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+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 1479 ***
+A Vanished Arcadia
+
+Being Some Account of the Jesuits in Paraguay
+1607 to 1767
+
+
+By R. B. Cunninghame Graham
+
+Author of “Mogreb-El-Acksa”, etc.
+
+With a Map
+
+
+
+
+I DEDICATE
+THIS SHORT ACCOUNT OF
+A VANISHED ARCADIA
+TO THE AUTHOR OF
+‘SANTA TERESA, HER LIFE AND TIMES’,
+BEING CERTAIN THAT
+THE LIFE OF ALL SAINTS IS TO THEM AND US AN ARCADIA;
+UNKNOWN TO THEM AND TO US VANISHED WITH THEIR LIVES,
+YET STILL REMEMBERED, FITFULLY AS ARE THE JESUITS
+IN PARAGUAY, BY A FEW FAITHFUL,
+WHEN THE ANGELUS WAKES RECOLLECTION IN THE INDIANS’ HEARTS.
+BUT, THEN, THE ANGELUS (EVEN OF MEMORY)
+IS TO THE MOST PART OF MANKIND ONLY
+A JANGLING OF AN ANTIQUATED BELL.
+
+
+
+
+Preface
+
+
+_Historicus nascitur, non fit._ I am painfully aware that neither my
+calling nor election in this matter are the least sure. Certain it is
+that in youth, when alone the historian or the horseman may be formed,
+I did little to fit myself for writing history. Wandering about the
+countries of which now I treat, I had almost as little object in my
+travels as a Gaucho of the outside ‘camps’. I never took a note on any
+subject under heaven, nor kept a diary, by means of which, my youth
+departed and the countries I once knew so well transmogrified, I could,
+sitting beside the fire, read and enjoy the sadness of revisiting, in
+my mind’s eye, scenes that I now remember indistinctly as in a dream. I
+take it that he who keeps a journal of his doings, setting down day by
+day all that he does, with dates and names of places, their longitude
+and latitude duly recorded, makes for himself a meal of bitter-sweet;
+and that your truest dulcamara is to read with glasses the faded notes
+jotted down hurriedly in rain, in sun, in wind, in camps, by flooded
+rivers, and in the long and listless hours of heat—in fact, to see
+again your life, as it were, acted for you in some camera obscura, with
+the chief actor changed. But diaries, unless they be mere records of
+bare facts, must of necessity, as in their nature they are
+autobiographical, be false guides; so that, perhaps, I in my
+carelessness was not quite so unwise as I have often thought myself.
+Although I made no notes of anything, caring most chiefly for the
+condition of my horse, yet when I think on them, pampa and cordillera,
+virgin forest, the ‘passes’ of the rivers, approached by sandy paths,
+bordered by flowering and sweet-smelling trees, and most of all the
+deserted Jesuit Missions, half buried by the vigorous vegetation, and
+peopled but by a few white-clad Indians, rise up so clearly that,
+without the smallest faculty for dealing with that which I have
+undertaken, I am forced to write. Flowers, scents, the herds of horses,
+the ostriches, and the whole charm of that New World which those who
+saw it even a quarter of a century ago saw little altered from the
+remotest times, have remained clear and sharp, and will remain so with
+me to the end. So to the readers (if I chance to have them) of this
+short attempt to give some faint idea of the great Christian
+Commonwealth of the Jesuit Missions between the Paraná and Uruguay, I
+now address myself. He who attacks a subject quite fallen out of date,
+and still not old enough to give a man authority to speak upon it
+without the fear of contradiction, runs grave risk.
+
+Gentle, indulgent reader, if so be that you exist in these the days of
+universal knowledge and self-sufficient criticism, I do not ask for
+your indulgence for the many errors which no doubt have slipped into
+this work. These, if you care to take the trouble, you can verify, and
+hold me up to shame. What I do crave is that you will approach the
+subject with an open mind. Your Jesuit is, as we know, the most
+tremendous wild-fowl that the world has known. ‘La guardia nera’ of the
+Pope, the order which has wrought so much destruction, the inventors of
+‘Ciencia media’,[1] cradle from which has issued forth Molina, Suarez,
+and all those villains who, in the days in which the doctrine was
+unfashionable, decried mere faith, and took their stand on works—who in
+this land of preconceived opinion can spare it a good word? But,
+notwithstanding, even a Jansenist, if such be left, must yet admit the
+claim of Francis Xavier as a true, humble saint, and if the sour-faced
+sectary of Port Royale should refuse, all men of letters must perforce
+revere the writer of the hymn.
+
+But into the whole question of the Jesuits I cannot enter, as it
+entails command of far more foot and half-foot words than I can muster
+up. Still, in America, and most of all in Paraguay, I hope to show the
+Order did much good, and worked amongst the Indians like apostles,
+receiving an apostle’s true reward of calumny, of stripes, of blows,
+and journeying hungry, athirst, on foot, in perils oft, from the great
+cataract of the Paraná to the recesses of the Tarumensian woods. Little
+enough I personally care for the political aspect of their
+commonwealth, or how it acted on the Spanish settlements; of whether or
+not it turned out profitable to the Court of Spain, or if the crimes
+and charges of ambition laid to the Jesuits’ account were false or
+true. My only interest in the matter is how the Jesuits’ rule acted
+upon the Indians themselves, and if it made them happy—more happy or
+less happy than those Indians who were directly ruled from Spain, or
+through the Spanish Governors of the viceroyalties. For theories of
+advancement, and as to whether certain arbitrary ideas of the rights of
+man, evolved in general by those who in their persons and their lives
+are the negation of all rights, I give a fico—yes, your fig of
+Spain—caring as little as did ancient Pistol for ‘palabras’, and
+holding that the best right that a man can have is to be happy after
+the way that pleases him the most. And that the Jesuits rendered the
+Indians happy is certain, though to those men who fudge a theory of
+mankind, thinking that everyone is forged upon their anvil, or run out
+of their own mould, after the fashion of a tallow dip (a theory which,
+indeed, the sameness of mankind renders at times not quite untenable),
+it seems absurd because the progress of the world has gone on other
+lines—lines which prolonged indefinitely would never meet those which
+the Jesuits drew. All that I know is I myself, in the deserted
+missions, five-and-twenty years ago often have met old men who spoke
+regretfully of Jesuit times, who cherished all the customs left by the
+company, and though they spoke at secondhand, repeating but the stories
+they had heard in youth, kept the illusion that the missions in the
+Jesuits’ time had been a paradise. Into the matter of the Jesuits’
+motives I do not propose to enter, holding that the origin of motives
+is too deeply seated to be worth inquiry until one has more information
+about the human mind than even modern ‘scientists’ seem able to impart.
+Yet it is certain the Jesuits in Paraguay had faith fit to remove all
+mountains, as the brief stories of their lives, so often ending with a
+rude field-cross by the corner of some forest, and the inscription
+‘_hic occissus est_’ survive to show. Some men—such is the complexity
+of human nature—have undergone trials and persecutions for base
+motives, and it is open for anyone to say the Jesuits, as they were
+Jesuits, could do nothing good. Still, I believe that Father Ruiz
+Montoya—whose story I have told, how falteringly, and with how little
+justice to his greatness, none knows better than myself—was a good
+man—that is, a man without ulterior motives, and actuated but by his
+love to the poor Indians with whom he passed his life. To-day, when no
+one can see good in anything or anybody outside the somewhat beefy pale
+of the Anglo-Saxon race, I do not hope that such a mere dabbler in the
+great mystery of history as I am myself will for an instant change one
+preconceived opinion; for I am well aware that speeches based on facts
+are impotent in popular assemblies to change a single vote.
+
+It is an article of Anglo-Saxon faith that all the Spanish colonies
+were mal-administered, and all the Spanish conquerors bloodthirsty
+butchers, whose sole delight was blood. This, too, from the members of
+a race who . . .; but ‘In the multitude of the greyhounds is the
+undoing of the hare.’ Therefore, I ask those who imagine that all
+Spaniards at the conquest of America were ruffians, to consider the
+career of Alvar Nuñez, who also struts through his brief chapter in the
+pages of my most imperfect book. Still, I admit men of the stamp of
+Alvar Nuñez are most rare, and were still rarer in the sixteenth
+century; and to find many of the Ruiz Montoya brand, Diogenes would
+have needed a lantern fitted with electric light. In the great
+controversy which engaged the pens of many of the best writers of the
+world last century, after the Jesuits were expelled from Spain and her
+colonial possessions (then almost half the world), it will be found
+that amongst all the mud so freely flung about, the insults given and
+received, hardly anyone but a few ex-Jesuits had any harm to say of the
+doings of the Order during its long rule in Paraguay. None of the
+Jesuits were ever tried; no crimes were charged against them; even the
+reasons for their expulsion were never given to the world at large.
+Certain it is that but a few years after their final exit from the
+missions between the Uruguay and Paraná all was confusion. In twenty
+years most of the missions were deserted, and before thirty years had
+passed no vestige of their old prosperity remained.
+
+The semi-communism which the Jesuits had introduced was swept away, and
+the keen light of free and vivifying competition (which beats so
+fiercely upon the bagman’s paradise of the economists) reigned in its
+stead. The revenues declined,[2] all was corruption, and, as the
+Governor, Don Juan José Vertiz, writes to the Viceroy,[3] the secular
+priests sent by the Government were brawlers, drunkards, and strikers,
+carrying arms beneath their cloaks; that robbery was rife; and that the
+Indians daily deserted and returned by hundreds to the woods.
+
+All the reports of riches amassed in Paraguay by the Jesuits, after the
+expulsion of their order proved to be untrue; nothing of any
+consequence was found in any of the towns, although the Jesuits had had
+no warning of their expulsion, and had no time for preparation or for
+concealment of their gold. Although they stood to the Indians almost in
+the light of gods, and had control of an armed force larger by far than
+any which the temporal power could have disposed of, they did not
+resist, but silently departed from the rich territories which their
+care and industry had formed.
+
+Rightly or wrongly, but according to their lights, they strove to teach
+the Indian population all the best part of the European progress of the
+times in which they lived, shielding them sedulously from all contact
+with commercialism, and standing between them and the Spanish settlers,
+who would have treated them as slaves. These were their crimes. For
+their ambitions, who shall search the human heart, or say what their
+superiors in Europe may, or perhaps may not, have had in view? When all
+is said and done, and now their work is over, and all they worked for
+lost (as happens usually with the efforts of disinterested men), what
+crime so terrible can men commit as to stand up for near upon two
+centuries against that slavery which disgraced every American
+possession of the Spanish[4] crown? Nothing is bad enough for those who
+dare to speak the truth, and those who put their theories into practice
+are a disgrace to progressive and adequately taxed communities. Nearly
+two hundred years they strove, and now their territories, once so
+populous and so well cultivated, remain, if not a desert, yet delivered
+up to that fierce-growing, subtropical American plant life which seems
+as if it fights with man for the possession of the land in which it
+grows. For a brief period those Guaranís gathered together in the
+missions, ruled over by their priests, treated like grown-up children,
+yet with a kindness which attached them to their rulers, enjoyed a
+half-Arcadian, half-monastic life, reaching to just so much of what the
+world calls civilization as they could profit by and use with pleasure
+to themselves. A commonwealth where money was unknown to the majority
+of the citizens, a curious experiment by self-devoted men, a sort of
+dropping down a diving-bell in the flood of progress to keep alive a
+population which would otherwise soon have been suffocated in its muddy
+waves, was doomed to failure by the very nature of mankind. Foredoomed
+to failure, it has disappeared, leaving nothing of a like nature now
+upon the earth. The Indians, too, have vanished, gone to that limbo
+which no doubt is fitted for them. Gentle, indulgent reader, if you
+read this book, doubt not an instant that everything that happens
+happens for the best; doubt not, for in so doing you would doubt of all
+you see—our life, our progress, and your own infallibility, which at
+all hazards must be kept inviolate. Therefore in my imperfect sketch I
+have not dwelt entirely on the strict concatenation (after the Bradshaw
+fashion) of the hard facts of the history of the Jesuits. I have not
+set down too many dates, for the setting down of dates in much
+profusion is, after all, an _ad captandum_ appeal to the suffrages of
+those soft-headed creatures who are styled serious men.
+
+Wandering along the by-paths of the forests which fringe the mission
+towns, and set them, so to speak, in the hard tropical enamel of green
+foliage, on which time has no lien, and but the arts of all-destroying
+man are able to deface, I may have chanced upon some petty detail which
+may serve to pass an hour away.
+
+A treatise of a forgotten subject by a labourer unskilled, and who,
+moreover, by his very task challenges competition with those who have
+written on the theme, with better knowledge, and perhaps less sympathy;
+a pother about some few discredited and unremembered priests; details
+about half-savages, who ‘quoi! ne portaient pas des haults de
+chausses’; the recollections of long silent rides through forest paths,
+ablaze with flowers, and across which the tropic birds darted like
+atoms cut adrift from the apocalypse; a hotch-potch, salmagundi, olla
+podrida, or sea-pie of sweet and bitter, with perhaps the bitter ruling
+most, as is the way when we unpack our reminiscences—yes, gentle and
+indulgent reader, that’s the humour of it.
+
+          R. B. Cunninghame Graham.
+
+Gartmore, _March 30, 1900._
+
+
+
+
+Contents
+
+Chapter I
+
+Early history—State of the country—Indian races—Characteristics of the
+different tribes—Dobrizhoffer’s book—Various expeditions—Sebastian
+Cabot—Don Pedro de Mendoza—Alvar Nuñez—His expedition and its
+results—Other leaders and preachers—Founding of the first mission of
+the Society of Jesus
+
+Chapter II
+
+Early days of the missions—New settlements founded—Relations of Jesuits
+with Indians and Spanish colonists—Destruction of missions by the
+Mamelucos—Father Maceta—Padre Antonio Ruiz de Montoya—His work and
+influence—Retreat of the Jesuits down the Paraná
+
+Chapter III
+
+Spain and Portugal in South America—Enmity between Brazilians and
+Argentines—Expulsion of Jesuits from Paraguay—Struggles with the
+natives—Father Mendoza killed—Death of Father Montoya
+
+Chapter IV
+
+Don Bernardino de Cardenas, Bishop of Paraguay—His labours as apostolic
+missionary—His ambitions and cunning—Pretensions to saintliness—His
+attempts to acquire supreme power—Quarrels between Cardenas and Don
+Gregorio, the temporal Governor
+
+Chapter V
+
+Renewal of the feud between the Bishop and Don Gregorio—Wholesale
+excommunications in Asuncion—Cardenas in 1644 formulates his celebrated
+charges against the Jesuits—The Governor, after long negotiations and
+much display of force, ultimately succeeds in driving out the
+Bishop—For three years Cardenas is in desperate straits—In 1648 Don
+Gregorio is suddenly dismissed, Cardenas elects himself Governor, and
+for a short time becomes supreme in Asuncion—The Jesuits are forced to
+leave the town and to flee to Corrientes—A new Governor is appointed in
+Asuncion—He defeats Cardenas on the field of battle—The latter is
+deprived of his power, and dies soon after as Bishop of La Paz
+
+Chapter VI
+
+Description of the mission territory and towns founded by the
+Jesuits—Their endeavours to attract the Indians—Religious feasts and
+processions—Agricultural and commercial organizations
+
+Chapter VII
+
+Causes of the Jesuits’ unpopularity—Description of the lives and habits
+of the priests—Testimony in favour of the missions—Their opposition to
+slavery—Their system of administration
+
+Chapter VIII
+
+Don José de Antequera—Appoints himself Governor of Asuncion—Unsettled
+state of affairs in the town—He is commanded to relinquish his illegal
+power—He refuses, and resorts to arms—After some success he is defeated
+and condemned to be executed—He is shot on his way to the
+scaffold—Renewed hatred against the Jesuits—Their labours among the
+Indians of the Chaco
+
+Chapter IX
+
+The Spanish and Portuguese attempt to force new laws on the Indians—The
+Indians revolt against them—The hopeless struggle goes on for eight
+years—Ruin of the missions
+
+Chapter X
+
+Position of the Jesuits in 1761—Decree for their expulsion sent from
+Spain—Bucareli sent to suppress the colleges and drive out the
+Jesuits—They submit without resistance—After two hundred years they are
+expelled from Paraguay—The country under the new rule—The system of
+government practically unchanged
+
+Chapter XI
+
+Conclusion
+
+A Vanished Arcadia
+
+Being Some Account of the Jesuits in Paraguay
+
+1607 to 1767
+
+
+
+
+Chapter I
+
+
+Early history—State of the country—Indian races—Characteristics of the
+different tribes—Dobrizhoffer’s book—Various expeditions—Sebastian
+Cabot—Don Pedro de Mendoza—Alvar Nuñez—His expedition and its
+results—Other leaders and preachers—Founding of the first mission of
+the Society of Jesus
+
+With the exception of the French Revolution, perhaps no event caused so
+much general controversy at the end of the eighteenth century as the
+expulsion of the Jesuits from Spain and Portugal and their colonial
+possessions. As no definite charges were ever brought, at least in
+Spain, against the members of the Company of Jesus (King Charles III.
+having kept the reasons _ocultas y reservadas_ and the proofs
+_privilegiados_), curiosity is to some extent not satisfied as to the
+real reason of their expulsion from the Spanish possessions in America.
+
+It is almost impossible to understand nowadays the feelings which
+possessed the average man in regard to the Jesuits from the middle of
+the last century till a relatively short time ago. All the really great
+work done by the Society of Jesus seemed to have been forgotten, and
+every vulgar fable which it was possible to invent to their prejudice
+found ready acceptance upon every side. Nothing was too absurd to be
+believed. From the calumnies of the Jansenists to the follies of Eugène
+Sue the mass of accusation, invective, and innuendo kept on increasing
+in intensity. Indiscriminate abuse and unreasoning hatred, mixed with
+fear, seem to have possessed all minds. Even Pascal confesses (in a
+postscript to the ninth Provincial Letter) that ‘after having written
+my letter I read the works of Fathers Barry and Binet.’ If such a man
+as Pascal could be so grossly unfair as to write a criticism on works
+which he had not read, what can be expected from the non-judicial and
+uncritical public which takes all upon trust?
+
+From Japan to the interior of Bolivia there is scarcely a country in
+which the Jesuits have not laboured assiduously, and in which they have
+not shed their blood freely without hope of reward, yet it would
+require much time and a lengthy catalogue to enumerate the list of
+satirical and calumnious works which have appeared against them in
+almost every language in Europe. Of these, perhaps the most celebrated
+is the well-known ‘Monarquia de los Solipsos’,[5] by Padre Melchior
+Inshoffer, an ex-Jesuit, who describes the company in the worst
+possible terms. It is interesting chiefly on account of the portraits
+of well-known people of the time (1615 to 1648), as Pope Clement VIII.,
+Francisco Suarez, Claudio Aquaviva, and others, veiled under easily
+distinguishable pseudonyms. The object of the writer, as the title
+indicates, is to show that the Jesuits endeavoured to turn all to their
+own profit. In this, if it was the case, they do not seem to have been
+greatly different from every other associated body of men, whether lay
+or clerical. The celebrated Spanish proverb, ‘Jesuita y se ahorca,
+cuenta le hace’, meaning, Even if a Jesuit is hung he gets some good
+out of it, may just as well be applied to members of other learned
+professions as to the Jesuits.
+
+The world has rarely persecuted any body of men conspicuous by its
+poverty, or if it has done so has rarely persecuted them for long. The
+Inquisition of Spain, violent against the wealthy Jews and comfortable
+Moriscos, took little notice of the Gipsies; but, then, ‘Pobre como
+cuerpo de Gitano’ was and is a common saying in Spain.
+
+As in the case of the Templars, persecution only began against the
+Jesuits when it became worth while to persecute them. Ignatius Loyola,
+Francisco Xavier, and Diego Lainez, as long as they confined themselves
+to preaching and to teaching, were safe enough. Even the annals of
+theological strife, bloodthirsty and discreditable to humanity as they
+are, contain few examples of persecutors such as Calvin or Torquemada,
+to whom, ruthless as they were in their savage and narrow malignity and
+zeal for what they thought the truth, no suspicion of venal motives is
+attributed.
+
+Of the Jesuits’ intrigues, adventures, rise and fall in Europe, much
+may be said in attack or in extenuation; but it is not the intention of
+the present work to deal with this aspect of the question. It was in
+Spanish America, and especially in Paraguay and Bolivia, where the
+policy of the Company in regard to savage nations was most fully
+developed, as it was only the Jesuits who ever succeeded in reclaiming
+any large number of the nomad or semi-nomad tribes of those countries.
+
+Many excellent works in French, and the celebrated ‘Christianismo
+Felice nel Paraguay’ of the Abbate Muratori in Italian, certainly
+exist. But neither Father Charlevoix, the French historian of the
+missions, nor Muratori was ever in Paraguay, and both their books
+contain the faults and mistakes of men, however excellent and well
+intentioned, writing of countries of which they were personally
+ignorant. Both give a good account of the customs and regimen of the
+missions, but both seem to have believed too readily fabulous accounts
+of the flora and fauna of Paraguay.[6] The fact of having listened too
+readily to a fable about an unknown animal in no way detracts from the
+general veracity of an author of the beginning of the eighteenth
+century, for in all other respects except natural history Charlevoix
+keeps within the bounds of probability, though of course as a Jesuit he
+holds a brief for the doings of the Company in Paraguay. Muratori is
+more rarely led into extravagances, but is concerned in the main with
+the religious side of the Jesuits, as the title of his book indicates.
+
+Many other French writers, as Raynal, Montesquieu, and Voltaire, have
+treated of Paraguay under Jesuit rule, but their writings are founded
+on hearsay evidence. A German, Father Dobrizhoffer, stands alone.[7]
+His delightful ‘History of the Abipones, an Equestrian People of
+Paraguay’, is perhaps the most charming book dealing with the subject.
+A simple and easy style, a keen habit of observation, long acquaintance
+with the country, a zeal for the conversion of the infidel, not only to
+Christianity, but to a more comfortable mode of life, to which he adds
+a faith sufficient to move the Cordillera of the Andes, but at the same
+time restricted by a common-sense and veracity not always observable in
+religious writers, render Dobrizhoffer a personal friend after the
+perusal of his writings.
+
+English is singularly barren in regard to the Jesuits in Paraguay.
+Father Falconer, an English Jesuit, has left a curious and interesting
+book (printed at Hereford in 1774), but he treats exclusively of what
+is now the province of Buenos Ayres, the Falkland Islands, and of
+Patagonia. As an Englishman and a Jesuit (a somewhat rare combination
+in the eighteenth century), and as one who doubtless knew many of the
+Paraguayan priests, his testimony would have been most important,
+especially as he was a man of great information, much education, an
+intrepid traveller, and, moreover, only entered the Company of Jesus at
+a comparatively advanced age.
+
+It is in Spanish, or in Latin by Spanish authors, that the greater
+portion of the contemporary histories and accounts are to be found.[8]
+Literatures, like other things, have their times of fashion. At one
+time a knowledge of Spanish was as requisite as some tincture of French
+is at present, and almost as universal. Men from Germany, England, and
+Holland who met in a foreign country communicated in that language. In
+the early portion of the century Ticknor, Prescott, and Washington
+Irving rendered Spanish literature fashionable to some degree.
+
+Later the historical researches of Sir William Stirling Maxwell drew
+some attention to it. To-day hardly any literature of Europe is so
+little studied in England. Still leaving apart the purely literary
+treasures of the language, it is in Spanish, and almost alone in
+Spanish, that the early history of America is to be found.
+
+After the struggle for independence which finished about 1825, some
+interest was excited in the Spanish-American countries, stimulated by
+the writings of Humboldt; but when it became apparent that on the whole
+those countries could never be occupied by Northern Europeans, interest
+in them died out except for purposes connected with the Stock Exchange.
+Yet there is a charm which attaches to them which attaches to no other
+countries in the world. It was there that one of the greatest dramas,
+and certainly the greatest adventure in which the human race has
+engaged, took place. What Africa has been for the last twenty years,
+Spanish America was three hundred years ago, the difference being that,
+whereas modern adventure in Africa goes on under full observation, and
+deals in the main with absolutely uncivilized peoples, the conquest of
+South America was invested with all the charm of novelty, and brought
+the conquerors into contact with at least two peoples almost as
+advanced in most of the arts of civilization as they were themselves.
+
+When first Sebastian Cabot and Solis ascended the Paraná, they found
+that the Guaranís of Paraguay had extended in no instance to the
+western shore of either of those rivers. The western banks were
+inhabited then, as now, by the wandering Indians of the still not
+entirely explored territory of the Gran Chaco. Chaco[9] is a Quichua
+Indian word meaning ‘hunting’ or ‘hunting-ground’, and it is said that
+after the conquest of Peru the Indian tribes which had been recently
+subjugated by the Incas took refuge in this huge domain of forest and
+of swamp.
+
+Be that as it may, the Chaco Indians of to-day, comprising the remnants
+of the Lulis, Tobas, Lenguas, Mocobiós, and others, are almost as
+savage as when first we hear of them in the pages of Alvar Nuñez and
+Hulderico Schmidel. These tribes the Jesuits on many occasions
+attempted to civilize, but almost entirely without success, as the long
+record of the martyrdom of Jesuit missionaries in the Chaco proves, as
+well as the gradual abandonment of their missions there, towards the
+second half of the eighteenth century.
+
+Certain it is that at various places in the Chaco, in the quaint old
+maps the Jesuits have left us, one reads ‘Mission de Santa Cruz de los
+Vilelas’, ‘Mission de la Concepcion de los Frontones’, and others; but
+much more frequently their maps are studded with crosses, and some such
+legend as ‘Hic occisi sunt PP. Antonius Salinus et Petrus Ortiz
+Zarate’.[10] It was only when the Jesuits encountered the more peaceful
+Guaranís that they met with real success.
+
+What was the nature of their success, how durable it was, what were the
+reasons which caused the expulsion of the order from America, and
+especially from Paraguay, and what has been the result upon the
+remainder of the Indians, it is my object to endeavour to explain.
+
+A long residence in the river Plate, together with two visits to
+Paraguay, in one of which I saw almost all the remnants of the
+Paraguayan missions and a few of those situated in the province of
+Corrientes, and in the Brazilian province of Rio Grande do Sul, have
+given me some personal acquaintance with the subject.[11]
+
+The actual condition of the rich district of Misiones (Paraguay) at the
+time I visited it, shortly after the conclusion of the great war
+between Paraguay and Brazil in 1870, does not enable me to speak with
+authority on the condition of communities, the guiding spirits of which
+were expelled as far back as the year 1767. The actual buildings of the
+missions, the churches in a dismantled state, have indeed survived; in
+many instances the tall date-palms the Jesuits planted still wave over
+them. Generally the college was occupied by the Indian Alcalde, who
+came out to meet the visitor on a horse if he possessed one, with as
+much silver about the bridle and stirrups as he could afford, clothed
+in white, with a cloak of red baize, a large _jipi-japa_ hat, and
+silver spurs buckled on his naked feet. If he had never left the
+mission, he talked with wonder and respect of the times of the Jesuits,
+and at the _oracion_ knelt down to pray wherever the sound of the
+angelus might catch him. His children before bedtime knelt all in a row
+to ask his blessing. If he had been to Asuncion, he probably remarked
+that the people under those accursed priests were naught but animals
+and slaves, and launched into some disquisition he had heard in the
+solitary café which Asuncion then boasted. In the latter case, after
+much of the rights of man and the duties of hospitality, he generally
+presented you with a heavy bill for Indian corn and _pindo_[12] which
+your horse had eaten. In the former, usually he bade you go with God,
+and, if you spoke of payment, said: ‘Well, send me a book of Hours when
+you get to Asuncion.’
+
+Of Indians, hardly any were left to judge of, for in the villages in
+which, according to the reports furnished to Bucareli, the Viceroy of
+Buenos Ayres at the time of the expulsion of the Jesuits, the
+population numbered in the thirty towns of the missions one hundred and
+twenty thousand,[13] a population of at most twenty thousand was to be
+found. On every side the powerful vegetation had covered up the fields.
+On ruined church and chapel, and on broken tower, the lianas climbed as
+if on trees, creeping up the belfries, and throwing great masses of
+scarlet and purple flowers out of the apertures where once were hung
+the bells. In the thick jungles a few half-wild cattle still were to be
+found. The vast _estancias_, where once the Jesuits branded two and
+three thousand calves a year, and from whence thousands of mules went
+forth to Chile and Bolivia, were all neglected. Horses were scarce and
+poor, crops few and indifferent, and the plantations made by the
+Jesuits of the tree (_Ilex Paraguayensis_) from which is made the
+_yerba maté_, were all destroyed.
+
+In the vast forests, stretching to the Salto de Guayrá, a few scattered
+tribes, known as Caaguas, roamed through the thickets, or encamped upon
+the streams. In the thirty towns, once full of life and stir, in every
+one of which there was a church, finer, as an old Spanish writer says,
+than any in Buenos Ayres, there was naught but desolation and despair.
+The Indians either had returned into the woods, been killed in the
+ceaseless revolutionary wars, or had been absorbed into the Gaucho
+populations of Corrientes, Rio Grande, Entre Rios, and of Santa Fé.
+
+It may be that all Indian races are destined to disappear if they come
+into contact with Europeans; certainly, experience would seem to
+confirm the supposition. The policy of the Jesuits, however, was based
+on isolation of their missions, and how this might have worked is
+matter at least for speculation. It was on account of the isolation
+which they practised that it was possible for the extravagant calumnies
+which were circulated as to their rule and riches to gain belief. It
+was on account of isolation that the first conflicts arose betwixt them
+and the authorities, both clerical and lay. That the Jesuits were more
+highly esteemed than the other religious orders in Spanish America in
+the seventeenth century, the saying current in those days, ‘Los demas
+van á uña, los Jesuitas á una’—_i.e._, The others get all they can, but
+the Jesuits have one aim (the conversion of the Indians)—seems to show.
+
+It is not my purpose to deal with the probable reasons which induced
+their expulsion in Europe. Suffice it to say that, whatever crimes or
+misdemeanours they were guilty of, they were never called on to answer
+before any tribunals, and that in many instances they were treated,
+especially in Portugal, with great cruelty and injustice.
+
+The burning, at the age of eighty, of the unfortunate Malagrida in
+Lisbon under the auspices of Pombal, for a book which it seems
+improbable he could have written in prison at so great an age, and
+which, moreover, was never brought into court, only supposed extracts
+from it being read, may serve as an example. In order clearly to
+understand the position of the Jesuits in America, and especially in
+Paraguay and Bolivia, it is necessary to glance briefly at the history
+of the first conquest of the river Plate.
+
+The discovery of America opened up to Europe, and especially to Spain,
+opportunities for expansion of national territory and individual
+advancement which no epoch, either before or since, has equalled. From
+a cluster of small States, struggling for existence against a powerful
+enemy on their own soil, in a few years Spain became the greatest
+empire of the world. The result was that a spirit of adventure and a
+desire to grow rich speedily possessed all classes. In addition to
+this, every Spaniard in America during the first few years of the
+conquest seemed to consider himself, to some extent, not only as a
+conqueror, but also as a missionary.
+
+Now, missionaries and conquerors are men, on the whole, more imbued
+with their own importance and sanctity, and less disposed to consider
+consequences, than almost any other classes of mankind. The conjunction
+of the two in one disposed the _conquistadores_ of America to imagine
+that, no matter how cruel or outrageous their treatment of the Indians
+was, they atoned for all by the introduction of what they considered
+the blessing of the knowledge of the true faith. It will be seen at
+once that, if one can determine with accuracy which of the many
+‘faiths’ preached about the world is actually the true faith, a man who
+is in possession of it is acting properly in endeavouring to diffuse
+it. The meanest soldier in the various armies which left Spain to
+conquer America seems to have had no doubt about the matter.
+
+Bernal Diaz del Castillo, who, as he himself relates, came to America
+at the age of eighteen, and therefore could have had little previous
+opportunity of studying theology, and who, moreover, was unfitted to do
+so by the want of knowledge of Latin, to which he himself confesses,
+yet at the end of his history of the conquest of Mexico, one of the
+most interesting books ever written, has the following passage:
+
+‘But it is to be noted that, after God, it was we, the real conquerors,
+who discovered them [the Indians] and conquered them; and from the
+first we took away their idols, and taught them our holy doctrine, and
+to us is due the reward and credit of it all, before any other people,
+even though they be churchmen: for when the beginning is good, the
+middle and ending is good, which the curious [_i.e._, attentive] reader
+may see in the Christian polity and justice which we showed them in New
+Spain.
+
+‘And I will leave the matter, and tell the other benefits which, after
+God, by our agency, came to the natives of New Spain.’[14]
+
+One would imagine, on reading the above extract, Bernal Diaz had never
+killed an Indian in his life, and that he had sacrificed his prospects
+in coming to Mexico solely to introduce ‘a Christian polity and
+justice’ amongst the inhabitants. Yet he was no hypocrite, but a stout
+sagacious soldier, even kindly, according to his lights, and with a
+love of animals uncommon in a Spaniard, for he has preserved the names
+and qualities of all the horses and mares which came over in the fleet
+from the Havana with Cortes.[15] The phrase, _despues de Dios_ (after
+God) occurs repeatedly in the writings of almost all the
+_conquistadores_ of America. Having, after God, conquered America, the
+first action of the conquerors was to set about making their fortunes.
+In those countries which produced gold and silver, as Mexico and Peru,
+they worked the mines by the labour of the Indians, the cruelties and
+hardships being so great that, in a letter of Philip II. to the Come de
+Chinchon, the Viceroy of Peru, dated Madrid, April 30, 1639, written
+fifty years after the discovery, he says: ‘These Indians flee, become
+ill, and die, and have begun to diminish greatly in number, and they
+will be finished soon unless an efficient remedy is provided shortly.’
+
+In Paraguay there were no mines, but there were other methods of
+extracting money from the Indians. At the first conquest Paraguay was
+not the little country bounded on the west by the Paraguay, on the
+south by the Paraná, on the north by the Aquidaban, and on the east by
+Sierra of Mbaracavu, as it is at present. On the contrary, it embraced
+almost all that immense territory known to-day as the Argentine
+Confederation, some of the Republic of Uruguay, and a great portion of
+Brazil, embracing much of the provinces of Misiones, Rio Grande do Sul,
+Paraná, and Matto Grosso, as well as Paraguay itself. How the little
+country, twelve hundred miles from the sea, came to give its name to
+such an enormous territory, and to have the seat of government at
+Asuncion, demands some explanation. Peru and Chile were discovered and
+occupied some time before the eastern side of South America. Their
+riches naturally drew great attention to them; but the voyage, first to
+Cartagena de Indias, and then across the isthmus, and the
+re-embarkation again on the Pacific, were both costly and arduous. It
+had been the ambition of all explorers to discover some river which
+would lead from the Atlantic to the mines of Peru and what is now
+Bolivia, then known as Alta Peru. Of course, this might have been
+achieved by ascending the Amazon, especially after the adventurous
+descent of it by Orellana, of which Fray Gaspar de Carbajal has left so
+curious a description; but, whether on account of the distance or for
+some other reason, it never seems to have been attempted.
+
+In 1526 Sebastian Cabot left Spain with three small vessels and a
+caravel for the object of reaching the Moluccas or Spice Islands. It
+was his purpose to reach them through the Straits of Magellan. Being
+compelled by want of supplies to abandon his route, he entered a broad
+estuary, and ascended it under the impression that he had discovered
+another channel to the Pacific. He soon found his mistake, and began to
+explore the surrounding country. Fifteen years before, with the same
+object, Juan de Solis had entered the same estuary. On the island of
+Martin Garcia he was killed by a Chana Indian, and his expedition
+returned home. Hearing that there was much silver at the head-waters,
+he had called it the Rio de la Plata. If we take the head-waters of the
+river Plate to be situated in Bolivia, there certainly was much silver
+there; but Cabot was unaware that the head-waters were above two
+thousand miles from the estuary, and he was not destined to come near
+them. He did go as far as a point on the river Caracara, in what is now
+the province of Santa Fé, and there he built a fort which he named
+Espiritu Santo, the first Spanish settlement in that part of America.
+Whilst at Espiritu Santo, several exploring parties were sent to scour
+the country. One of them, under a soldier of the name of Cesar, never
+returned. Tradition, always eager to make up to history for its want of
+interest, asserted that after marching for years they reached a city.
+Perhaps it was the mystic Trapalanda of which the Gauchos used to
+discourse at night when seated round a fire of bones upon the pampa.
+Perhaps some other, for enchanted cities and Eldorados were plentiful
+in those days in America, alternating with occasional empires, as that
+of Puytita, near the Laguna de los Xarayes, Manoa, and the Ciudad de
+los Cesares, supposed to be situated near Arauco in the Chilian Andes.
+However, one of the party actually returned after years, and related
+his adventures to Ruy Diaz de Guzman,[16] the first historian of
+Paraguay. Thus it was that the stream of adventurers was ever seeking
+for a channel to the mines of Peru from the Atlantic coast. Cabot
+appears to have ascended the Paraná to the island of Apipé, and then,
+returning, entered the river Paraguay. Having ascended past what is now
+Asuncion, the capital of Paraguay, Cabot encountered Indians from the
+north who told him of the mines in Peru and in Bolivia, probably
+unaware that Cabot knew of them already. At this point, encouraged by
+what he heard, he gave the name of Rio de la Plata to what had
+previously been known either as La Mar Dulce or El Rio de Solis. Like
+most names which are wrongly given, it remained to testify to the want
+of knowledge of the giver. Four years after, Cabot returned to Spain,
+having failed to attract attention to his discoveries. In the face of
+the wealth which was pouring in from the Peruvian mines, another
+expedition started for the river Plate. Its General—for in Spain the
+title was used indifferently by land and sea—was Don Pedro de Mendoza,
+a gentleman of Guadix in Almeria, and a member of the household of
+Charles V.
+
+Don Pedro had seen service in the Italian wars, and seems to have been
+a man of character and bravery, but wanting in the discretion and the
+necessary tact essential in the founder of a colony. In 1534 the
+expedition started, unfortunate almost from the first. In a ‘certain
+island’, as the historian of the expedition, Hulderico Schmidel, a
+German or Flemish soldier, calls Rio Janeiro, a dispute occurred
+between Don Pedro and his second in command, Juan de Osorio. At a
+court-martial held upon Osorio, Don Pedro appears to have let fall some
+remarks which Juan de Ayolas, the Alguazil Mayor (Chief Constable),
+seems to have taken up as an order for instant execution. This he
+performed upon the spot, plunging his dagger repeatedly into Osorio,
+or, as Hulderico Schmidel has it, ‘sewing him up with cuts’
+(_cosiendole à puñaladas_). This murder or execution—for who shall tell
+when murder finishes and its legal counterpart begins?—rendered Don
+Pedro very unpopular with all the fleet; for, as Schmidel has it in his
+history,[17] ‘the soldiers loved Osorio.’ To be loved by the soldiers
+was the only chance a Spanish officer had in those times of holding his
+own. Both Schmidel and Bernal Diaz del Castillo, who had both been
+common soldiers, and who, curiously, both wrote histories, lose no
+occasion of vilifying officers who used the soldiers hardly. It is true
+that Bernal Diaz (who, unlike Schmidel, was a man of genius) does so
+with some discretion, and always apparently with reason. Schmidel, on
+the other hand, seems to have considered that any officer who
+interfered between the soldiers and the Indians was a tyrant, and hence
+his denunciation of Alvar Nuñez, under whom he served.
