In 1623 de Angelis and Simon Jempo, with a number of their followers, were burned to death, after having their feet cut off. Carvalho and Buzomo were caught in a forest in mid-winter, and on February 21, 1624, were plunged naked into a pond, and left there to freeze for the space of three hours. Four days afterwards the experiment was repeated for six consecutive hours. But the night was so cold that they were both found dead in the morning, wrapped in a shroud of ice. Another Carvalho perished in the same year. Petitions were sent from the Philippines and elsewhere, imploring a cessation of these horrors, but the appeals made the Shogun more cruel. As the persecutions had produced only a few apostacies, the executioners were told to scourge the victims down to the bone, to tear out their nails, to drive rods into their flesh or ears or nose, to fling them into pits filled with venomous snakes, to cut them up piece by piece, to roast them on gridirons, to put red-hot vessels in their hands, and, what was the most diabolical of all, to consider the slightest movement or cry a sign of apostasy. Another favorite punishment was to hang the sufferer head down over a pit from which sulphurous or other fumes were rising, or to stretch them on their backs and by means of a funnel fill them full of water till the stomach almost burst, and then by jumping on the body to force the fluid out again.
It is unnecessary here to enter into all the details of these martyrdoms; but it will be enough to state that in a very few years, twenty-eight native Japanese Jesuits, besides multitudes of people who were living in the world, men, women and children, gave up their lives for the Faith, side by side with those who had come from other parts of the world to teach them how to die. In 1634 only a handful of Jesuits remained. Chief among them was Vieira. He had been sent to report conditions to Urban VIII, and in 1632 he returned to die. He re-entered Japan as a Chinese sailor, and for nearly two years hurried all over the blood-stained territory, facing death at every step, until finally he and five other Jesuits stood before the tribunal and were told to apostatize or die. Vieira, the spokesman, said: "I am 63 years old, and all my life I have received innumerable favors from Almighty God; from the emperor--nothing, and I am not going now to bow down to idols of sticks and stones to obey a mortal man like myself. So say the others." They were put to death.