The Story of the Franciscan friars who sailed with the Mendaña (1567) and Quirós (1605) expeditions from Callao, Port of Lima in Peru, in search of the Unknown Southland, finds a place in the vast missionary enterprise of the Spanish Friars of the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: as maritime expeditions they form important links in the chain of discoveries that eventually led to the finding of Australia; as religious enterprises they are part of the world-wide missionary apostolate of the Franciscan Order of that period.

Beyond All Question, the most valuable export of colonial Mexico was silver. However, the exaggerated emphasis usually accorded to this fact has tended to obscure the importance of other products in the Mexican colonial economy. Prior to the development of synthetic dyestuffs, the native dyes of New Spain ranked among her more valuable products. Such important tinting agents as Campeche wood (logwood), indigo, and cochineal were discovered in Mexico shortly after the conquest, and they were soon exported to the mother coutry in considerable volume. From Spain these raw dyestuffs were reexported to all of Europe, where, although the impact of American dyestuffs on the European economy has never been fully evaluated, these New World products served to bring about a revolution in the cloth industry of the continent.

Silence must never be allowed to mean consent when truth and justice are at stake. In that case it becomes one’s sacred duty to speak out not only in self-defense but also to prevent the dissemination and perpetuation of error and to remedy as far as possible abuse of confidence and victory over ignorance where the victims are blameless and practically helpless.