always been few.

Moreover, in a country in which fires consume every year thousands of
dwellings and where the terrible typhoons frequently destroy whole
towns with heavy loss of lives, the damage done by earthquakes has
rarely been so great as to impress those occurrences indelibly upon
the memory. This is beyond doubt one of the reasons why prior to the
beginning of the nineteenth century hardly any data can be found
concerning the numerous earthquakes which during the preceding two
centuries must have occurred in the Visayas and above all on the large
Island of Mindanao.

The first earthquake of which the chronicles contain a mention is that
of 1599. There is no reasonable doubt that during the twenty-eight
years which had then elapsed since the founding of Manila by Legaspi,
several strong and possibly even destructive earthquakes occurred in
this part of Luzon Island, but, as the author of the "Verdadera
relación de la grande destrucción * * * del año 1645" tells us, "when
first founded, Manila consisted of wooden houses roofed with a certain
kind of palm leaves, the same which the natives use in their
buildings." Hence the damage done by these earthquakes must have been
insignificant. Much more terrible were the losses caused by
conflagrations which within a few years twice wiped out the entire
city.

The first Bishop of Manila, Domingo de Salazar, seeing the city
exposed to such general destructions by fire like the one of February
14, 1583, gave the first impulse to the construction of stone
buildings and worked indefatigably in this direction. In person he
explored the surroundings of Manila in quest of stone quarries and by