Sucesos de las Islas Filipinas (Events of the Philippine Islands)
A history of the Spanish Philippines by a judge who served as lieutenant-governor at Manila in the 1590s. Its sixth chapter tells of the wreck of the galleon San Felipe in Japan in 1596 and the crucifixion of the Franciscans and their Japanese companions at Nagasaki.
Morga was in office at Manila when the news of the crucifixions arrived there in May 1597, brought by the survivors of the wrecked galleon, and one of the friars wrote to him from the road to execution; he prints that letter. His account is therefore close to the events but is not that of an eyewitness in Japan. It rests on what the Spaniards of the ship and the surviving Franciscans reported.
It is a Spanish and Franciscan view of the affair. Morga blames the greed of the Japanese ruler, whom he calls Taicosama, and the hostility of his courtiers; he also records the pilot’s boast that Spain’s conquests began with missionaries, and he mentions the opposition of the Jesuits in Japan to the coming of the friars. The sentence and the friar’s letter that he prints speak of twenty-four crucified, six friars and eighteen Japanese, and his own narrative of six friars and twenty-six Japanese, where the Jesuit account recorded as Account of the Twenty-Six Crucified at Nagasaki counts twenty-six in all; the translators mark these figures with “sic”. He gives the text of the sentence that was carried before the condemned.
Cited in
- 1597 to 1614, firm date