THE MARTYRS
In this entry we will see the history of the Martyrs, as we look at the murals by Erik Cichosz
The Reverend Father Friar Ignacio de Acevedo, a native of Porto and with unique missionary qualities, had remained in Brazil and then became Provincial of this part of America. He returned to Europe due to his mission and was received by His Holiness Pope Pius V, of whom he held dear. From his Holiness he received several relics, which he left, or at least some of them, in Tazacorte.
The General of the Order of the Society of Jesus, Saint Francis of Borja, in mandate had arranged the mission led by Father Acevedo and on the 5th of June 1570 he left Portugal in the Boat Santiago, together with the thirty-nine religious who accompanied him to the Brazilian missions. From Portugal he set off for Tazacorte, a western port of the island of La Palma, where they had to take a shipment of cane of sugar from the then magnificent sugar mills of Argual and Tazacorte, and to then dispatch in Santa Cruz de La Palma, where the delegated judges from la Casa de Contratación resided, authorized for the dispatch of ship records to the Indies, already called in 1570 Judges of the Indies.
The Boat of Santiago arrived in Tazacorte around July 6, 1570. It had left Portugal on June 5, and assuming with the favourable winds of that month about four days to arrive on the island of Madeira, where for reasons that were ignored it remained anchored for 24 days and then about three days to reach Tazacorte.
In Tazacorte, he was able to embrace Father Ignacio de Acevedo his dear friend D. Melchor de Monteverde, son of D. Jácome de Monteverde, and owners of the hacienda and mills of Tazacorte.
Father Acevedo and his companions had a pleasant seven-day stay in the fervent land of Tazacorte. To the unforgeable memories of childhood, refreshed and celebrated in the house of the Monteverde where all the religious and Captain Vasconcelos stayed, with a prodigious spectacle of this fertile land, fruitful as if the hand of God had laid in these temperate latitudes, a unique corner of the tropics. Sugar Islands were called the Canary Islands because of its sugar cane fields.
On the 13th of July 1570, Father Acevedo celebrated his last Mass on earth. It was in this place (read the tombstone that is at the bottom of the Church) where all the missionaries and free-on-board people, the Monteverde family and many neighbours, attended with special recollection. There they all communed, and there, at the solemn moment of the blood, Father Ignatius, in suspense for a few moments, had the Revelation of the martyrdom to suffer. In the silver chalice of the hermitage, with which Father Ignatius celebrated holy Mass, there was a confusing dent, a sign or footprint made with the teeth at the time of the Revelation. (CENTER MURAL TO THE LEFT).
The origin of this wooden box, lined in embossed and gold leather, can be seen through other arches of the same type documented in several churches in the sixteenth century.
On July 13, 1570, the nao Santiago was ready to go out to sea, bound for Santa Cruz de La Palma, where it had to be reviewed and dispatched by the Judge of Indies, and to take some packages missing to complete the cargo.
The sea was in complete calm. An almost imperceptible breeze from the earth at sunset hardly helped just to get out. On the 14th he followed the nao with his sails deployed, almost within reach of the voice of the earth, the dead sea, and not a crumb of air. At sunset, it is as is the sails want to thank a very softened earth that makes the ship maneuver, bowing to the tip of Fuencaliente.
The night must have been used because with the first lights of the 15th of July 1570, still in sight of the Port..
But the Boat was already boarded by port and starboard. More powerful and lighter ships, ships of the pirate Jacques de Soria, had surprised and dominated him in the early morning. The fight was horrible. Santiago's command and crew had already been killed, thrown into the water. The French pirate ships were Huguenots, passionate Calvinists. The shortfall of the missionaries showed from its short distance to the coast, the indelible traces of the struggle, the stripping of the beauty of its rigging: half dismantled, the greater two-thirds of the male stick was seen; riggings had surrendered and fallen in disarray upon deck and amuras. Parts of the velamen were still held clutched at the wreckage, half aboard, half in the water and those candles rendered, wet in the saltpeter of our seas, were like a symbolic shroud, residues of matter that disappears in the antithesis of the spirits that eternize. The fleet of Jaques de Sores had opened some blows in the two bands of the Christian boat. A valuable prey could already be counted: The Christian ship that was to thicken the Norman pirate's maritime power, the valuable shipment of sugar, and other necessary supplies.
The forty Jesuit missionaries still lived. From a larger ship ruled to the windward of the boarding was a boat. It flies the black rag and its Corsican skull. On the masts of the other Norman lower lestles also flied, albeit smaller, the pirate flag. In the boat, and as an escort, are placed some reluctant sailors of confidence, knife to the belt. Jacques de Sores then appears in his best-gown outfit. He sets foot on the first board of the cat scale, and, like a rider riding, jumps overboard, and careful not to get dirty, descends on the boat where he awaits, paddles aloft, the flaking people at his command.
A slow bogar, an air of miserable pomp, brings that boat peeled off the side of the ship logo. The pirate, standing on the stern, stares at the deck of Nao Santiago. The forty missionaries appear on the roof of the James. At their head is Father Acevedo with a small painting of the Virgin that Pope Pius V had given him, encouraging and comforting in the Faith the other companions.
Jacques de Sores, on board the Nao Santiago, proposes that the religious abjure the Catholic religion. He guarantees to spare everyone's life. Insist the pirate. The face of the religious lit more and more with ineffable light. In the last invitation, the pirate loses the serene dignity with which he had begun his dialogue and a bloody fury looms in his eyes. There is a silence of majesty in the salty air. All eyes fixed at the Norman Corsican, all start and nerve, and in the opposite lily tenderness of the missionaries, already abstracted into other higher landscapes. Jacques de Sores gives the terrible order. That trusted escort was the first to pounce; and Father Ignatius of Acevedo, wounded in the head with a sword, hardly continued to exhort his people to forgive the executioners, while vigorously embracing the small painting of the Virgin. The forty Martyrs of Tazacorte, with their necks pierced by knives, are thrown into the sea in the first lights of dawn on July 15 1570, at the sight of the port of Tazacorte. The martyred were two priests, seven students of the Scholastic eight coadjutor brothers and twenty-three novices (RIGHT CENTRE MURAL).
After the cruel murder of the Martyrs of Tazacorte, the galleon of Jaques de Sores moves to La Gomera next to 28 hostages where he is received by the then Count of La Gomera, Don Diego de Ayala y Rojas. He asks the French privateer to deliver the survivors to avoid further bloodshed. Sent to Madeira a few weeks later, they recounted what happened in the attack and these stories were collected in The Relationship of the Martyrdom of Father Ignatius of Acevedo and his companions by the Jesuit Father Pedro Díaz.
Santa Teresa de Jesús, (who had among the martyrs his nephew Francisco Pérez Godoy, originally from Torrijos, Toledo), assured his confessor Baltasar Alvarez on the same day in Avila to have participated in his prayer of glory with which heaven had crowned that unseen squad of missionary martyrs. He informed him that he had had a vision in which he had seen these martyrs "enter the sky dressed in stars and with victorious palms". (RIGHT MURAL)
Pope Benedict XIV, in his Bula of 21 September 1742, recognized the martyrdom of the forty religious, and Pius IX in the year of 1862, the day of Pentecost, beatified them.
* The murals were made on the occasion of the celebration of the V Centenary of the Evangelization of the Island of La Palma on September 29, 1992.