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The inhabitants of Momoya, naturally changeable and cruel, began the massacre by the murder of Simon Vaz, their first pastor; and had killed Alvarez, whom they pursued with flights of arrows to the sea side, if accidentally he had not found a bark in readiness, which bore him off, all wounded as he was, and saved him from the fury of those Christian barbarians.
Atayda receiving favourably those propositions of the prince of Momoya, the prince came in person to Ternate, and desired baptism; taking then, the name of John, in honour of John III., king of Portugal. At his return to Momoya, he took along with him a Portuguese priest, called Simon Vaz, who converted many idolaters to the faith.
Tolo, the chief town of the island, inhabited by twenty-five thousand souls, was entirely converted, together with Momoya.
The number of Christians, thus daily increasing more and more, another priest, called Francis Alvarez, came to second Vaz, and both of them laboured so happily in conjunction, that the whole people of Momoya renounced idolatry, and professed the faith of Jesus Christ.
It was reported to him, that those islanders, barbarians as they were, had been most of them baptized, but that the faith had been abolished there immediately after it was introduced, and this account he heard of it. The inhabitants of Momoya, which is a town in the Isle del Moro, would never embrace the law of Mahomet, though all the neighbouring villages had received it.
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