+
+In 1535 the expedition entered the river Plate. Here Mendoza, with his
+usual want of judgment, pitched upon what is now the site of Buenos
+Ayres as the spot on which to found his colony. It would be difficult
+to select a more inconvenient place in which to found a town. The site
+of Buenos Ayres is almost level with the waters of the river Plate,
+which there are shallow—so shallow that large vessels could not
+approach nearer than ten to fifteen miles. Without a harbour, the
+anchorage was exposed to the full fury of the south-west gales, known
+as ‘pamperos’. However, if the site was bad the air was good; at least,
+it seems so, for a captain of the expedition exclaimed on landing, ‘Que
+buenos aires son estos!’ and hence the name. Here every sort of evil
+chance came on the newborn colony. The Pampa Indians, whom the
+historian Schmidel seems to have only known by their Guaraní name of
+Querandis, at first were friendly. After a little while they ceased to
+bring provisions, and the General sent out an expedition to compel them
+under his brother, Don Diego de Mendoza. It does not seem to have
+occurred to Don Pedro de Mendoza that, had the _cacique_ of the
+Querandis landed in Spain, no one would have brought him provisions for
+a single day without receiving payment. However, Don Pedro[18] had come
+to America to introduce civilization and Christianity, and therefore,
+knowing, like Bernal Diaz and the other conquerors, his own moral
+worth, was justly indignant that after a day or two the Indians refused
+him more supplies. In the encounter which took place between the
+Spaniards and the Indians, Don Diego de Mendoza was slain, and with him
+several others. Here for the first time we hear of the bolas, or three
+stones united, like a Manxman’s legs, with strips of hide, with which,
+as Hulderico Schmidel tells us, the Indians caught the horses by the
+legs and threw them down. After this foretaste of European justice, the
+Indians besieged the newly-built town and brought it to great straits,
+so much so that, after three men had been hung for stealing a horse, in
+the morning it was discovered they had been cut down and eaten. In this
+desperate state Don Pedro despatched Juan de Ayolas to get supplies.
+He, having obtained some maize from the Timbu Indians, returned,
+leaving a hundred of his men in a little fort, called Corpus Christi,
+close to Espiritu Santo, the fort which Cabot had constructed. The
+friendliness of the Timbus induced Don Pedro to abandon Buenos Ayres
+and move to Corpus Christi. There he repaired with about five hundred
+men, all who remained of the two thousand six hundred and thirty with
+which he sailed from Cadiz. The horses he abandoned on the pampa; there
+they became the ancestors of the innumerable herds which at one time
+overspread the Argentine Republic from the Chaco to Patagonia, and
+whose descendants to this day stock the _estancias_ of that
+country.[19]
+
+From Corpus Christi Juan de Ayolas was sent out to explore the river,
+and try to find the long-sought-for waterway to the Peruvian mines. He
+never reached Peru, and Corpus Christi never saw him return. Mendoza
+waited a year, and then returned to Spain, leaving his garrison with
+provisions for a year, the bread[20] ‘at the rate of (_á razon de_) a
+pound a day, and if they wanted more to get it for themselves.’ On the
+passage home he died insane. The pious were of opinion that it was a
+judgment on him for the murder of Don Juan Osorio. Before he embarked,
+Don Pedro had despatched a relative, Gonzalo de Mendoza, to Spain to
+bring provisions and recruits. Gonzalo, having obtained provisions in
+Brazil, returned to Corpus Christi; thence in company with Salazar de
+Espinosa he headed an expedition up the river in search of Juan de
+Ayolas, who had been appointed successor to Don Pedro. With them went
+Domingo Martinez de Irala, a man destined to play a great part in the
+conquest of Paraguay.
+
+The expedition went up the Paraguay to a place near Fort Olimpo (21°
+long., 58° lat.) about a hundred leagues above Asuncion. Here they sent
+out exploring parties in all directions to seek Ayolas, but without
+success. Irala remained with one hundred men at Fort Olimpo. Gonzalo de
+Mendoza on his return, being attracted by the sight of a fine site for
+a town, landed, and on the fifteenth day of August, 1537, founded
+Asuncion. Here the Spaniards first met the Guaranís, who were destined
+in after-years to be the converts of the Jesuits, and be assembled by
+them in their famous missions.
+
+‘At the discovery of America,’ says Felix de Azara in his ‘Descripcion
+y Historia del Paraguay’, ‘the Guaranís were spread from the Guianas to
+the shores of the river Plate, and occupied all the islands of the
+Paraná extending up to latitude 20° on the Paraguay, but without
+crossing either that river or the river Plate.’ They had also a few
+towns in the province of Chiquitos, and the nation of the Chiriguanás
+was an offshoot from them. In Brazil they were soon all either rendered
+slaves or so crossed with the African negro that the pure race has been
+almost entirely lost, though the language remains under the name of the
+Lingoa Geral, and many words from it have been introduced into
+Portuguese spoken by the Brazilians, as _capim_, grass; _caipira_,
+half-caste, etc. In fact, so great is the number of these words,
+idioms, phrases, and terms of speech derived from Guaraní, that Dr.
+Baptista de Almeida, in his preface to his grammar published at Rio
+Janeiro (1879), computes that there are more words derived from Guaraní
+than even from Arabic in the Portuguese spoken in Brazil.[21] The
+Guaranís in Brazil were known either as Tupis, from the word
+_tupy_,[22] savage, or Tupinambás, from _tupynambá_, literally, the
+savage or indigenous men.
+
+Jean de Lery, the well-known Huguenot pastor and friend of Calvin,
+passed a year on the coast of Brazil about 1558, having accompanied the
+expedition of the famous Villegagnau. In his book (‘Histoire d’un
+Voyage faict en la Terre du Brezil’) he always refers to the Indians as
+Toupinaubaoults, and has preserved many curious details of them before
+they had had much contact with Europeans. He appears to have had a
+considerable acquaintance with the language, and has left some curious
+conversations _en langage sauvage et Français_, in which he gives some
+grammatical rules. The language of conversation is almost identical
+with that of Paraguay, though some words are used which are either
+peculiar to the Tupis or obsolete in Paraguay to-day. His account of
+their customs tallies with that of the various Spanish writers and
+explorers who have written on the subject. Tobacco, which seems to have
+been known under the name of ‘nicotiane’ to Lery, he finds in Brazil
+under the name of ‘petun’, the same name by which it is called in
+Paraguay at present. He believed that ‘petun’ and ‘nicotiane’ were two
+different plants, but the only reason he adduces for his belief is that
+‘nicotiane’ was brought in his time from Florida, which, as he
+observes, is more than a thousand leagues from ‘Nostre Terre du
+Brezil’. His experience of savages was the same as that of Azara, and
+almost all early travellers, for he says: ‘Nos Toupinambaoults
+reçoivent fort humainement les estrangers amis qui les vont
+visiter.’[23] Lery, however, seemed to think that, in spite of their
+pacific inclination, it was not prudent to put too much power in their
+hands, for he remarks: ‘Au reste parcequ’ils chargeyent, et
+remplisseyent leurs mousquets jusques au bout . . . nous leurs
+baillions moitié (_i.e._, la poudre) de charbon broyé.’ This may have
+been a wise precaution, but he omits to state if the _charbon broyé_
+was _bailli_ at the same price as good powder. According to Azara, who
+takes his facts partly from the contemporary writers—Schmidel, Alvar
+Nuñez, Ruy Diaz de Guzman, and Barco de la Centenera—the Guaranís were
+divided into numerous tribes, as Imbeguas, Caracaras, Tembues,
+Colistines, and many others. These tribes, though apparently of a
+common origin, never united, but each lived separately under its own
+chief. Their towns were generally either close to or in the middle of
+forests, or at the edge of rivers where there is wood. They all
+cultivated pumpkins, beans, maize, mani (ground nuts), sweet potatoes,
+and mandioca; but they lived largely by the chase, and ate much wild
+honey. Diaz in his ‘Argentina’ (lib. i., chap. i.) makes them
+cannibals. Azara believes this to have been untrue, as no traditions of
+cannibalism were current amongst the Guaranís in his time, _i.e._, in
+1789-1801. Liberal as Azara was, and careful observer of what he saw
+himself, I am disposed to believe the testimony of so many
+eye-witnesses of the customs of the primitive Guaranís, though none of
+them had the advantage enjoyed by Azara of living three hundred years
+after the conquest. It may be, of course, that the powers of
+observation were not so well developed in mankind in the beginning of
+the sixteenth as at the end of the eighteenth century, but this point I
+leave to those whose business it is to prove that the human mind is in
+a progressive state. However, Father Montoya, in his ‘Conquista
+Espiritual del Paraguay’, affirms most positively that they used to eat
+their prisoners taken in war.’[24]
+
+Their general characteristics seem to have been much the same as those
+of other Indians of America. For instance, they kept their hair and
+teeth to an extreme old age, their sight was keen, they seldom looked
+you in the face whilst speaking, and their disposition was cold and
+reserved. The tone of their voices was low, so low that, as Azara says:
+‘La voz nunca es gruesa ni sonora, y hablan siempre muy bajo, sin
+gritar aun para quejarse si los matan; de manera que, si camina uno
+diez pasos delante, no le llama el que le necesita, sino que va á
+alcanzarle.’ This I have myself observed when travelling with Indians,
+even on horseback.
+
+There was one characteristic of the Guaranís in which they differed
+greatly from most of the Indian tribes in their vicinity, as the
+Indians of the Chaco and the Pampas, for all historians alike agree
+that they were most unwarlike. It is from this characteristic that the
+Jesuits were able to make such a complete conquest of them, for,
+notwithstanding all their efforts, they never really succeeded in
+permanently establishing themselves amongst any of the tribes in the
+Chaco or upon the Pampas.
+
+The name Guaraní is variously derived. Pedro de Angelis, in his
+‘Coleccion de Obras y Documentos’, derives it from _gua_, paint, and
+_ni_, sign of the plural, making the signification of the word ‘painted
+ones’ or ‘painted men’. Demersay, in his ‘Histoire du Paraguay’,[25]
+thinks it probable that the word is an alteration of the word
+_guaranai_, _i.e._, numerous. Barco de la Centenera[26] (‘Argentina’,
+book i., canto i.) says the word means ‘hornet’, and was applied on
+account of their savageness. Be that as it may, it is certain that the
+Guaranís did not at the time of the conquest, and do not now, apply the
+word to themselves, except when talking Spanish or to a foreigner. The
+word _abá_, Indian or man, is how they speak of their people, and to
+the language they apply the word _Abanêe_.
+
+In the same way the word ‘Paraguay’ is variously derived from a
+corruption of the word ‘Payaguá’ (the name of an Indian tribe), and
+_y_, the Guaraní word for water, meaning river of the Payaguas. Others,
+again, derive it from a Guaraní word meaning ‘crown’, and _y_, water,
+and make it the crowned river, either from the palm-trees which crown
+its banks or the feather crowns which the Indians wore at the first
+conquest. Others, again, derive it from a bird called paraquá
+(_Ortolida paraqua_). Again, Angelis, in his work ‘Serie de los Señores
+Gobernadores del Paraguay’ (lib. ii., p. 187), derives it from Paraguá,
+the name of a celebrated Indian chief at the time of the conquest. What
+is certain is that _y_ is the Guaraní for water, and this is something
+in a derivation. _Y_ is perhaps as hard to pronounce as the Gaelic
+_luogh_, a calf, the nasal _gh_ in Arabic, or the Kaffir clicks, having
+both a guttural and a nasal aspiration.[27] It is rarely attempted with
+success by foreigners, even when long resident in the country. Though
+Paraguay was so completely the country of the Jesuits in after-times,
+they were not the first religious Order to go there. Almost in every
+instance the ecclesiastics who accompanied the first conquerors of
+America were Franciscans. The Jesuits are said to have sent two priests
+to Bahia in Brazil ten years after their Order was founded, but both in
+Brazil and Paraguay the Franciscans were before them in point of time.
+
+San Francisco Solano, the first ecclesiastic who rose to much note as a
+missionary, and who made his celebrated journey through the Chaco in
+1588-89 from Peru to Paraguay, was a Franciscan.[28] Thus, the
+Franciscans had the honour of having the first American saint in their
+ranks. It is noteworthy, though, that he was recalled from Paraguay by
+his superiors, who seem to have had no very exalted opinion of him.
+
+Charlevoix remarks (‘History of Paraguay’) ‘that it seems as if
+Providence, in granting him miraculous powers, had forgotten the other
+necessary steps to make them effective.’ That he really had these
+powers seems strange, but San Francisco Solano narrates of himself
+that, in passing through the Chaco, he learned the languages of several
+of the tribes, and ‘preached to them in their own tongues of the birth,
+death, and transfiguration of Christ, the mysteries of the Trinity,
+Transubstantiation, and Atonement; that he explained to them the
+symbols of the Church, the Papal succession from St. Peter downwards,
+and that he catechized the Indians by thousands, tens and hundreds of
+thousands, and that they came in tears and penitence to acknowledge
+their belief.’
+
+Of course, to-day it is difficult to controvert these statements, even
+if inclined to do so; but the languages spoken by the Chaco Indians are
+amongst the most difficult to learn of any spoken by the human race, so
+much so that Father Dobrizhoffer, in his ‘History of the Abipones’,
+says ‘that the sounds produced by the Indians of the Chaco resembled
+nothing human, so do they sneeze, and stutter, and cough.’ In such a
+language the Athanasian Creed itself would be puzzling to a neophyte.
+
+He also says that several of the Jesuits who had laboured for years
+amongst the Indians could never master their dialects, and when they
+preached the Indians received their words with shouts of laughter. This
+the good priest attributed to the presence of a ‘mocking devil’ who
+possessed them. It may be that the mocking devil was but a sense of
+humour, the possession of which, even amongst good Christians, has been
+known to give offence.
+
+But be this as it may, San Francisco de Solano remained two years at
+Asuncion, though whilst he lived there his powers of speech (according
+to the Jesuits) seem to have been diminished, and he held no
+communication with the Indians in their own languages. It may be that,
+like St. Paul, he preferred to speak, when not with Indians, five words
+with his understanding rather than ten thousand in an unknown tongue.
+
+At the time of the first conquest Paraguay was almost entirely peopled
+by the Guaraní race.[29] It does not appear that their number was ever
+very great, perhaps not exceeding a million in the whole country. From
+the writings of Montoya, Guevara, Lozano, and the other missionaries of
+the time, it is certain that they had attained to no very high degree
+of civilization, though they were certainly more advanced than their
+neighbours in the Gran Chaco. It is most probable that they had not a
+single stone-built town, or even a house, or that such a thing existed
+south of New Granada, to the eastward of the Andes, for we may take the
+description in Schmidel’s ‘History of the Casa del Gran Moxo’[30]
+either as a mistake or as a story which he had heard from some Peruvian
+Indian of the palaces of the Incas. At any rate, no remains of
+stone-built houses, still less of palaces, are known to have been found
+in Brazil or Paraguay.
+
+To-day all the Guaranís who are still unconquered live in the
+impenetrable forests of the North of Paraguay or in the Brazilian
+province of Matto Grosso. Their limits to the south extend to near the
+ruined missions of Jesus and Trinidad. By preference, they seem to
+dwell about the sources of the Igatimí, an affluent of the Paraná, and
+in the chain of mountains known either as San Jose or Mbaracayú. The
+Paraguayans generally refer to them as Monteses (dwellers in the
+woods), and sometimes as Caaguás. They present almost the same
+characteristics as they did at the discovery of the country, and wander
+in the woods as the Jesuits describe them as doing three hundred years
+ago. Olive in colour, rather thickly set, of medium height, thin
+beards, and generally little hair upon the body, their type has
+remained unchanged. The difference in stature amongst the Guaranís is
+less noticeable than amongst Europeans. Their language is poorer than
+the Guaraní spoken by the Paraguayans, and the pronunciation both more
+nasal and guttural. Their numerals only extend to four, as was the case
+at the time of the discovery.[31]
+
+Like their forefathers, they seldom unite in large numbers, and pay
+little honour or obedience to their chiefs, who differ in no respect,
+either in arms, dress, or position, from the ordinary tribesmen.
+
+In Brazil they are confined to the southern portion of the province of
+San Paulo, and are called by the Brazilians Bugres—that is, slaves. A
+more unfitting name it would have been impossible to hit upon, as all
+efforts to civilize them have proved abortive, and to-day they still
+range the forests, attacking small parties of travellers, and burning
+isolated farm-houses. The Brazilians assert that they are cannibals,
+but little is known positively as to this. What has altered them so
+entirely from the original Guaranís of the time of the conquest, who
+were so easily subdued, it is hard to conjecture. One thing is certain:
+that the example given them by the Christian settlers has evidently not
+been such as to induce them to leave their wild life and enter into the
+bonds of civilization.
+
+Diaz, in the ‘Argentina’, thinks the Caribs of the West Indies were
+Guaranís, and the Jesuits often refer to them under that name.[32] This
+point would be easily set at rest by examining if any Guaraní words
+remain in the dialect of the Caribs of the Mosquito coast. As to their
+relative numbers at the time of the foundation of the missions, it is
+most difficult to judge. At no one time does the population of the
+thirty towns seem to have exceeded one hundred and thirty thousand.
+
+D’Orbigny in his ‘L’Homme Américain’, estimates the Guaranís of Brazil
+at one hundred and fifty thousand.
+
+Humboldt cites two hundred and sixty-nine thousand as the probable
+number of Indians of every kind in the Brazilian Empire.
+
+The Viscount de Itabayana (a Brazilian writer) fixes the number at two
+hundred and fifty thousand to three hundred thousand.
+
+Veloso de Oliveira puts it at eight hundred thousand; and later
+statisticians range between one million five hundred thousand and seven
+to eight hundred thousand.
+
+The numbers given of Indians by the Spanish conquerors are almost
+always grossly overstated, from the wish they not unnaturally had to
+magnify the importance of their conquests and to enhance their exploits
+in the eyes of those for whom they wrote.
+
+Struck by the tractable character of the Guaranís, Mendoza began to
+build a fort on August 15, 1537 (which is the day of the Assumption),
+and the name he gave to his fort was Asuncion, which afterwards became
+the capital of Paraguay.
+
+Espinosa returned to Corpus Christi, and afterwards to Buenos Ayres,
+where a small force had still remained. This force, tired of the
+ceaseless battles with the Querandis, or Pampa Indians, embarked for
+Asuncion.
+
+Irala, after waiting for many months at Fort Olimpo, returned to
+Asuncion, where he found Ruiz de Galan acting as Governor. A dispute at
+once arose between them, and Irala, after having been imprisoned, was
+allowed to return to Fort Olimpo. Here he found the Payaguá Indians in
+rebellion, and in the battle which ensued he is reported to have slain
+seven of them with his own hand.[33] He still maintained a fitful
+search for Juan de Ayolas, but without success.
+
+Galan returned to Buenos Ayres, and, stopping at Corpus Christi, took
+occasion to fall upon the friendly and unsuspecting Timbú Indians and
+massacre a quantity of them. Why he did so is quite uncertain, for the
+Timbues had been in the habit of supplying the fort of Corpus Christi
+with provisions; it may be that the quality of the provisions was
+inferior, but neither Ruiz Diaz nor Schmidel informs us on the point.
+Galan, after his ‘victory’, re-embarked for Buenos Ayres, leaving
+Antonio de Mendoza in command with a hundred men.
+
+One day, when about the half of the force was hunting, the Indians fell
+upon it and cut it off to the last man; but for the opportune arrival
+of two vessels the fort would have been destroyed. However, many
+Spaniards were slain, and Antonio de Mendoza amongst them.
+
+After this battle, in which Santiago[34] is said to have appeared on
+the top of the principal tower of the fort dressed in white with a
+drawn sword in his hand, Galan and Espinosa returned to Asuncion,
+taking with them the remainder of the inhabitants of Buenos Ayres. At
+Asuncion they found that Irala had again returned without having
+discovered traces of Ayolas. Irala was elected Governor under a clause
+in the royal letters patent which provided for the case of Ayolas not
+returning. His first act was to order the complete evacuation of Buenos
+Ayres. An Italian vessel, which was going to Peru with colonists,
+having been driven into the river Plate, united with the remains of the
+colonists at Buenos Ayres and proceeded to Asuncion.
+
+Curiously enough, the remnants of several expeditions thus joined to
+found the first permanent city in the territories of the river Plate;
+not at Buenos Ayres, but a thousand miles away in the interior of the
+country, where it seemed little probable that their attempt would prove
+successful.
+
+To preside over the heterogeneous elements of which Asuncion was
+composed, Domingo Martinez de Irala was chosen. He was a Biscayan, a
+member of that ancient race which neither Romans nor Moors were ever
+able to subdue. Nothing is known about his antecedents. Not improbably
+he was a son of one of the innumerable small gentlemen with whom the
+Basque provinces used to swarm. Almost every house in the little towns
+even to-day has its coat of arms over the door. Every inhabitant
+claimed to be a nobleman, and in the reign of Charles V. they furnished
+many soldiers of repute in the wars of Europe and America.
+
+The system of Irala was to conciliate rather than subdue the natives.
+Isolated from help of every kind, the length of the voyage from Spain
+precluding all idea of speedy succour in a rebellion, it was the only
+course he could pursue.
+
+From the very first he encouraged the soldiers to marry women of the
+country, thus creating ties which bound them to the land.
+
+Two Franciscan friars[35] set about at once to learn the language and
+preach to the people. They also seem to have endeavoured to reduce the
+Guaraní language to writing. So, from several circumstances, the early
+history of Paraguay was very different from that of every other Spanish
+possession in America. To all the others Spanish women seem to have
+gone in greater or in smaller numbers. To Paraguay, at the foundation
+of Asuncion, it seems that hardly any women went.
+
+So there a different state of society arose to that, for example, in
+Chile or in Mexico. In both those countries few Spaniards ever married
+native women. Those who did so were either members of the highest
+class—who sometimes, but rarely, married Indian women of position from
+motives of policy—or else the lowest class of Spaniards; in this case,
+after a generation, their children became practically Indians. In
+Paraguay it was quite the contrary, and the grandchildren of Indian
+mothers and Spanish fathers were almost reckoned Spaniards, and the
+next generation always so.
+
+Washburne, in his ‘History of Paraguay’ (p. 32, cap. i., vol. i.),
+points out the contrast between the effects of the treatment meted out
+by Penn to the Indians in Pennsylvania and that by Irala in Paraguay.
+Where, he asks, are the Indian tribes with whom the celebrated Quaker
+treated? In Paraguay, on the other hand, at least in the time when
+Washburne was Minister from the United States to Lopez (from 1861 to
+1868), the few remaining Paraguayans of the upper class were almost all
+descended from the intermarriages of the followers of Irala with the
+natives.
+
+The tyranny of Lopez, and the effects of the disastrous war with Brazil
+and the Argentine Republic, have almost extirpated every Paraguayan (of
+the old stock) with the least pretensions to white descent.
+
+Ruiz Diaz de Guzman, speaking of the mixed race in Paraguay and Buenos
+Ayres, says:
+
+‘They are generally good soldiers, of great spirit and valour, expert
+in the use of arms, especially in that of the musquet, so much so that,
+when they go on long journeys, they are accustomed to live on the game
+which they kill with it. It is common for them to kill birds on the
+wing, and he is accounted unfit for a soldier who cannot bring down a
+pigeon. They are such excellent horsemen that there is no one who is
+not able to tame and ride an unbroken colt.
+
+‘The women generally are virtuous, beautiful, and of a gentle
+disposition.’
+
+If the inhabitants of Paraguay and the river Plate of those days were
+good marksmen, it is more than can be said of the Gauchos of the
+Argentine provinces and the Paraguayans of twenty years ago. Without
+military training, so far from being able to bring down a pigeon on the
+wing, few could hit the trunk of a tree at fifty paces. The usual
+method of shooting used to be to cram as much ammunition into the gun
+as the hand would contain, and then, looking carefully away from the
+object aimed at, to close both eyes and pull the trigger. Accuracy of
+aim was not so much considered as loudness of report. As regards their
+powers of riding, they are still unchanged; and as to the virtue of
+their women, virtue is so largely a matter of convention that it is
+generally wisest to leave such matters uncommented on, as it is so easy
+not to understand the conventions of the people of whom one writes.
+
+Whilst Irala was conciliating the Guaranís in Paraguay, Charles V. had
+not forgotten that the new settlement of Buenos Ayres had been
+abandoned. After much search, he selected Alvar Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca to
+be the new Governor; and, as Alvar Nuñez was perhaps the most
+remarkable of all the Spanish _conquistadores_ of the New World, it may
+not be out of place to give some facts of his career, as his policy in
+regard to the Indians was almost that of the Jesuits in after-times.
+
+As he himself informs us in his Commentaries,[36] his ‘father was that
+Pedro de Vera who won Canaria,’ and his mother ‘Doña Teresa Cabeza de
+Vaca, a noble lady of Jerez de la Frontera.’ After the Spanish fashion
+of the time, he used the names of both his parents.
+
+In 1529 he sailed with the ill-fated expedition of Panfilo de Narvaez
+to Apalache in Florida, was shipwrecked, tried to regain the Spanish
+settlements in boats, and then cast by a storm absolutely naked, and
+with only three companions, upon an unknown land. Taken by the Indians,
+he was made a slave, then rose to be a pedlar, then a doctor, and
+finally a chief, held sacred for his mysterious powers. At last he made
+his way on foot into the territory of New Spain, not as a captive, but
+as the leader of several hundred Indians, who followed him and did his
+bidding as if he had been born their chief. Rambling about for months,
+but always followed by his Indians, he at length encountered a Spanish
+horse-soldier, and, accosting him, found he had almost forgotten
+Spanish during his ten years’ sojourn with the Indians. His first
+entreaty, when he found Spanish gradually returning to him, was to the
+Spaniards not to harass his Indian following. Then he besought the
+Indians themselves to cease their nomad life and cultivate the soil. In
+neither case was he successful, as the Spaniards, like all other
+Europeans, held Indians little removed from dogs. And for the Indians,
+the few remaining are as much attached to their old wandering life as
+in the days of the discovery of the New World. In all that Alvar Nuñez
+writes, he shows a grandeur of soul and spirit far different from the
+writings, not only of the conquerors of the New World, but of the
+conquerors of Africa of to-day. For him no bragging of his
+exploits.[37] All that he says he sets down modestly and with excuses
+(as every now and then, ‘Me pesa hablar de mis trabajos’), and as
+befits a gentleman. Lastly, he leaves the reader (when describing his
+captivity in Florida), by telling him quite quietly and without comment
+that God was pleased to save from all these perils himself, Alonso del
+Castillo Maldonado, Andres Dorantes, and that the fourth was a negro
+called Estevanico, a native of Azimur. But, not contented with his ten
+years’ captivity, after three years at home he entered into a certain
+_asiento_[38] and _capitulacion_[39] with the King to sail at his own
+charges with an expedition to succour Don Pedro de Mendoza, who was
+hard pressed by famine and the Indians at Buenos Ayres. He agreed to
+furnish eight thousand ducats, horses, arms, men, and provisions at his
+own expense, upon condition that he was made Governor and Adelantado of
+the Rio de la Plata, and General both of its armies and its fleets.
+
+Upon November 2, 1537, he embarked at Cadiz with his fleet, consisting
+of a caravel and two full-rigged ships. All went well up to the Cape de
+Verdes. On nearing the equator, it occurred to the ‘Maestro del Agua’
+to examine his stock of water, and, out of one hundred pipes which had
+been put aboard, he found but three remaining, and from these the
+thirty horses and four hundred men who were on board all had to drink.
+Seeing the greatness of the necessity, the Governor—for Alvar Nuñez
+almost always speaks of himself in the third person—gave orders that
+the fleet should make for land. ‘Three days,’ he says in his
+Commentaries, ‘we sailed in search of it’; and on the fourth, just
+before sunrise, occurred a very notable affair, and, as it is not
+altogether _fuera de proposito_, I set it down, and it is this—‘that,
+going towards the land, the ships had almost touched on some sharp
+rocks we had not seen.’ Then, as now, I take it, vigilance was not a
+noticeable quality in Spanish sailors. Just as the vessels were almost
+on the rocks, ‘a cricket commenced to sing, which cricket a sick
+soldier had put into the ship at Cadiz, being anxious to hear its
+music, and for the two months which our navigation had endured no one
+had heard it, whereat the soldier was much enraged; and as on that
+morning it felt the land [_sintio la tierra_], it commenced to sing,
+and its music wakened all the people of the ship, who saw the cliffs,
+which were distant almost a crossbow-shot from where we were, so we
+cast out anchors and saved the ship, and it is certain that if the
+cricket had not sung all of us, four hundred soldiers and thirty
+horses, had been lost.’ Some of the crew accepted the occurrence as a
+miracle from God; but Nuñez himself is silent on that head, being a
+better observer of natural history than a theologian. But ‘from there,
+and sailing more than a hundred leagues along the coast, the cricket
+every evening gave us his music, and thus with it we arrived at a
+little port beyond Cape Frio, where the Adelantado landed and unfurled
+his flag, and took possession for His Majesty.’ The expedition
+disembarked at Santa Catalina in Brazil. ‘There the Governor landed his
+men and twenty-six of the horses which had escaped the sea, all that
+remained of forty-six embarked in Spain.’ The _odium theologicum_ gave
+the Governor some work at once. Two friars—Fray Bernardo de Armenta and
+Fray Alonso Lebron, Franciscans—had burnt the houses of some Indians,
+who had retaliated in the heathen fashion by slaughtering two
+Christians. The ‘people being scandalized’, the Governor sent for the
+friars, admonished them, and told them to restrain their zeal. This was
+the first false step he made, and set all friars and priests throughout
+America against him. Hearing at Santa Catalina that Buenos Ayres was
+almost abandoned, and that the inhabitants had founded the town of
+Asuncion del Paraguay, Alvar determined to march thither by land, and
+send his ship into the river Plate and up the Paraguay. The two
+Franciscan friars he told to remain and ‘indoctrinate’ the Indians.
+This they refused to do, saying they wished to reside amongst the
+Spaniards in Asuncion. Had they been Jesuits, it is ten to one they had
+remained and spent their lives ‘indoctrinating’, for the Jesuits alone
+of all the religious Orders were ever ready to take every risk.
+
+Upon his march the Governor, contrary to all good policy and precedent,
+ordered that nothing should be taken from the Indians without due
+payment being made. To insure this being done, he paid for all
+provisions himself, and served them out to the soldiery. This made him
+as unpopular with his soldiers as his dealings with the two Franciscans
+had made him amongst the friars. Surely he might have known that
+Pizarro, Cortes, Almagro, and the rest, were men who never paid for
+anything. Still, he persisted in his conduct to the end, and so brought
+ruin on himself. The Indians seemed to appreciate his method, for he
+says that ‘when the news was spread abroad of the good treatment the
+Governor gave to all, they came to meet the army decked with flowers
+and bringing provisions in great abundance.’ It was, he also says, ‘a
+thing to see how frightened the Indians were of the horses, and how
+they brought them food, chickens and honey to keep them quiet and in
+good humour, and they asked the Governor to tell the horses not to hurt
+them.’
+
+After passing the river Iguazú, he sent the two friars ahead to collect
+provisions, and ‘when the Governor arrived the Indians had no more to
+give.’[40]
+
+So having started from the coast upon November 2, 1541, he arrived at
+Asuncion on March 2, 1542, having accomplished a march of more than two
+thousand miles with but the loss of a single man and without the
+slaughter of a single Indian. Hardly had he arrived at Asuncion before
+he found himself embroiled on every side. The Indians were in full
+rebellion, the settlement of Buenos Ayres almost in ruins, and the
+officers appointed by the King to collect the royal dues all hostile to
+him to a man.
+
+After having consulted with the clergy to find if they thought it
+lawful to attack the Guaycurús who had assailed the newly-founded town,
+he received the opinion ‘that it was not only lawful, but expedient.’
+Therefore he sent off an expedition against them, to which was joined a
+priest to require the Guaycurús to become Christians and to acknowledge
+the King of Spain. The propositions, not unnaturally, did not seem
+reasonable to the Indians, who most likely were unaware of the benefits
+which Christianity confers, and probably heard for the first time of
+the King of Spain. The Governor, who seems to have doubted of the
+humanity of the clergy, called another council, which confirmed the
+previous opinion. Strangely enough, this seems to have surprised him,
+for he probably did not reflect that the clergy would not have to fight
+themselves, and that the first blood ever spilt on earth was on account
+of a religious difference.
+
+Just before the expedition started it was found that the two Franciscan
+friars who had come with him from Santa Catalina could not be found. It
+then appeared they had started back to the coast accompanied by a bevy
+of Indian damsels, thirty-five in all. They were followed and brought
+back, and then explained that they were on their way to Spain to
+complain against the Governor. The five-and-thirty dusky catechumens
+remained without an explanation, and the people were once more
+‘scandalized’. The Governor then started out against the Guaycurús.
+Only those who know the Chaco, or western bank of the river Paraguay,
+can form the least idea of what such an expedition must have been. Even
+to-day in the Chaco the change since the beginning of the world can be
+but slight. As a steamer slips along the bank, nothing for miles and
+miles is seen but swamp, intersected with backwaters,[41] in which lie
+alligators, electric eels, and stinging rays. Far as the eye can reach
+are swamps, swamps, and more swamps, a sea of waving pampa-grass. After
+the swamps thickets of tacuaras (canes), forests of thorny trees,
+chañares, ñandubay, jacarandas, urundey, talas, and quebrachos, each
+one hard enough to split an axe, some, like the black canela, almost
+like iron; the inhabitants ferocious and intractable as when the
+Governor himself first saw them; the climate heavy and humid, the air
+dank with vinchucas[42] and mosquitoes and the little black infernal
+midget called the jejen; no roads, no paths, no landmarks, but here and
+there at intervals of many leagues a clearing in the forest where some
+straggling settlement exists, more rarely still the walls of a deserted
+Jesuit mission-house or church. Ostriches and deer, tigers,[43]
+capibaras and tapirs, and now and then a herd of cattle as wild as
+buffaloes, are seen. Sometimes an Indian with his lance sits motionless
+upon his horse to watch the vessel pass—a sentinel to guard the
+wilderness from encroachments from without. So Alvar Nuñez, as he tells
+us in his Commentaries, started with four hundred men and with one
+thousand friendly Indians, all well armed and painted, and with plates
+of metal on their heads to reflect the sun, and so strike terror to
+their enemies. To save the horses they were put on board,[44] whilst
+the Indians marched along the bank, keeping up with the ships. Horses
+at that time in Paraguay and in Peru often were worth one thousand
+crowns of gold, though Azara tells us that in the last century in
+Buenos Ayres you could often buy a good horse for two needles, so cheap
+had they become. Then, as at present, time was of no account in
+Paraguay, so almost every day they landed the horses to keep them in
+condition and to chase the ostriches and deer.
+
+Just the kind of army that a thinking man would like to march with; not
+too much to eat, but, still, a pleasant feeling of marching to spread
+religion and to make one’s fortune, with but the solitary unpleasant
+feature to the soldier—the system of payment for provisions which the
+Governor prescribed. All was new and strange; the world was relatively
+young. Each night the Governor religiously wrote up his diary, now
+chronicling the death of some good horse, or of an Indian, or
+commenting upon the fruits, the fish, the animals, the trees, and ‘all
+the other things of God which differ from those in the Castiles.’
+Occasionally a fight took place with Guasarapos or with Pagayuás, but
+nothing of much account (_de mucha monta_); always the tales of
+gold-mines to be met with further on. Eventually the expedition came to
+a point not far from where is now the town of Corumbá. There Alvar
+Nuñez founded a town to which he gave the name of Reyes, which has long
+fallen into decay. He also sent two captains to explore and search for
+gold, waiting two or three months for their return, and suffering from
+a quartan ague which confined him to his bed; then, having failed to
+find the talked-of gold-mines, he set his face again towards Asuncion.
+Just before starting he gave the final blow to his waning popularity.
+Some of his followers, having taken Indian girls, had hidden them on
+board the ships; this, when he knew it, Nuñez at once forbade, and,
+sending for the fathers of the girls, restored their children to them.
+‘With this,’ he says, ‘the natives were much pleased, but the Spaniards
+rendered angry and desperate, and for this cause they hated me.’
+Nothing more natural, and for the same cause the Spanish Paraguayans
+hated the Jesuits who carried out the policy which the wise Governor
+began.
+
+On April 8, 1543, the Governor returned to Asuncion, worn out and ill
+with ague. There he found all confusion. Domingo de Irala, a clever,
+ambitious Biscayan soldier who had been interim Governor before Nuñez
+had arrived, had worked upon the people, saying that Nuñez wished to
+take away their property. As their chief property was in Indians whom
+they had enslaved, this rendered Nuñez most unpopular, and the same
+kind of allegations were laid against him as were laid against the
+Jesuits when in their turn they denounced slavery in Paraguay. All the
+complaints were in the name of liberty, as generally is the case when
+tyranny or villainy of any sort is to be done.
