Complex sentence: Fearing a reprisal from China, the Spaniards tried to explain their actions to the Chinese Ming rulers and were quite surprised to learn that the Chinese rulers viewed the "sangleys" as "wicked people" who had abandoned their ancestral homeland.
Split into simpler sentences: Fearing a reprisal from China, the Spaniards tried to explain their actions to the Chinese Ming rulers. They were surprised to learn that the Chinese rulers viewed the "sangleys" as "wicked people" for abandoning their ancestral homeland.