Page:Vol 2 History of Mexico by H H Bancroft.djvu/182

162 August 30th, and were received with the demonstrations suited to their sacred mission. Tezcuco was chosen for head-quarters, none of them as yet speaking Spanish well enough to secure the attention of Spanish congregations at the capital. Indeed, the Flemings do not appear to have been favorites among the soldiers, and Gante, at least, took little pains to court them, or to employ their idiom. Their charge was the natives, whose language they studied and to whose wants they ministered, while rapidly extending the sway of the church, and raising her emblem in numerous edifices, assisted, according to Mendieta, by two other Franciscans from the Antilles, who died soon after their arrival. Little is known of their labors, however, for the chroniclers confined their attention almost exclusively to those sent out by the Spanish prelates.

The election of Francisco de los Ángeles to the generalship of the Franciscans enabled him to prosecute his scheme for the conversion of the new-world natives with greater directness, and with the approval of the king and council he selected a friar to accomplish his purpose in the person of Martin de Valencia, provincial since 1518 of San Gabriel, wherein he had earned a pious fame by founding the monastery of Santa María del Berrocal. He had long sought in vain for missionary glory, and now, in his fiftieth year, with hope fast fading, his ambition was to be gratified.