage.  This assistance was not sufficient, and, not being able to sell my estates, I was obliged to leave them deserted, because I had already sold my negroes.  I shall be entirely ruined unless your Majesty release me from the payment of those two thousand pesos, or at least give me a continuance of ten years.  I entreat your Majesty for this, since in order to foster decency among the women I brought here three sons and a nephew, whose exceedingly honorable and virtuous reputation is known throughout Nueva Espana, where I brought them up.