+
+So Alvar Nuñez[45] tells us in his Commentaries that at the hour of the
+Ave Maria ten or twelve of the ‘factious’ entered his house where he
+lay ill in bed, all shouting ‘Liberty!’ and to prove they were all good
+patriots one Jaime Resquin put a bent crossbow to his side, and forced
+him to get out of bed, and took him off to prison amid a crowd all
+shouting ‘Liberty!’ The friends of liberty (upon the other side)
+attempted a rescue, but the patriots[46] were too strong. So the
+unpatriotic Governor was thrown, heavily ironed, into a cell, out of
+which to make room they let a murderer who was awaiting death. ‘He’
+(Alvar Nuñez grimly remarks) ‘made haste to take my cloak, and then set
+off down the street at once, calling out “Liberty!”’ That everything
+should be in order, the patriots confiscated all the Governor’s goods
+and took his papers, publishing a proclamation that they did so because
+he was a tyrant. Unluckily, the Indians have not left us any
+commentaries, or it would be curious to learn what they thought as to
+the tyranny of Alvar Nuñez. Most probably they thought as the Indians
+of the Jesuit missions thought at the expulsion of the Jesuits from
+Paraguay, as is set forth in the curious memorial addressed in 1768 by
+the people of the Mission of San Luis to the Governor of Buenos Ayres,
+praying that the Jesuits might be suffered to remain instead of the
+friars, who had been sent to replace them against the people’s
+will.[47] Having got the Governor into prison, the patriots had to
+elect another chief, and the choice naturally ‘fell’ upon Domingo de
+Irala, who, having been interim Governor, had never ceased intriguing
+from the first. He promptly put his friends in office, after the
+fashion of all Governors, whether they enter office to the cry of
+‘Liberty’ or not. The friends of Alvar Nuñez, in the usual Spanish
+fashion (long sanctified by use and wont), declared themselves in
+opposition—that is, they roamed about the land, proving by theft and
+murder that their love of liberty was just as strong as that of those
+in power. Things shortly came to such a pass that no one could leave
+his house by night. The marauding Guaycurús burnt all the suburbs, and
+threatened to attack the town. Nuñez himself was guarded day and night
+by four men armed with daggers in a close prison. As he says himself,
+his prison was not ‘fitting for his health,’ for day and night he had
+to keep a candle burning to see to read, and the grass grew underneath
+his bed, whilst for the sake of ‘health’ he had a pair of first-rate
+fetters on his feet. For his chief gaoler they procured one Hernando de
+Sosa, whom Nuñez had put in gaol for striking an Indian chief. A guard
+watched constantly at the prison gate, but, still, in spite of this he
+managed to communicate almost uninterruptedly with his friends outside.
+His method was certainly ingenious. His food was brought to him by an
+Indian girl, whom, so great was the fear of the patriots that he should
+write to the King, they made walk naked into the prison, carrying the
+dishes, and with her head shaved. Notwithstanding this, she managed to
+bring a piece of paper hidden between her toes. The party of Liberty,
+suspecting that Nuñez was communicating with his friends, procured an
+Indian youth to make love to the girl and learn the secret. This he
+failed to do, owing, perhaps, to his love-making being wanting in
+conviction on account of her shaved head. At last Irala and his friends
+determined to send the Governor a prisoner to Spain, taking care, of
+course, to despatch a messenger beforehand to distort the facts and
+prejudice the King. The friends of Nuñez, however, managed to secrete a
+box of papers, stating the true facts, on board the ship. At dead of
+night a band of harquebusiers dragged him from his bed (after a
+captivity of eleven months), as he says, ‘almost with the candle in his
+hand’—_i.e._, in a dying state. As he left the prison, he fell upon his
+knees and thanked God for having let him once more feel the air of
+heaven, and then in a loud voice exclaimed: ‘I name as my successor
+Captain Juan de Salazar de Espinosa.’ At this one Garci Vargas rushed
+at him with a knife, and told him to recall his words or he would kill
+him instantly. This he was stopped from doing, and Nuñez was hurried to
+the ship and chained securely to a beam. On board the vessel, he says,
+they tried to poison him; but this seems doubtful, as there was nothing
+on earth to prevent their doing so had they been so inclined. Still, as
+a prudent man he took the precaution to provide some oil and a piece of
+unicorn (_pedazo de unicornio_), with which he tried the food. Unicorns
+he could not have seen in Paraguay, nor yet in Florida, and he does not
+explain how he became so luckily equipped.
+
+None the less, of all the discoverers of America he is the man of least
+imaginative power—that is, in matters appertaining to natural
+history—so one must conclude he had his piece of unicorn from Spain,
+where he most probably had bought it from some dealer in necessaries
+for travellers to the New World.
+
+After a stormy voyage he arrived in Spain to find his accusers just
+before him. With truly Eastern justice, both accusers and accused were
+put in gaol, a custom worthy of adoption in other lands. Nuñez was soon
+released on bail, and, his accusers having all died, in eight years’
+time he was triumphantly acquitted of all the charges brought against
+him. To prove, however, that Justice is and always has been blind, the
+King never restored him to his government in Paraguay, and, as Nuñez
+says, forgot to repay him what he had expended in his service.[48] With
+Alvar Nuñez was lost the only chance of liberal treatment to the
+Indians, for from his time the governors, instead of being men of the
+world above the petty spite of party differences, were chosen either
+from officers who, having served in the frontier wars, quite naturally
+looked on the Indians as enemies, or were appointed by intriguing
+Ministers at Court. From the death of Alvar Nuñez to the inauguration
+of the missions by the Jesuits, no one arose to take the Indians’ side,
+and it may be that had his policy prevailed there would have been an
+Indian population left in the mission territory of Paraguay; for had
+the civil governors co-operated with the Jesuits, the dispersion of the
+Indians, which took place at the expulsion of the Jesuits, had not
+occurred.
+
+Thus was Domingo Martinez de Irala left in sole command in Paraguay. He
+naturally had all to gain by not communicating with Spain. Had he done
+so, the part he played in reference to Alvar Nuñez must have been
+known. He had, however, certain good qualities, courage in abundance,
+Herculean strength and great endurance, and the power of making himself
+obeyed. But he had to justify himself to Spain for his position, and
+the surest way to do so was to discover gold-mines. So, naming
+Francisco de Mendoza his lieutenant, he started up the Paraguay, taking
+with him three hundred and fifty soldiers and two thousand Guaranís.
+After many hardships, he reached the frontiers of Peru, only to find
+the country already conquered from the Pacific side, and to be met by
+the messengers of the wise President, La Gasca, who told him to return,
+and named one Diego Centeno Governor of Paraguay instead of him.
+Centeno died before he could assume the governorship, so it seemed that
+fate determined that Irala was to continue in command.
+
+After a year and a half he returned to Paraguay, having found no gold
+or riches, but bringing many thousand Indians as slaves. It is
+important to remember that Irala, who was remarkable for his relatively
+kind treatment of the Indians, on this occasion led so many of them
+captive. On arriving at Asuncion he found a rebellion going on, as not
+infrequently occurred when a Spanish Governor left his domains. His
+lieutenant, Mendoza, had been killed by one Diego de Abreu. After
+quieting matters in Asuncion, he despatched Nuflo de Chaves (one of his
+captains) to found a town on the higher waters of the Paraguay.
+
+Like many other captains of those days, the idea of Chaves was to make
+himself quite independent of authority; so, striking into the interior,
+he founded the town of Santa Cruz de la Sierra in Bolivia. After many
+adventures he was killed by an Indian, who struck him with a club
+whilst he was sitting eating without his helmet.
+
+Irala died at the little village of Itá in 1557, and was buried in the
+cathedral at Asuncion, which he was building at the time. With him
+expired the generation of the conquering soldiers of fortune, who,
+schooled in the wars of Italy, brought to America some of the virtues
+and all the vices of the Old World. After him began the reign of the
+half-caste Spaniards who were the progenitors of the modern occupants
+of the Spanish-American republics. At Irala’s death the usual feuds,
+which have for the last three hundred years disgraced every part of
+Spanish America, began. Into them it is unnecessary to enter, for with
+Irala died almost the only Governor of Paraguay who showed the smallest
+capacity to make himself obeyed.
+
+True indeed that Arias de Saavedra, a native of Paraguay and
+Lieutenant-Governor under Ramirez de Velasco, the Governor of Tucuman,
+displayed some traces of ability and of intelligence. He it was who
+first appealed to Spain for missionaries to convert the Indians.
+
+Whilst Alvar Nuñez and Irala, with Nuflo de Chaves and the other
+captains, had been conquering and building towns, the Jesuits had been
+preaching in the wilderness and gathering together the Indian tribes.
+Not ten years after the foundation of their Order,[49] or about 1550,
+they had landed at San Salvador de Bahia in Brazil.
+
+In 1554, in the district of Guayrá, on the upper waters of the Paraná,
+and above the cataract, the towns of Ontiveros, Ciudad Real, and Villa
+Rica, had been founded by Don Ruy Diaz de Melgarejo.
+
+In 1586 Fathers Alfonso Barcena and Angulo left the town of Santa Maria
+de las Charcas (Bolivia) at the request of Francisco Vitoria, Bishop of
+Santiago, who had appealed for missionaries to the Society of Jesus.
+They reached the province of Guayrá, and began their labours. Shortly
+afterwards they were joined by Fathers Estezan Grao, Juan Solano, and
+Thomas Fields; Solano and Fields had already visited some of the
+wandering tribes upon the Rio Vermejo in the Chaco.
+
+In 1593 others arrived, as Juan Romero, Gaspar de Monroy, and Marcelino
+Lorenzana. Shortly after this they founded the college in Asuncion.
+Then Fathers Ortega and Vellarnao penetrated into the mountains of the
+Chiriguanás, and began to preach the Gospel to the Indians.
+
+In 1602 Acquaviva, seeing the necessity of common action, called all
+the scattered Jesuits of Paraguay and the river Plate to a conference
+at Salta to deliberate as to their future policy.[50] In 1605 Father
+Diego Torres was named Provincial of the Jesuits of Paraguay and Chile,
+thus proving both the paucity of Jesuits in South America at the time,
+and the little idea the General in Rome had of the immensity of the
+countries he was dealing with.
+
+Torres arrived in Lima with fifteen priests, and almost at the same
+time some others arrived at Buenos Ayres; both parties proceeded to
+Paraguay. Already the Jesuits found themselves a prey to calumny.
+
+Both in Tucuman and Paraguay they were expected to lend themselves to
+the enslavement of the Indians. In Chile Father Valdivia was expelled
+from Santiago, and took refuge at Tucuman. There he found the condition
+of affairs so intolerable that he went to Madrid to solicit the
+protection of the King, Philip III., for his Indian subjects.
+
+In 1608 Philip issued his royal letters patent to the Society of Jesus
+for the conversion of the Indians in the province of Guayrá.
+
+The Bishop and the Governor, Arias de Saavedra (himself a Paraguayan by
+birth), offered no objection, and the scheme of colonization was agreed
+upon at once.
+
+Thus the Jesuits obtained their first official status in America.
+
+Fathers Simon Maceta and José Cataldino (both Italians) left Asuncion
+on October 10, 1609, and arrived in February, 1610, on the banks of the
+river Paranapané.[51]
+
+There they met the Indians amongst whom Fields and Ortega had begun to
+labour, and there they founded the Reduction[52] of Loreto, the first
+permanent establishment instituted by the Jesuits amongst the Guaranís.
+Thus, in the woods of Paraguay, upon a tributary of the Paraná but
+little known even to-day, did the Society of Jesus lay the first
+foundation of their famous missions. But little more than fifty years
+from the foundation of their Order, thus had they penetrated to what
+was then, and is perchance to-day, after their missions all are ruined,
+one of the remotest corners of the world.
+
+There they built up the system with which their name is linked for
+ever—the system which for two hundred years was able to hold together
+wandering Indian tribes, restless as Arabs, suspicious above every
+other race of men—and which to-day has disappeared, leaving nothing of
+a like nature in all the world.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter II
+
+
+Early days of the missions—New settlements founded—Relations of Jesuits
+with Indians and Spanish colonists—Destruction of missions by the
+Mamelucos—Father Maceta—Padre Antonio Ruiz de Montoya—His work and
+influence—Retreat of the Jesuits down the Paraná
+
+It does not seem doubtful but that the work done by Fathers Ortega and
+Filds[53] had borne some fruit. Perhaps not quite after the fashion
+that the Jesuits believed; but when Maceta and Cataldino arrived at
+Guayrá and founded the Reduction of Loreto, their success at first was
+of a nature that almost justified the epithet ‘miraculous’, an epithet
+which indeed all men apply to any enterprise of theirs which meets
+success. Almost from the first inception of the missions, the Jesuits
+found themselves in the strange position of, though being hated by the
+Spanish settlers, yet recurred to as mediators when any of the wild
+tribes proved too powerful for the Spanish arms. Thus, far from cities,
+far from even such elementary civilization as Paraguay should show,
+almost upon the edge of the great cataract of the Paraná, the Jesuits
+founded their first reduction; to which the Indians flocked in such
+numbers that a second was soon necessary, to which they gave the name
+of San Ignacio, in memory of the founder of their rule.
+
+For the first few years all went well with the Jesuits. The Indians,
+happy to escape the persecutions of the Spaniards on the one hand, and
+the incursions of the Paulistas[54] on the other, flocked to the
+reductions, mission after mission was soon formed, and the wild Indians
+gathered up into townships and taught the arts of peace. But though the
+Guaranís at first entered into the Jesuit reductions as a refuge
+against their persecutors, the Portuguese and Spaniards, soon, as was
+only natural to men accustomed to a wild forest life, they found the
+Jesuit discipline too irksome, and often fled back to the woods. Then
+the poor priest, left without his flock, had to take up the trail of
+the flying neophytes, follow them to the recesses of the forests, and
+persuade them to come back.
+
+As a means to secure the confidence of the Indians, the Jesuits found
+themselves obliged to communicate as rarely as possible with the
+Spanish settlements. Thus, from the first the policy of isolation,
+which was one of the chief charges brought against the Order in later
+years, was of necessity begun.[55] Voltaire, no lover of religious
+Orders, says of the Jesuits:[56] ‘When in 1768 the missions of Paraguay
+left the hands of the Jesuits, they had arrived at perhaps the highest
+degree of civilization to which it is possible to conduct a young
+people, and certainly at a far superior state than that which existed
+in the rest of the new hemisphere. The laws were respected there,
+morals were pure, a happy brotherhood united every heart, all the
+useful arts were in a flourishing state, and even some of the more
+agreeable sciences; plenty was universal.’
+
+It is, however, to be remembered that Voltaire wrote as a philosopher,
+and not as an economist, and that his statement most probably would be
+traversed by those who see advancement rather in material improvement
+than in moral happiness, for without doubt, in Lima and in Mexico upon
+the whole, society must have made amongst the Spanish and
+Spanish-descended citizens greater advances than in the Jesuit
+reductions of Paraguay. In some respects their almost inaccessible
+situation close to the cataract of the Paraná was favourable to the
+early Jesuits, and in quick succession the villages of Loreto, San
+Francisco Xavier, San José, San Ignacio, San Pedro, and others of less
+importance, were founded, containing in all about forty thousand
+souls.[57]
+
+So in the Jesuit reductions of the province of Guayrá was first begun
+the system of treating the Indians kindly, and standing between them
+and the Spanish settlers, which made the Company of Jesus so hated
+afterwards in Paraguay. Little by little their influence grew, so that
+when, in 1614, Padre Antonio Ruiz de Montoya arrived, he found that
+there were already one hundred and nineteen Jesuits in Guayrá and in
+Paraguay. Of all the Jesuits who, during the long period of their
+labours, appeared in Paraguay, he was the most remarkable; one of the
+most learned men of the age in which he lived, he yet united in himself
+the qualities of a man of action to those of scholar and of missionary.
+Without his presence most likely not a tenth part of the Indians would
+have escaped after the destruction of the missions of Guayrá in 1630
+and 1631 at the hands of the half-civilized hordes known as Paulistas
+or Mamalucos, who from the city of San Paulo carried fire and sword
+amongst the Guaranís.
+
+It is easy to understand that the Spanish colonists, who had looked on
+all the Indians as slaves, were rendered furious by the advent of the
+Jesuits, who treated them as men.
+
+To-day the European colonist in Africa labours less to enslave than to
+exterminate the natives; but if a body of clergy of any sect having the
+abnegation and disregard of consequences of the Jesuits of old should
+arise, fancy the fury that would be evoked if they insisted that it
+were as truly murder to slay a black man as it is to kill a man whose
+skin is white. Most fortunately, our clergy of to-day, especially those
+of the various churches militant in Uganda, think otherwise, and hold
+that Christ was the first inventor of the ‘colour-line’.
+
+At the first settlement of South America great semi-feudal fiefs called
+_encomiendas_ were granted to the conquerors. One of the conditions of
+their tenure was that the _encomenderos_ (the owners of the fiefs)
+‘should see to the religious education of the Indians’. Much the same
+kind of thing as to enjoin kindness and Christian forbearance upon the
+directors of a modern Chartered Company. But, in addition to the
+_encomiendas_, two other systems were in vogue called _yanaconas_ and
+_mitayos_, which were in fact designed to reduce the Indians to the
+condition of mere slaves.
+
+Herrera[58] says that the ‘_yanaconas_ were men destined from birth to
+perpetual slavery and captivity, and in their clothing, treatment, and
+the conditions of their toil, were differently treated from free men.’
+
+In Paraguay these _yanaconas_ were known as ‘Indios Originarios’, and
+generally were descendants of Indians conquered in war; they, too, were
+in a condition of serfdom. They lived in the house of the
+_encomendero_, and could not be sold, and the _encomendero_ was (in
+theory) obliged not only to feed and clothe them, but to instruct them
+in religious truths. In order to see that these conditions were duly
+carried out, visitors were sent each year to hear what mutually the
+_encomenderos_ and the Indians had to say.
+
+Herrera[59] describes the Indians under the _mitayo_ system by the name
+of _mitayos tindarunas_, explaining that the word _tindaruna_ signifies
+‘forced labour’. The chiefs had to provide a certain number of them
+every year to work in mines and manufactories, and so well was the
+labour in the mines known to be fatal, that the Indians upon being
+drawn for service disposed of all their property, and not infrequently
+divorced their wives. The _mitayos_ were at the beginning Indians who
+had not fought against the Spaniards, but had submitted to their rule.
+They were grouped in townships composed of portions of a tribe under a
+chief to whom the Spaniards gave the position of Alcalde. In the towns
+thus formed only the men between eighteen and fifty were liable to be
+drawn for service in the mines; originally their term of service was
+for only two months in the year, and for the remaining ten months they
+were in theory as free as were the Spanish settlers. By 1612 the abuses
+of their system had so diminished the number of the Indians that Don
+Francisco de Alfaro was named by the Spanish Government to report upon
+it, and to reform abuses where he found it possible. His report
+declared that the Guaranís and Guaycurús should not be made slaves of,
+and it abolished in their favour the forced labour which they had
+previously endured. The European settlers in Asuncion thought that this
+was owing to the influence of the Jesuits, and therefore they expelled
+them from the town. Recalled to Santiago, they founded there a college,
+and those who remained in Paraguay pushed on the mission-work.
+Brabo[60] points out that the first twenty reductions founded by the
+Company of Jesus were settled in the first twenty years from their
+first appearance in the land,[61] and that from the foundation of the
+Mission of St. George (the last established of the first twenty towns)
+to that of San Joaquim, in the wild forests of the Tarumá, they
+employed a hundred and twelve years. In the interval they chiefly
+occupied themselves in the consolidation of their first settlements,
+and in various unsuccessful attempts to institute similar reductions
+amongst the Indians of the Chaco across the Paraguay.
+
+But whilst the Jesuits were settling their reductions in the province
+of Guayrá and those upon the Paraná and Uruguay, a nest of hawks looked
+at their neophytes as pigeons ready fattening for their use. Almost
+eight hundred miles away, at the city of San Paulo de Piritinanga, in
+Brazil, a strange society had come into existence by degrees. Peopled
+at first by Portuguese and Dutch adventurers and malefactors, it had
+become a nest of pirates and a home for all the desperadoes of Brazil
+and Paraguay. This engaging population, being in want of wives whereby
+to propagate their virtues, took to themselves Indians and negresses,
+and bred a race worse ten times than were themselves, as often happens
+both in the cases of Mulattos and Mestizos in America. Under the name
+of Mamelucos[62] (given to them no one knows why) they soon became the
+terror of the land. Equally at home on horseback, in canoes upon the
+rivers, or in schooners on the sea, excellent marksmen and courageous
+fighters, they subsisted chiefly by procuring Indians as slaves for the
+plantations in Brazil. In a short time they exhausted all the Indians
+near San Paulo, and were forced to search far in the depths of the
+unknown interior. Little by little, following the course of the great
+rivers in their canoes, they reached the Jesuit settlements upon the
+upper waters of the Paraná, where they burned the towns and the
+churches, made captives of the converts, and killed the priests.
+Montoya relates that a Jesuit, having clasped an Indian in his arms to
+save him, was deluged with his blood, a Mameluco having crept up behind
+him and plunged his lance into the Indian behind the Jesuit’s back. The
+Mameluco, on being, as Montoya says, ‘reprehended’ by the Jesuit,
+dogmatically remarked, ‘I shall be saved in spite of God, for to be
+saved a man has only to believe,’[63] a remark which showed him clearly
+an honest opponent of the Jesuits, as they insisted greatly on the
+doctrine of good works.
+
+Ruiz Montoya and others tell us that the plan of action of the
+Paulistas was either to attack the Jesuit reductions on Sunday, when
+the sheep were gathered in the fold listening to Mass, surround the
+church, murder the priest, and carry off the neophytes as slaves; or
+else, disguised as Jesuits, enter a mission, gain the confidence of the
+Indians, and then communicate with their soldiers, who were waiting in
+the woods. But not content with this, it seems, so often did they
+practise singing Mass to pass as Jesuits, that on returning to San
+Paulo, in their orgies, their great diversion was to masquerade as
+priests. So that the rascals not only profited by their villainy, but
+extracted much amusement from their wicked deeds.[64] This, in
+Montoya’s opinion, was even more damnable than the actual crime. And so
+no doubt it was, and we in England, by having made our vice as dull as
+virtue is in other lands, have gone some way towards morality, for vice
+and virtue, both deprived of humour, become not so far separated as
+some virtuous dull folk may think.
+
+Quite naturally, these redoubtable land and river pirates saw in the
+Jesuit reductions upon the Paranapané, and generally throughout the
+district of Guayrá, merely an opportunity of capturing more Indians
+than usual at a haul. In 1629 they first appeared before the Mission of
+San Antonio and destroyed it utterly, burning the church and houses,
+and driving off the Indians to sell as slaves. San Miguel and
+Jesus-Maria shortly suffered the same fate. In Concepcion Padre Salazar
+was regularly besieged, and he and all the people reduced to eating
+dogs, cats, rats, mice, and even snakes. At the last moment, when about
+to surrender, Father Cataldino, hastily arming some Indians with any
+rude weapons at his command, marched on the place and raised the siege.
+A worthy member of the Church militant this exploring, fighting,
+intrepid Italian priest, and one the Company of Jesus should honour,
+for to him, perhaps as much as to any of these first explorers of the
+Upper Paraná, is credit due.
+
+But still the Mamelucos ran their course, destroying town after town,
+so that in the short space of a year (1630-31) they destroyed partially
+the reductions of San Francisco Xavier, San José, San Pedro, and La
+Concepcion; and the two first founded, San Ignacio and Loreto, were
+ruined utterly. The wretched Indians, to whom by law the Jesuits were
+forbidden to serve out firearms, stood no chance against the
+well-trained Paulistas, with their horses, guns, and bloodhounds,
+assisted as they were by troops of savage Indians who discharged
+poisoned arrows from blowpipes and from bows. Small wonder that, as
+Montoya, Charlevoix, Lahier,[65] and Filiberto Monero[66] all agree,
+despair took hold of them, so that in many instances they cursed the
+Jesuits and fled back to the woods. When one reflects that many of the
+Indian tribes looked upon baptism as a poison,[67] it is not strange
+that they should have associated effect with cause, and set down all
+their sufferings to the influence of the malignant rite to which the
+Jesuits had subjected them. The isolated Jesuits ran considerable risk
+from their own sheep, and Padre Mola, after the ruin of San Antonio,
+was suspected by them of being in league with the Paulistas, and had to
+flee for safety to another town; and as a touch of comedy is seldom
+wanting to make things bitterer to those in misfortune, a troop of
+savage Indians, having arrived to attack the Reduction of San Antonio,
+and finding it already burning, instantly thought poor Padre Mola had
+been the instigator, and, starting on his trail, almost surprised him
+before he reached a refuge from their patriotic rage.
+
+Thus in the greater world reformers of all sorts have not infrequently
+in times of scarcity and danger been taken by their protégés for the
+authors of their trials and stoned, whilst the smug Government which
+caused the ruin, well bolstered up in the affection of its ‘taxables’,
+chuckled, serenely confident in the unending folly of mankind. Most
+certainly the Jesuits struggled to do their duty to their neophytes in
+what they thought they saw was right. On foot and unattended Fathers
+Maceta and Mansilla followed the fifteen thousand captives to Brazil,
+confessing those who fell upon the road before they died, and instant
+in supplication to the Paulistas for the prisoners’ release. Father
+Maceta especially behaved heroically, carrying the chains of those who
+could hardly drag themselves along, himself half dead with hunger and
+his constant toil. Especially he strove to effect the release of a
+captive chief called Guiravera, who had been one of his bitterest
+enemies, and strove so hard that a Paulista captain, either touched by
+his zeal or wearied with his pleading, released the chief, his wife and
+family, and six of the Indians of his tribe. The chief returned to
+become the Jesuits’ best friend, and the two priests on foot followed
+the captives’ train. What they endured on foot without provisions,
+tortured by insects, and in danger from wild beasts, as well as
+constant perils from the Paulistas, who now and then pricked them with
+lances or fired pistols over their heads to frighten them away, none
+but those who have journeyed in the forests of that forgotten corner of
+the world can estimate. I see them in their torn and sun-browned
+cassocks struggling through the _esteros_[68] in water to the knees,
+falling and rising oft, after the fashion of the supposititious
+Christian on life’s way; pushing along through forest paths across
+which darted humming-birds, now coming on a dying man and kneeling by
+his side, now gathering the berries of the guavirami[69] to eat upon
+the road, and then again catching sight of a jaguar as it slunk beside
+the trail, and all the time convinced that all their efforts, like the
+efforts of most of those who strive, would be in vain. So stumbling
+through the woods, crossing the rivers on inflated ox-skins, baked by
+the sun upon the open plains, at length the Jesuits reached San Paulo,
+where they had a college, and without resting set at once to work. In
+season (and what in cases of the kind is ten times more important), out
+of season, they besought, pleaded, and preached, and finding as little
+grace from the Paulista chiefs as a transgressor against some fiery
+dogma would find from a sour-faced North British dogmatist, they
+started for Rio de Janeiro to see the Council-General of Brazil. There
+they were told that the right person to address was the Captain-General
+of the colony, who had his residence in Bahia, five or six hundred
+miles away. Not the least daunted, they set out, and found Don Diego
+Luis Oliveira more or less friendly, but as usual fearful of giving
+offence to those who had a vested interest in the trade. Then the two
+Jesuits, hearing that another invasion of the Paulistas was expected in
+Guayrá, started back on their long journey through the woods, over the
+plains, across the mountain ranges, and through the dank _esteros_
+which lay between them and their missions on the Paraná. The
+Captain-General seems to have been roused to a sense of the position by
+their words, for on his annual visitation at San Paulo he spoke in
+public to the colonists against their slave raids, when a shot fired
+from the meeting ended his speech.[70] The inhabitants then signified
+to him that, sooner than give up what seemed to them a justifiable and
+honest means of life, they would be debaptized. How they proposed to
+debaptize themselves is not related, but perhaps after the fashion of
+the Guaranís—by sand, hot water, and scraping with a shell; though why
+the tongue should be thus scarified seems doubtful, for no sect of
+Christians that is known exacts that people at that sacrament should
+put out their tongues, and even baptism does little or nothing to
+increase the power of scandal inherent both in those who have been and
+those who never were baptized.
+
+About this time (1630) the poor Jesuits were much tormented by the
+return to paganism of their Indians, and most especially by a hideous
+dwarf who set himself up as a god, and found a host of worshippers.
+Good Father Charlevoix thinks that _ce petit-monstre_,[71] despairing
+of being thought a man, had no resource but to give out he was a god,
+and remarks that, as even more hideous gods have been adored, it is not
+surprising that the Indians took him at his word. When stripped of the
+somewhat strange phraseology of the simple Jesuit, there is nothing
+really shocking in the incident. People in general, in making gods,
+endue them with their own least admirable attributes, and logically
+these poor Indians but followed out the general scheme.
+
+But in the midst of heresies and dwarf-gods, with the Paulistas almost
+always in the field, a man arose who was to lead the Jesuits and their
+neophytes out of Guayrá and settle them securely below the cataract in
+the Misiones of Paraguay. Born probably late in the sixteenth century
+in Spain, Antonio Ruiz de Montoya was amongst the first of the Jesuit
+Fathers who came to Paraguay. In 1612 we find him recently arrived from
+Spain;[72] sent up to the province of Guayrá to the assistance of
+Fathers Maceta and Cataldino. For thirty years,[73] as he himself
+informs us in his book, he remained in Paraguay, and in his own
+pathetic words he tells us how most of his life was spent. ‘I have
+lived,’ he says, ‘all through the period of thirty years in Paraguay,
+as in the desert searching for wild beasts—that is, for savage
+Indians—crossing wild countries, traversing mountain chains, in order
+to find Indians and bring them to the true sheepfold of the Holy Church
+and to the service of His Majesty.[74] With my companions I established
+thirteen reductions or townships in the wilds, and this I did with
+great anxiety, in hunger, nakedness, and frequent peril of my life. And
+all these years I passed far from my brother Spaniards have made me
+almost a rustic and ignorant of the polished language of the Court.’
+Travelling as he did continually, few knew the country from Guayrá to
+Yapeyu[75] so well as he; he tells us that for ‘all travelling
+equipment’ he took a hammock, and a little mandioca flour, that he
+usually travelled on foot with either sandals or bare feet, and that
+for eight or nine years he never once tasted bread.
+
+About the year 1611-12 we find him charged with a mission to the
+Provincial at Asuncion to disabuse him of a report which had been
+carried there that the Jesuits of Guayrá were garnering in no fruit
+from all their labours in the wilds. The rumour had been so much
+repeated that the superiors in Asuncion were on the point of calling
+back the missionaries and giving up all hope. Montoya, accompanied by
+six Indians, set out upon the journey, which by land to-day is enough
+to appal the boldest traveller. Walking along, he found himself about
+the middle of his way alone, his Indians having loitered in the rear.
+Night caught him in the forests, and a storm came on. He passed the
+night at the foot of a large tree, hungry and wet, and, waking in the
+morning, found himself so crippled with arthritic pains as to be
+obliged to continue his journey on his hands and knees. Alone and
+helpless, he dragged himself to a place called Maracayu, and, failing
+to obtain a canoe, went on another league, and there lay down to die,
+his leg being swelled enormously with the rheumatic pains. Then, as he
+says himself, he prayed to San Ignacio, telling him that from a
+sentiment of obedience he had set out upon the journey through the
+waste. Nothing could have been better, for the saint (who must have
+seen him all the time), flattered, perhaps, that his own chief virtue
+had been the cause of so much pain, promptly healed him and restored
+his leg to its usual size, and Montoya went on his way rejoicing to
+Asuncion. The Provincial heard and was disabused, but was unable to
+send a single man to help, and poor Montoya set off again back to
+Guayrá alone, having gained nothing but his sufferings on the road.
+
+Again, in 1614, we find him in Asuncion combating calumnies spread by
+the Spanish settlers against the Jesuits. In the same year (as he
+informs us[76]) he was witness in the Reduction of Loreto of a strange
+circumstance. ‘An Indian,’ he says, ‘of intelligence and pious conduct
+called me to administer the last Sacraments, and to confess him before
+he died, and this I did. As there seemed little hope of his recovery,
+and pressing business called me away, I quitted him after having given
+orders for his burial. He died in a short time—at least, all those who
+were with him had no doubt of this; on my return I found the man whom I
+had charged to stay beside the Indian till his death preparing for his
+funeral. Toward mid-day they came to tell me that the dead man had come
+to life, and wished to speak to me. I ran there, and found him with a
+cheerful face in the middle of a crowd of Indians. I asked him what had
+happened since I last saw him, and he answered me that the instant that
+I quitted him his soul had taken its departure from his body; then, at
+a point which he thought near to his hammock, a devil had appeared, who
+said to him, “You are my prey,” and that he answered it could not be,
+for he had confessed himself to the best of his ability, and had
+received the holy Viaticum before his death; that the devil had
+sustained that his confession had been incomplete, and that he had
+forgotten to confess that twice he had been drunk, to which he answered
+that it was an oversight, and he hoped that God would not remember it.
+Then, on the devil sustaining that he had committed a sacrilege, St.
+Peter had appeared, followed by angels, and driven off the fiend. I
+asked him how he had known St. Peter, and he replied by describing him,
+though he had never seen an image of the saint. “The saint,” he said,
+“covered me with his mantle, and I felt myself instantly carried
+through the air. First I perceived a lovely landscape, and further on a
+great city, from which a shining light appeared. Then the Apostle and
+the angels stopped, and the first said to me, ‘This is the city of the
+Lord; we live here with Him, but the time of your entry is not yet. It
+is written that your soul shall once more join your body, and in three
+days you must appear in church.’ Then all was dark, and in an instant I
+woke up alive and well.”
+
+‘I,’ says Montoya, ‘understood by the last words of St. Peter that the
+man had to die in three days, and I asked what he thought himself. “I
+think,” said he, “that next Sunday they will carry my body to the
+church, and I am certain that I only returned to life in order to
+exhort my relatives and my friends to listen to your instructions.” . .
+. When Sunday came he made his general confession,[77] admitted the two
+sins the devil had reproached him with, exhorted all to live a
+Christian life, and a few moments afterwards quietly gave up the
+ghost.’
+
+This is the sole occasion on which Padre Ruiz Montoya even remotely
+touches the field of miracles, as he in general relies upon himself,
+his knowledge of the world, and on his patience, which must have been
+almost North British in its quality, if he acted up to his own
+favourite maxim of ‘by returning thanks for injuries is how wise men
+conduct their business.’[78]
+
+In 1623 we find him praying Father Cataldino to let him accompany the
+expedition to Itiranbaru, a mountain wooded to the summit, in which
+lived several wild tribes. There he so worked upon the Indians as to
+establish them in a reduction under the title of St. Francis
+Xavier,[79] and left the mountain, which had been a haunt of savages,
+as Padre del Techo says in his curious work on Paraguay, ‘all at the
+service of the Lord.’
+
+In 1623, whilst preaching, he was suddenly assailed by hostile Indians,
+and seven of his Indians pierced with arrows at his feet. Undoubtedly,
+he must have been killed had not an Indian taken his hat and cloak, and
+run into the middle of the enemy to distract the fire. In the confusion
+both the heroic Indian and Montoya managed to escape, the latter
+getting into a canoe which, fortunately, was ready at the river-side.
+But in the midst of all his occupations he had time to study natural
+history in the spirit of the time, as the following description clearly
+shows: ‘Amongst the other rarities of the land is an amphibious animal.
+. . . It is like a sheep, with but the difference that its teeth and
+nails are like a tiger’s, which animal it equals in ferocity. The
+Indians never look on it without terror, and when it sallies from the
+marshes where it lives (which it does ordinarily in troops), they have
+no other chance of escape but to climb up a tree, and even then
+sometimes are not in safety, for this terrible creature sometimes
+uproots the tree, or sometimes stays on guard until the Indian falls
+into its jaws.’ Thus far Montoya; but Charlevoix informs us that, _en
+langue Guaranie_, it is known as the ‘ao’, and rather tamely adds,
+‘When one of these animals is slain, the people make a jacket of its
+skin.’
+
+Again, Montoya tells us of the horse on which the venerable Padre Roque
+used to ride, which, when he died, refused all food, and wept
+perpetually, two streams of water running from its eyes. It never
+allowed an Indian to mount it after its master’s death, and finally
+expired, close to his grave, of grief. A kindly, scholarly, intrepid
+priest, well skilled in knowledge of the world, and not without some
+tincture of studies in science, as the above-related anecdotes reveal
+to us. No doubt the Indians loved him far and wide, and his superiors
+stood in some little awe of him, as those in office often do of their
+subordinates when they show that capacity for action which is a sure
+bar to advancement either in Church or State.
+
+In 1627 Montoya was made head of the missions in Guayrá, which opened
+up to him the opportunity of showing what kind of man he was. In this
+year the Spaniards of Villa Rica, the nearest town in Paraguay to the
+reductions in Guayrá, sent out an expedition to chastize some Indians
+who had insulted a chief called Tayaoba, whom Montoya had baptized.
+This was the pretext for the expedition, but Montoya knew well that the
+real object was to hunt for slaves. He brought before the Governor the
+edict of the King of Spain forbidding any war to be made upon the
+Indians without sufficient cause. All was in vain, and the expedition
+left Villa Rica and plunged into the wilds. Montoya, sore against the
+Governor’s desire, went with the expedition, taking with him Padre
+Salazar and some well-armed Indians. It was lucky for the Spaniards
+that he was there, for on the second day a flight of arrows burst from
+a wood and wounded many of them. The captain of the expedition ordered
+a retreat, which, situated as they were, exposed on all sides to the
+fire of an enemy whom they could not see, must have proved fatal.
+Montoya counselled throwing up earthworks before some huts which stood
+upon the edge of the woods in which the Indians were; this done, he
+sent a messenger to Villa Rica for reinforcements. Even behind the
+earthworks the Spaniards were hard pressed; no one could show himself
+without being pierced by an arrow. The number of the Indians daily
+increased, till on the third day they numbered about four thousand, and
+seemed likely to advance upon the huts. The Spanish captain ordered a
+rally, and the neophytes wished to decamp, taking Montoya with them,
+and then gain the shelter of the woods. This he would not allow, and,
+charging with the soldiers, put the Indians to flight. The Spaniards,
+far from being grateful for their lives, seeing their hopes of making
+prisoners had vanished, wished to lay hands upon the Indians whom
+Montoya had brought, and who had fought beside them in the recent fray.
+Hearing that in the morning the Spanish soldiers would attack his
+neophytes, Montoya sent them off by night, and in the morning, when the
+Spanish captain found him and the other priest alone, he said,
+‘Thinking you had no other use for the Indians, I advised them to
+return.’ The captain had the grace to say nothing but, ‘Then, you gave
+them good advice, my father.’ The two priests waited patiently till the
+soldiers had retired, and then sent for their Indians and quietly went
+home. Thus it appears that at necessity Padre Montoya was a true son of
+San Ignacio.
