The publications of the Hakluyt Society (founded in 1846) made available edited (and sometimes translated) early accounts of exploration. The first series, which ran from 1847 to 1899, consists of 100 books containing published or previously unpublished works by authors from Christopher Columbus to Sir Francis Drake, and covering voyages to the New World, to China and Japan, to Russia and to Africa and India. This 1868 volume is the first publication in English of a book originally published in Mexico in 1609, which describes the Spanish 'discovery, conquest and conversion' of the Philippines in the sixteenth century, and the administration of this part of the Spanish empire. The introductory essay situates the book in the context of the historiography of the Spanish empire, and identifies parallels for the colonial experience, and especially for the treatment of indigenous peoples, in the issues confronting the mid-nineteenth-century British empire.