_ 442 _ he goes there during that time. This is what happened to this fleet, so that on the second day after they had arrived only eight of the eight hundred in it were in a condition to take arms. As most of the men returned to Ormuz to be nursed and many of the soldiers died, the father, who was on his own, had to nurse, confess and administer the sacrament to them, turning his own lodgings into a hospital where he had almost sixty men to look after. Some were dying of starvation, and in the space of two months, he heard five hundred confessions; and when many died of fever, he went through the city of Ormuz in stole and surplice to bury them in two tombs. Some he watched over at night and others he consoled and helped in their dying hours as best he could. 34. In the year and a half, he was there he converted fifty souls to Christianity, which is proportionately as many as those converted in India, because they are all Moors and very obstinate in their perverse beliefs. Among them was an important woman in the house of the mother of the King of Ormuz, her chambermaid, who on becoming a Christian fled from the palace and then married very honourably in the city of Ormuz.
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