+
+In 1628 Montoya seems to have met for the first time Padre Diaz Taño,
+who afterwards was his companion both in the retreat from Guayrá down
+the Paraná and in his mission to the King. No matter whether a man make
+his career with Indians in the wilds of Paraguay or amongst the
+so-called reasoning people in more sophisticated lands, if he once show
+himself superior to the ordinary run of men, there is something of an
+invidious character certain to be attributed to him by those who think
+that genius is the worst attribute that man can have. This, Montoya did
+not escape from amongst the Spaniards, but the Indians, at least, were
+less envious, being perhaps less educated, for they believed that the
+soul of one of their _caciques_,[80] known in his life as Quaratici,
+had entered into him. The rumour reached at last a chief called
+Guiravera, known to the Spaniards as the ‘Exterminator’ from his
+cruelty, who, hearing that the soul of his late rival had entered into
+Montoya, came to see him at the head of a large retinue of people of
+his tribe. Montoya and Maceta were at Villa Rica, and on the chief’s
+approach they happened to be seated in the plaza of the town. As he
+approached them, followed by his men, and with a threatening air, they
+remained seated, merely motioning him to take a seat upon a bench. This
+he did, after making one of his men cover the seat with a tiger-skin
+and stand behind on guard. What passed between them, most unluckily,
+Montoya has not set down. What he has told us only makes us wish for
+more, for it appears that after the usual salutations Guiravera refused
+to speak, and getting up walked about the town, silently looking at
+everything. But, as it ever happens, even Montoya was no exception to
+the general run of history-writers, who usually are occupied alone with
+facts which seem to them important at the time, forgetting that
+posterity (for whom they write) can judge of the result as well as they
+themselves, but thirst for details to complete the chain betwixt them
+and their predecessors. One thing is set down _in extenso_—not by
+Montoya, but by another Jesuit—that is, the sermon which Montoya
+preached to bring the chief into the fold. Considered as a sermon it
+does not seem out of the common way, and judged by its results was
+futile at the time, for the chief answered coldly that he would think
+the matter over, and then retired into the woods. But the seed thus
+sown in Villa Rica was to bear fruit, for in a year the chief, either
+tired of his ancestral gods or having pondered on the sermon, came into
+the fold and was baptized as Paul.
+
+An irruption[81] of the Mamelucos called Father Montoya from baptizing
+Indians and recovering their souls to the more prosaic, if as useful,
+task of saving their bodies, which he did at the immediate peril of his
+own. The Mamelucos had appeared (1628) before the Reduction of
+Encarnacion, and many of the Indians had already taken refuge in the
+woods. Those who remained were like a flock of sheep without a
+shepherd, and knew not what to do. Padre Montoya hastened to the spot,
+and called on every Christian to take up arms. Under the circumstances
+he undoubtedly was right; still, in reading history one is puzzled to
+observe how often and in how many different countries Christians have
+to resort to arms. But before proceeding to extremities, Montoya sent
+out Fathers Mendoza and Domenecchi with some of the principal
+inhabitants of the reduction to parley with the Mamelucos, who, under
+their celebrated leader Antonio Raposo, were encamped outside the
+place. Upon arriving within range of the Paulista camp they were
+greeted with a shower of balls and arrows, which killed several of the
+Indians and wounded Father Mendoza in the foot. But when, in spite of
+his wound, the Jesuit advanced towards the camp and insisted on
+speaking with the leader, the Mamelucos were so struck with his courage
+that they gave up to him several of the Indians whom they had taken
+prisoners upon the previous day. Next day Father Montoya, encouraged by
+the unhoped-for success of Father Mendoza, went out himself, and,
+facing the Paulistas, somewhat imprudently threatened them with the
+wrath of Heaven and the King if they did not retire. The wrath of
+Heaven is often somewhat capricious in its action, and the King of
+Spain, although as wrathful as he had been an Emperor, was too far away
+to inspire much terror in his subjects on the Paraná. So that the
+Paulista treated the wrath of both their Majesties as qualities which
+he could well neglect, and for sole answer ordered his men to march
+upon the town. But, whether owing to their hard hearts having been
+touched by the good Father’s eloquence, or the fact that the neophytes
+were under arms, when the Paulistas arrived close to the town they
+altered their intentions and filed off into the woods. Profiting by the
+respite from hostilities, Montoya, in conjunction with Padre Diaz Taño
+and a Father bearing the somewhat curious name of Padre Justo Vansurk
+Mansilla,[82] devoted all his attention for the time to the Mission of
+Santa Maria la Mayor, which was the most flourishing of all the
+missions of the time, and which to-day still shows the greatest
+remnants of the Jesuits’ work, both in regard to architecture and the
+remains of Indian population still settled on the old mission lands.
+But even there the Jesuits did not escape without their trials, for it
+appears[83] that a quantity of new proselytes arrived with women, whom
+the good Fathers stigmatized as ‘concubines’, and whom the ignorant
+Indians in the innocence of their hearts looked on as wives. The order
+being given to dismiss these concubines (or wives), a few submitted;
+but the rest, leaving the mission, started cultivating a tract of land
+in the vicinity.
+
+Then the good Fathers, with Montoya at their head, hit on a stroke of
+genius. Taking the opportunity when the seceding Indians were away
+gathering their crops, they set fire to their houses and carried off
+the children and the women,[84] back to the mission. The recalcitrants
+appeared next day at Santa Maria la Mayor, and were received again into
+the bosom of the Church. Heresy, also, now and then made its
+appearance, for two rascals, having built two temples upon two hills,
+transported to them the skeletons of two magicians long since dead, and
+the fickle people left the churches empty, and went to worship at the
+magicians’ shrines. But in this season of sorrow and of care, and
+whilst the churches in the Mission of Encarnacion were left deserted,
+Montoya once again showed his determination, and put things right. Not
+being able to cope alone with the heathen, Father Diaz Taño went to
+Guayrá, and induced Montoya (still the superior of the reductions in
+that province) to give his aid. He came, and, having armed some of the
+faithful, at dead of night attacked the temples and razed them to the
+ground.
+
+In 1631 Montoya and others came in the forests of Guayrá upon the wild
+Caaguas. These they strove hard to civilize, but, after labouring long,
+with all their eloquence were able to induce only eighteen to return
+with them to the Encarnacion. It was ‘with difficulty that they were
+able to give them a sufficient knowledge of the mysteries of our faith
+to be able to bestow the rite of baptism.’ It may be that the Caaguas,
+not having much to occupy their minds, approached the mysteries of our
+faith in more receptive attitudes than is attained by those whose minds
+are full. But, anyhow, Montoya, with true prudence, deferred their
+baptism till just before their death, for a few months of life outside
+the forests proved fatal to them all. Faith is a wondrous thing, and
+able to move most things, even common-sense. One wonders, though, why,
+when the Jesuits learned from experience that the poor Indians
+invariably died when exposed to the burning sun upon the plains, they
+continued in their fatal efforts to inflict baptism on the unoffending
+people of the woods. If it were necessary, it surely might have taken
+place in their own homes, and the patients then might have been left to
+chance, to see how the reception of the holy rite acted upon their
+lives.
+
+In 1631 the Mamelucos broke into the province of Guayrá. All was
+confusion, and Montoya sent Father Diaz Taño to Asuncion to beg the
+Governor, Don Luis de Cespedes, to send them help. He answered that he
+could do nothing, and thus by leaving the whole territory of Guayrá
+without defence lost a rich province to the Crown of Spain. Though at
+the time (1631) Portugal and Spain were united, yet in the Indies their
+subjects were at war, and though in Europe Spain was the stronger of
+the two, in America the Portuguese conquered about that time rich
+provinces, which to-day form part of the quondam Empire of Brazil.
+
+Upon the failure of Don Luis de Cespedes to render help, Padre Diaz
+Taño was despatched to Charcas[85] to lay the matter before the
+Audiencia Real (the High Court of the Indies). The frequent journeys
+and diplomatic negotiations in which the Jesuits of Paraguay were
+engaged rendered them far more apt to manage business than members of
+the other Orders in America. Whilst in Guayrá all was confusion, and
+the Paulistas swept through the land ruining everything, upon the
+Uruguay things prospered, and Padre Romero founded two new reductions
+(1631), known as San Carlos and Apostoles; he also laid the foundation
+of that territory in which the persecuted neophytes of Guayrá were soon
+to find a safe retreat. Father Diaz Taño by this time had returned from
+Charcas with a decree of the High Court, declaring the action of Don
+Luis de Cespedes in failing to protect Guayrá against the Mamelucos
+prejudicial to the interests of the King; but as neither he nor the
+High Court of Charcas possessed any power by means of which to
+stimulate the Governor to greater zeal, the decree was useless, and
+Taño and Ruiz Montoya found themselves summoned hastily to meet a new
+attack. But before they arrived the missions, both of San Francisco
+Xavier and of San José, had been destroyed. As there were still three
+reductions undestroyed, Montoya, as Provincial of Guayrá, called all
+the Jesuits of the province to deliberate as to their chance of making
+a defence. The debate ran high; some of the priests wished that the
+neophytes should fight to the end; others, more sensible, pointed out
+that the ill-armed and quite untrained militia of the missions could do
+nothing with their bows and arrows against the well-led and
+well-disciplined Paulistas all armed with guns.[86] Padre Truxillo gave
+it as his opinion that it would be more prudent to transport the
+Indians to a place of safety, and pointed out that near the cataract of
+Guayrá they would be able to cross the river and place it between
+themselves and the Paulistas in case of an attack. This advice seemed
+prudent to the rest, and Father Truxillo set out to make his
+preparation for the march. Few European travellers even to-day have
+visited the great cataract known as El Salto de Guayrá, or in
+Portuguese As sete Quedas. Bourgade la Dardye[87] has described it in
+his book on Paraguay. Situated as it is in the midst of almost
+impenetrable forests, it has not even now been properly placed upon the
+map. Bourgade la Dardye inclines to think he was the first to visit it
+since the expedition sent by the elder Lopez, President of Paraguay,
+under Lieutenant Patiño in 1861. Before that time it had been left
+unvisited since 1788, when the Boundary Commissioners sent to determine
+the dividing line between the Spanish and Portuguese possessions camped
+near it for a week. Felix de Azara writes about it in his ‘Historia del
+Paraguay’,[88] but he does little more than reproduce the account given
+by the Boundary Commissioners. He places it in 24° 4′ 27″ lat., and
+refers to it as ‘a tremendous precipice of water[89] worthy of Homer or
+of Virgil’s pen.’ He says the waters do not fall vertically as from a
+balcony or window (_como por un balcon ó ventana_), but by an inclined
+plane at an inclination of about fifty degrees. The river close to the
+top of the falls is about four thousand nine hundred Castilian yards in
+breadth, and suddenly narrows to about seventy yards, and rushes over
+the fall with such terrific violence as if it wished to ‘displace the
+centre of the earth, and cause thus the nutation which astronomers have
+observed in the earth’s axis.’ The dew or vapour which rises from the
+fall is seen in the shape of a column from many miles away, and on it
+hangs a perpetual rainbow, which trembles as the earth seems to tremble
+under one’s feet. ‘The noise,’ he says, ‘is heard full six leagues off,
+and in the neighbourhood neither bird nor beast is found.’ In Azara’s
+time the journey was not too pleasant, for he says: ‘He who wishes to
+see this fall must cross the desert for thirty leagues from the town of
+Curuguaty to the river Guatimi. There he must choose trees to construct
+canoes. In these he must embark all those who go with him, arms and
+provisions, and besides, where he embarks, leave an armed escort to
+secure his base of supplies from the wild Indians’ attack. In the
+canoes he then must navigate the Guatimi for thirty leagues until it
+joins the Paraná, and always with much care, for in the woods upon its
+banks are Indians who give no quarter.[90] . . . Then there remain
+three leagues to sail upon the Paraná, then one can reach the falls
+either in the canoes or struggling along the woods which fringe the
+river’s bank.’
+
+Azara was, perhaps, of all the travellers of the last century, the man
+who above all things shines in accuracy, and in point of fact his
+description of the cataract is the best we have up to the present time.
+Bourgade la Dardye tells us that not far above the cataract the Paraná
+expands into a lake almost five miles in breadth, and from the lake the
+river issues in two great arms, which have forced their way through the
+mountains known as the Sierra de Mbaracyu.
+
+Dr. Bourgade la Dardye seems to think the circular eddies found in the
+whirls are the most curious features of the falls. He describes them
+thus: ‘They flow in falls varying from fifty to sixty feet in depth;
+these circular eddies, which are quite independent of one another,
+range along an arc of about two miles in its stretch. They are detached
+like giant caldrons yawning unexpectedly at one’s feet, in which the
+flood seethes with incredible fury; every one of these has opened for
+itself a narrow orifice in the rock, through which like a stone from a
+sling the water is hurled into the central whirlpool. The width of
+these outlets rarely exceeds fifteen yards, but their depth cannot be
+estimated. They all empty themselves into one immense central chamber
+about two hundred feet wide, rushing into it with astounding velocity.
+. . . A more imposing spectacle can scarcely be conceived, and I doubt
+whether abysses such as these exist elsewhere in the world.’ He places
+the falls in latitude 24° 2′ 59″, but corrects the longitude given by
+Azara as 56° 55′ west of Paris to 58° 18′ 8″—that is, 53° 57′ 53″ west
+from Greenwich, which certainly has some importance in fixing the
+breadth of the territory of Paraguay.
+
+But neither Azara nor the French traveller, with their yards and feet,
+their longitude and latitude, and the rest, give an idea of the
+grandeur of the place. Buried in the primeval forests, forgotten by the
+world, known to the wandering Indians who give no quarter (any more
+to-day than in Azara’s time), the giant cataract is a lost wonder of
+the world. In the ruined missions on the Paraná, two hundred miles
+away, I have heard the Indians talk of it with awe. They told how
+through the woods tangled with undergrowth, matted together with
+lianas, they had hewed a path. Monkeys and parrots chattered at them,
+and a white miasmatic vapour hung over trees and lakes, burying the
+clearings in its wreaths, and lifting only at mid-day, to close again
+upon the woods at night. They talked of alligators, jaguars, the giant
+ant-eater, and the mysterious bird known to them as the ‘ipetatá’,
+which in its tail carries a burning fire. In the recesses of the
+thickets demons lurked, and wild Caaguas, who with a blowpipe and a
+poisoned arrow slew you and your horse, themselves unseen. Pools
+covered with Victoria regia; masses of red and yellow flowers upon the
+trees, the trees themselves gigantic, and the moss which floated from
+their branches long as a spear; the voyage in canoes, whirled like a
+cork upon the rapids; lastly the falls themselves, and how they,
+awestricken at the sight, fell prostrate and promised many candles to
+the Virgin and the saints on their return, they talked of into the
+watches of the night.
+
+Somehow, I like those countries which, as the province of Guayrá and
+Paraguay, appear to have no future, and of which the charm is in the
+past. It pleases me to think that the sharp business men of times gone
+by, patting their stomachs (the prison of their brain), predicted great
+advancement, and were all deceived. For then it seems as if the
+prognostications of to-day’s schemes may also fail, and countries which
+they have doomed to progress still remain as is Guayrá, their towns
+deserted, with but the broken spire of some old church emerging from
+the verdure of the tropics, as the St. Paul’s Rocks rise sheer out of
+the sea. If there is charm in the unknown, there is at least as great a
+charm in the forgotten, and the Salto de Guayrá is one of the most
+forgotten corners of the earth. To this wild place Father Mendoza
+proposed to lead the Indians from the Reductions of San José and San
+Francisco Xavier, and then unite with them any of the fugitives he
+could assemble from those reductions which had been destroyed. But even
+the doglike patience of the Indians was at an end, and they preferred
+to die or be led captives rather than run the chances of escape in such
+a solitary place. In their despair, and placed between the Paulistas
+and the fear of emigration, the neophytes turned, as even more
+civilized people than themselves will turn, on their best friends, and
+held the Jesuits responsible for all their woes. Two Indian women,
+wives of _caciques_, having been taken by the Paulistas, the Indians
+broke into the church where a Jesuit (Padre Salazar) was officiating,
+and interrupted him during the Mass with the most bitter insults. One
+of the Indians menaced him with a lance, another with an arrow, whilst
+a third tried to snatch the chalice from his hands. He escaped, and
+ran, holding the chalice, out into the woods, followed by two little
+Indian boys. Wandering about, he fell in with the other Jesuits, all
+like himself outcasts, without a church, and almost deserted by the
+Indians. Padre Ruiz Montoya alone possessed a shadow of authority, and
+he advised the outcasts with the remnant of their flocks to retire into
+the woods, and sow a crop of maize for food, whilst he endeavoured to
+get help from Paraguay. Hardly was this done, when news was brought him
+which made him alter all his plans. Two messengers came to inform him
+that an army of Paulistas was marching on Villa Rica, and that a strong
+detachment of them was advancing from the south. Then Padre Montoya
+took a supreme resolve, and ordered the evacuation of the two principal
+reductions (San Ignacio and Loreto) which yet remained intact. They
+were the first which had been founded in Guayrá, and were as important
+as any of the Spanish towns in Paraguay. The churches, all the Jesuit
+writers, as Montoya, Charlevoix, Mastrilli, and Lozano, are agreed,
+were finer than any in the land. The Indians were, according to
+Montoya, far better Christians than the inhabitants of the Spanish
+settlements, and their faith and innocence were above all praise. They
+cultivated cotton and had large herds of cattle, so that the most
+bitter enemies of the Jesuits must allow that much had been
+accomplished in the short space of two-and-twenty years. In 1609 the
+Jesuits came to Guayrá, and found it absolutely untouched; and when in
+1631 they left it, it was upon the road to become one of the most
+flourishing American provinces of the Spanish throne. The other
+missionaries imagined that nothing would persuade the Indians to depart
+from their homes, where for so many years they had been happy; but
+after Montoya explained to them his plans, they all assented to them as
+with a single voice.
+
+The plan by means of which the Jesuit Moses led his sheep out of the
+wilderness of Guayrá was most remarkable. The river Paraná forms a
+great artery between Brazil and Paraguay; upon each side of it a
+network of rivers disembogue. The Paranapané, on which most of the
+missions of Guayrá were situated, flows from the east, and falls into
+the Paraná, not much more than fifty miles above the cataract. After
+the last of the once-flourishing six Jesuit reductions had been
+evacuated at the orders of Montoya, he collected all the boats, rafts,
+and canoes, and after much persuasion got all the Indians persuaded to
+follow him to seek for safer habitations lower down the Paraná. The
+population of the six reductions has been estimated at about one
+hundred thousand souls; but of these, during the years of 1629 and
+1630, thousands had been led captive to San Paulo, and thousands had
+dispersed into the woods. Still, assembled on the banks of the
+Paranapané, there was a multitude of Indians of every sex and age.
+Fortunately or unfortunately, no record by an eye-witness exists,[91]
+except that written by Montoya, and he is modest to a fault about all
+details, and absolutely silent as to the part he played himself. He
+tells us that at the starting-point were gathered two thousand five
+hundred families, and this in spite of the dispersions and the efforts
+made by the Spanish settlers in the town of Ciudad Real,[92] who
+feared, with cause, to be exposed to the full fury of the Paulistas
+without allies. It appears the Indians were in a state of spiritual
+exaltation, for some young men having remarked the Jesuits were packing
+up a Christ and an image of the Blessed Virgin, which in happier times
+had been miraculous, they declared that to affront exile, and even
+death, in such good company was a foretaste of heaven.
+
+Montoya, in opposition to the modern style, tries to shift the burden
+of the praise on to the shoulders of the Provincial, Padre Francisco
+Lopez Truxillo,[93] but with indifferent success. This matter of
+bearing your own praise will require regulation in the future, when an
+advance of civilization has opened people’s eyes to the perception that
+praise is just as disagreeable to the sufferer as is blame. The
+sentinel whom they had placed to warn them of the enemy’s approach gave
+the alarm. Montoya sent at once to Ciudad Real for help, but the
+Spanish settlers were too hard pressed themselves to give assistance.
+Nothing remained but to make a portage of all their rafts, boats, and
+canoes, and then to re-embark and sail down the Paraná out of the reach
+of the Paulistas. Montoya passed in review his boats, and found he had
+seven hundred, and that twelve thousand people had embarked with him on
+leaving the Paranapané. When the Paulistas found the Jesuits had
+evacuated all their towns, they burnt the churches, on the principle,
+perhaps, that, the nests once pulled down, the rooks would not return.
+They turned the Jesuit cells into barracks for themselves, taking, as
+Montoya says with horror, ‘infamous women’ into those chaste abodes,
+where never woman had passed through the doors. The Paulistas then
+entered into a rigorous examination[94] of the Jesuits’ private lives,
+hoping to find some scandal to bring against them. Especially they
+questioned the Indian women, giving them presents to discover
+everything they knew. All was in vain, the discipline of the Order, or
+the strict conscientiousness of the individual members of it, not
+having given scandal any hold.[95] The most difficult part of the great
+exodus was now to come. The rapids and the cataracts of the Paraná
+extend to nearly ninety miles, and the whole country is a maze of
+tangled forest interspersed with rocks. No paths exist, the place is
+desert, and over the dank mass of vegetation the moisture from the
+clouds of vapour thrown up by the falling water descends in
+never-ending rain.[96] In order to endeavour to save the trouble of
+reconstructing new rafts and canoes at the bottom of the cataract,
+Montoya launched three hundred empty boats (sending an Indian in
+advance) to see if any of them would arrive safely at the bottom of the
+falls. Not one escaped; and so the pilgrimage began, almost without
+provisions and without arms, in the middle of a country quite
+uncultivated, and where game was scarce.[97] To make things worse,
+intelligence was brought that, a few miles below the beginning of the
+falls, the Spaniards of Guayrá had built a wooden fort, surrounded with
+a strong stockade, hoping to intercept the retreating Indians, and make
+slaves of any who might fall into their hands. Montoya himself, dressed
+as an Indian, went out to observe the enemy, and on his return the
+whole immense assemblage silently plunged into the woods, leaving so
+little traces of its passage that the Spaniards in the fort were still
+expecting them when they were far beyond their reach.
+
+Each Indian had to take his bundle on his back; even the children
+carried bundles in proportion to their strength. The missionaries
+carried what was held most sacred, as altar-plate and images of saints.
+In front a band of men armed with machétes (cane-knives) opened the way
+through the dense woods and pathless jungle of the bank; and as they
+marched along, Montoya says they sang hymns which the Jesuits had
+taught them, and at the sound of them fugitives who had been hiding in
+the woods came out and joined their march. Especially those from the
+out-station of Tayaoba joined them; their priest, Pedro de Espinosa,
+had met his death ‘with a good chance of his eternal welfare,’ as
+Montoya says.[98] But after the second day the hymns no longer sounded
+through the woods, nor did they play upon the harps and other
+instruments, whose strings being all broken and the wood unglued, ‘they
+left them on the rocks, being too sad to look at them.’ All through the
+weary journey Montoya seems never once to have despaired, and sets down
+in his book the adventures of each separate day, never forgetting to
+chronicle anything strange or pathetic as it occurred to him. On the
+fourth day he sent off Fathers Diego, Nicolas Hennerio, and Mansilla
+into the province of Itatines to found a mission there, acting upon
+orders which had just reached him from the Provincial of the Order
+shortly before he had started from Guayrá. They took with them ‘bells,
+images, and everything suitable for the foundation of a mission’; but
+the first two were martyred by the wild Indians, and the third just
+fled in time to save his life. It took the fugitive Indians eight weary
+days of marching to reach the lower end of the cataract, where once
+again the Paraná was navigable. On their arrival they hoped to find
+provisions and more boats; but none were there, their own stores were
+almost done, and the people too exhausted to march on. Fever broke out,
+and many of them died; and others, lost in the forests, without a
+guide, wandered about till death released them from their march. A
+weaker man than Padre Montoya might have despaired of ever issuing from
+the woods. However, he set the Indians to work to make canoes, and
+others[99] to cultivate patches of maize for food, working himself
+alternately with axe and hoe to give example to the neophytes. Others,
+again, cut down the enormous canes, which in that region grew to fifty
+feet in height, to make them into rafts.
+
+So, after a considerable time, all was in readiness for a new start,
+and luckily provisions from the reductions on the Paraná arrived. So
+they embarked again, and on the journey a raft in which a woman and two
+children were sitting upset, to Montoya’s agony, as he knew that ‘in
+that river there are fish that the people call culebras,[100] which
+have been seen to swallow men entire, and throw them out again with all
+their bones broken as if it had been done with stones.’ He says: ‘I
+confess I suffered infinitely, and, turning my eyes to heaven, I blamed
+my sins as having been the cause of so much misery, and said, “O Lord,
+is it possible that for this Thou hast brought these people out of
+their country, that my eyes should endure the spectacle of so much
+misery, and my heart break at so much suffering, and then to let them
+die devoured by savage fish!”’ As the good man was praying, the Indian
+woman’s head appeared above the water, and Montoya himself, aided by
+Indians, drew her and the children in safety to the land. But his
+trials were not at an end, for many of the hastily constructed rafts
+and canoes sank before his eyes, and the mortality of Indians was
+great. Eventually they found a temporary refuge in the Reduction of the
+Nativity upon the Acaray, and at Santa Maria la Mayor upon the Iguazú.
+Then famine raged, and the arrival of so many people increased the
+scarcity, so that six hundred of the new arrivals died in one
+reduction, and five hundred in the next. At last the scarcity became so
+great that the poor Indians had to roam about the forests to gather
+fruit, and many of them died in the recesses of the woods.
+
+Seeing no hopes of saving the remainder, Montoya led them further on to
+the banks of a little river called the Jubaburrús,[101] and there he
+once again founded two reductions, which he named Loreto and San
+Ignacio, after the two the Mamelucos had destroyed. He bought ten
+thousand head of cattle out of the money the King allowed to the
+Jesuits of Guayrá, and from the sale of some few objects saved from the
+general destruction of the towns, and settled down his Indians, who in
+Guayrá had been all agriculturists, to a pastoral life. Thus did he
+bring successfully nearly twelve thousand people a distance of about
+five hundred miles through desert country, and down a river broken in
+all its course by rapids, landing them far from their enemies in a safe
+haven at the last. Most commonly the world forgets or never knows its
+greatest men, while its lard-headed fools, who in their lives perhaps
+have been the toys of fortune, sleep in their honoured graves, their
+memory living in the page of history, preserved like grapes in aspic by
+writers suet-headed as themselves. But though this Hegira was the most
+stirring episode of Montoya’s life, he yet had work to do, and in the
+province of diplomacy rendered as great, or even greater, services to
+the Indians, whom he loved better than himself, as in the memorable
+journey when he led them down the Paraná.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter III
+
+
+Spain and Portugal in South America—Enmity between Brazilians and
+Argentines—Expulsion of Jesuits from Paraguay—Struggles with the
+natives—Father Mendoza killed—Death of Father Montoya
+
+In the province of Guayrá the Spaniards who had looked with disfavour
+on the Jesuits, and had enslaved the Indians when they were able, were
+in sore straits. The Mamelucos, finding no more Indians to enslave,
+fell on the two towns of Villa Rica and Ciudad Real, destroyed them
+utterly, and forced the inhabitants to flee for refuge into Paraguay.
+Thus Guayrá went the way of Matto Grosso and several other provinces of
+Spain, and became Portuguese. Strangely enough, most of these losses
+happened when Spain and Portugal were joined under one crown. At home
+the Spaniards and the Portuguese, however much they detested one
+another, were forced to keep the peace. In America they were always at
+war, which ended invariably to the detriment of Spain.[102] The strife
+begun by the Papal Bull of 1493, in which Pope Alexander VI. divided
+the territories discovered and to be discovered between Portugal and
+Spain, went on, till bit by bit Spain was stripped of the provinces of
+Matto Grosso, Rio Grande, and Guayrá, and found herself drawn into the
+numerous disputes about the Colonia del Sacramento, which cost so much
+blood to both contending Powers. Perhaps the most curious and
+interesting incident of the long struggle was the Three Years’ War,
+which began in 1750, after the marriage of Ferdinand VI. of Spain with
+Doña Barbara of Portugal. By the treaty entered into at this marriage,
+seven of the most flourishing of the missions situated on the left bank
+of the Uruguay were ceded to Portugal in exchange for La Colonia del
+Sacramento on the river Plate. The towns resisted change of
+sovereignty, as Portugal to them was typified by the Paulistas, their
+most inveterate enemies. The Marquis de Valdelirios in his curious
+despatches touches much upon this war, but perhaps the best account is
+to be found in the curious memoir of the Irish Jesuit Father, Tadeo
+Hennis,[103] who was the backbone of the resisting Guaranís.
+
+The ancient enmity of the two nations has been continued in their
+descendants, the Brazilians and the Argentines and Uruguayans, and
+little by little Brazil is absorbing all the northern portion of the
+Republic of Uruguay. After the retreat under Montoya down the Paraná,
+the Jesuit missions, especially in Paraguay and what is now the
+province of Corrientes, for some time enjoyed a period of peace and of
+repose, and the strange policy of the Jesuits was developed, and
+township after township arose amongst the Guaranís (1630-31). But there
+was still no rest for Ruiz Montoya, who was of those who rest but in
+the grave. In 1632, at the instance of the Governor and magistrates of
+the township of Jerez, Montoya sent Fathers Jean Rançonier and Mansilla
+to the north of Paraguay to found a mission amongst the Itatines, a
+forest-dwelling tribe. Their territory was marshy and the climate bad,
+and woods of indiarubber-trees covered all the land. Fathers del Techo
+and Charlevoix both speak of the ‘rebounding balls’ with which they
+played, which, thrown upon the ground, start up again as if they were
+filled with air. This is, perhaps, one of the first times that
+indiarubber is mentioned, though in some places Jean de Léry[104] seems
+to indicate he was acquainted with its use.
+
+The Jesuits found that to make progress was not easy with these
+Indians, who willingly enough listened to their preaching, but refused
+to alter their social habits, to which the Jesuits ascribe the fact
+that even then their numbers were diminishing. Like most of the Indians
+of America, they were polygamists, which custom in their race operates
+differently to polygamy amongst the negroes: for whereas they seem to
+increase and thrive, the Indians even at the conquest often tended to
+become extinct. When a headman amongst the Itatines died, a number of
+his followers jumped down precipices to accompany him upon his journey
+to a better world. This custom and polygamy gave much trouble to the
+Jesuits, but their most admirable patience and knowledge of mankind
+helped them to overcome them by degrees. All was about to flourish in
+the mission, when one Acosta, a Brazilian priest, appeared. Perhaps he
+was in league with the Paulistas, or perhaps was jealous of the
+Jesuits, for he tried hard to lead a number of the Indians to San Paulo
+to show them (as he said) how they should follow the true law of
+God.[105]
+
+The Itatines, either suspecting that Acosta’s true law was false, or
+tired of his preaching, rose and killed him; but the effect was bad,
+and there grew up amongst those infidels a coldness even towards the
+Jesuits themselves. Had it not been for two miraculous events which
+happened opportunely, as such things should happen if they are to be
+turned to good account, much harm might have been done. A chief, having
+cursed a priest, was seized at once with a malignant ulcer in the
+throat, which shortly killed him. The Itatines did not apparently think
+anything of the influence of the unhealthy climate in which they lived,
+and set the occurrence down to the act of God.
+
+But more was still to come. Another chief having so far forgotten
+himself as to jeer at a priest, a thunderbolt fell so close to him that
+he was knocked senseless, and lay as dead. These two events confirmed
+the Jesuits’ power, and things began to flourish in their four new
+missions. But the Great Power, so careful of the individual effort of
+His priests, seems to have been most unaccountably remiss of their
+success considered as a whole. In the same year (1632) the Mamelucos
+appeared and ruined all the four missions, so that the efforts of the
+Jesuits and the miracles were lost.
+
+In 1633 the first skirmish took place between the Bishop of Paraguay
+and the Jesuits. This skirmish little by little grew into a war, kept
+up for more than a hundred years, and ended finally in the expulsion of
+the Jesuits from Paraguay. The Governor, Don Luis de Cespedes, having
+called upon the Indians of the Jesuit missions for personal service, a
+proceeding quite against both the King’s orders and the Papal Bulls,
+the Bishop thought the moment opportune to press for tithes. This, too,
+was equally forbidden both by a Bull and by an order of the Council of
+the Indies. Padre Romero went to Asuncion and displayed his Bulls and
+his orders of the Council, and the Governor withdrew his claims. The
+Bishop, after some opposition, withdrew likewise, and the Provincial of
+the Order arrived at Asuncion, bringing with him an order from the King
+signifying that the Indians of the reductions were to be left entirely
+to the Jesuits. So for the present the Jesuits scored a victory, though
+in the future it was to cost them dear. But the Governor of Paraguay
+having returned apparently to his design of exacting personal service
+from the Indians of the missions, the Provincial checkmated him with a
+royal order from Philip IV. The order was addressed to the Viceroy of
+Peru, the fourth Count of Chinchon. The missive, dated at Madrid in
+1633, condemned in the strongest terms all personal service (that is,
+forced labour) amongst the Indians, not only of the Jesuit missions,
+but of Peru and Mexico. With a touching confidence in his own powers,
+and absolute right Divine, the well-meaning King added to his orders a
+paragraph commanding all to be done as he had ordered within six
+months. Strange to find Philip IV., whom Velasquez has immortalized and
+shown us as he sat upon his horse ineffable, so far away from the Museo
+del Prado, where alone he ever seems really to have lived. But foolish
+Governors and Bishops were not the Jesuits’ worst enemies in Paraguay.
+In 1634 the Provincial, Father Boroa, was shipwrecked in a voyage up
+the Uruguay, and only saved by the devotion of his neophytes.
+
+Sometimes the cruel treatment of the natives by the Spanish settlers
+was avenged upon the Jesuits. This was the case with a band of
+Guapalaches, who, coming on Father Espinosa in a wood, attacked and
+massacred him and all his Indians, and, having cut his body into
+pieces, left it for the wild beasts to eat. Upon another occasion
+Father Mendoza fell into an ambuscade, from which he might have escaped
+had not his horse sunk in a miry stream. Long he defended himself with
+an Indian shield, but at length was stretched upon the ground and left
+for dead. During the night he revived, and dragged himself up to some
+rocks; but the Indians in the morning, following up his trail, came on
+him praying in a loud voice. They told him that he served a blind God,
+or at best a powerless God, as He did nothing to defend His servant;
+then, after torturing him cruelly, they despatched him, and, taking out
+his heart, said: ‘Let us see if his soul will take the road to heaven.’
+These savages do not seem to have been genuinely interested in finding
+out what became of the soul after the dissolution of the body, for they
+sat down and made a hearty meal of two young Indians who accompanied
+the unlucky priest. But they had heard their victim say that when he
+baptized them it purified their souls, and the last words of Father
+Mendoza had been to recommend his soul to God. I often wonder if the
+Christians of to-day, their creed so firmly fixed by the martyrdoms of
+simple folk, who held their faith without perhaps much reasoning on it,
+know what they owe to men like Father Christopher Mendoza, slain by the
+Indians in the Paraguayan woods. Your ancient martyr, fallen out of
+fashion and forgotten by the Christians of to-day, should have his
+homage done to him, if only by the chance writer, who in his studies
+for some subject of no interest to the general world comes on his trail
+of blood; for martyrdom, no matter how obscure, forgotten by the people
+of the faith for which the martyr suffered, is a slur not only on the
+faithful, but on the faith itself. In 1636 occurred the second invasion
+of the Paulistas, which induced Father Montoya, accompanied by Father
+Diaz Taño, to go to Europe to seek protection for the Indians both from
+the King of Spain and from the Pope.
+
+The Mamelucos burst into the province of Tapé,[106] and, as the mission
+of Jesus-Maria (one of the few left undestroyed at the former invasion)
+was most exposed, Father Romero asked permission of the Governor of the
+River Plate[107] to make some trenches to defend the place. The
+Governor consented, but the storm burst on the mission before the
+defences were in a fit state to defend. The mission priests Antonio
+Bernal and Juan Cardenas were in the front ranks encouraging the
+Indians, and both were badly wounded. Fathers Mola and Romero went
+about ministering to the wounded, but escaped themselves. At last, the
+Mamelucos having set fire to the church, capitulation became
+inevitable, and the chief part of the Indians were led away in chains.
+The same fate would have overtaken the mission of San Cristobal, where
+father Romero had retreated with some fugitives from Jesus-Maria, had
+not the people and their priest retreated hastily upon the mission of
+Santa Ana. But even there they were not long in safety, and had to
+undertake another perilous journey down the river Iguai. Here a party
+of passing Mamelucos fell into an ambuscade, and were hewn in pieces,
+presumably before the Lord. The Mamelucos pushed their advance so far
+that Father Montoya had given orders that all the missions of that
+province should be burned. The inhabitants, who trusted him quite
+blindly, were just about to begin to burn their houses, when an order
+from the Provincial stopped them from doing so till he himself appeared
+upon the scene. He arrived, and, gathering up the scattered Indians as
+far as he was able, left them for safety in some of the missions which
+had not been destroyed, and set off himself to ask for help from the
+Governor of Paraguay.
+
+Finding no help either from him or from the Governor of the River
+Plate, he went to Corrientes, and was received almost with contumely.
+Then, desperate, he equipped an army of the mission Indians, and
+advanced to fight the Mamelucos; but they had retreated into Brazil,
+and were beyond his reach. Seeing that nothing was to be hoped from the
+Spanish Governors, he sent a box of papers in a ship going to Portugal,
+and laid his case before the Council of the Indies. Montoya and
+Charlevoix relate that the box was thrown into the sea near Lisbon by
+some enemy of the Jesuits, but providentially was washed up by the
+tide, and, being found miraculously, was taken to the King of Spain.
+Whether this happened as it is written, who shall say? But, in
+distress, when have good men (before the time of the encyclopædists)
+been without a miracle to sustain their cause? In the next year (1637)
+Father Montoya and Taño started upon their mission to Europe, and a new
+field was opened to Montoya in which to show his talents on the
+Indians’ behalf.
+
+Whilst Father Montoya was in Spain, the Provincial appointed Father
+Alfaro to take his place. He fell on troublous times, for the Mamelucos
+were preparing to attack the three remaining missions in the province
+of Guayrá.[108] As they were not defensible, it was agreed to evacuate
+them, and to retreat into the provinces upon the Uruguay. When they
+were just about to start from Santa Teresa, where the inhabitants of
+the other missions had been collected, the Mamelucos appeared just
+before Christmas. The Indians were driven off as slaves, and the
+Mamelucos, with their usual sense of humour, attended Mass as penitents
+on Christmas Day, with candles in their hands, and listened to the
+sermon in an edifying way. The priest reproached them for their
+cruelty, and they, after listening devoutly, gave him the liberty of
+two choir boys, and quietly left the church.
+
+At length the Jesuits, rendered desperate by the perils to which the
+mission Indians were exposed, armed several bands of Indians and
+attacked the Mamelucos. But, as was to be expected, the half-armed
+Indians were always worsted by the well-armed and disciplined Paulista
+bands, and then the Jesuits took the supreme resolve to evacuate Guayrá
+entirely, and place the Indians in safety between the rivers Paraná and
+Uruguay.
+
+Formed into three great companies, the Indians started on their second
+exodus. Although the difficulties were less than in the voyage down the
+Paraná, still, to march several thousand Indians just emerged from
+savagery, accompanied by their women and children, and charged with all
+their possessions, through a wild country, where they were exposed to
+the attack of a well-armed enemy upon the way, was not an easy task.
