FROM The Life and Letters of St. Francis Xavier, Book III, Letter LV, (c. 1545-1548):
I have very good reason to thank God for the fruits which came of this work. The converts took up the practice of singing hymns of the praises of God with so much ardour, that the native boys in the street, the young girls and the women in the houses, the labourers in the fields, the fishermen on the sea, instead of singing licentious and blasphemous songs, were always singing the elements of the Christian doctrine. And as all the songs had been put in the language of the country, they were understood equally well by the newly made Christians and the heathen. And, by the favour of God, the Portuguese in the country and the rest of the inhabitants, both Christian and heathen, took such an affection for me that I found favour in their eyes. I passed from thence into the islands that are called ‘of the Moor,’ about sixty leagues from Molucco. There were here many Christian villages unattended to for a length of time, both on account of their great distance from India, and because the natives had put to death the only priest who was among them. In these islands I baptized a great number of children, and in the space of three months, for I remained that length of time, I visited all the Christian villages, and made them devoted to Christ and to myself. All these isles are full of dangers, on account of the feuds which rage among the inhabitants and their civil wars; the race is barbarous, totally ignorant of letters, devoid of any written monuments of the past, and without any notions of reading or writing. It is their practice to take away the lives of any whom they hate by poison, and in this way a great many are killed. The soil is rugged and destitute of productions which support life. There is no corn nor wine; the natives scarcely know what flesh meat is; they have no herds nor flocks, nothing but a few swine, which are rather objects of curiosity than food. Wild boars abound; good water is very rare; rice is plentiful; there are trees in great numbers from which they get a kind of bread and of wine, and others out of the woven bark of which the clothing which they all use is made. I have written all this to you, my dearest brothers, that you may know how much these islands overflow with heavenly joys. All these dangers and discomforts, when borne for the love of our Lord Jesus Christ, are treasuries filled full with heavenly consolations, so much so that one might think these islands were just the places where in a few years one might lose one’s eyesight from weeping so abundantly the sweetest tears of joy. Nowhere do I remember either to have been so flooded with so much of limpid and perpetual spiritual delight, or to have borne so lightly all fatigue and bodily trouble, though I was going about islands begirt with enemies, inhabited by not the most trustworthy friends, and entirely destitute of anything that could help in sickness, or could defend and preserve life when endangered. In short, it seems as if these isles should rather be called the Islands of Divine Hope than of the Moor.
There is here a race of men, enemies to Christianity, called Javars. They believe that to kill any men they can get hold of is a sort of immortal life. And it often happens that when they have no strangers to kill, they kill their own wives and children. These Javars make great slaughter of the Christians. One of the islands is almost continually, throughout its length and breadth, shaken by earthquakes, and it sends up flames and ashes. The natives say that the violence of the subterranean fire is so great, that the strata of rocks on which a certain town is built are all on fire. What they say seems credible; for it often happens that large redhot stones, as big as the largest trees, are hurled into the air, and when there is a very strong wind such a quantity of ashes is sent up from the cavities that the men and women who are at work in the country come home so covered with ashes that you can hardly see their eyes or nose or face. You would think they were rather demons than human beings.
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