Francisco Ignacio Alcina, S.J. spent 37 years among the Bisayan people of Samar and Leyte before completing his nine-volume Historia de las islas e indios de Bisayas in 1668, and this bilingual edition — translated into English for the first time in 2002 — makes the first volume of that monumental work accessible to a modern readership. It is the most extensive ethnographic record of any Philippine region at the point of Western contact, documenting the Bisayans' syllabic writing system, oral poetry, cosmology, music, and religious beliefs as Alcina observed them firsthand.