+Father Christobal Arenas formed them into three divisions, leading the
+first himself; but the Provincial seems to have done most of the
+organizing, for Charlevoix says that ‘to his courage, prudence, and
+inalterable kindness,’ the success was due.[109]
+
+Courage and prudence and inalterable kindness are the three virtues
+which have most moved the world; perhaps the last has been most
+efficacious, and one would hope that in the future it would be the only
+one of the whole three required.
+
+Twelve thousand Indians, not counting women and children, were thus led
+into a territory[110] between the rivers Uruguay and Paraná, rich,
+fertile, and, as the distance between the rivers is not above some
+five-and-twenty miles, defended in some measure, and easily rendered
+almost impregnable.
+
+No one can see the heart of man, and, even if God sees it, He never
+tells us what is there, so that we are obliged to judge of actions as
+we find them, and leave the search for motives to omniscients. On the
+face of it, the Jesuits, both those who led the Indians down the Paraná
+and those who headed them in this migration to the Mesopotamia between
+the Uruguay and Paraná, were not impelled by thought of gain; and if a
+Jesuit must of necessity have some dark scheme behind the smallest
+action of his life, these men concealed it so deep down within their
+souls that all the researches of their keenest enemies have not been
+able to throw light on it. But, even settled in their new homes, the
+Indians were defenceless against the Mamelucos, as it was a state maxim
+of the Spanish court that the Indians should never be allowed the use
+of guns. This was a wise enough precaution, without doubt, for the
+Indians of the Encomiendas, who lived amongst the Spaniards and owed
+them personal services; but arms for the Indians of the missions were a
+necessity of life. Therefore, before he started for Madrid, the
+Provincial impressed upon Montoya to approach the Council of the Indies
+and the King, and represent to them that it was impossible to guarantee
+the existence of the reductions against the Mamelucos unless the
+Indians were allowed to provide themselves with arms. So Father
+Montoya, though he was charged to press for various reforms, was most
+especially impressed upon this point. He was to tell the King that the
+Indians were not to be allowed to keep their arms themselves, but that
+they would be kept by the Jesuits, and served out to the Indians in
+case of an attack; then, that the arms would not cost a penny to the
+treasury, but be all paid out of the alms collected for the purpose by
+the Company; lastly, and this was a true stroke of Jesuit policy, that,
+to instruct the Indians how to shoot, they would bring from Chile
+certain Jesuits who in the world had served as soldiers. One sees them
+brought from the frontiers of Araucania, and from the outposts of the
+trans-Andean towns, half sacristan, half sergeant, instant in prayer,
+and yet with a look about them like a serious bull terrier—a fitting
+kind of priest for a frontier town, and such as could alone be found
+amongst the Jesuits.
+
+About this time (1639) the third invasion of the Mamelucos took place,
+and Father Alfaro, who had been left in charge of the missions on the
+Uruguay and Paraná, was shot by a Mameluco with a crossbow, and fell
+dead from his horse. The Governor of Paraguay, on hearing of it,
+marched with an army, and, having killed two or three hundred of the
+Mamelucos, took the rest prisoners, and carried them back to Asuncion.
+There, to the disgust of all the Jesuit historians, he menaced them
+with the wrath of Heaven and let them go. The feelings of a churchman,
+when his own privilege is thus usurped, may be compared to those of a
+strict game-preserver who sees his coverts poached. It is not so much
+the damage that is done as the personal insult and the humiliation
+which he suffers in his pride.
+
+In this year, too, the Indians of the missions rendered their first
+armed service to the State which afterwards so often drew on them in
+its necessity and treated them so ill.
+
+The Governor of Buenos Ayres, Don Pedro Estevan Davila, was setting out
+upon an expedition against a tribe of Indians who had taken refuge in
+the islands of the Lake Yberá. Eighty of the Indians were sent, and,
+being well led and armed, contributed considerably towards success.
+Next year a second contingent was required by the Governor of Tucuman,
+and duly sent to his assistance. History seems to repeat itself, and
+foolish soldiers and others never to gain experience; for the Governor
+(Padre del Techo in his ‘Historia Paraquaiæ’ tells us), having made war
+in Flanders, could never be dissuaded that the same system was not
+suitable for warfare in America. Accordingly, he set out in good order,
+but neglected to send out scouts, and consequently fell into the middle
+of the Calchaquis strongly entrenched within a marsh, attacked them
+with a rush, lost heavily, and had to retire to Tucuman. But all this
+time Father Montoya and Diaz Taño were striving in Rome and at Madrid
+with the Pope and with the King.
+
+Urban VIII., at that time God’s vicegerent for the Christian portion of
+the world, received Diaz Taño kindly, listened to all he had to say
+with interest, promised him his help, and gave him a Papal letter
+menacing the Mamelucos with the wrath of God. From Rome Father Taño
+went to Madrid, and thence to Lisbon, whence he sailed armed with the
+protection of the Pope and accompanied by a fresh band of zealous
+priests. Arrived in Rio de Janeiro, he published the Papal letter, and
+fixed it on the doors of the Jesuit College and on those of their
+church. He seems on this occasion to have been wanting in the chief
+Jesuit virtue, prudence, or at the least he seems to have mistaken the
+character of the people amongst whom he was. Most of the colonists
+having relations with the Mamelucos were indignant, and a mob broke in
+the doors both of the college and of the church. The riot grew so
+serious that the Governor convoked a council, and cited Father Taño to
+appear. He came and spoke, and in the eyes of the chief people of the
+place made out his case; but the multitude, caring not much for reason
+(and nothing for philanthropy), became more furious, but was appeased
+at last by a petition being sent in protest to the Pope.
+
+But if these things passed in Rio de Janeiro (which Del Techo refers to
+as _oppido sanctorum_), what was the fury of the people in San Paulo,
+the very centre of the Mamelucos, when the Vicar-General published the
+brief by order of Don Pedro Albornoz! The people rose immediately, and
+menaced the Vicar-General with instant death unless he instantly
+withdrew the brief. This he refused to do, although forced on his knees
+and with a naked sword held at his throat. His courage quieted them,
+and they drew up an appeal which they tried hard to make him sign, but
+he again refused. The mob, having demanded the brief, was told it was
+in the college of the Jesuits. Thither they went post-haste, and were
+met upon the steps by the Superior, dressed in canonicals and holding
+the holy wafer in his hand. He spoke, and most of them fell prostrate
+on the ground before the Body of our Lord. Others stood upright, and
+said that, whilst they adored the Holy Sacrament with their whole
+souls, they would not suffer that their slaves, who were their chiefest
+property, should be set free. An atheist (or some kind of Protestant)
+cried out to fire upon the priest, but he had no support. The Superior
+then gave them a copy of the brief, and they returned to the
+Vicar-General to ask for absolution for any censure of the Church they
+might have incurred; but he for the third time was obdurate, and let
+them welter in their sin.
+
+The news of the revolution which liberated Portugal from Spain having
+just reached the town, the Jesuits had to retreat from it, leaving the
+inhabitants enraged against them and more determined than before to
+push their forays into Paraguay. But the time was past for their
+incursions, for Father Ruiz Montoya had prospered at Madrid, and
+secured even more than he had hoped for when he started on his quest.
+On arriving at Madrid, which he did after a prosperous journey of four
+months, he waited on the King (Philip IV.), and laid before him and
+commissaries chosen from the Indies and Castile the following points:
+
+1. That the law of 1611, which provided that no Indians, unless taken
+in a just war, should be reduced to slavery, should be put into effect.
+
+2. That the Pope should be approached to confirm the briefs of Paul
+III. and Clement VIII., which contained the same provisions.
+
+3. That those who did not conform to these instructions should be
+handed over to the Inquisition to be judged.
+
+4. That the Indians who had been enslaved by the Paulistas should be at
+once set free and the aggressors punished.
+
+The King after deliberation granted every point, and, further,
+regulated the tribute which the Indians were to pay.[111] All this was
+easy to enact, but, like most other laws, not quite so easy to put into
+effect. Moreover, as the revolution which separated Portugal from Spain
+had just occurred, all Spanish thunder against the Mamelucos was of but
+small account. Montoya then pressed the demand for license to use
+firearms in self-defence against the Mamelucos. The King after
+deliberation granted this last point, and from that time the incursions
+of the Mamelucos ceased in Paraguay and generally throughout the
+mission territory. Then also there was set on foot that Jesuit militia
+which rendered such good service to the crown, but was the cause of so
+much murmuring, as it protected the mission Indians both from the
+Paulistas and from the inroads of the Spanish colonists.
+
+Father Montoya never returned to Paraguay, where he had fought so long
+and done so much for the poor Indians. Apparently it was not written
+that he should see the results of all his efforts, for, having embarked
+at Seville for Peru, he was detained at Lima on business of the Order.
+From thence he went to Tucuman, and, having returned to Lima, died aged
+seventy. The Viceroy and the chief members of the Audiencia (with whom
+he had struggled all his life) accompanied his body to the grave, and
+it is said that several miracles showed forth the glory he enjoyed in
+heaven.
+
+That may be so, and if they happened (as they well may have done, for,
+after all, a miracle[112] really exists for those who credit it), if
+Heaven has honoured him, ’tis more than man has done: for even in
+Paraguay his name is not remembered, though it remains enshrined in the
+neglected pages of many a dusty Latin or a Spanish book.
+
+But all the time that Fathers Montoya and Diaz Taño were in Europe a
+serious danger to the Jesuits was growing up. At the discovery of the
+New World, the Franciscans had been the first of all the Orders to go
+out. Some had accompanied Columbus, some were with Cortes in Mexico.
+Almagro and Pizarro’s hosts had their Franciscan chaplains. In his
+commentaries, Alvar Nuñez relates how he met some of the Order in
+Brazil. Lastly, the first of all the saints of the New World was a
+Franciscan.
+
+In 1638 the Franciscans in the province of Jujuy[113] disputed with the
+Jesuits the right to certain missions, accusing them, as Padre del
+Techo says, ‘of putting their sickle into their ripening corn.’[114]
+What could be more annoying if it were true? As if a Wesleyan mission
+in the Paumotus Group should, after having shed its Bibles and its
+blankets like dry leaves, suddenly find an emissary from Babylon itself
+arrive and mark the sheep!
+
+But from Jujuy the dissensions spread to Paraguay, where the
+Franciscans had several missions extending from Yuti to Cazapá, thus
+being almost within touch of the Jesuit Gospellers in Santa Maria, upon
+the eastern bank of the Tebicuari, which bounds their territory. These
+jealousies might have gone smouldering on, and never burst out into
+fire, had not the appointment of a Franciscan to the see of Paraguay
+caused the flames to flare out fiercely.
+
+Had a firebrand been wanted to stir up strife, none better could have
+been found than Don Bernardino de Cardenas, who was just then appointed
+to the bishopric of Paraguay.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter IV
+
+
+Don Bernardino de Cardenas, Bishop of Paraguay—His labours as apostolic
+missionary—His ambitions and cunning—Pretensions to saintliness—His
+attempts to acquire supreme power—Quarrels between Cardenas and Don
+Gregorio, the temporal Governor
+
+Don Bernardino de Cardenas first saw the light in the town of La
+Plata,[115] capital of the province of Charcas in Bolivia, or, as it
+was then called, Alta Peru. The date of his birth is uncertain, but it
+would appear to have been in the early years of the seventeenth
+century. At an early age he entered the Franciscan Order.
+
+As the Franciscans had had the honour of having furnished to the
+calendar the first saint canonized in the New World, it seems to have
+been the dream of Cardenas from his earliest youth to emulate him. In
+this desire he seems to have acted in good faith, and all his life the
+dream of saintship haunted him. Charlevoix[116] says ‘he made a rather
+superficial study of theology, and then engaged in preaching, in which,
+with memory, assurance, and facility, he found it easy to succeed in a
+country where brilliant gifts are more esteemed than solid learning.’
+Certainly a preacher without assurance, memory, and facility would
+scarcely have succeeded in any country; and in what country in the
+world is brilliancy not far esteemed above the deepest scholarship?
+Besides, ‘he was a man of visions (_homme à visions_) and revelations,
+which he took good care to publish.’ Visions are generally, in the case
+of saints, confined to the soul’s eye, and revelation to the inward
+ear; if, therefore, the recipient of them does not make them known,
+they run the risk of being lost. In a word, according to
+Charlevoix,[117] he was ‘one of the most complete and dangerous
+ecstatics that ever lived.’ ‘His first successes’ (whether as preacher
+or ecstatic are not specified) caused his superiors to name him
+guardian of their college of La Plata. They soon repented of their
+choice. No sooner was he named Superior than he sought to qualify
+himself for saintship by a sort of royal road. Saints are of several
+classes, and, in looking through the calendars, it strikes one how
+different seem to have been the methods by which they severally
+attained their goal.
+
+Prince Juan Manuel, in the preface to his ‘Fifty Pleasant Stories of
+Patronio’, says that, ‘amongst the many strange things our Lord God
+made, He thought good to make one marvellous in special—that is, that,
+of the numberless men who are on earth, not one entirely resembles any
+other in his face.’ He might have said the same of saints and of their
+ways. One, like St. Francis of Assisi, treats his father (as it seems
+to me) but scurvily, and yet to every other created man and all the
+animals he is a brother. The saint of Avila founds convents, mingles
+with men of business, and has visions in the intervals of her
+journeying through Spain upon an ass. Again, another preaches to the
+Indians or the Japanese, gives up his substance, begs his bread from
+door to door, and leaves the devil’s advocate scarcely a quillet or a
+quiddity against him. Lastly, you find against the names of some merely
+the docket ‘virgin’ or ‘martyr’, as their case or sex may serve.
+
+Don Bernardino adopted none of these methods of procedure. Carrying a
+heavy cross, with ashes on his head and shoulders bared, followed by
+all his priests, he sallied out one day to discipline himself in
+public. This plan did not succeed with all the world, for his superiors
+ordered him to remain inside his convent gates. There he remained, and,
+as his Life informs us, profited by his retreat to study Holy
+Scriptures, and to such good effect that, the next time he preached, he
+charmed his hearers by his eloquence. Soon after this the Archbishop of
+La Plata held a provincial council, with the object of reforming the
+morals of the Indians in his diocese. Cardenas, being a fluent speaker,
+was chosen for the post of Apostolic Missionary. From this time dates
+the beginning of his fame.
+
+In those days all the Indians of the Charcas, and generally of all
+Peru, were sunk in misery, but little removed from slaves, and their
+religion was a mixture of Christianity and paganism—just the kind of
+folk a fluent preacher of the style of Cardenas could work upon. All
+through the province he made his apostolic progress, preaching,
+converting, and confessing, everywhere preceded by his fame as seer of
+visions, miracle-worker, and recipient of celestial light. He took his
+way, dressed like a pilgrim, on foot, carrying a wooden cross, and
+followed by a multitude of Indians from town to town.
+
+Religion in America (Catholic or Protestant) has always tended to
+revert to the original Eastern form, from which, no doubt, it sprung.
+The influence of the vast plains and forests, and the great distances
+to travel, have introduced the system of camp meetings amongst the
+Protestants, whereas the Catholics have often held a sort of ambulatory
+mission, the people of one village following the preacher to the next,
+and so on, in the same fashion as in Palestine the people seem to have
+followed John the Baptist.
+
+Soon the news was spread about that the Indians who followed Cardenas
+had told him of rich mines, on the condition that he would not divulge
+the secret to the Spaniards. At that time the search for mines was
+carried almost to madness in Peru. Even to-day, in almost every mining
+town, a mysterious, poverty-stricken man sometimes approaches you with
+great precaution, and, drawing from his pocket an object wrapped in
+greasy paper, declares with oaths that it is _rosicler_ (red silver
+ore), and that he knows where there are tons and tons of it. In Mexico
+the curious class of miners known as _gambusinos_ rove through the
+valleys of the Sierra Madre armed with pick and pan, passing their
+lives in hunting mines, as pigs hunt truffles. If they come upon a
+mine, they never try to work it, but sell the secret for a trifling
+sum, and, drinking out the money, start on again to find the mines
+worked by the Aztecs, till an Apache bullet or arrow stops them, their
+El Dorado still ahead, or they are found beside their pick and shovel
+dead of thirst.
+
+Neither in Mexico nor in Peru do things grow less in telling, and we
+may well suppose the stories of the mines the Indians told to Cardenas
+became colossal; for at last the Alcalde of Cochabamba wrote on the
+subject to the Count of Salvatierra, the Viceroy of Peru.
+
+As Charlevoix says, ‘it seemed as if it all worked to the advantage of
+the holy missionary, who, not content with saving souls, did not forget
+the interests of his native land.’ In the middle of his triumphs, being
+recalled to Lima, no one doubted that it was in order to confer with
+the Viceroy about the supposititious mines. Others, again, imagined
+that a mitre was destined for the successful evangelist, and therefore
+many, even quite poor people, pressed forward to offer funds to help
+him on his way. With quite apostolic assurance, he took all that was
+offered to him, being certain, as some think, that, the mines being
+real, he could some day repay with usury all he had borrowed, or, as
+others said, being indifferent about the matter, and trusting to repay
+in that better country where no usury exists and where no gold
+corrupts.
+
+The Viceroy, being a man of little faith, sent to investigate the
+supposititious mines, but found them non-existent.
+
+The superiors of Cardenas, as judicious as the higher officers of the
+Franciscan Order often proved themselves throughout America, informed
+him that he had given offence to many by his public scourgings and
+processions carrying a cross, and, most of all, that in his sermons
+propositions had escaped him of a nature likely to bring him under the
+censure of the Holy Office. A convent in Lima was assigned to him as a
+retreat and place of meditation on the virtues of submission and
+obedience.
+
+As we may well believe, no man who felt he had the stuff within himself
+to make a saint ever cared much for obedience or submission, except in
+others; so in his convent, instead of meditating on his faults, he
+passed his time in writing a memorial to the Council of the Indies,
+setting forth his views on the way in which to spread the gospel
+amongst the Indians. Nothing was better calculated to win him favour.
+Every Indian baptized was so much yearly gain to the Spanish
+Government.
+
+Conversion and taxation always went hand-in-hand, and therefore Indians
+who, unbaptized, brought nothing to the treasury, having received the
+Gospel truths, were taxed so much a head to show them that from
+thenceforth they were Christians. Thus, we find that in the Paraguayan
+missions each Indian paid a dollar every year as a sort of poll-tax,
+and most of the disputes between the Viceroys of Paraguay and the
+Jesuits arose from the number of the Indians taxable. The Viceroys
+always alleged that the population of the missions never increased, on
+account of the Jesuits returning false numbers to avoid the tax.
+
+Cardenas specially inculcated, in his memorial to the Council of the
+Indies, that it was not expedient to place the Indians under the
+regular clergy, a theory of which he himself was destined to become a
+great antagonist. Promotion, as we know, cometh neither from the east
+nor from the west; so it fell out that during his retreat, through the
+influence of his friend Don Juan de Solorzano, a celebrated lawyer, who
+had heard him preach when Governor of Guancavelico, he found himself
+named Bishop of Asuncion del Paraguay. This piece of luck opened the
+doors of his convent to him, and he repaired at once to Potosi to wait
+the arrival of the Papal Bull authorizing him to take possession of his
+bishopric. There he appeared in the habit of his Order, a little wooden
+cross upon his breast, and a green hat upon his head, a costume which,
+if not quite fitting to his new dignity, was at least suited to the
+Indian taste.
+
+His biographer informs us that, without a word to anyone, he began to
+preach and hear confessions. Being absolutely without resources, he was
+reduced to distribute indulgences and little objects of piety, and at
+the end of every sermon to send his green hat round the audience. His
+talent for preaching stood him in good stead, and after every sermon
+gifts were showered upon him, and a crowd accompanied him home.
+
+The priest of Potosi being just dead, Don Bernardino took his place
+without permission, and set himself up in the double character of
+parish priest and Bishop to hold a visitation throughout the diocese.
+
+Some people took this conduct as evidence of his saint-like humility in
+condescending, though a Bishop, to officiate as a mere priest. The
+Archbishop had a different opinion, but, as Don Bernardino had a great
+following, he thought it best to dissemble his resentment. Cardenas
+himself, by his imprudence, furnished the Archbishop with an excuse to
+get him out of the bishopric.
+
+A rich Indian, whom Cardenas confessed upon his death-bed, left him ten
+thousand crowns. Not content with that, he influenced one Diego Vargas
+to change his will and leave him money. On this the Archbishop wrote to
+him, requesting that he would go and govern his own see. He had to go,
+but left the town, which he had entered without a farthing, with a long
+train of mules carrying his money, plate, and furniture. Why he did not
+instantly go to Asuncion is not quite clear, for in America it was the
+custom, owing to the great distance from Rome, that Bishops, on receipt
+of the royal order of appointment, got themselves chosen by the chapter
+of their diocese to govern provisionally. Instead of doing that, he
+went to Tucuman, and thence to Salta, where he arrived in 1641.
+
+In Salta, his first visit was to the Jesuit college, where he laid his
+case before the Jesuit fathers, and showed them several letters, one
+from the Cardinal Antonio Barberini dated in 1638, and another from the
+King without a date, naming him Bishop of Asuncion. On the strength of
+these two letters he asked the Jesuits if he could get himself
+consecrated without the Papal Bulls. Charlevoix alleges that they dared
+not refuse to answer in the way he wished. Why this was so is not so
+easy to make out, as, even with his green hat and wooden cross, he
+could not at that time have been a formidable personage. Their written
+opinion he sent at once to the rector of the Jesuit college at Cordova,
+asking for his opinion and that of the doctors of the university. The
+answer reached him in Santiago del Estero, and was unfavourable. On
+reading the letter, Cardenas fell into a most unsaint-like fury, and
+tore it up without communicating it to anyone, not even to the Bishop
+of Tucuman, Don Melchior Maldonado. This was not strange, as he had
+counted on this Bishop to consecrate him.
+
+Notwithstanding what was at stake, he went on in the diocese of Tucuman
+just as he had done in that of Charcas, preaching, confessing, and
+celebrating Mass. Don Melchior Maldonado, a quiet man of no
+pretensions, wrote him a letter in which he said: ‘You came into my
+diocese like a St. Bernard; such is the reputation you have for
+holiness and preaching that my people pay me no respect, and only look
+on me as a man of common virtue and mediocre talents. Although I hope I
+am not jealous, still, I must remind you that you act as if you were
+St. Paul.’
+
+A Bishop of common virtue and of mediocre talents is, of course, a
+Bishop lost, and one can well conceive that poor Don Melchior Maldonado
+was placed in an unpleasant position during the stay of Cardenas in his
+diocese. Such were Don Bernardino’s powers of persuasion that at last
+the Bishop consecrated him. The ceremony was hardly over, when a letter
+arrived from the Rector of the University of Cordova advising Bishop
+Maldonado against the consecration. Unluckily for Paraguay, it was too
+late to undo the action, and Cardenas was now in a position to take
+possession of his see. Poor Melchior Maldonado, Bishop of Tucuman, had,
+as it happened, laid hands a little hastily upon the candidate. The
+Council of Trent pronounced upon the case, and found ‘that the
+consecration of the Bishop of Paraguay had been a valid one as touching
+the sacrament (ordination), and the impression of the character, but
+that it had been void as regards the power of discharging the functions
+attaching to the dignity, and that the Bishop and his consecrator had
+need of absolution, which the same holy congregation thinks ought to be
+accorded with the good pleasure of the Pope.’ As the same holy
+congregation had previously declared the taking possession of the
+diocese by Cardenas had been illegal, it is difficult for ordinary
+minds to grasp their real opinion of the case.
+
+Finding that he had failed with the University of Cordova, Don
+Bernardino took his way to Santa Fé, from whence he wrote an insulting
+letter to the poor rector. The letter was conceived in such outrageous
+terms that the Bishop of Tucuman wrote in expostulation, saying he
+expected to see something extraordinary happen in Paraguay if he gave
+way to such excess of passion.
+
+Don Bernardino’s usual luck attended him in Santa Fé. This town then
+formed part of the diocese of Buenos Ayres, though situated about four
+hundred miles from the metropolis. It happened that the see of Buenos
+Ayres was vacant, and the chapter of the cathedral invited Cardenas to
+visit that portion of the diocese through which he had to pass.
+Cardenas was, of course, delighted to show his talents for preaching,
+as he had done before in Charcas and in Potosi. When he arrived at
+Corrientes the enthusiasm for his holiness and talents was
+extraordinary. In Corrientes, Don Bernardino seems to have felt, for
+the first time, his calling and election really sure. At the time he
+landed (1642) the land was sunk in ignorance and superstition. Even
+to-day in Corrientes (the city of the seven currents), situated just at
+the junction of the rivers Paraná and Paraguay, close to the celebrated
+missions of the Jesuits, the inhabitants, living in a country almost
+tropical, are half Indians in type.
+
+What Corrientes looked like in Don Bernardino’s time is matter of
+conjecture. Perhaps it was not greatly different from some remote
+Spanish-American frontier towns some five-and-twenty years ago, save
+for the groups of Spanish soldiery, with their steel morions, trunk
+hose and heavy arquebuses lounging about, and in the matter of the
+scarcity of horses in the streets. No doubt the self-same listless air
+hung over everything, and in the place of the modern blue and white
+barred flags with a rising sun or cap of liberty stuck like a
+trade-mark in the corner, the blood and orange Spanish colours with the
+quarterings of castles and of lions flapped heavily against the
+flagstaff of the fort. The Indian women dressed all in white, their
+hair cut square across the forehead and hanging down their backs, sat
+with their baskets of fruit and flowers in the market-place. The town,
+as now, built chiefly of adobes, with a few wooden huts dotted about,
+was semi-oriental in design. On every church were cupolas after the
+eastern fashion, flat roofs on every house, and everything shone
+dazzling white against the dark, metallic-looking foliage of the trees.
+The streets, as now, were sandy water-courses, crossed here and there
+with traverses of rough-hewn stone to break the force of the water in
+the season of the rains.
+
+At night the fireflies glistened amongst the heavy leaves of the
+mamayes and the orange-trees, whilst from the Chaco rose the mysterious
+voices of the desert night, and from the outskirts of the town the
+wailing Indian Jarabis and Cielitos sung in a high falsetto key to the
+tinkling of a cracked guitar, but broken now and then by the sharp
+warning cry ‘Alerta centinela!’ of the soldiers on the walls. Could one
+have landed there, one would have felt much as a sailor feels, dropped
+on the beach of Eromango or on some yet unbemissionaried island of the
+Paumotus Group.
+
+Embarking from Corrientes up the river Paraguay, the Bishop met two
+vessels sent from Asuncion to do him honour. When night approached he
+put in practice one of the manœuvres which in Peru had stood him in
+good stead. On every side a swarm of launches and canoes accompanied
+the ship to see the Bishop, whom already many believed a saint. He
+asked them all to retire a little from his ship. All did so but the
+guard of honour sent from Asuncion. Towards the middle of the night the
+sound of scourging wakened them. It was their Bishop trying to prepare
+himself for the duties that awaited him. Every succeeding night the
+same thing happened. During the day he celebrated Mass pontifically
+upon the deck. Voyages upon the river Paraguay before the days of
+steamers took a considerable time, especially as every night the custom
+was to anchor or to make fast the vessel to a tree. Soon the rumour
+reached Asuncion that a second St. Thomas was on his way to visit them.
+St. Thomas, as is said, once visited Paraguay, and a cave in the
+vicinity of a town called Paraguari, where he once lived, exists to-day
+to prove the passage of the saint.
+
+Fate seemed determined that the Bishop should always meet the Jesuits,
+no matter where he went.
+
+Becoming weary of the slow progress of the ships, he disembarked four
+leagues below Asuncion, at a farm belonging to the Company. He managed
+to dissemble his resentment so perfectly that no one knew he had a
+grudge against them. Arrived at the capital, he went at once to the
+church of San Blas, then to the Cathedral, where he celebrated Mass and
+preached, his mitre on his head. After service he dismissed the people
+to their homes to dine, saying, however, that he himself was nourished
+by an invisible food and by a beverage which men could not perceive.
+‘My food’ (he said) ‘is but to do the work and will of Him who sent
+me.’ Therefore he remained in prayer and meditation until vespers, and
+that office finished, he retired to the palace accompanied by a
+shouting crowd.
+
+In his position his conduct was most adroit, for, as his Bulls had not
+arrived, he must have known he had no legal status, and that, in
+default of that, he had to conquer public sympathy. The chapter never
+doubted that Don Bernardino would place himself entirely in their hands
+as his Bulls had not arrived. He, however, seems to have thought that
+the act of celebrating Mass pontifically in the Cathedral had put him
+in possession of his powers. So he named one Cristobal Sanchez as his
+Vicar-General. Two of the members of the chapter, Don Diego Ponce de
+Leon and Don Fernando Sanchez, remonstrated, but a considerable portion
+of the chapter sided with Cardenas. The stronger party left the
+Cathedral and celebrated Mass in the church belonging to the Jesuits,
+thus giving Cardenas a second cause of offence against the Company.
+
+The Bishop, not being secure of his position, had recourse to every
+art[118] to catch the public eye: fasting and scourging, prayers before
+the altar, two Masses every day, barefoot processions—himself the
+central figure, carrying a cross—each had their turn. Along the deep
+red roads between the orange-gardens which lead from Asuncion towards
+the Recoleta and the Campo Grande, he used to take his way accompanied
+by Indians crowned with flowers, giving his benediction as he passed,
+to turn away (according to himself) the plague and to insure a fertile
+harvest. Not being content with the opportunities which life afforded,
+he instituted an evening service in a church in order to prepare for
+death.
+
+Soon, as was to be expected in such a country, this service proved the
+occasion of much scandal, and, instead of showing people how to leave
+the world, became the means of introducing many into life in a
+clandestine way. The rector of the Jesuit college thought it his duty
+to inform the Bishop; but he, like all good men, thought nothing bad
+could spring from anything that he himself originated. No doubt he put
+it down to malice, as good people will when worldlings put the finger
+on the weak spot of a religious institution; but anyhow, regardless of
+the scandals, he continued his nocturnal rites.
+
+The Governor of Paraguay at that time was one Gregorio de Hinostrosa,
+an officer born in Chile, an honest, pious, wooden-headed man, and much
+beloved by the inhabitants of Paraguay. On his arrival Don Bernardino
+tried to conciliate him. Unluckily, a friendship with the Bishop was
+impossible without a blind submission to his will. In the beginning all
+was flattery; when Don Gregorio attended Mass, the Bishop used to meet
+him at the church door. Not to be outdone, the Governor returned the
+Bishop’s politeness in a similar way, but went so far in his
+complaisance that Don Bernardino ceased to respect him. Soon there
+arose bickerings and jealousies, and at length they hated one another
+fervently.
+
+Nor was the Bishop more successful with his clergy. Some of them
+laughed at his pretensions to be a saint, and called him an ambitious
+schemer. Again, amongst the laity, many did not quite understand his
+habit of celebrating two Masses every day. He answered that he never
+celebrated without releasing a soul from purgatory, and that there had
+been saints who celebrated nine Masses every day, and, moreover, that
+he was Pope in his own diocese. This cut the ground from under the feet
+of his detractors, for in a town of the calibre of Asuncion the people
+looked on a service in a church as a welcome means of getting through
+the day, and had he celebrated a dozen masses they would but have been
+more delighted with their new Bishop.
+
+Under the pretext that there were not enough priests to serve the
+churches, he, by degrees, took several parishes into his own hands, and
+went from church to church to celebrate his Mass in each, whilst not
+forgetting to draw the various stipends for his work. But, not content
+with this, he began to ordain young men who knew no Latin, and even
+criminals, setting forth the view that ordination was a sort of second
+baptism, which purged all crimes—a most convenient theory, and one
+which is not half enough insisted on in these degenerate days.
+
+The position of Asuncion gave him an opportunity of an almost unique
+kind to show his talents in another sphere. Across the river Paraguay,
+there about one mile broad, extends the country called the Chaco, a
+vast domain of swamp and forest, inhabited in those days, as at
+present, by tribes of wandering Indians. From the city walls, whilst
+listening to the church-bells, one can see the smoke of Indian
+encampments across the river only a mile away.
+
+Of all the Indian tribes in the time of Cardenas, the most ferocious
+were the Guaycurús. The Jesuits had laboured almost in vain amongst
+them. Missions had been founded, and all gone well for months, and even
+years, when on a sudden, and without reason, the Guaycurús had burned
+the houses, killed the priests, and gone back to the wilds. From Santa
+Fé up to the province of Matto Grosso they kept the frontier in a
+turmoil, crossing the river and feeding like locusts on the settlements
+in Paraguay.
+
+Not long before his arrival the Guaycurús had intimated their intention
+of holding a conference with Don Gregorio Hinostrosa. Don Bernardino
+thought the chance too good to lose, and at once declared that, as a
+Bishop, it was his place to carry on negotiations with the barbarians.
+Dressed in his robes and with an escort furnished by the Governor, he
+met the chiefs—who no doubt looked on him as a new kind of
+medicine-man—preached to them through an interpreter, curiously being
+without the gift of tongues, but notwithstanding that a reasonable
+number of them were baptized. On his return, he wrote to the King that
+by his efforts he had appeased the most ferocious Indians within his
+Majesty’s domains.
+
+Within a week the Guaycurús surprised and burned a settlement a little
+higher up the stream. Not content with this Caligulesque apostolate to
+the Guaycurús, the Bishop longed for serious occupation, and caused it
+to be rumoured about the city that he did nothing except by the direct
+authority of the Holy Ghost, an allegation hard to confute, and if
+allowed, likely to lead to difficulties even in Paraguay.
+
+Some years before the advent of Don Bernardino the Dominicans had built
+a convent in Asuncion. As they had no license to build, they were in
+the position of religious squatters on the domain of God. The citizens
+had applied to the Audiencia of Charcas, the supreme court on all such
+matters in South America, situated, with true Spanish unpracticality,
+in one of the most secluded districts of the continent. The Audiencia
+had refused the license, but had taken the matter _ad advisandum_ for
+ten years. To take a matter into consideration for ten years, even in
+Spain or South America, where the law’s delay is generally more mortal
+than in any other country, was as good as giving a permission. So the
+Dominicans construed it, and no one dreamed of now molesting them.
+
+One day the Bishop, dressed in his robes, proceeded from his palace to
+the convent, informing the Governor that he wanted him to meet him
+there. Entering the convent church, he took the sacrament from off the
+altar and stripped the church of all its ornaments, setting a gang of
+workmen to demolish both the convent and the church. When the work was
+over, he went to a neighbouring church, and then and there, without
+confession, celebrated Mass, remarking to the faithful that there was
+no need for him to make confession, as he was satisfied of the
+condition of his conscience. Some murmured; but the greater portion of
+the people, always ready to take a saint at his own valuation, were
+delighted with his act. Doubts must have crossed his mind, as shortly
+afterwards he wrote to Don Melchior Maldonado, Bishop of Tucuman, for
+his opinion. That Bishop answered rather tartly that his zeal appeared
+to him to savour more of the zeal of Elias than of Jesus Christ, and
+that in a country where churches were so few it seemed imprudent to
+pull down rather than to build. ‘However,’ he added, ‘my light is not
+so brilliant as the light your lordship is illumined by.’
+
+When once a man is well convinced that all he does comes from the Holy
+Ghost, there is but little that he cannot do with satisfaction to
+himself. Self-murderers, according to the custom of those times, were
+not allowed admission into holy ground, as if the fact of having found
+their life unbearable debarred them from the right to be considered
+men. Such a man a few years previously had been buried at a cross-road.
+It now occurred to Cardenas to have a special revelation on the
+subject; and, curiously enough, this special revelation was on the side
+of common-sense. ‘This body,’ said the Bishop, ‘is that of a Christian,
+and I feel pretty sure his soul is now in bliss.’ He gave no reason for
+his opinion, as is the way of most religious folk, but, as he had
+special means of communication with heaven, most people were contented.
+Incontinently he had the corpse dug up and buried in the church of the
+Incarnation, himself performing all the funeral rites.
+
+Although a miracle or two would have shocked nobody, still, in the
+matter of the suicide he had gone too far for the simple people of the
+place. They murmured, and for a moment the Bishop’s prestige was in
+jeopardy; but in the nick of time his Bulls arrived, brought by his
+nephew, Pedro de Cardenas, who, like himself, was a Franciscan friar.
+This saved him, and gave the people something new to think of, though
+at the same time he incurred a new anxiety.
+
+In the Bulls there was a passage to the effect that, if at his
+consecration any irregularity had been incurred, he was liable to
+suspension from all his functions. This the Jesuit who translated the
+documents into Spanish for the purpose of publication drew his
+attention to. However, Cardenas was not a man to be intimidated by so
+small a matter, but read the translation to the people in the
+Cathedral, and intimated to them that the Pope had given him unlimited
+power in Paraguay, both in matters spiritual and temporal.
+
+Though Don Gregorio, the Governor, was present at the ceremony, he made
+no protest at the assumption of temporal power by Cardenas. He had
+remarked it, though, and secretly determined to show him that his
+pretensions were unfounded. His nephew, Don Pedro de Cardenas,
+furnished the occasion. This young man had been despatched to Spain to
+get the Bulls. Upon the voyage he seems to have conducted himself with
+scant propriety. On his return, when passing Corrientes, he took on
+board a lady whom Charlevoix, quite in the spirit of the author of the
+Book of Proverbs, describes as ‘une jeune femme bien faite’. Having
+some qualms of conscience, he put on a secular dress, and on nearing
+Asuncion put his religious habit over it. In such a climate this double
+costume must have been inconvenient, and why he should have worn one
+dress above the other does not appear. His uncle, in his delight at the
+forthcoming of the Bulls, most probably paid little attention to his
+appearance. He lodged him in the palace, and assigned him a prebendary
+which was vacant. Where the ‘jeune femme bien faite’ was lodged is not
+set down, and the people of Asuncion no doubt looked leniently on such
+affairs, as does society to-day in England. After his usual fashion,
+the Bishop set all down to calumny.
+
+About this time the Governor had put in prison one Ambrosio Morales, a
+sub-official of the Inquisition, who had had a quarrel with an officer.
+Cardenas, being informed of this, could not lose so good a chance of
+exercising the power he arrogated in temporal affairs. Holding a
+monstrance in his hands, he went to the prison and asked for the
+prisoner, placing the monstrance on a table at the prison gate. The
+rector of the Jesuit college came and expostulated with him, saying
+that it was not fitting to expose the body of Jesus Christ in such a
+place, and that it was not decent that the Bishop himself should stay
+there. Considering his position, and the times in which he lived, it
+seems the rector was judicious in his expostulation. Cardenas replied
+that he would stay there till the prisoner was released. The rector,
+knowing him to be as obstinate as a male mule, went and begged the
+Governor to let Morales out. This he did at once, and then the Bishop,
+cross in hand, returned in triumph to the palace with the rescued
+Inquisitor following amongst his train. The people, whose lives were
+dull, snatched at the opportunity for some amusement, and said that it
+was good luck the Governor and Bishop were not always of one mind, for
+that their agreement had caused the demolition of a church and convent,
+and their quarrel the setting of a prisoner free.
