being repeated five and ten times a year, and each expedition cost
the islands over eight hundred prisoners.

"With the invasions of the pirates from Sulu and Mindanao," says
Padre Gaspar de San Agustin, [the island of Bantayan, near Cebu]
"has been greatly reduced, because they easily captured the people
there, since the latter had no place to fortify themselves and were
far from help from Cebu. The hostile Sulu did great damage in this
island in 1608, leaving it almost depopulated." (Page 380).

These rough attacks, coming from without, produced a counter effect,
in the interior, which, carrying out medical comparisons, was like
a purge or diet in an individual who has just lost a great deal
of blood. In order to make headway against so many calamities, to
secure their sovereignty and take the offensive in these disastrous
contests, to isolate the warlike Sulus from their neighbors in the
south, to care for the needs of the empire of the Indies (for one of
the reasons why the Philippines were kept, as contemporary documents
prove, was their strategic position between New Spain and the Indies),
to wrest from the Dutch their growing colonies of the Moluccas and
get rid of some troublesome neighbors, to maintain, in short, the
trade of China with New Spain. it was necessary to construct new
and large ships which, as we have seen, costly as they were to the
country for their equipment and the rowers they required, were not
less so because of the manner in which they were constructed. (16)
Fernando de los Rios Coronel, who fought in these wars and later
turned priest, speaking of these King's ships, said: "As they were
so large, the timber needed was scarcely to be found in the forests
(of the Philippines!), and thus it was necessary to seek it with great
difficulty in the most remote of them, where, once found, in order