The Life and Martyrdom of Diego Luis de San Vitores, S.J.
is a collection of official and unofficial letters and documents in addition to testimonies collected shortly after the death of Diego Luis de San Vitores, S.J., the Jesuit priest who established the Catholic religion in the island of Guam in the late 1600s. This book captures both the life and events surrounding the death of San Vitores and a narrative of subsequent events in the Mariana Islands from 1672 to 1681. The scope of the book includes not just the four brief years of San Vitores’ time in Guam, but another ten years of missionary work following his death. It offers a detailed description of the early critical years of mission activity between 1668 and 1682 in this earliest of mission fields in Oceania.