+
+This little triumph emboldened the Bishop to go further. He admitted
+Morales into minor orders, gave him the tonsure, and thus, having
+placed him above the temporal power, enabled him to brave the Governor
+openly. The Bishop’s nephew, taking the Governor’s kindness for
+weakness, broke publicly into insulting terms about him. The Governor’s
+brother, Father Hinostrosa, pressed him to vindicate his dignity, but
+he refused, saying he wanted peace at any price. This policy the Bishop
+did not understand, for all concessions he set down as weakness, and
+they encouraged him to fresh exactions and more violence.
+
+Dining with the Governor, the Bishop chanced to see upon the table a
+fine pair of silver candlesticks. To see and to desire with Cardenas
+was to ask, and so he intimated to the Governor his wish to have them.
+The Governor, thinking, perhaps, to wipe out the remembrance of the
+difficulty about Morales, sent them to the palace with his compliments.
+The Bishop took the present, and, turning to the man who brought them,
+said, ‘I should now be quite content if I only had the silver ewer and
+flagon which I noticed in your master’s house.’ The Governor, we may
+suppose, on hearing this made what the Spaniards call ‘la risa del
+conejo’; but sent the plate and a message, saying all his house
+contained was at the Bishop’s service. Don Bernardino, who, though he
+may have been a saint, as his friends proclaimed, was certainly far
+from a gentleman, sent for the flagon and the ewer, which he received
+at once, together with a friendly message from the Governor.
+
+But even this free-will offering brought no quiet, for a new quarrel
+soon arose between the Bishop and the unlucky wielder of the temporal
+power. The Society of the Holy Sacrament enjoyed an _encomienda_ at or
+near Asuncion. The Bishop, no doubt thinking he was most fitted to
+indoctrinate the Indians, endeavoured to persuade the Governor to get
+the Society of the Holy Sacrament to make their Indians over to
+himself. The Governor, who knew his fellow-countrymen, flatly refused,
+and upon this Don Bernardino fell into a fury, and reproached him with
+such bitterness that Don Gregorio, too, overstepped the bounds of
+prudence, and threw the conduct of his nephew with the ‘jeune femme
+bien faite’ into the Bishop’s teeth.
+
+Hell has been said to have no fury equal to a woman scorned, but a
+Bishop thwarted makes a very tolerable show. Don Bernardino was one of
+those who think an insult to themselves carries with it a challenge to
+God, an outrage on religion, and generally conceive the honour of
+Heaven is attacked by any contradiction of themselves. To animadvert
+upon the actions of a Bishop’s nephew is as bad as heresy—far worse
+than simony—and the man who does it cannot but be a heretic at heart.
+So, at least, Don Bernardino thought; for, with candle, bell, and book,
+and what was requisite, he excommunicated the poor Governor, and
+declared him incompetent to bear the royal standard in a religious
+festival which was shortly to take place. Excommunication was at least
+as serious then as bankruptcy is now, though in Spanish America it did
+not carry with it such direful consequences as in European States.
+
+Not wishing to use force, the Governor yielded the point, and did not
+trouble the procession. His moderate conduct gained him many partisans,
+and put many people against the Cardenas. The nephew, Pedro de
+Cardenas, thought it a good occasion to insult the Governor in public;
+so one day in the street he followed him, casting reflections on his
+mother and his female relatives. Don Gregorio, who was a man of tried
+courage, having served for years against the Indians of Arauco, the
+bravest race of all the Indians of America, controlled his temper, and,
+turning to the young Franciscan, said, ‘Go with God, my father; but do
+not try me any more.’ It was not to be expected that in those times and
+such a place a man like Don Gregorio de Hinostrosa, who had passed his
+life upon the frontiers, and who held supreme authority, would quietly
+submit to such a public insult; so one night he appeared at the
+Bishop’s palace, accompanied by soldiers, to arrest Don Pedro. Out came
+Cardenas, and excommunicated the Governor and all his soldiers on the
+spot, and Don Pedro pointed a pistol at his head. He, seeing himself
+obliged either to make a public scandal or retire, being for peace at
+any price, retired, and the triumphant Bishop published his edict of
+excommunication, which he extended with a fine of fifty crowns to every
+soldier who had been present at the scene. On reflection, thinking,
+perhaps, it was unwise to excommunicate so many soldiers, who might be
+needed to repel an Indian attack, he sent and told the Governor he was
+ready to absolve him upon easy terms. The Governor, who had made light
+of the first excommunication, was rather staggered when he found the
+second posted at the Cathedral door. And now a comedy ensued; for Don
+Gregorio went to the Bishop, and on his knees asked for forgiveness.
+He, taken unawares, also knelt down, and, when the Governor kissed his
+hand, wished to return the compliment, and would have done so had the
+rector of the Jesuit college not prevented him.
+
+As Charlevoix says, ‘to see them on their knees, no one could have
+imagined which one it was who asked the other’s grace.’ The Bishop
+granted absolution to the Governor; but the soldiers’ action had been
+flat sacrilege at least, for every one of them was forced to pay the
+fine.
+
+Two excommunications in a week were almost, one would think, enough to
+satisfy a Pope; but having nominated one Diego Hernandez, a Portuguese,
+to the post of Alguacil Mayor of the Inquisition, and given him the
+right to wear a sword in virtue of his office, the Governor, meeting
+the man in the street wearing a sword against his regulations, made him
+a prisoner. At once Don Bernardino launched another excommunication.
+But this time he had gone too far; the Governor laughed at his thunder,
+and condemned the prisoner to be hanged. At his wits’ end, the Bishop
+sent a servant to the man, and told him to fear nothing, for that, if
+he suffered death, he was a martyr, and that he himself would preach
+his funeral sermon. The Governor, who was perhaps a humorist, laughed
+at the message, which, he said, was not consoling, and then himself let
+Hernandez out of prison under heavy bail. The excommunication was then
+taken off, and peace once more reigned in Asuncion.
+
+As well as being not given to wine, it is essential that a Bishop shall
+know how to keep his own counsel—as Lorenzo Gracian expresses it,[119]
+‘not to lie, but not for that to speak out always the whole truth.’
+Everyone who knew the Bishop and his hasty temper was astonished at his
+behaviour to the Jesuits. No one imagined he had forgotten the attitude
+the rector of the University of Cordova had assumed towards his
+consecration, and still the Bishop seemed to show more favour to the
+Jesuits in Asuncion than to the members of the other religious
+communities. Perhaps he felt the want of partisans amongst the educated
+classes, for his quarrel with the Governor had lost him many friends.
+Certainly in Asuncion it was of great importance that the Jesuits
+should not declare against him openly.
+
+He praised them fulsomely both in the pulpit and in conversation, went
+in procession to their church, and treated them in public with marked
+consideration. As a contemporaneous Jesuit has left a record, they were
+not his dupes, but still endeavoured to live up to the praises he
+dispensed to them. He went so far as in a letter to the King, Philip
+IV., to say that the Jesuits only in all Paraguay were really fitted to
+have the care of Indians, and he advised the King to transfer the
+Indians who were under other religious bodies, as well as those under
+the secular clergy, to the care and guidance of that Order. No doubt in
+this the Bishop was right, even if not sincere. One of the
+qualifications the Jesuits had for the care of Indians was that the
+Indians did not look on them as Spaniards.
+
+As in the same way that in Matabeleland, perhaps, a German, Frenchman,
+or Italian is less hateful to the natives than an Englishman, so in
+Paraguay the Indians liked the Jesuits better than the other Orders,
+for there were many foreigners amongst their ranks. The Jesuits soon
+comprehended that the Bishop wished to make them odious to the public
+by overpraise. To set to work in such a manner almost requires an early
+training in a seminary, and that such tactics should have been put in
+force against such skilled diplomatists as were the Jesuits argues no
+ordinary capacity for diplomatic work in Cardenas. With him, however,
+the Spanish proverb, ‘Betwixt the word and deed the space is great’,
+had little application. The vicar of a place called Arecayá, close to
+Asuncion, had fallen into disgrace; the Bishop removed him from his
+parish, and asked the rector of the Jesuit college to send a priest to
+take his place. The answer he received was politic, and to the effect
+that there was no Jesuit who could be spared, and even if there was it
+ill-befitted any Jesuit to infringe upon the duties of the secular
+clergy; but that, if Cardenas intended to found a new reduction with
+all the privileges that the King had always given to that kind of
+establishment, the rector himself would ask permission from his
+Provincial to undertake the work. A splendid answer, and one which
+proved that the man who gave it was a man wasted in Paraguay, and that
+his place by rights was Rome or, at the least, some court.
+
+Don Bernardino, who in matters such as these was quite as cunning as
+the rector, thanked him, and said he did not want a saint, but a priest
+to take the duty of another priest for a short time. The rector, seeing
+his diplomacy had failed, told Father Mansilla, who was at Itatines, to
+transfer himself to Arecayá, and, writing to the Bishop, told him that
+he had no doubt Mansilla would do all that was fitting in the case. The
+Bishop, who had gained his point and saw no further use for diplomacy,
+said: ‘Of that I am quite sure, and if he does not I shall
+excommunicate him, and lay the district of the Itatines under an
+interdict.’ Nothing appeared to give Don Bernardino such unmitigated
+pleasure as an excommunication; on the slightest protest he was ready,
+so that during his episcopate someone or other in Asuncion must have
+always been under the ban of Holy Mother Church. The rector felt
+instinctively that Don Bernardino had not done with him. This was the
+case, for soon another order came to send two Jesuits to undertake the
+guidance of a mission near Villa Rica. As at the time the Jesuits had
+no missions near Villa Rica, the order was most unpleasant to him.
+Firstly, the two who went—Fathers Gomez and Domenecchi—had to leave
+their missions and undertake a lengthy journey in the wilds. On
+reaching Villa Rica, they found not only that the inhabitants looked on
+them with great disfavour as interlopers, but that the Indians, whom
+they were sent to guide, were under the _encomienda_ system, thus
+forcing them to wink at that which they disapproved. The resolution
+that they took did them great honour; it was to leave the town of Villa
+Rica and live out in the forests with the Indians.
+
+The Jesuits of the college at Asuncion felt the situation keenly.
+People began to murmur at them for their invasion of the spiritual
+domains of others, and the rector, in despair, sent to the Bishop, and
+begged him not to praise them in his sermons. Nothing cost Cardenas so
+little as to promise, so he promised not to mention them again, and
+next time that he preached he spent an hour in telling of the wonders
+that the Jesuits had done in saving souls, not only amongst Catholics,
+but also amongst the infidels and Turks. The tactics of the Bishop were
+so marked that at last a rumour reached Don Melchior Maldonado, the
+Bishop of Tucuman, of whom Don Bernardino always stood in dread. His
+letter somehow became public, and as in it he spoke most warmly of the
+Jesuits, and praised the rector, the public turned again upon their
+side. Just at this time, however, the sleeping feud between the Bishop
+and the Governor broke out anew with so much fury that attention was
+directed from the Jesuits for the time being; but on them the situation
+still was hung, and both sides made advances to them for support.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter V
+
+
+Renewal of the feud between the Bishop and Don Gregorio—Wholesale
+excommunications in Asuncion—Cardenas in 1644 formulates his celebrated
+charges against the Jesuits—The Governor, after long negotiations and
+much display of force, ultimately succeeds in driving out the
+Bishop—For three years Cardenas is in desperate straits—In 1648 Don
+Gregorio is suddenly dismissed, Cardenas elects himself Governor, and
+for a short time becomes supreme in Asuncion—The Jesuits are forced to
+leave the town and to flee to Corrientes—A new Governor is appointed in
+Asuncion—He defeats Cardenas on the field of battle—The latter is
+deprived of his power, and dies soon after as Bishop of La Paz
+
+The Governor, like a prudent soldier, was biding his time. The Bishop,
+not yet strong enough to walk alone, dared not break openly with the
+Jesuits. Don Pedro Cardenas still following up his evil courses, poor
+Don Gregorio Hinostrosa, accustomed all his life to deal with ‘officers
+and gentlemen’, thought fit to bring this under his uncle’s notice. The
+Bishop spoke to his nephew in a paternal fashion, enjoining certain
+penances upon him, and amongst others that he was to kiss the earth.
+Although Don Pedro Cardenas was not a man accustomed to lavish kisses
+on things inanimate, he complied, but, though complying, still pursued
+his vicious course.
+
+Quite in the manner of King Charles (of pious memory), the Governor
+determined to arrest the recalcitrant with his own hand. Armed to the
+teeth, and with a band of musketeers accompanying him, he appeared
+before the convent of St. Francis, where Father Cardenas had taken
+refuge, and, dragging him from his bed, haled him incontinently to the
+river’s bank, and left him gagged and bound, a prey to flies and sun,
+for two whole days, dressed in his drawers and shirt. On the third day
+he was embarked in a canoe for Corrientes, with a small quantity of
+jerked beef for all provision, and a woman’s cloak wrapped round his
+shoulders to shield him from the cold. Not quite the guise in which a
+clergyman would care to appear before the eyes of his superiors, even
+in Paraguay. Naturally, the Bishop, having nothing else to do, got out
+his excommunication in his usual style, but no man marked him.
+
+Meantime Asuncion was in confusion, the Bishop and the Governor keeping
+no measure with the other man of sin. One tried to obtain possession of
+the other’s person to throw him into prison; the other strove to
+animate the preachers in the various churches to consign his rival’s
+soul to hell. In the deserted streets drums thundered, whilst in the
+air bells jangled, and the quiet, sleepy town was rent in twain by the
+dissensions of the opposing powers. The churches closed their doors,
+and the consolations of religion were withdrawn from those who wanted
+them.
+
+To add to the confusion, Don Pedro Cardenas escaped from Corrientes,
+and, having taken to himself a companion—one Francisco Sanchez de
+Carreras—raged through the city like a devil unchained. In his
+extremity, the poor Bishop went to the Jesuits for advice, informing
+them he could not stand the scandals that were taking place, and that
+he intended to leave the city after launching an interdict of
+excommunication upon all. Placed in the position of declaring openly
+either for Bishop or for Governor, the Jesuits refused an answer,
+knowing that anything they said would be brought up against them. All
+their advice to him was, ‘to trust in God, to persevere in his good
+efforts, to resign himself to divine will, which will, as the Bishop
+knew full well, worked sometimes in a mysterious fashion for the
+welfare of the soul.’ The Bishop answered this advice ‘_fort
+sèchement_’,[120] taking it for a reproach, and as a sort of thing not
+to be tolerated amongst professionals—as if one lawyer, having gone to
+another for his advice upon a private matter, had received for answer a
+lecture on conveyancing or a short treatise upon Roman Law.
+
+Still, the occasion called for something to be done; so, calling an
+Indian servant, he stripped to the waist, and, to the horror and
+amazement of the public, appeared with naked feet and shoulders,
+dressed in a sack and armed with a heavy scourge. At the first blow he
+gave himself some canons of the Cathedral begged him to desist; but he,
+after prayer, replied that he intended, so to speak, to act as his own
+Pascal lamb, and wipe out the affront done to St. Francis in his
+unworthy blood.
+
+A naked Bishop in a sack is almost sure to attract some observation
+even in Paraguay. Religious women not unfrequently have been attracted
+by such a spectacle, and so it proved on this occasion. Although the
+Jesuits and the saner portion of the population blamed the Bishop’s
+action, he made himself a host of partisans amongst the women of all
+classes, who followed him as they have often followed other
+thaumaturgists in times present and gone by.
+
+His friend Don Melchior Maldonado, hearing what had passed, wrote to
+reprove him for his inconsiderate zeal. In his epistle he observed
+that, though some of the Apostles had scourged themselves, it was not
+their habit to appear half naked before a crowd of women; that our Lord
+Himself had not of His own accord taken off His garments for the
+scourger; that saints who scourged themselves had, as a general rule,
+chosen a private place for their self-discipline. This was quite
+reasonable, but the advice was little to the taste of the recipient,
+who hated criticism when levelled at himself.
+
+If crosses make a saint, about this time Don Bernardino had his full
+share of them. News came from Itatines, where the two Jesuits had been
+marooned, that both of them were ill. Cardenas, who, we may remember,
+was _homme à visions_, called in the rector of the Jesuit college to
+inform him that the Company of Jesus had a new martyr in their ranks.
+Though martyrs (even to-day) enter the ranks of General Loyola’s army
+pretty frequently, it still seemed strange that the Bishop should know
+of this particular recruit before the rector. Pressed for an
+explanation, he replied that a pious person who was vouchsafed
+communication with the Lord in prayer had seen Father Domenecchi in
+heaven shining in glory and with a halo round his head.
+
+Nothing could be more satisfactory. All the essentials of a
+well-attested miracle had been complied with. A man was dead, another
+man had seen the dead man in an ecstasy of prayer, and, to make all
+complete, refused to testify himself, sending the Bishop as a sort of
+pious phonograph. No true believer in such a case could doubt, and all
+went well till it appeared a man from Itatines, charged with a message
+to the Jesuit college, had passed the night before he gave his message
+at the Bishop’s house. In Holy Writ we read the wicked man shall have
+no rest; if this is so, it is as it should be, though generally the
+good seem just as troubled in their lives as the most erring of their
+brethren. He who would be a saint must be a-doing, year in, year out,
+just like a common workman, and Cardenas was no exception to the rule.
+
+The pseudo-miracle not having been quite a success, he turned to other
+fields, and summoned all the inhabitants of Paraguay to attend at the
+Cathedral upon a certain day. The Governor, thinking there was a
+revolution likely to break out, fixed a review of all the troops for
+the same date. A Jesuit priest waited upon the Bishop to persuade him
+that the crowds which would assemble might break the peace. The Bishop
+reassured him, and sent him to the Governor to say that his intention
+was to preach to the people and explain to them the faith; further,
+that he intended on that day to raise his excommunication and be
+reconciled: only he asked him to allow the troops to attend and hear
+his sermon. The crowd was great; the Bishop mounted the pulpit, and,
+extending his forefinger in the attitude of malediction so dear to
+Bishops, straight began to preach. For a time all went well. The
+Governor, presumably, was waiting for the circulation of the hat—that
+awful mystery which makes all sects kin—when to his horror Cardenas
+began to enumerate all his offences: he was anathema, was
+excommunicated, a disbeliever, and had endeavoured to cast down that
+which the Lord Himself had set on high. The Bishop then informed the
+crowd that God was angry with the Governor, talked about Moses, and
+dwelt with unction on the fact that the great lawgiver had been swift
+to slay.
+
+In a peroration which, no doubt, went home to all, he called upon his
+hearers, under penalty of a heavy fine and his displeasure, to seize
+the Governor, adding that if there was resistance ‘he should kill his
+brother, his friend, or his nearest relative.’[121] After these words
+he seized a banner from the hands of the astonished officer who stood
+nearest to him, and stood forth, like another Phineas, surrounded by
+his clergy, all of whom had arms beneath their cloaks.
+
+A most dramatic scene, and probably almost successful, had but the
+Bishop only reckoned with two things: Firstly, he had forgotten that
+the Governor was an old Indian fighter, and ready for surprises; and,
+secondly, he had not taken into account the usual apathy of the common
+people when their leaders fight. Dumbly and quite unmoved the people
+stood, staring like armadillos at a snake, and made no sign. Then word
+was brought that the Governor had left the church and was assembling a
+force of arquebusiers.
+
+Surrounded only by clergymen, Don Bernardino had to yield, and yielded
+like a Levite, with a subterfuge. He sent a priest to beg the
+magistrates to come to the Cathedral and reason with him. After a
+consultation this was done, and Cardenas consented to abate his fury
+and exhale his wrath. He said that Holy Writ itself gave leave to recur
+to force in self-defence (but did not quote the text), and that the
+Governor had meditated a like enterprise against himself; moreover,
+that, he being an excommunicated man, it became lawful for God’s
+vicegerent to lay hold on him.
+
+After the scene was over, and the Bishop was escorted back to his
+palace by the magistrates, a second letter came from Tucuman making
+plain his conduct to him after the manner of a friend. The rector of
+the Jesuits also thought fit to remonstrate, and say that Cardenas had
+gone too far in attempting to assume the temporal power. This sufficed
+to further strain the relations between the Bishop and the Jesuits.
+
+As, even in Asuncion in 1643, it was unusual that the Governor should
+remain for ever under the ban of Holy Mother Church, arbiters were
+chosen to discuss the matter, and provide means whereby the Bishop
+could conveniently climb down. The arbiters absolved the Governor on
+the condition that he paid a fine of four thousand arrobas[122] of
+_yerba maté_, which in money amounted to eight thousand crowns. Quite
+naturally, the Bishop refused to abide by the decision, replaced his
+adversary under the ban, and recommenced to preach against him with
+considerable force.
+
+The higgling of the market not having proved effectual in the
+adjustment of the sum to be paid by the Governor, a priest, one Juan
+Lozano, who had been condemned to imprisonment by his superiors for his
+loose life, and who had taken refuge with the Bishop, hit on a stroke
+of veritable genius. At a conference which took place between the
+Bishop and several notables of the place, including the rector of the
+Jesuits, Lozano gave it as his opinion that, if the Governor refused to
+pay, a general interdict should be proclaimed. The rector of the
+Jesuits retired indignantly, and ‘Père Lozano, retroussant sa robe le
+poursuivit en criant à pleine tête, et s’exprimant en des termes peu
+seans à sa profession.’[123] By this time Asuncion must have been like
+a madhouse, for no one seems to have been astonished, or even to have
+thought his conduct singular. The Bishop, always ready to take the
+worst advice, got ready for his task, and on Easter Eve embarked upon
+the river, leaving his Vicar-General under orders to proclaim the
+general ban. This was done, and the edict so contrived as to catch the
+luckless Governor in every church. The practical effect was to close
+all the churches, for to whatever church the Governor went the priest
+refused to celebrate the Mass. Several other persons were mentioned in
+the ban, which was posted up below a crucifix in the choir of the
+Cathedral. As Don Bernardino had omitted to state the particular
+offences for which they were condemned, the general confusion became
+intense, and no one attended Mass, so that the churches were deserted.
+After a little some of the churches opened in a clandestine manner,
+others remained closed, and the followers of the Bishop and the
+Governor alternately assembled in a rabble, and threw stones at all the
+churches, dispensing their favours quite impartially. The various
+religious Orders, not to be behindhand, also took sides, the Jesuits
+giving as their opinion that the Governor, not having a war upon his
+back, was really excommunicated; the Dominicans holding that the
+Bishop, in the general interest, ought to absolve him. He, armed with
+the opinion of the latter Order, marched to the dwelling of the
+Bishop’s Vicar-General, and, having nailed up both doors and windows,
+sent a trumpeter to tell him he should not leave his house till
+absolution had been granted. Still nothing came of it, and then the
+Governor did what he should have done at first: he sent a statement of
+the whole proceedings to the high court at Charcas. This high court
+(Audiencia) was situated right in the middle of what is now Bolivia,
+miles away from Lima, half a world from Paraguay, at least two thousand
+miles from Buenos Ayres, and separated from Chile by the whole
+Cordillera of the Andes. Even to-day the journey from Paraguay often
+exceeds a month.
+
+The Bishop, not to be outdone, also prepared a statement, in which he
+accused his adversary of all the crimes that he could think of, and
+confirmed his statement with an oath. The chapter, thinking things were
+in an impossible condition, besought that the fine laid on the
+excommunicated folk should be raised or lessened, as it appeared to
+them there was not money in the town to satisfy it. Cardenas refused,
+and thus four months elapsed. Soon after this arrived one Father
+Truxillo, of the Order of St. Francis, who came from Tucuman as
+Vice-Provincial. Cardenas, thinking, as they were both Franciscans,
+that Truxillo must needs be favourable to his cause, made him his
+Vicar-General, with power to bind and to unloose—that is, to free the
+excommunicated folk from all their disabilities if, on examination, it
+seemed good to him. Truxillo, who was quite unbiassed as to matters in
+Asuncion, looked into everything, and declared the Governor and
+everybody ought to be absolved. He further gave it as his opinion that,
+the affair having gone to the high court at Charcas, he could do
+nothing but give an interim decree. Don Bernardino heard the news at
+Itati, an Indian village a few miles outside Asuncion. From thence he
+went to a somewhat larger village called Yaguaron, and shut himself up
+in a convent, after declaring everyone (except the superior clergy)
+under the severest censure of the Church if they should dare approach.
+Not a bad place for prayer and meditation is Yaguaron. A score or two
+of little houses, built of straw and wood and thatched with
+palm-leaves, straggle on the hillside above the shores of a great
+camalote-covered[124] lake. Parrots scream noisily amongst the trees,
+and red macaws hover like hawks over the little patches of maize and
+mandioca planted amongst the palms. Round every house is set a grove of
+orange-trees, mingled with lemons, sweet limes, and guayabas. Inside
+the houses all is so clean that you could eat from any floor with less
+repulsion than from the plates at a first-class hotel. A place where
+life slips on as listless and luxuriant as the growth of a banana, and
+where at evening time, when the women of the place go to fetch water in
+a long line with earthen jars balanced upon their heads, the golden age
+seems less improbable even than in Theocritus. To Yaguaron the higher
+clergy flocked to intercede for the good people of Asuncion, all except
+Father Truxillo, who, knowing something of his Bishop, did not go. That
+he was wise, events proved shortly. Two canons—Diego Ponce de Leon and
+Fernando Sanchez—he imprisoned in their rooms, calling them traitors to
+their Bishop and their Church. Deputations came from the capital to beg
+for their release, but all in vain. The Bishop answered them that he
+had set his mind to purge his diocese of traitors; and the two canons
+remained in prison. After a detention which lasted forty days, they
+escaped and fled to Corrientes, which must have looked upon Asuncion as
+a vast madhouse. Truxillo, who seems to have been a man not quite so
+absolutely devoid of sense as the other clergy, endeavoured to organize
+a religious _coup d’état_; but, most unfortunately, a letter he had
+written to some of the saner clergy fell into the Bishop’s hands.
+Excommunications now positively rained upon the land. The Governor, the
+Jesuits, the Dominicans, each had their turn; but, curiously enough,
+the poorer people still stood firm to Cardenas, thinking, no doubt, a
+man who treated all the richer sort so harshly must do something for
+the poor. Nothing, however, was further from the thoughts of Cardenas,
+who thought the whole world circled round himself. The Bishop’s nephew
+having returned to Corrientes and his former naughty life, Don
+Bernardino, casting about for another secretary, came on one Francisco
+Nieto, an apostate from the Order of St. Francis, and living openly
+with an Indian woman, by whom he had a son. Him the Bishop made his
+chaplain, then his confessor; and poor Nieto found himself obliged to
+send his Indian wife away in spite of all his protests and his wish to
+live obscurely as he had been living before his elevation to the post
+of secretary. A veritable beachcomber Father Francisco Nieto seems to
+have been, and the type of many a European in Paraguay, who asks no
+better than to forget the tedium of our modern life and pass his days
+in a little palm-thatched hut lost in a clearing of a wood or near some
+lake.
+
+So in Asuncion things went from bad to worse. Such trade as then
+existed was at a standstill, and bands of starving people swarmed in
+the streets, whilst the incursions of the savage Indians daily became
+more frequent. In fact, Asuncion was but a type of what the world would
+be under the domination of any of the sects without the counterpoise of
+any civil power. The Governor, seeing the misery on every side,
+determined, like an honest man, to pocket up his pride and reconcile
+himself with Cardenas at any price. So, setting forth with all his
+staff, he came to Yaguaron. There, like a penitent, he had to bear a
+reprimand before the assembled village and engage to pay a fine before
+the rancorous churchman would relieve him from the ban. The weakness of
+the Governor had the effect that might have been expected, and heavy
+fines were laid on all and sundry who had in any manner displeased the
+Bishop or leaned to the other side in the course of the dispute.
+
+Right in the middle of the struggle between the clerical and lay
+authorities, a band of over three hundred Guaycurús appeared before the
+town. Unluckily, all the chief officers of the garrison were
+excommunicated, and thus incapable of doing anything to defend the
+place. Foolish as Cardenas most indubitably was, his folly did not
+carry him so far as to leave the capital of his diocese quite
+undefended. Still, he would not give way first, and only at the moment
+when the Indians seemed prepared to attack the town, at the entreaty of
+a ‘pious virgin’, he raised the excommunication on the Governor and his
+officers for fifteen days. The Governor, instead of, like a sensible
+man, seizing the Bishop and giving him to the _cacique_ of the
+Guaycurús, led out his troops and drove the Indians off. That very
+night he found himself once more under the censure of the Church, and
+the conflict with his opponent more bitter than at first. The Viceroy
+of Peru, the Marquis of Mancera, indignant at the weakness of the
+Governor, wrote sharply to him, reprimanding him and telling him at
+once to assert himself and force the Bishop to confine himself to
+matters spiritual. On the Governor’s attempt to reassert himself, the
+answer was a general interdict laying the entire capital under the
+Church’s ban. On this, he marched to Yaguaron with all his troops,
+resolved to take the Bishop prisoner; but he, seeing the troops
+approach, went out at once, fell on the Governor’s neck, and
+straightway absolved him.
+
+After the absolution came a banquet, which must have been a little
+constrained, one might imagine, and even less amusing than the
+regulation dinner-party of the London season, where one sits between
+two half-naked and perspiring women eating half-raw meat and drinking
+fiery wines with the thermometer at eighty in the shade. Thus
+disembarrassed from the Governor, Don Bernardino turned his attention
+to the Jesuits, and signified to them that he intended to take the
+education of the young out of their hands. This was a mortal affront to
+the Jesuits, as they have always understood that men, just as the other
+animals, can only learn whilst young. Hard upon this new step, Cardenas
+issued an edict forbidding them to preach or hear confessions. As for
+the Governor, the Bishop did not fear him, and the poorer people of
+Asuncion had always inclined to the Bishop’s party, either through
+terror of the Church’s ban or from their natural instinct that the
+Bishop was against the Government.
+
+But Cardenas saw clearly that, to deal as he wished with the Jesuits,
+he must entirely gain the Governor’s confidence. This he tried to do by
+sending to him one Father Lopez, Provincial of the Dominicans. This
+Lopez was an able and apparently quite honest man, for he told the
+Governor that the wish of Cardenas was to expel the Jesuits from
+Paraguay, and from their missions, warning him at the same time not to
+allow himself to be made use of by the Bishop in his design. From that
+moment the two adversaries seemed to have changed characters, and Don
+Gregorio became as cautious as a churchman, whereas the Bishop seemed
+to lose all his diplomacy.
+
+To all the protestations of friendship which were addressed to him, the
+Governor answered so adroitly that the Bishop fell into the trap, and
+thought he had secured a partner to help him in the expulsion of the
+Jesuits. Finally, at Yaguaron, during a sermon, he formulated his
+celebrated charges against the Jesuits, which, set on foot by him in
+1644, eventually caused the expulsion of the whole Order from America,
+and, though refuted a thousand times, still linger in the writing of
+all those who treat the question down to the present day. The charges
+were seven in number, and so ingeniously contrived that royal,
+national, and domestic indignation were all aroused by them. The first
+was that the Jesuits prevented the Indians from paying[125] their
+annual taxes to the crown. Secondly, that the Jesuits kept back the
+tithes from Bishops and Archbishops.[126] Thirdly, he said the Jesuits
+had rich mines in their possession, and that the product of these mines
+was all sent out of the country to the general fund at Rome. This the
+Jesuits disproved on several occasions, but, as often happens in such
+cases, proof was of no avail against the folly of mankind, to whom it
+seemed incredible that the Jesuits should bury themselves in deserts to
+preach to savages, unless there was some countervailing advantage to be
+gained. Even the fact that at the expulsion of the Company of Jesus
+from America no treasure at all was found at any of their colleges or
+missions did not dispel the conviction that they owned rich mines. The
+fourth charge was that the Jesuits were not particular about the
+secrets of the confessional, and that they used the information thus
+acquired for their own selfish ends. Further, that Father Ruiz de
+Montoya had acquired from the King, under a misapprehension, a royal
+edict,[127] giving the territory of the missions to the Jesuits, thus
+taking the fruits of their conquest from the Spanish colonists.
+Fifthly, that the Jesuits entered Paraguay possessed but of the clothes
+upon their backs, that they had made themselves into the sovereign
+rulers of a great territory, but that he was going to expel them, as
+the Venetians had expelled them from Venetia.[128] Sixthly, that even
+the Portuguese of San Paulo de Piritinanga had expelled them.[129] His
+last assertion was that he himself, together with the Bishop of Tucuman
+and others, had secret orders from the King to expel the Jesuits from
+their dioceses, but that the other Bishops lacked the courage which he
+(Cardenas) was then about to show. He wound up all by saying that, once
+the Jesuits were gone, the King would once again enjoy his rights, the
+Church be once again restored to freedom, and, lastly, that there would
+be plenty of Indians for the settlers to enslave. Quite possibly
+enough, the public, ever generous to a fault with other people’s goods,
+cared little for the rights of a King who lived ten thousand miles
+away; and as for the Church, it seems most probable they failed to see
+the peril that she ran. But when the Bishop spoke of enslaving the
+Indians, they saw the Jesuits must go, for from the conquest the
+Jesuits had stood between the settlers and their prey. All things
+considered, Don Bernardino made a remarkable discourse that Sunday
+morning in the palm-thatched village by the lake, for the echo of it
+still resounds in the religious world against the Jesuits.
+
+Like other men after a notable pronouncement, it is most probable that
+Cardenas was unaware of the full import of his words. Perhaps he
+thought (as speakers will) that all the best portions of his sermon had
+been left unsaid. Be that as it may, he shortly turned his thoughts to
+other matters of more direct importance to himself. In judging of his
+life, it should not be forgotten that, by his sermon at Yaguaron, he
+placed himself upon the side of those who wanted to enslave the
+Indians. Perhaps he did not know this, and certainly his popularity
+amongst the Indians outside the missions was enormous. His next
+adventure was to try and eject the Jesuits from a farm they had, called
+San Isidro. The Governor having forbidden him to do so, he armed an
+army of his partisans to expel the Jesuits from their college in the
+capital.
+
+Outside Asuncion the Lieutenant-Governor, Don Francisco Florez, met the
+Bishop’s secretary, Father Nieto, who informed him of the enterprise,
+exhorting him to enlist the sympathies of the Governor in so good a
+cause. Florez, a better diplomatist than his commanding officer, seemed
+to approve, and naturally deceived poor Father Nieto, who, like most
+hypocrites, became an easy prey to his own tactics when used against
+himself.
+
+Florez informed the Governor at once, and he sent to the Jesuits, and
+put them on their guard. Next day he met the Bishop, and told him that
+his enterprise could not succeed, as the Jesuits were under arms. No
+doubt he learned these artifices in his campaigns against the Indians
+of Arauco, or it may have been that, like others who have had to strive
+with churchmen, he learned to beat them with their own controversial
+arms. The Bishop fell completely into the snare, and, thinking the
+Governor was a fast friend, confided all his plans to him for the
+expulsion of the Jesuits and the conquest of the mission territory.
+Just then Captain Don Pedro Diaz del Valle came from La Plata, and gave
+Don Bernardino a new decision of the High Court of Charcas, telling him
+to live in peace with all men, and govern his diocese with zeal. He
+certainly was zealous to an extraordinary degree, if not judicious.
+Therefore, the very mention of the word ‘zeal’ must have been
+peculiarly offensive to such a zealous man. The letter went on to say
+that all the fines he had exacted were illegal, and commanded him to
+give back the _yerba_ which he had extorted from his involuntary
+penitents, and in the future live on better terms with all around him.
+To all of this he paid no notice, as was to be expected, but, to avoid
+returning the _yerba_, sent a letter to his officers to have it burned.
+This letter, which he denied, was subsequently produced against him in
+the High Court at Charcas.
+
+Seeing the Governor was bent on frustrating or on deceiving him, he
+tried to get from Don Sebastian Leon, who held an office under the
+Governor, an edict of the Emperor Charles V., which he had heard was in
+the archives, and which provided that, in case a Governor should die or
+be deposed, the notables of the place had power to appoint an interim
+Governor to fill his place. If such a paper ever existed, it must have
+been a very early document given by Charles V. at the foundation of the
+colony, for nothing was more opposed to the traditions of Spanish
+policy throughout America. Don Sebastian Leon having informed the
+Governor, the latter saw that things were coming to a crisis, and that
+either he or the Bishop would have to leave the place. Not being sure
+of all his troops, and the Bishop having the populace upon his side, he
+sent to the Jesuit missions for six hundred Indians. Thus the supremacy
+of the royal government fell to be supported by men but just emerging
+from a semi-nomad life, who owed the tincture of civilization they
+possessed to the calumniated Jesuits.
+
+On many occasions armies of Indians from the Jesuit missions rendered
+important services to the crown of Spain: not only against the
+Portuguese, but against English corsairs, and in rebellions, as in the
+case of Cardenas; or as when, in the year 1680, Philip V. wrote to the
+Governor of Buenos Ayres to garrison the port with a contingent of
+Indians from the Jesuit reductions; in 1681, when the French attacked
+the port with a squadron of four-and-twenty ships; and at the first
+siege of the Colonia, in 1678, when three thousand Indians marched to
+the attack, accompanied by their Jesuit pastors, but under the command
+of Spanish officers.[130]
+
+An army from the Jesuit missions consisted almost entirely of cavalry.
+It marched much like a South American army of twenty years ago was wont
+to march. In front was driven the _caballada_, consisting of the spare
+horses; then came the vanguard, composed of the best mounted soldiers,
+under their _caciques_. Then followed the wives and women of the
+soldiers, driving the baggage-mules, and lastly some herdsmen drove a
+troop of cattle for the men to eat. When Jesuits accompanied the army,
+they did not enter into action, but were most intrepid in succouring
+the wounded under fire, as Funes, in his ‘Historia Civil del Paraguay’,
+etc.,[131] relates when speaking of their conduct at the siege of the
+Colonia in 1703. For arms they carried lances, slings, _chuzos_
+(broad-pointed spears), lazos, and bolas, and had amongst them certain
+very long English guns with rests to fire from, not very heavy, and of
+a good range. Each day the accompanying Jesuits said Mass, and each
+town carried its particular banner before the troop. They generally
+camped, if possible, in the open plain, both to avoid surprises and for
+convenience in guarding the cattle and the _caballada_. In all the
+territories of South America no such quiet and well-behaved soldiery
+was to be found; for in Chile, Peru, Mexico, and Guatemala, the passage
+of an army was similar to the passing of a swarm of locusts in its
+effect.
