2012. "Although Xavier used Marulić’s book as a source of examples for preaching
and instruction, it was no more—as he wrote in one of his famous letters to another Jesuit, Gaspar Barzaeus, who was about to be sent to Ormuz, on the Persian Gulf, in 1549—than a “dead book (livro morto)”;3 he preferred the study of “living books (vivos livros).” In a word, Xavier advised Gaspar Barzaeus to study the people around him. It is from them, he wrote, that we can learn more in order to usefully “fructify the souls, your own and that of your neighbour.”4"
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2) According to Georg Schurhammer, this book, preserved in the Jesuit Casa Professa in Madrid, was burnt by “the Reds in the Spanish Civil War in 1932.” G. Schurhammer, Francis Xavier: His Life, His Times, vol. 2, India (1541-1545), trans. from the German by M.J. Costelloe (Rome: Jesuit Historical Institute, 1977): 225.
3) F. Xavier, Epistolae S. Francisci Xavierii aliaque eius scripta (1535-1552), ed. G. Schurhammer and J. Wicki (Rome: Monumenta Historica Societatis Iesu, 1996): 2:98.
4) Xavier, Epistolae: 2:98-9. The letter is mostly about how to confess and cleanse the Christians of sin, as Ormuz was a Portuguese commercial outpost in which Christians lived among a Muslim majority. Xavier’s mission, according to his own correspondence, was to help Portuguese souls that were perceived as being in danger in the non-Christian environment, as well as to convert non-Christians.