_ 371 _ was Rector of St. Paul’s College in the city of Goa, of how Your Reverence had given instructions for me to recount to him what the Lord was achieving here through our holy Society.(A) It would be pointless for me to describe the satisfaction I received from this communication. To be commanded under holy obedience was enough to offset my inadequacy and lack of virtue and to compensate for my failings, through which, up to the present I had ceased to do so. I was sent to the Persian Gulf with another Brother, called Reimão Pereira. There, at the end of two months of very unfavourable winds, beset by great thirst before the entrance to the Straits of Mecca, where the Red Sea lies, we arrived at the port of Muscat in Arabia Felix. I was detained there with the nau for a period of three days so that I could confess their sins and preach the word of God, because the majority of them were deserters, evil-doers, and had rarely confessed in their lives. It is no wonder this land seemed to me to belong to the Moors, since the Christians could hardly be distinguished from them. The fruit that the Lord produced here through the farvour [118v] they possessed can be imagined. (A) The letter of Fr. Antonio Gomes has perished (Cf Doc 49a).
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy OTg0NzAy