+
+Don Bernardino, on his side, was occupied in animating the populace
+against the Jesuits with all the fervour of an Apostle. Naturally, he
+first commenced by launching his usual sentence of excommunication
+against them, and having done so returned again to Yaguaron. This
+village, like other Paraguayan villages, many of which in times gone by
+have been the scenes of stirring episodes, retains to-day but little to
+distinguish it. Nature has proved too powerful in the long-run for men
+to fight against. On every side the woods seem ready to overwhelm the
+place. Grass grows between the wooden steps of the neglected church;
+seibos, lapachos, espinillos de olor, all bound together with lianas,
+encroach to the verges of the little clearings in which grows mandioca,
+looking like a field of sticks. All day the parrots scream, and toucans
+and picaflores dart about; at evening the monkeys howl in chorus; at
+night the jaguar prowls about, and giant bats fasten upon the
+incautious sleeper, or, fixing themselves upon a horse, leave him
+exhausted in the morning with the loss of blood.
+
+When Cardenas used the place as a sort of Avignon from which to safely
+utter his anathemas, it must have worn a different aspect. No doubt
+processions and ceremonies were continual, with carrying about the
+saints in public, a custom which the Paraguayans irreverently refer to
+as ‘sacando á luz los bultos’.[132] Messengers (_chasquis_), no doubt,
+came and went perpetually, as is the custom in countries such as
+Paraguay, where news is valuable and horseflesh cheap. Thereto flocked,
+to a moral certainty, all the broken soldiers who swarmed in countries
+like Peru and Paraguay, with Indian _caciques_ looking out for work to
+do when white men quarrelled and throats were to be cut. Priests went
+and came, friars and missionaries; and Cardenas most certainly, who
+loved effect, gave all his emerald ring to kiss, and made those
+promises which leaders of revolt lavish on everyone in times of
+difficulty.
+
+When the Indian contingent arrived, the Governor marched upon Yaguaron,
+although the air was positively lurid with excommunications. The
+Bishop, rushing to the church, was intercepted by the Governor, who
+seized his arm and tried to stop him. Cardenas struggled with him, and
+declared him excommunicated for laying his hand upon the anointed of
+the Lord. But, most unfortunately, there was no Fitz-Urse at hand to
+rid the Governor of so turbulent a priest. A mulatto[133] woman rushed
+to the Bishop’s aid, together with some priests. This gave him time to
+gain the altar and seize the Host, which he exposed at once to the
+public gaze, and for the moment all present fell upon their knees.
+Turning to the Governor, he asked what he wanted with armed men in a
+church. The Governor replied he had come to banish him from Paraguay,
+by order of the Viceroy, for having infringed upon the temporal power.
+Cardenas, taken aback, replied he would obey, and, turning to the
+people, took them all for witnesses. The Governor, no doubt thinking he
+was dealing with an honest Araucan chief, retired. The Bishop
+immediately denounced the Governor in a furious sermon, after which he
+left the church, carrying the Host in full procession, accompanied by
+the choir singing the ‘Pange Lingua’, followed by a band of Indian
+women with their hair dishevelled, and carrying green branches in their
+hands. He then returned to the church, and from the pulpit denounced
+the Governor, who, standing at the door surrounded by a group of
+arquebusiers blowing their matches, answered him furiously.
+
+The honours, so to speak, being thus equally divided, it remained for
+one side or the other to negotiate. Cardenas, knowing himself much
+abler in negotiations than his adversary, proposed a conference, in
+which he bore himself so skilfully that he made the Governor consent to
+dismiss his Indians, and allow him six days to make his preparations
+for the road. This settled, at dead of night he set out for the
+capital. Arrived there, he showed himself in public in his green hat,
+having upon his breast a little box of glass in which he bore the Host.
+A band of priests escorted him, all with arms concealed beneath their
+cloaks, in the true spirit of the Church militant. The bells were rung,
+and every effort strained to raise a tumult, but all in vain. He had to
+throw himself for refuge into the convent of the Franciscans.
+
+At once he set about to fortify the place to stand a siege. In several
+places he constructed embrasures for guns, and pierced the walls for
+musketry. But, thinking that his best defence lay in the folly of the
+people—as public men always have done, and do—he sent to the Cathedral
+for a statue of the Blessed Virgin, and another of San Blas, and placed
+them at the gate. Then, remembering that calumny was a most serviceable
+weapon, he put about the town a report that the Indians from the
+missions had pillaged Yaguaron, and that they even then were marching
+on the place. Again recurring to the edict of Charles V., which he
+pretended to have found, he issued a proclamation that, as the present
+Governor was excommunicated, and therefore could not govern, the office
+being vacant, he intended to nominate another in his stead. His
+subsequent behaviour shows most clearly that he wished to nominate
+himself.
+
+Again both sides sent off a relation of their doings to the High Court
+of Charcas. Don Bernardino wrote in his that the Jesuits had offered
+the Governor thirty thousand crowns, and placed a thousand men at his
+command, if he would expel the Bishop from the country, under the
+belief that he (Don Bernardino) knew of their hidden mines in the
+mission territory. His witnesses were students and priests, and one of
+these proving recalcitrant, the Bishop had him heavily chained, and
+then suspended outside the convent of the Franciscans.
+
+This drastic treatment had the desired effect, as torture always has
+with reasonable men, and the poor witness signed, but afterwards
+protested, thus giving a good example in himself of the truth of the
+Spanish saying, ‘Protest and pay’.[134]
+
+By this time the patience and long-suffering of the Governor were quite
+exhausted. He therefore sent to the Bishop to say a ship was ready to
+take him down the river, and at the same time reminded him of his
+promise at Yaguaron to obey the order of the Viceroy of Peru. He sent
+the message by the royal notary, Gomez de Coyeso, who accordingly
+repaired to the convent of San Francisco. At the door a priest
+appeared, armed with a javelin, who three times tried to wound the
+notary, on which the Governor stationed a band of fifty soldiers at the
+convent gate, in spite of the presence of the statues of the Blessed
+Virgin and San Blas. Then, having published an edict that the Bishop
+was deposed, he proceeded to elect another in his stead.
+
+One of the canons, Don Cristobal Sanchez, who had governed the diocese
+during the interregnum before the advent of Don Bernardino, still lived
+in retirement near the town. The Governor approached him with the
+request that he would once more take the interim charge until the King
+should send another Bishop to replace Cardenas. Sanchez consented, on
+the understanding that the Governor would guarantee his personal
+safety. This being done, Sanchez was taken to the Jesuit college as the
+securest place.
+
+So it fell out that everything concurred to strengthen the hatred of
+the Bishop to the Jesuits. To the Jesuit college came the Governor and
+all the notables, and, having taken Sanchez in procession through the
+streets, they placed him on the Bishop’s throne in the Cathedral, and
+invested him with all the power that he had held before the coming of
+Don Bernardino Cardenas. The proclamation set forth by the Governor
+alluded to the informality of the consecration of Don Bernardino, and
+to his actions during his time of power.
+
+At last the Bishop saw that he must go. So, after launching a supreme
+anathema, and after having expressed his great unwillingness to tarry
+longer in a city where half the population had incurred the censure of
+the Church, and marked with a cross those churches where he permitted
+Mass to be celebrated, he went on board the ship. Before embarking, he
+drew a silver bell from underneath his cloak, and to the sound of it he
+solemnly proclaimed the town accursed. The bells of the Franciscan
+convent and the Bishop’s palace, according to his orders, all tolled
+loudly. This caused so much confusion that, in order to appease the
+tumult, the authorities ordered the bells of all the churches in the
+town to ring.
+
+Entering the vessel, Don Bernardino sat himself upon the poop on a low
+stool, with all the clergy who were faithful to him grouped about the
+deck. With him he had the sacred wafer in a glass box, and not far off
+a group of sailors on the forecastle lounged about smoking and drinking
+_maté_ whilst they played at cards. Someone reminded him it was not
+fitting that God’s Body should thus be seen so near to sailors, and
+therefore the Bishop, according to the custom of the Church in cases of
+accident or desecration, consumed the offended wafer, and peace
+descended on the ship.
+
+Thus, in 1644, he took his first departure from the place where for the
+last two years he had brought certainly rather a sword than peace. His
+friends assured the public that, at the moment he stepped on board the
+ship, stars were seen to fall from heaven towards the church of St.
+Luke, and passed from thence to the episcopal palace and disappeared;
+that at the same time a slight shock of earthquake had been
+experienced; that stones had danced about, and several hills had
+trembled. The sun, quite naturally, had appeared blood-red; trouble and
+desolation had entered every heart, and animals had prophesied woe and
+destruction, predicting ruin and misfortune to the town till the good
+Bishop should return once more.
+
+The events of the past two years in Paraguay had not been favourable to
+the conversion of the Indians. Not only in the missions, where the
+neophytes had seen themselves obliged to furnish troops against their
+Bishop, but in the territory of Paraguay itself, the Indians had not
+had a good example of how Christians carry out the duties of their
+faith. As a general rule, the Indian (unlike the negro) cares little
+for dogma, but places his belief entirely in good works. Perhaps on
+this account the Jesuits, also believers in good works, have had the
+most success amongst them. Be that as it may, the Jesuits, after the
+departure of the Bishop, found that many of their recent converts had
+fallen away and gone back to the woods.
+
+Whilst Jesuits in Paraguay were seeking to convert the Indians, and
+whilst the Governor, no doubt, was thanking his stars for the absence
+of his rival, in Rome the question of the Bishop’s consecration filled
+all minds. From May 9, 1645, to October 2 of the same year no less than
+four congregations of the Propaganda had been held about the case. The
+Pope himself was present at one of them. Nothing was arrived at till
+1658, when finally the consecration was declared in order, but not
+until Don Bernardino was appointed to another see.
+
+Just about this time (1644-45) a rumour was set on foot that the
+Jesuits had discovered mines near their reductions on the Paraná. These
+rumours were always set about when there was nothing else by means of
+which to attack the Jesuits. An Indian by the name of Buenaventura, who
+had been a servant in a convent in Buenos Ayres, on this occasion was
+the instrument used by their enemies. For a short time everyone
+believed him, and excitement was intense; but, most unluckily,
+Buenaventura happened at the zenith of his notoriety to run away with a
+married woman, and, being pursued, was brought to Buenos Ayres, and
+then in public incontinently whipped. In any other country Buenaventura
+after his public whipping would have been discredited, but a letter
+arrived from the Bishop of Paraguay, telling the Governor of Buenos
+Ayres that the mines really existed. At that time a new Governor, one
+Don Jacinto de Lara, had just arrived. Being new to America and its
+ways, he started out himself to try the question, and with fifty
+soldiers, taking Buenaventura as his guide, went to the missions. As
+might have been expected, on the journey Buenaventura disappeared, this
+time alone. ‘Cette fuite lui donna beaucoup à penser,’ says Charlevoix.
+But having gone so far, the Governor determined to try the question
+thoroughly.
+
+Father Diaz Taño, one of the best and hardest-working missionaries who
+ever entered Paraguay, besought the Governor to satisfy himself and
+search their territory for gold and silver, and requested him to call
+upon the Bishop for confirmation of the statements he had made. This he
+did, and then, accompanied by his soldiers, began his search. He gave
+out that the first man to find a mine should be at once promoted to be
+captain and have a large reward. After several days’ march, and having
+found no mines, letters were brought him from the Governor of Paraguay
+and from the Bishop. The first informed him that he had heard rumours
+of mines, but nothing certain. The second declined to specify the
+mines, which thus were destined to remain for ever, so to speak, _in
+partibus_. But he gave advice, and good advice is better than any mine,
+whether of silver or of gold. He told the Governor to start by turning
+out the Jesuits, and he would find the profits of their expulsion just
+as valuable as mines.
+
+Whether this also made the Governor pensive I do not know, but,
+luckily, the Jesuits, who were concerned in exposing the imposture, had
+come on Buenaventura, and brought him ironed to the Governor. He, after
+having tried to make him confess his imposture without success,
+condemned him to be hung. The Jesuits, with their accustomed humanity
+(or ingenuity), begged for his life. This was accorded to them, and
+once again Buenaventura received a good sound whipping for his pains.
+
+Thus ended the journey of Don Jacinto, without profit to himself,
+except so far as the experience gained. No doubt he saw and marked the
+Jesuit towns, the churches built of massive timber or of stone, and the
+contented air of Indians and priests, which always struck all
+travellers in those times. He saw the countless herds of cattle, the
+cultivated fields; enjoyed, no doubt for the first time since arriving
+in South America, the sense of perfect safety, at that time to be
+experienced alone in Misiones. But in despite of his exposure of the
+imposture, the rumour as to the existence of the mines never died out,
+and lingers even to-day, in spite of geological research in Paraguay.
+
+Whilst this was going on in Misiones, in the remote and
+recently-converted district of the Itatines, in the north of Paraguay,
+the example set by the Bishop had borne its fruit. The Indians became
+unmanageable. One of the chiefs broke into open rebellion, and wounded
+a Jesuit father called Arenas at the very altar-steps. Soon the general
+corruption of manners became almost universal throughout the district.
+This, I fancy, must be taken to mean that the Indians reverted to
+polygamy, for the Jesuits always had trouble in this matter, being
+unable to persuade the Indians of the advantage of monogamy.
+
+But most fortuitously, just as the general corruption gained all
+hearts, a tiger rushed into the town, and, after killing fourteen
+people and some horses, disappeared again into the woods.
+
+The Jesuits, ever ready to take advantage of events like these, called
+on the Indians to see in the visitation of the tiger the wrath of
+Heaven, and to leave their wicked ways.
+
+The Indians, always as willing to submit as to revolt, submitted, and
+the good fathers ‘prirent le parti de faire un coup d’autorité, qui
+leur réussit,’ as Charlevoix relates.
+
+They decoyed the chief, his nephew, and son, into another district,
+where they seized and shipped them off two hundred leagues to a remote
+reduction across the Uruguay. The Spaniards used to say of Ferdinand
+VII., when he had committed any great barbarity, ‘He is quite a King’
+(‘Es mucho Rey’), and the Indians of the Itatines esteemed the Jesuits
+for their ‘coup d’autorité’ in the same manner as the Spaniards their
+King.
+
+His usual luck attended Cardenas in his exile in Corrientes. This town
+formed part of the diocese of Buenos Ayres, which happened to be vacant
+at the time. He therefore took upon himself to act just as he had acted
+in Paraguay—appointed officers of justice, held ordinations, and
+instituted a campaign against the Jesuits of the town.
+
+Whilst he was thus occupied in his favourite pastime of usurping other
+people’s functions, two citations were sent him to appear before the
+High Court of Charcas. He disregarded them, and sent a statement of his
+case by the hands of his nephew to the Bishop of Tucuman. In the letter
+he set forth all his complaints against the Governor of Paraguay,
+calling him a violator of the Church, a heretic, and generally applying
+to him all those terms in which a thwarted churchman usually exhales
+his rage. Mixed up with this was a detailed accusation of the Jesuits,
+to whose account he laid all his misfortunes whilst in Paraguay.
+Lastly, he called upon the Bishop of Tucuman to summon a provincial
+council to condemn the monstrous heresies which he attributed to the
+Jesuits, reminding him that the Council of Trent had recommended the
+holding of frequent provincial councils, and stating his opinion that,
+unless a council were called at once, the Bishop would incur a mortal
+sin.
+
+The answer Cardenas received from Tucuman was most ironically couched
+in the best style that his long-suffering friend was able to command.
+After addressing Cardenas as ‘your illustrious lordship’, he proceeded
+to demolish all his statements in such a manner as to argue that he had
+had much practice with refractory priests in his own diocese. He told
+him that the Jesuits were the only Order in Paraguay that really worked
+amongst the Indians. He reminded him that from that Order the ‘second
+Paul’, _i.e._, St. Francis Xavier, had himself issued. He asked him
+whether, as a churchman, he thought the yearly sum of twelve thousand
+crowns given by the King out of the treasury of Buenos Ayres towards
+the Jesuits’ work was better saved, or that the thousands of Indians
+whom the Jesuits had converted should be lost to God. And as to heresy,
+he said he was no judge, leaving such matters to the Pope; but that no
+one accused the Jesuits of corruption in their morals, or of any of the
+greater crimes to which the great fragility of human nature renders us
+liable. He reminded him the Jesuits had made no accusation on their
+part, but always spoke of him with moderation and respect. And as to a
+provincial council, he said that it was impossible, for the following
+good cause: The Bishop of Misque[135] was too infirm to travel; the
+Bishop of La Paz was lately dead, and the see still vacant; the Bishop
+of Buenos Ayres only just arrived, and too much occupied to leave his
+diocese. Therefore, the only Bishops available were himself and
+Cardenas, and that they never would agree.
+
+‘Moreover,’ he remarked, ‘what is it that your illustrious lordship
+wishes me to do?
+
+‘To advise a Bishop?
+
+‘God has only given me the charge of my own sheep. Your lordship knows
+as well as I do how a Bishop should comport himself.’
+
+He finished with a quotation, saying that a Bishop’s state was not to
+lie ‘in splendore vestium, sed morum; non ad iram, sed ut omnimodum
+patientium.’
+
+What Cardenas replied is not set down in any history which has come
+under my observation, but what he must have thought is easy to divine.
+
+The Governor of Paraguay, not content with having put his case before
+the Supreme Court of Charcas, sent also to the Council General of the
+Indies in Seville, detailing all the vagaries of the Bishop. The
+Jesuits also empowered an officer to represent them there.
+
+During these preparations, and whilst everyone was off his guard, the
+Guaycurús endeavoured to surprise the capital, and would have done so
+had not some regiments of Guaranís arrived in time from the mission
+territory. This should have been an object-lesson to those who always
+tried to show the Jesuits in the light of enemies to the authority of
+the King of Spain. Nothing, however, proved of the least avail, and
+though on several occasions the Spanish power in Paraguay was only
+saved by the exertions of the Jesuits and their Indians, the calumnies
+of Cardenas had taken too deep root to be dispelled.
+
+Meanwhile, in Corrientes, Cardenas schemed night and day to return to
+Paraguay. In his own city of La Plata naturally he had some friends,
+and these did all they could to get him reinstated. In spite of all
+their efforts, an order came from Charcas for him to leave the city
+under pain of banishment.[136] Anyone but Cardenas would have been
+disconcerted; he, though, pretended, as in the order he was still
+styled Bishop of Paraguay, that before leaving for Charcas, to present
+himself before the court, he had to go to Asuncion to name a
+Vicar-General, and towards the end of 1646 he embarked upon the river
+for Paraguay.
+
+The Governor was on the alert, and sent a vessel with orders to turn
+him back, which order was carried out in spite of his remonstrances,
+and he returned to Corrientes in a miserable state.
+
+Then came another citation to appear at Charcas, and an intimation that
+he was appointed Bishop of Popayán. As Popayán (in New Granada) was at
+least three thousand miles from Asuncion, his joy at the appointment
+must have been extreme.
+
+His fortunes now seemed desperate; as he said himself in a letter to
+the King, ‘at an advanced age he could not undertake so great a
+journey’; and on every side his enemies seemed to have got the upper
+hand.
+
+In 1648 a change came over everything. Don Gregorio Hinestrosa was
+removed from Paraguay, and a new Governor, Don Diego Escobar de Osorio,
+appointed in his place. Immediately the news reached Cardenas he set
+out for Paraguay. Arriving at Asuncion, his friends all met him and
+took him in procession to the Cathedral. His first thought was to renew
+his persecution of the Jesuits. Most unfortunately for them, Don Juan
+de Palafox, Bishop of Puebla de los Angeles in Mexico, who had himself
+in Mexico had many quarrels with the Jesuits, wrote begging Cardenas
+and all the Bishops of South America to join against them.
+
+This Palafox was afterwards beatified, and even in his lifetime enjoyed
+the reputation of a saint, so that his letter greatly strengthened
+Cardenas. Notwithstanding this, Palafox in subsequent works of his
+during the time that he was Bishop of Osma (in Spain) said many things
+in praise of the work done by the Jesuits in Paraguay.
+
+The new Governor, himself a member of the Supreme Court of Charcas, had
+never been before in Paraguay, and therefore resolved to treat the
+Bishop (as Don Gregorio had done) with every respect due to his
+station. The Bishop wanted nothing better, and saw at once he had
+another fool to deal with. Therefore he made no secret of his intention
+of not complying with the citation of the court at Charcas, and set
+himself at once to preach against the Jesuits, and stir up popular
+resentment against them. Unluckily, proof was wanting of the crimes he
+alleged they had committed, so he resorted to the device of getting a
+petition signed by all and sundry, asking for the expulsion of the
+Order from Paraguay. Like all petitions, it was largely signed by women
+and by children and by those who had never thought before about the
+matter, but liked the opportunity to write their names after the names
+of others, as sheep go through a gap or members give their votes (out
+of mere sympathy) in the high court of Parliament.
+
+This device having taken too much time, blank documents were passed
+about for all to write upon whatever they imagined to the disadvantage
+of the Jesuits. By an untoward chance, a bundle of these, sent to the
+agent of the Bishop in Spain, was taken on the voyage by an English
+corsair. The worthy pirate (no doubt a Protestant) was, if we can
+believe the Jesuits, extremely scandalized at the bad faith of those
+who used such means of wreaking their malevolence.
+
+So all seemed once again to smile upon Don Bernardino, who no doubt
+resumed his flagellations, his midnight services, and his saying of two
+Masses, and once again became the idol of the people of Asuncion.
+
+But in the north, in the wild district of Caaguayu, hard by the
+mountains of Mbaracayá, close to the great _yerbales_,[137] the Jesuits
+had formed two towns amongst the Indians. These two towns were destined
+to be the outposts of the country against the incursions of the wild
+Indians from the Chaco.
+
+The Bishop prevailed upon the Governor to let him turn out the Jesuits
+and replace them by priests of another Order. This being done, the
+Indians all deserted, leaving the district quite uninhabited.
+
+The court at Charcas, hearing of this folly, sent an order to the
+Governor to send the Jesuits back. A year was passed in ceaseless
+searching of the woods and deserts for the Indians, but only half of
+the population could ever be persuaded to return, and Father Mansilla,
+the ex-missionary, died of the hardships that he underwent.
+
+From that date down to the time of Dr. Francia (_circa_ 1812-35), the
+district remained a desert. Francia used it as a penal settlement, and
+to-day, save for a few wild, wandering Indians, known as Caaguas, and a
+sparse population of _yerba_-gatherers, it still remains almost
+unpopulated.
+
+Meanwhile, the general indignation against the Jesuits seemed to infect
+all classes of the population. Certainly, the citizens of Asuncion had
+good and sufficient causes of complaint against the Jesuits. On several
+occasions the efforts of the Jesuits and their Indians alone had saved
+the capital from the wild Indians, and benefits are hard to bear, if
+only from their rarity.
+
+Popular hatred, to the full as idiotic as is popular applause, fell
+chiefly upon Father Diaz Taño—he who had saved ten thousand Indians for
+the King of Spain in his celebrated retreat before the Mamelucos down
+the Paraná—and he was frequently insulted in the streets. Father
+Antonio Manquiano, a quiet and learned man, was almost murdered in open
+day by a furious fanatic, who fell upon him with the openly expressed
+intent ‘to eat his heart’.
+
+This was the moment Cardenas pitched on to declare the entire Order of
+the Jesuits excommunicated. As he had been a year away from the scene
+of his former exploits, people were not so used to excommunications,
+and therefore took them seriously.
+
+At this eventful juncture the Governor, Don Diego, died so suddenly
+that suspicions of his having been poisoned were aroused. Scarce was he
+dead than all the population assembled at the palace to elect an
+interim successor. This was a most important thing, as to communicate
+with Spain took, at the very shortest time, about eight months. By
+acclamation the choice fell on the Bishop, who thus found himself head
+of the spiritual and the temporal power at once.
+
+The election was absolutely illegal, as the Spanish law provided that,
+if a Governor of Paraguay should chance to die, the nomination of an
+interim successor should rest first with the Viceroy of Peru, and
+failing him with the High Court of Charcas.
+
+Cardenas based his election on the pretended edict of the Emperor
+Charles V., but, if he had a copy of the edict, never produced it. As
+usual, ‘good men daring not, and wise men caring not’, but only fools
+and schemers taking part in the election, no serious opposition to his
+usurpation was encountered.
+
+Cardenas never doubted for a moment that the function of a Governor was
+to govern, and he began at once to do so with a will.
+
+Xarque, a Spanish writer, gives the following curious description of
+how he set about to get the people on his side to expel the
+Jesuits:[138]
+
+Preaching one day in the Cathedral, after the consecration he turned
+towards the people, and, showing the holy wafer, said, ‘Do you believe,
+my brethren, that Jesus Christ is here?’ All, being true believers,
+answered as one man that such was their belief. In the same way as at a
+scientific lecture, when the lecturer holds up some substance, and
+says, ‘You all know well that calcium tungstate or barium hydrocyanide
+has this or the other property,’ the hearers nod assent like sheep,
+being afraid to contradict so glib a statement from so eminent a man.
+
+Then said Cardenas, ‘Believe as firmly that I have an order from the
+King to expel the Jesuits.’ The people all believed, and Cardenas
+forgot to tell them that by the expulsion of the Jesuits twenty
+thousand Indians would pass into his power, whom he could then
+distribute amongst his friends as slaves, as he proposed to divide the
+Indians of the missions amongst the Paraguayan notables to win them to
+his side.
+
+Being at the head of everything in Asuncion, Cardenas no longer
+hesitated, but ordered an officer, Don Juan de Vallejo Villasanti, with
+a troop of soldiers to march to the college of the Jesuits. This he
+did, and finding the gates all barred, he burst them open, and,
+entering the college, signified to the rector an order from the
+Governor (duly countersigned by the Bishop) to leave the city with all
+his priests, and to evacuate all the missions on the Paraná. The rector
+answered that the Jesuits had a permission from Philip II., renewed by
+his successors, to found a college, and Father Taño exhibited the
+documents. Villasanti, who had but little love for documents, snatched
+the parchments from his hand, and the soldiers forced the Jesuits in a
+body to the port like sheep. There they were tied and thrown into
+canoes almost without provisions, and sent off down the river to
+Corrientes, the certain haven of the party in Paraguay which has got
+the worst of an election or a revolution, and wishes to gain time.
+
+Arrived in Corrientes, Don Manuel Cabral, a pious officer, received
+them in his house, and, curiously enough, the population welcomed the
+Jesuits with enthusiasm, and pressed them earnestly to build a college
+in the town.
+
+Their college at Asuncion was treated like a town taken by storm:
+pulpit and font, confessionals and doors, all were torn down and burnt,
+and, with a view of justifying what was done, the Bishop’s partisans
+spread a report that, as the Jesuits were heretics, their temple was
+unclean.
+
+The population, more artistic in its instincts than the Bishop, refused
+to allow the altar, which had been brought from Spain, to be destroyed.
+Besides the altar, there were also statues of San Ignacio and San
+Francisco Xavier. These the Bishop wished to turn into St. Peter and
+St. Paul. With this design he gave them to an Indian carpenter to work
+upon. The poor man did his best, but only managed to turn out two
+monstrous blocks, which looked like nothing human.
+
+A statue of the Blessed Virgin which had the eyes turned up to heaven
+the Bishop wished to alter, and replace the head by another with the
+eyes turned down to earth, as being more befitting to the statue’s sex.
+The people, less mad or superstitious than the Bishop, refused to allow
+it, and the image, too, was placed in the Cathedral.
+
+In 1649 the expulsion of an Order so powerful as were the Jesuits
+caused some commotion through the world at large. Miracles happened
+opportunely to strengthen waning faith. A fire placed round their
+church, though it destroyed, refused to blacken; and ropes fixed to the
+tower of the church, although attached to windlasses, refused to pull
+it down, so that the tower and church, though gutted, still remained
+almost intact, and, on the Jesuits’ return, were easily repaired, and
+served as a monument of victory.
+
+Uneasy lies the head that wears a mitre, as poor Cardenas found out.
+His popularity suffered some decrease by the lack of treasure found in
+the Jesuits’ college, for he had always dangled millions in prospective
+before the people’s eyes to engage them on his side, and, most
+unluckily, he had no millions to bestow. So, to make all things right,
+he sent Fray Diego Villalon[139] to Madrid to represent his interests.
+
+The Jesuits upon their side were not inactive. By virtue of a brief of
+Gregory XIII. they had the privilege of appointing an official called a
+judge conservator in cases where their honour or their possessions were
+attacked. Therefore Father Alfonso de Ojeda was sent to Charcas to
+arrange about the case. At Charcas they found that Cardenas had been
+before them, and had instituted proceedings against their Order in the
+High Court. Father Pedro Nolasco, Superior of the Order of Mercy, was
+appointed judge conservator. He at once summoned the Bishop to appear
+before him, and arranged to try the case and hear the evidence.
+
+Cardenas having refused to appear, sentence went by default against
+him. The High Court, being convinced that the pretended edict of the
+Emperor Charles V. did not exist, appointed Don Andres Garabito de Leon
+to be interim Captain-General of Paraguay, and gave him power, if
+necessary, to restore order by force of arms. The court then issued a
+decree summoning Cardenas to appear at once at Charcas and give his
+reasons why he had had himself made Governor and had expulsed the
+Jesuits from Paraguay. It then communicated with the Marquis of
+Mancera, Viceroy of Peru, who quite concurred in its decision as to
+Cardenas.
+
+Apparently upon the principle which prevails amongst Mohammedans of
+always appointing, first an officer, and then a caliph to that officer
+to do the work, the High Court of Charcas also appointed a commander to
+proceed to Paraguay, pending the time that Don Andres should feel
+inclined to start himself. As the caliph’s name was Sebastian de Leon,
+it is not improbable that he was a relation of the first-appointed man.
+
+Don Sebastian de Leon seems to have been in Paraguay already, for both
+Charlevoix and Xarque agree that he and his brothers, after the
+expulsion of the Jesuits by Cardenas, had retired to an estate some
+distance from Asuncion. At the estate the news of his appointment
+reached him, and must have placed him in a most difficult position as
+to what to do.
+
+On several occasions in the various rebellions which occurred in South
+America during the Spanish rule, men were appointed to quell
+rebellions, pacify countries, and restore order, and all without an
+army or any forces being placed at their command. This was the case
+with the celebrated La Gasca, who was sent from Spain to put down the
+rebellion of Gonzalo Pizarro, and succeeded in so doing, though he left
+Spain without a single soldier in his train. In this connection it is
+to be remembered that none of the rebellions in Spanish America from
+the days of Charles I. (_i.e._, the Emperor Charles V.) to those of
+Charles III. were for the object of separation from the metropolis, but
+merely risings against Governors sent out from Spain. It seems that
+both in Peru and Paraguay the very name of the imperial power was able
+to draw hundreds of men to the standard of whatever officer held a
+commission from Madrid, such as that held by Garabito de Leon or by La
+Gasca on the Paraná.
+
+At first Don Sebastian did not show himself in Asuncion, but sent out
+messengers on every side to summon soldiers, requisition horses, and
+collect provisions. He also sent to Corrientes to tell the Jesuits he
+was ready to reinstate them in their possessions.
+
+Don Bernardino meanwhile was preparing for the great adventure of his
+life. He seems to have believed most firmly that no power on earth had
+any right to remove him from the governorship of Paraguay. In a letter
+which he addressed to Don Juan Romero de la Cruz[140] he says he is on
+the point of distinguishing himself by heroic exploits and great
+victories; that he had on his side justice and force (a most uncommon
+combination); that the entire capital was favourable to him; and that
+he was resolved neither to readmit the Jesuits nor to recognise Don
+Sebastian de Leon as Governor.
+
+Asuncion was once again convulsed, and all was preparation for the holy
+war. The Bishop had given out that angels were to help him, and this so
+reassured his soldiers that they provided themselves with cords to bind
+the Indians in the army of Don Sebastian Leon, thinking they would fall
+an easy prey to them. This matter of the cords explains, perhaps, why
+the population of Asuncion was almost unanimous in favour of the
+Bishop.
+
+In the army of Don Sebastian, as well as the militia of the province,
+marched three thousand Indians from the Jesuit reductions on the
+Paraná. The Spaniards of the capital were all determined not to kill
+any of them, but keep them alive for slaves, and hence the cords with
+which they armed themselves.
+
+The sacred generalissimo led out his army from Asuncion in person,
+celebrating Mass himself, and then heading his troops like many another
+Spanish ecclesiastic has done before and after him, and continued doing
+even to the latest Carlist war.
+
+The armies met not far from Luqué, in a little plain known as the Campo
+Grande. An open plain with sandy soil, which gave the horses a good
+footing, with several little stagnant pools in the centre where the
+wounded men could drink and wash their wounds, with a most convenient
+forest on all sides for the deserters and the cowards to hide in, made
+a good battlefield. The village of Luqué, grouped round its church, and
+with a little plaza in the middle in which sat Paraguayan women selling
+mandioca, chipa,[141] and rapadura,[142] with sacks of maize and of
+mani,[143] stood on the summit of a little hill. Upon the plain the
+earth is red, and looks as if a battle had been fought upon it and much
+blood spilt. In all directions run little paths, worn deep by the feet
+of mules and horses, and in which the rider has to lift his feet as if
+he were going through a stream. To Asuncion there leads one of the
+deep-sunk roads planted with orange and paraiso[144] trees, constructed
+thus (as Barco de la Centenera tells us in his ‘Argentina’) so as to be
+defensible against the Indians after the country was first conquered by
+the Spaniards.
+
+On the Bishop’s side hardly a soldier but thought himself an emissary
+of God, or doubted of the victory for a moment in his heart. Angels
+themselves had promised victory to their leader, who, to make all
+things safe, had issued a proclamation punishing surrender with the
+pain of death; so they stood quietly in array of battle waiting to be
+attacked.
+
+Upon his side, Don Sebastian Leon, seeing the attitude of the enemy,
+immediately ordered an advance, and charged himself, with all his
+cavalry, upon the Bishop’s men. They, with the firmness that fanatics
+so often show, stood firmly in their ranks, thinking themselves
+invulnerable. Their valour proved but momentary, for at the second
+charge they broke their ranks and fled. Flight turned to rout, and Don
+Sebastian having commanded that they should not be pursued, they still
+fled on, no man pursuing them.
+
+The Governor then entered the capital without resistance. On the plaza
+he stopped, and having gathered up the wounded without respect of
+party, he sent them to the hospital. Then, having seen to the safety of
+the town, he rode to the Cathedral to give thanks to God for having
+preserved him from the dangers of the fight. Dressed in his robes and
+seated on his throne was Cardenas. Don Sebastian entered the church,
+dismounted, and kissed his hand respectfully, like a true Spaniard, and
+asked him ceremoniously to deign to give him the baton of the civil
+power. Cardenas answered not a word, but handed him the baton, and then
+retired, accompanied by all his priests.
+
+The victory did not terminate the work of Don Sebastian. After a
+reasonable interval, and before witnesses, he cited the Bishop to
+appear before the court of Charcas. The Bishop promised to obey,
+thinking he had another Don Gregorio Hinostrosa to deal with, but quite
+determined never to comply, acting according to the custom of Governors
+in South America, who, when an order reached them from Madrid, either
+absurd or quite impossible to execute, solemnly answered, ‘I obey, but
+I do not comply,’[145] saving by the phrase the honour of their
+sovereigns and themselves. Upon their side the Jesuits pressed the
+judge conservator, Father Nolasco, to issue his sentence, and free them
+from the charges under which they lay. This he did, and gave as his
+opinion they were quite innocent of all that Cardenas had laid to their
+account.
+
+As in a palace,[146] things go slow in Spain, and it was not till 1654
+that a royal decision confirmed the judgment of Nolasco, and freed the
+Jesuits from all the charges raised against them.
+
+Order restored, Cardenas deprived of his usurped authority, and the
+Jesuits reinstated, the temporary commission of Sebastian Leon was at
+an end. Therefore he retired again to plant his mandioca under his own
+guayaba-tree. Yet feeling ran so high that he was hardly safe from the
+vengeance of the partisans of Cardenas, so that he found himself once
+more obliged to summon the militia of the province, and lead them to a
+perfunctory campaign against the Payaguás. These Indians the earlier
+historians of the conquest, Barco de la Centenera and Rui Diaz de
+Guzman, describe as river-pirates, almost living in canoes, and dashing
+out on any passing Spanish vessel that they thought weak enough. The
+Jesuits Montoya and Dobrizhoffer tell us that they went naked, painted
+in many colours, with a hawk’s or parrot’s wing passed through the
+cartilage of their left ear, and that they were, of all the Indians of
+Paraguay, the most indomitable. A few, when I knew Paraguay some twenty
+years ago, hung round Asuncion, squalid and miserable, passing their
+time in fishing in canoes, and as attached to their own mode of life as
+when the first discoverers called them ‘sweet-water pirates’ and the
+‘most pestilent of all the Indians on the river Paraguay.’ The Payaguás
+chastised, Don Sebastian, upon one pretext or another, did not disband
+his troops, keeping them always by him, and thus making the position of
+the Bishop quite untenable, till by degrees his followers fell away and
+left him almost deserted and his party all dissolved. Seeing the game
+was up, the Bishop, after having named one Don Adrian Cornejo as his
+suffragan, took his departure (1650) for Charcas to appear before the
+court. For eight tumultuous years he had kept his bishopric in a
+perpetual turmoil, having been the evil genius of the land.
+
+What sort of man he really was is hard to-day to judge, for Xarque,
+Villalon, Charlevoix, and Dean Funes,[147] who chronicle his doings,
+were all, on one side or the other, partisans. The Jesuits condemn him
+as a spoliator, the Franciscans hold him up as one who fought
+throughout his life for the honour of the founder of their rule.
+Tracts, books, and pamphlets for and against him have been written in
+numbers, and in the history of the times in Paraguay his name bulks
+large. One thing is certain—that the Indians loved and revered him, and
+followed him up to the end. Even in Charcas, where he lived for years
+upon a pension of two thousand crowns allowed him by the King whilst
+his case dragged its weary course to Rome, Madrid, back to Peru, and
+then to Rome again, the Indians, when he appeared in public, greeted
+him with flowers. He may have been a saint: so many men are saints, and
+the world knows them not. He may have been a schemer; but he made
+nothing by his schemes except the barren honour of his consecration to
+the see of Paraguay. A preacher certainly he was, able and willing to
+draw crowds, after the fashion of all those who have the gift of words.
+
+Headstrong and obstinate, through a long life he hated vigorously,
+thinking all those who differed from him were accursed of God. A
+strenuous member of the Church militant on earth, he was at least a
+personality, and those who read the history of his time must reckon
+with, and take sides for or against, him after the fashion of the men
+with whom he passed his life, who to a man revered him as a saint, or
+looked upon him as a devil sent to plague mankind.
+
+Arrived in Charcas, he soon fell on evil times, although at first he
+made some partisans. Still looking back to Paraguay, he passed his time
+in drawing out petitions to the King; then, one by one, all his friends
+fell from him, except some faithful Indians, who considered him a
+saint. His dreams of saintship were not fulfilled, for his name never
+figured in the calendar. Years did not tame nor yet did hope ever
+completely leave him; for in old books I find him always protesting,
+ever complaining, and still striving, till, in 1665, Philip IV. in pity
+made him Bishop of Santa Cruz. A sentence from the registers of the
+Consistory at Rome informs us that, as Bishop of La Paz, in his own
+province of the Charcas, he left off troubling, and rested from his
+agitated life.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter VI
+
+
+Description of the mission territory and towns founded by the
+Jesuits—Their endeavours to attract the Indians—Religious feasts and
+processions—Agricultural and commercial organizations
+
+With the death of Cardenas the most dangerous enemy the Jesuits ever
+had in Paraguay had disappeared. They worsted him, and drove him from
+his see; but the movement set on foot by him and the calumnies he
+levelled at their Order still remained and flourished, and in the end
+prevailed against them and drove them from the land. A calumny is hard
+to kill; mankind in general cherish it; they never let it die, and, if
+it languishes, resuscitate it under another form; they hold to it in
+evil and in good repute, so that, once fairly rooted, it goes on
+growing like a forest-tree throughout the centuries. Therefore, the
+charges against the Jesuits in Paraguay, which Cardenas first started,
+are with us still, and warp our judgment as to the doings of the Order
+in the missions of the Paraná and Uruguay even until to-day.
+
+But neither calumny nor the raids of the Paulistas, nor yet the
+jealousy of the Spanish settlers in Paraguay, deterred the Jesuits from
+the prosecution of their task. The missions gradually extended, till
+they ranged from Santa Maria la Mayor, in Paraguay, to San Miguel, in
+what is now Brazil; and from Jesus, upon the Paraná, to Yapeyu, upon
+the Uruguay. Most of the country, with the exception of the missions of
+Jesus and Trinidad, upon the Paraná, which to-day, at least, are only
+clearings in the primeval forest, is composed of open rolling plains,
+with wood upon the banks of all the streams. Covered as it was and is
+with fine, short grass, it formed excellent cattle-breeding country,
+and hence the great industry of the Indians was to look after stock.
+The country being so favourable for cattle, they multiplied
+immoderately, so that in the various establishments (_estancias_),
+according to the inventories published by Brabo, their numbers were
+immense.[148]
+
+These open rolling plains, called by the natives _campos quebrantados_,
+are generally studded thickly with stunted palms called yatais,[149]
+but not so thickly as to spoil the grass which covers them in spring
+and early summer, and even in winter they remain good feeding ground.
+Thick clumps of hard-wood trees[150] break up the prairie here and
+there into peninsulas and islands, and in the hollows and rocky valleys
+bushy palmetto rises above a horse’s knees. In general the soil is of a
+rich bright red, which, gleaming through the trees, gives a peculiarly
+warm colour to the land. All the French Jesuit writers refer to it as
+‘la terre rouge des missions’. The Jesuits used it and another earth of
+a yellow shade for painting their churches and their houses in the
+mission territory. Its composition is rather sandy, though after rain
+it makes thick mud, and renders travelling most laborious. The flowers
+and shrubs of the territory are quite as interesting and still more
+varied than are the trees. Many of the Jesuits were botanists, and the
+works of Fathers Montenegro,[151] Sigismund Asperger and Lozano are
+most curious, and give descriptions and lists of many of the plants
+unclassified even to-day. The celebrated Bonpland, so long detained by
+Dr. Francia in Paraguay, unfortunately never published anything; but
+modern writers[152] have done much, though still the flora of the whole
+country is but most imperfectly known, and much remains to do before it
+is all classified. The _Croton succirubrus_ (from which a resin known
+as ‘sangre-de-drago’ is extracted), the sumaha (bombax—the fruit of
+which yields a fine vegetable silk), the erythroxylon or coca of
+Paraguay, the incienso or incense-tree of the Jesuits, are some of the
+most remarkable of the myriad shrubs. But if the shrubs are myriad, the
+flowers are past the power of man to count. Lianas, with their yellow
+and red and purple clusters of blossoms, like enormous bunches of
+grapes, hang from the forest-trees. In the open glades upon the
+ñandubays,[153] the algarrobos, and the espinillos, hang various
+Orchidaceæ,[154] called by the natives ‘flores del aire’, covering the
+trees with their aerial roots, their hanging blossoms, and their
+foliage of tender green. The Labiatæ, Compositæ, Daturæ, Umbelliferæ,
+Convolvulaceæ, and many other species, cover the ground in spring or
+run up trees and bushes after the fashion of our honeysuckle and the
+traveller’s joy.
+
+The lakes and backwaters of rivers are covered with myriads of
+water-lilies (all lumped together by the natives as ‘camalote’), whilst
+in the woodland pools the Victoria Regis carpets the water with its
+giant leaves. In every wood the orange and the lemon with the sweet
+lime have become wild, and form great thickets. Each farm and _rancho_
+has its orange-grove, beneath the shade of which I have so often
+camped, that the scent of orange-blossom always brings back to me the
+dense primeval woods, the silent plains, the quiet Indians, and the
+unnavigated waterways, in which the alligators basked. Except the
+Sierra de Mbaracayu,[155] on the north-east, throughout the mission
+territory there are no mountains of considerable height; and through
+the middle of the country run the rivers Paraná and Uruguay, the latter
+forming the boundary on the south-east. The rolling plains and woods
+alternate with great marshes called _esteros_, which in some districts,
+as of that of Ñeembucu, cover large tracts of land, forming in winter
+an almost impenetrable morass, and in the spring and early summer
+excellent feeding-ground for sheep. Throughout the territory the
+climate is healthy, except towards the woody northern hills. With this
+rich territory and the false reports of mines, which even unsuccessful
+exploration could not dispel, it is but natural that the Jesuits were
+hated far and wide. It must have been annoying to a society composed,
+as were the greater portion of the Spanish settlements in Paraguay, of
+adventurers, who treated the Indians as brute beasts,[156] to see a
+preserve of Indians separated from their territory by no great barrier
+of Nature, and still beyond their power.[157] Bonpland, in speaking of
+the country, says: ‘The whole of the land exceeds description; at every
+step one meets with things useful and new in natural history.’ Such
+also was the opinion of the French travellers Demersay and D’Orbigny;
+of Colonel du Graty, whose interesting work (‘La République du
+Paraguay’, Brussels, 1862) is one of the best on the country; the
+recent French explorer Bourgade la Dardye, and of all those who have
+ever visited the missions of Paraguay.[158]
+
+In this rich territory the Jesuits, when, after infinite trouble, they
+had united a sufficient[159] quantity of Indians, formed them into
+townships, almost all of which were built upon one plan. In Paraguay
+itself only some three or four remain; but they remain so well
+preserved that, by the help of contemporary accounts, it is easy to
+reconstruct almost exactly what the missions must have been like during
+the Jesuits’ rule.[160]
+
+Built round a square, the church and store-houses filled one end, and
+the dwellings of the Indians, formed of sun-dried bricks or wattled
+canes in three long pent-houses, completed the three sides. In general,
+the houses were of enormous length, after the fashion of a St. Simonian
+phalanstery, or of a ‘miners’ row’ in Lanarkshire. Each family had its
+own apartments, which were but separated from the apartments of the
+next by a lath-and-plaster wall, called in Spanish _tabique_; but one
+veranda and one roof served for a hundred or more families. The space
+in the middle of the square was carpeted with the finest grass, kept
+short by being pastured close by sheep. The churches, sometimes built
+of stone, and sometimes of the hard woods with which the country
+abounds, were beyond all description splendid, taking into
+consideration the remoteness of the Jesuit towns from the outside
+world. Frequently—as, for instance, in the mission of Los Apostoles—the
+churches had three aisles, and were adorned with lofty towers, rich
+altars,[161] super-altars, and statuary, brought at great expense from
+Italy and Spain. Though the churches were often built of stone, it was
+not usual for the houses of the Indians to be so built; but in
+situations where stone was plentiful, as at the mission of San Borja,
+the houses of the Jesuits were of masonry, with verandas held up by
+columns, and with staircases with balustrades of sculptured stone.[162]
+The ordinary ground-plan of the priest’s house was that of the Spanish
+Moorish dwelling, so like in all its details to a Roman house at
+Pompeii or at Herculaneum. Built round a square courtyard, with a
+fountain in the middle, the Jesuits’ house formed but a portion of a
+sort of inner town, which was surrounded by a wall, in which a gate,
+closed by a porter’s lodge, communicated with the outside world. Within
+the wall was situated the church (although it had an entrance to the
+plaza), the rooms of the inferior priest, a garden, a guest-chamber,
+stables, and a store-house, in which were kept the arms belonging to
+the town, the corn, flour, and wool, and the provisions necessary for
+life in a remote and often dangerous place. In every case the houses
+were of one story; the furniture was modest, and in general home-made;
+in every room hung images and pious pictures, the latter often painted
+by the Indians themselves. In the smaller missions two Jesuits managed
+all the Indians.[163]
+
+The greatest difficulty which the Jesuits had to face was the natural
+indolence of their neophytes. Quite unaccustomed as they were to
+regular work of any kind, the ordinary European system, as practised in
+the Spanish settlements, promptly reduced them to despair, and often
+killed them off in hundreds. Therefore the Jesuits instituted the
+semi-communal system of agriculture and of public works with which
+their name will be associated for ever in America.[164]
+
+The celebrated Dr. Francia, dictator of Paraguay, used to refer to the
+Jesuits as ‘cunning rogues’,[165] and, as he certainly himself was
+versed in every phase of cunningness, perhaps his estimate—to some
+extent, at least—was just. A rogue in politics is but a man who
+disagrees with you; but, still, it wanted no little knowledge of
+mankind to present a daily task to men, unversed in any kind of labour,
+as of the nature of a pleasure in itself. The difficulty was enormous,
+as the Indians seemed never to have come under the primeval curse, but
+passed their lives in wandering about, occasionally cultivating just
+sufficient for their needs. Whether a missionary, Jesuit, or Jansenist,
+Protestant, Catholic, or Mohammedan, does well in forcing his own mode
+of life and faith on those who live a happier, freer life than any his
+instructor can hold out to them is a moot point. Only the future can
+resolve the question, and judge of what we do to-day—no doubt with good
+intentions, but with the ignorance born of our self-conceit. Much of
+the misery of the world has been brought about with good intentions;
+but of the Jesuits, at least, it can be said that what they did in
+Paraguay did not spread death and extinction to the tribes with whom
+they dealt.[166] So to the task of agriculture the Jesuits marshalled
+their neophytes to the sound of music, and in procession to the fields,
+with a saint borne high aloft, the community each day at sunrise took
+its way. Along the paths, at stated intervals, were shrines of saints,
+and before each of them they prayed, and between each shrine sang
+hymns.[167] As the procession advanced, it became gradually smaller as
+groups of Indians dropped off to work the various fields, and finally
+the priest and acolyte with the musicians returned alone.[168] At
+mid-day, before eating, they all united and sang hymns, and then, after
+their meal and siesta, returned to work till sundown, when the
+procession again re-formed, and the labourers, singing, returned to
+their abodes. A pleasing and Arcadian style of tillage, and different
+from the system of the ‘swinked’ labourer in more northern climes. But
+even then the hymnal day was not concluded; for after a brief rest they
+all repaired to church to sing the ‘rosary’, and then to sup and bed.
+On rainy days they worked at other industries in the same
+half-Arcadian, half-communistic manner, only they sang their hymns in
+church instead of in the fields. The system was so different to that
+under which the Indians endured their lives in the _encomiendas_ and
+the _mitas_ of the Spanish settlements, that the fact alone is
+sufficient to account for much of the contemporary hatred which the
+Jesuits incurred.
+
+Imagine a semi-communistic settlement set close to the borders of
+Rhodesia, in which thousands of Kaffirs passed a life analogous to that
+passed by the Indians of the missions—cared for and fed by the
+community, looked after in every smallest particular of their lives—and
+what a flood of calumny would be let loose upon the unfortunate
+devisers of the scheme! Firstly, to withdraw thousands of ‘natives’
+from the labour market would be a crime against all progress, and then
+to treat them kindly would be heresy, and to seclude them from the
+contamination of the scum of Europe in the settlements would be termed
+unnatural; for we know that native races derive most benefit from free
+competition with the least fitted of our population to instruct. But
+besides agriculture the enormous cattle-farms[169] of the mission
+territory gave occupation to many of the neophytes. The life on
+cattle-farms gave less scope for supervision, and we may suppose that
+the herders and the cattlemen were more like Gauchos; but Gauchos under
+religious discipline, half-centaurs in the field, sitting a plunging
+half-wild colt as if they were part of him, and when on foot at home
+submissive to the Jesuits, constant in church, but not so fierce and
+bloodthirsty as their descendants soon became after the withdrawal of
+the mission rule.
+
+As well as agriculture and _estancia_ life, the Jesuits had introduced
+amongst the Indians most of the arts and trades of Europe. By the
+inventories taken by Bucareli, Viceroy of Buenos Ayres, at the
+expulsion of the Order, we find that they wove cotton largely;
+sometimes they made as much as eight thousand five hundred yards of
+cloth in a single town in the space of two or three months.[170] And,
+in addition to weaving, they had tanneries, carpenters’ shops, tailors,
+hat-makers, coopers, cordage-makers, boat-builders, cartwrights,
+joiners, and almost every industry useful and necessary to life. They
+also made arms and powder, musical instruments, and had silversmiths,
+musicians, painters, turners, and printers to work their
+printing-presses: for many books were printed at the missions,[171] and
+they produced manuscripts as finely executed as those made by the monks
+in European monasteries.
+
+All the _estancias_, the agricultural lands and workshops were, so to
+speak, the property of the community; that is to say, the community
+worked them in common, was fed and maintained by their productions, the
+whole under the direction of the two Jesuits who lived in every town. A
+portion called _tupinambal_ in Guaraní was set aside especially for the
+maintenance of orphans and of widows. The cattle and the horses, with
+the exception of ‘los caballos del santo’, destined for show at feasts,
+were also used in common. The surplus of the capital was reserved to
+purchase necessary commodities from Buenos Ayres and from Spain.[172]
+Each family received from the common stock sufficient for its
+maintenance during good conduct, for the Jesuits held in its entirety
+the Pauline dictum that if a man will not work, then neither shall he
+eat. But as they held it, so they practised it themselves, for their
+lives were most laborious—teaching and preaching, and acting as
+overseers to the Indians in their labours continually, from the first
+moment of their arrival at the missions till their death. Thus, if the
+mayor of the township complained of any man for remissness at his work,
+he received no rations till he had improved.
+
+To inculcate habits of providence amongst the Indians, always inclined
+to consume whatever was given to them and go fasting afterwards, they
+issued the provisions but once a week, and when they killed their oxen
+forced the Indians to ‘jerk’[173] a certain quantity of beef to last
+throughout the week. Vegetables each family was obliged to plant both
+in their gardens and in the common fields; and all that were not
+actually consumed were dealt out to the workers in the common workshops
+or preserved for sale.
+
+Certain of the Indians owned their own cows and horses, and had gardens
+in which they worked; but all the product was obliged to be disposed of
+to the Jesuits for the common good, and in exchange for them they gave
+knives, scissors, cloth, and looking-glasses, and other articles made
+in the outside world. Clothes were served out to every Indian, and
+consisted for the men of trousers, coarse _ponchos_, straw hats or
+caps, and shirts; but neither men nor women ever wore shoes, and the
+sole costume of the latter was the Guaraní _tipoi_,[174] a long and
+sleeveless shift cut rather high, and with coarse embroidery round the
+shoulders, and made of a rough cotton cloth. For ornaments they had
+glass beads and rosaries of brass or silver, with silver rings, and
+necklaces of glass or horn, from which hung crucifixes. Thus food and
+clothing cost the Jesuits[175] (or the community) but little, and a
+rude plenty was the order of the land. The greatest luxury of the
+Indians was _maté_, and to produce it they worked in the _yerbales_ in
+the same way in which they worked their fields—in bands and with
+processions, to the sound of hymns and headed by a priest.
+
+This, then, was the system by means of which the Jesuits succeeded,
+without employing force of any kind, which in their case would have
+been quite impossible, lost as they were amongst the crowd of Indians,
+in making the Guaranís endure the yoke of toil. The semi-communal
+character of their rule accounts for the hostility of Liberals who,
+like Azara, saw in competition the best road to progress, but who, like
+him, in their consuming thirst for progress lost sight of happiness.
+
+In addition to the means described, the Jesuits had recourse to
+frequent religious feasts, for which the calendar gave them full scope,
+so that the life in a Jesuit mission was much diversified and rendered
+pleasant to the Indians, who have a rooted love of show. Each mission
+had, of course, its patron saint,[176] and on his day nobody worked,
+whilst all was joyfulness and simple mirth. At break of day a discharge
+of rockets and of firearms and peals upon the bells announced the
+joyful morn. Then the whole population flocked to church to listen to
+an early mass. Those who could find no room inside the church stood in
+long lines outside the door, which remained open during the ceremony.
+Mass over, each one ran to prepare himself for his part in the
+function, the Jesuits having taken care, by multiplying offices and
+employments, to leave no man without a direct share in all the others
+did.[177] The humblest and the highest had their part, and the heaviest
+burden, no doubt, fell upon the two Jesuits,[178] who were answerable
+for all. The foremost duty was to get the procession ready for the
+march, and saddle ‘los caballos del santo’[179] to serve as escort,
+mounted by Indians in rich dresses, kept specially for feasts.
+
+The inventory of the town of Los Apostoles[180] enables us to
+reconstruct, with some attempt at accuracy, how the procession was
+formed and how it took its way. All the militia of the town were in
+attendance, mounted on their best horses, and armed with lances
+(_chuzos_), lazo, bolas, and a few with guns. The officers of the
+Indians rode at their head, dressed out in gorgeous clothes, and troops
+of dancers, at stated intervals, performed a sort of Pyrrhic dance
+between the squadrons of the cavalry.[181] In the front of all rode on
+a white horse the Alferez Real,[182] dressed in a doublet of blue
+velvet richly laced with gold, a waistcoat of brocade, and with short
+velvet breeches gartered with silver lace; upon his feet shoes decked
+with silver buckles, and the whole scheme completed by a gold-laced
+hat. In his right hand he held the royal standard fastened to a long
+cane which ended in a silver knob. A sword was by his side, which, as
+he only could have worn it on such occasions, and as the ‘horses of the
+saint’ were not unlikely as ticklish as most horses of the prairies of
+Entre Rios and Corrientes are wont to be, must have embarrassed him
+considerably. Behind him came the Corregidor, arrayed in yellow satin,
+with a silk waistcoat and gold buttons, breeches of yellow velvet, and
+a hat equal in magnificence to that worn by his bold compeer. The two
+Alcaldes, less violently dressed, wore straw-coloured silk suits, with
+satin waistcoats of the same colour, and hats turned up with gold.
+Other officials, as the Commissario, Maestre de Campo, and the Sargento
+Mayor, were quite as gaily dressed in scarlet coats, with crimson
+damask waistcoats trimmed with silver lace,[183] red breeches, and
+black hats adorned with heavy lace. In the bright Paraguayan sunshine,
+with the primeval forest for a background, or in some mission in the
+midst of a vast plain beside the Paraná, they must have looked as
+gorgeous as a flight of parrots from the neighbouring woods, and have
+made a Turneresque effect, ambling along, a blaze of colours, quite as
+self-satisfied in their finery as if ‘the rainbow had been entail
+settled on them and their heirs male.’ Quite probably their broad, flat
+noses, and their long, lank hair, their faces fixed immovably, as if
+they were carved in ñandubay, contrasted strangely with their finery.
+But there were none to judge—no one to make remarks; most likely all
+was conscience and tender heart, and not their bitterest enemy has laid
+the charge of humour to the Jesuits’ account.
+
+As in the inventories of the thirty towns I find no mention either of
+stockings or of shoes for Indians, with the exception of the low shoes
+and buckles worn by the Alferez Real, it seems the gorgeous costumes
+ended at the knee, and that these popinjays rode barefoot, with,
+perhaps, large iron Gaucho spurs fastened by strips of mare-hide round
+their ankles, and hanging down below their naked feet. But, not content
+with the procession of the elders in parrot guise, there was a parody
+of parodies in the _cabildo infantil_, the band composed of children,
+who, with the self-same titles as their elders, and in the self-same
+clothes adjusted to their size, rode close upon their heels. Lastly, as
+Charlevoix tells us, came ‘des lions et des tigres, mais bien enchainés
+afin qu’ils ne troublerent point la fête,’ and so the whole procession
+took its way towards the church.
+
+The church, all hung with velvet and brocade, was all ablaze with
+lights, and fumes of incense (no doubt necessary) almost obscured the
+nave. Upon the right and left hand of the choir (which, as is usual in
+Spain, was in the middle of the church) the younger Indians were seated
+all in rows, the boys and girls being separated, as was the custom in
+all the missions of the Jesuits, who, no doubt, were convinced of the
+advisability of the saying that ‘entre santa y santo, pared de cal y
+canto.’[184] The Indians who had some office, and who wore the
+clothes[185] I have described, were seated or knelt in rows, and at the
+outside stood the people of the town dressed in white cotton, their
+simple clothes, no doubt, forming an effective background to their more
+parti-coloured brethren kneeling in the front. Throughout the church
+the men and women were separated, and if a rumour of an incursion of
+Paulistas was in the air, the Indians carried arms even in the sacred
+buildings and at the solemn feasts. Mass was celebrated with a full
+band, the oboe, fagot, lute, harp, cornet, clarinet, violin, viola, and
+all other kinds of music, figuring in the inventories of the thirty
+towns. Indeed, in two of the inventories[186] an opera called
+‘Santiago’ is mentioned, which had special costumes and properties to
+put it on the stage. Mass over, the procession was reconstituted
+outside the church, and after parading once more through the town broke
+up, and the Indians devoted the night to feasting, and not infrequently
+danced till break of day.
+
+Such were the outward arts with which the Jesuits sought to attach the
+simple people, to whom they stood in the position not only of pastors
+and masters both in one, but also as protectors from the Paulistas on
+one side, and on the other from the Spaniards of the settlements, who,
+with their _encomiendas_ and their European system of free competition
+between man and man, were perhaps unknowingly the direst enemies of the
+whole Indian race. There is, as it would seem, implanted in the minds
+of almost all primitive peoples, such as the Guaranís, a solidarity, a
+clinging kinship, which if once broken down by competition,
+unrestrained after our modern fashion, inevitably leads to their decay.
+Hence the keen hatred to the Chinese in California and in Australia.
+Naturally, those whom we hate, and in a measure fear, we also vilify,
+and this has given rise to all those accusations of Oriental vice (as
+if the vice of any Oriental, however much depraved, was comparable to
+that of citizens of Paris or of London), of barbarism, and the like, so
+freely levelled against the unfortunate Chinese.
+
+In Paraguay nothing is more remarkable in a market in the country than
+the way in which the people will not undersell each other, even
+refusing to part with goods a fraction lower than the price which they
+consider fair.[187] It may be that the Jesuits would have done better
+to endeavour to equip their neophytes more fully, so as to take their
+place in the battle of the world. It may be that the simple, happy
+lives they led were too opposed to the general scheme of outside human
+life to find acceptance or a place in our cosmogony. But one thing I am
+sure of—that the innocent delight of the poor Indian Alferez Real,
+mounted upon his horse, dressed in his motley, barefooted, and
+overshadowed by his gold-laced hat, was as entire as if he had eaten of
+all the fruits of all the trees of knowledge of his time, and so
+perhaps the Jesuits were wise.
+
+Strangely enough—but, then, how strangely all extremes meet in
+humanity!—the Jesuits alone (at least, in Paraguay) seem to have
+apprehended, as the Arabs certainly have done from immemorial time,
+that the first duty of a man is to enjoy his life. Art, science,
+literature, ambition—all the frivolities with which men occupy
+themselves—have their due place; but life is first, and in some
+strange, mysterious way the Jesuits felt it, though, no doubt, they
+would have been the first to deny it with a thousand oaths. But in a
+Jesuit mission all was not feasting or processioning, for with such
+neighbours as the Mamelucos they had to keep themselves prepared.[188]
+As for their better government in home affairs each mission had its
+police, with officers[189] chosen by the Jesuits amongst the Indians,
+so for exterior defence they had militia, and in it the _caciques_[190]
+of the different tribes held principal command. Most likely over them,
+or at their elbows, were set priests who before entering the Company of
+Jesus had been soldiers: for there were many such amongst the Jesuits.
+As their own founder once had been a soldier, so the Company was
+popular amongst those soldiers who from some cause or other had changed
+their swords to crucifixes, and taken service in the ranks of
+Christ.[191] As it was most important, both for defence and policy, to
+keep the _caciques_ content, they were distinguished by better
+treatment than the others in many different ways. Their food was more
+abundant, and a guard of Indians was on perpetual duty round the houses
+where they lived; these they employed as servants and as messengers to
+summon distant companies of Indians to the field. Their method of
+organization must have been like that of the Boers or of the Arabs; for
+every Indian belonged to a company, which now and then was brought
+together for evolutions in the field or for a period of training, after
+the fashion of our militia or the German Landwehr. Perhaps this system
+of an armed militia, always ready for the field, was what, above all
+other reasons, enabled their detractors to represent the Jesuits as
+feared and unpopular. Why, it was asked, does this community of priests
+maintain an army in its territories? No one remembered that if such
+were not the case the missions could not have existed for a year
+without a force to defend their borders from the Paulistas. Everyone
+forgot that Fathers Montoya and Del Taño had obtained special
+permission from the King for the Indians of the missions to bear arms;
+and, as no human being is grateful for anything but contumelious
+treatment, the Spanish settlers conveniently forgot how many times a
+Jesuit army had saved their territories. The body of three thousand
+Guaranís sent at the expense of the Company to assist the Spaniards
+against the Portuguese at the attack upon the Colonia del
+Sacramento[192] on the river Plate, in 1678, was quite forgotten,
+together with the innumerable contingents sent by the Jesuits at the
+demand of Spanish governors against the Chaco Indians, the Payaguás,
+and even against the distant Calchaquis, in what is now the province of
+Jujuy. Even when an English pirate, called in the Spanish histories
+Roque Barloque (explained by some to be plain Richard Barlow), appeared
+off Buenos Ayres, the undaunted neophytes shrank not a moment from
+going to the assistance of their co-religionists against the ‘Lutheran
+dog’.[193] Lastly, all Spanish governors and writers, both
+contemporaneous and at the end of the eighteenth century, seem to
+forget that if the Jesuits had an army of neophytes within their
+territory the fact was known and approved of at the court of
+Spain.[194] But it appears that Calvin had many coadjutors in his
+policy of ‘Jesuitas aut necandi aut calumniis opponendi sunt.’[195]
+When a Jesuit army took the field, driving before it sufficient cattle
+to subsist upon, and with its _caballada_ of spare horses upon its
+flank, it must have resembled many a Gaucho army I have seen in Entre
+Rios five-and-twenty years ago. The only difference seems to have been
+that the Gauchos of yesterday did not use bows and arrows, although
+they might have done so with as much benefit to themselves, and no more
+danger to their enemies, than was occasioned by the rusty,
+ill-conditioned guns they used to bear. The Indians were armed with
+bows, and in their expeditions each Indian carried one hundred and
+fifty arrows tipped with iron. Others had firearms, but all bore bolas
+on their saddles, and carried lazos and long lances,[196] which, like
+the Pampa Indians, they used in mounting their horses, placing one hand
+upon the mane, and vaulting into the saddles with the other leaning on
+the lance. The infantry were armed with lances and a few guns; they
+also carried bolas, but they trusted most to slings, for which they
+carried bags of hide, with a provision of smooth round stones, and used
+them dexterously. On several occasions their rude militia gave proofs
+of stubborn valour, and, as they fought under the Jesuits’ eyes, no
+doubt acquitted themselves as men would who looked upon their priests
+almost in the light of gods. But agriculture and cattle-breeding were
+not all the resources of the missions; for the Jesuits engaged in
+commerce largely, both with the outer world and by the intricate and
+curious barter system which they had set on foot for the mutual
+convenience of the different mission towns. In many of the inventories
+printed by Brabo, one comes across the entry ‘Deudas’, showing a sort
+of account current between the towns for various articles. Thus, they
+exchanged cattle for cotton, sugar for rice, wheat for pig-iron or
+tools from Europe; as no account of interest ever appears in any
+inventory as between town and town, it seems the Jesuits anticipated
+Socialism—at least, so far as that they bought and sold for use, and
+not for gain. Although between the towns of their own territory all was
+arranged for mutual convenience, yet in their dealings with the outside
+world the Jesuits adhered to what are known as ‘business principles’.
+These principles, if I mistake not, have been deified by politicians
+with their ‘Buy in the cheapest, sell in the dearest’ tag, and
+therefore even the sternest Protestant or Jansenist (if such there
+still exist) can have no stone to throw at the Company of Jesus for its
+participation in that system which has made the whole world glad.
+
+Cotton and linen cloth, tobacco, hides, woods of the various hard-wood
+forests of the country, and, above all, _yerba-maté_, were their chief
+articles of export to the outside world. Their nearest market was in
+Buenos Ayres, and to that port they sent their _yerba_ in boats made at
+their own yards, of which they had several, but notably at Yapeyú upon
+the Uruguay. The money that was made was sent to the Superior of the
+missions, who had the disposition of the way in which it was dispensed,
+either for use at home or to be sent to Europe for necessary goods. As
+well as _yerba-maté_, they sent great quantities of hides. The
+inventories of the towns taken at the expulsion state that the number
+of green hides[197] exported annually was fifty thousand, together with
+six thousand cured; in addition they sold from three to four
+arrobas[198] of horse-hair, and wood to the value of twenty-five to
+thirty thousand dollars every year. The total export of their _yerba_
+ranged between eighty and one hundred thousand arrobas, which at the
+lowest price could not have been sold at a profit under seven dollars
+an arroba,[199] so that the income[200] of the thirty towns must have
+been relatively large.[201] Two or three hundred barrels of honey[202]
+and some three or four thousand arrobas of tobacco made up the sum
+total of their exports, though, had they needed money, it might have
+been increased in such a country, and with so many willing labourers,
+almost indefinitely.
+
+Thus it will be seen that the missions were organized both
+agriculturally and commercially so as to be almost self-supporting, and
+that of the mere necessaries of life they had sufficient for
+exportation, no small achievement when we consider how averse from
+labour were the Indians with whom they had to deal. But that nothing
+should be wanting that a civilized community could possibly desire,
+they had their prisons, with good store of chains, fetters, whips, and
+all the other instruments with which the moral code is generally
+enforced. The most usual punishment was whipping;[203] and the crimes
+most frequent were drunkenness, neglect of work, and bigamy, which
+latter lapse from virtue the Jesuits chastised severely, not thinking,
+being celibates themselves, that not unlikely it was apt to turn into
+its own punishment without the aid of stripes.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter VII
+
+
+Causes of the Jesuits’ unpopularity—Description of the lives and habits
+of the priests—Testimony in favour of the missions—Their opposition to
+slavery—Their system of administration
+
+Much has been written of the interior government of the missions by the
+Jesuits, but chiefly by strong partisans, for and against, on either
+side, whose only object was to make out a case to fit the prejudices of
+those for whom they wrote. Upon the Jesuit side the Abbé Muratori[204]
+describes a paradise. A very Carlo Dolce amongst writers, with him all
+in the missions is so cloying sweet that one’s soul sickens, and one
+longs in his ‘Happy Christianity’ to find a drop of gall. But for five
+hundred pages nothing is amiss; the men of Belial persecute the Jesuit
+saints, who always (after the fashion of their Order and mankind) turn
+both cheeks to the smiter, and, if their purse is taken, hasten to give
+up their cloaks. The Indians are all love and gratitude. No need in the
+Abbé’s pages for the twelve pair of fetters, which Brabo most unkindly
+has set down amongst his inventories. Never a single _lapsus_ from the
+moral rule the Jesuits imposed—no drunkenness, and bigamy so seldom met
+with that it would seem that Joseph Andrews had been a swaggerer judged
+by the standard of these moral Guaranís. Then comes Ibañez,[205] the
+ex-Jesuit, on the other side. In a twinkling of an eye the scene is
+changed. For, quite in Hogarth’s vein, he paints the missions as a
+perpetual march to Finchley, and tells us that the Indians were
+savages, and quite unchanged in all their primitive propensities under
+the Jesuit rule. And for the Jesuits themselves he has a few
+home-truths administered with vinegar, after the fashion of the
+renegade the whole world over, who sees nothing good in the society
+that has turned him out. He roundly says the Jesuits were loafers,
+accuses them of keeping the Indians ignorant for their own purposes,
+and paints them quite as black as the Abbé Muratori painted them rose
+colour, and with as little art. So that, as usually happens in the
+writings of all polemists, no matter upon which side they may write,
+but little information, and that distorted to an incredible degree, is
+all that they afford.
+
+In general, curious as it may appear, the bitterest opponents of the
+Jesuits were Catholics, and Protestants have often written as
+apologists. Buffon, Raynal, and Montesquieu, with Voltaire, Robertson,
+and Southey, have written favourably of the internal government of the
+missions and the effect which it produced. No other names of equal
+authority can be quoted on the other side; but yet the fact remains
+that the Jesuits in Paraguay were exposed to constant calumny from the
+first day they went there till the last member of the Order left the
+land.
+
+It is my object first to try to show what the conditions of their
+government really were, and then to try and clear up what was the cause
+of unpopularity, and why so many and such persistent calumnies were
+laid to their account. Stretching right up and down the banks of both
+the Paraná and Uruguay, the missions extended from Nuestra Senora de
+Fé[206] (or Santa Maria), in Paraguay, to San Miguel, in what is now
+the Brazilian province of Rio Grande do Sul; and from the mission of
+Corpus, on the east bank of the Paraná, to Yapeyú, upon the Uruguay.
+The official capital was placed at Candelaria, on the east bank of the
+Paraná. In that town the Superior of the missions had his official
+residence, and from thence he ruled the whole territory, having not
+only the ecclesiastical but the temporal power, the latter, from the
+position in which he was placed, so many hundred miles from any Spanish
+Governor, having by degrees gradually come into his hands. The little
+town of La Candelaria was, when I knew it, in a most neglected state.
+The buildings of the Jesuits, with the exception of the church, were
+all in ruins. The streets were sandy and deserted, the foot-walk
+separated from them by a line of hard-wood posts, which, as tradition
+said, were left there by the Jesuits; but the hard woods of Paraguay
+are almost as imperishable as iron.
+
+A _balsa_—that is, a flying bridge worked by a cable—plied fitfully
+across the Paraná to Ytapua, also a little ex-Jesuit town upon the
+other side. Each shop had a sign outside, as was the case in England a
+hundred years ago. Indians supplied the place with vegetables, floating
+down in canoes piled up with fruit, with flowers, with sweet potatoes,
+and returning home empty, or for their cargo three or four tin pails, a
+looking-glass, or other of the marvels which Europe sends as a sample
+of her manufactures to little frontier towns. All was as quiet, or
+perhaps much quieter than in the time when the Superior of the Jesuits
+was in residence, and if it had been necessary, during the hot hours of
+noon, Godivas by the dozen might have ridden down the streets, had they
+been able to find horses quiet enough to ride, certain that no one in
+the town would lose his after-breakfast nap to look at them.
+
+In every mission two chosen Jesuits lived. The elder, selected for his
+experience of the country and knowledge of the tongue from amongst
+those who had been rectors of colleges or provincials of the Order, was
+vested with the civil power, and was responsible direct to the
+Superior. The second, generally styled companion (el Compañero), acted
+as his lieutenant, and had full charge of all things spiritual; so that
+they were a check on one another, and their duties did not clash.
+
+In difficulties the Superior transmitted orders, like a general in the
+field, by mounted messengers, who frequently rode over a hundred miles
+a day, relays of horses always being kept ready for emergencies every
+three leagues upon the road.
+
+From La Candelaria roads branched off to every portion of the
+territory, most of them fit for carts, and all superior to those tracks
+which were the only thoroughfares but twenty years ago. Roads ran to
+Corrientes, to Asuncion, others from Yapeyú to the Salto Grande, on the
+Paraná. Upon the Upper Uruguay were about eighty posts, all guarded,
+and with horses ready to equip the messengers. But there were also
+roads in the district of the Upper Paraná, which I myself remember as a
+wilderness, uncrossed, uncrossable, where tigers roamed about and
+Indians shot at the rare traveller with poisoned arrows out of a
+blow-pipe, whilst they remained unseen in the recesses of the woods. In
+the districts of the Upper Uruguay and Paraná, besides the roads and
+relays of post-horses, they had a fleet both of canoes and boats in
+which they carried _yerba_[207] and the other products of the land.
+Thus, with their fleet of boats and of canoes, their highroads
+branching out on every side, and their relays of post-horses at
+intervals, most probably no State of America at the time had such
+interior means of communication with the seat of government. The Incas
+and the Aztecs certainly had posts who carried messages and brought up
+fish from the coast with great rapidity; but all the Spanish colonies
+contemporaneous with the Jesuits’ settlements in Paraguay had fallen
+into a state of lethargy and of interior decay. The roads the Incas
+used in Peru were falling fast into disuse, and it took several weeks
+to send a letter from Buenos Ayres to the Pacific coast.
+
+The system of interior government in the missions was in appearance
+democratic—that is to say, there were officials, as mayors[208] and
+councillors; but most of them were named by the Jesuits, and all of
+them, even although elected, owed their election entirely to their
+priests. This sort of thought-suggested representation was the most
+fitting for the Indians at the time,[209] and those who look into the
+workings of a County Council of to-day cannot but think at times that
+the majority of the councillors would have been better chosen had the
+electorate had the benefit of some controlling hand, though from what
+quarter it is difficult to see. The problem which most writers on the
+Jesuits have quite misunderstood, is how two Jesuits were able to keep
+a mission of several thousand Indians in order, and to rule supreme
+without armed forces, or any means of making their power felt or of
+enforcing obedience to their decrees. Undoubtedly, the dangerous
+position in which the Indians stood, exposed on one side to the
+Paulistas, and on the other to the Spanish settlers, both of whom
+wished to take them as their slaves, placed power in the Jesuits’
+hands: for the Indians clearly perceived that the Jesuits alone stood
+between them and instant slavery. Most controversialists who have
+opposed the Jesuits assert that the Indians of the missions were, in
+reality, half slaves. Nothing is further from the truth, if one
+consults the contemporary records, and remembers the small number of
+the Jesuits. The work the Indians did was inconsiderable, and under
+such conditions as to deprive it of much of the toilsomeness which is
+incident to any kind of work. The very essence of a slave’s estate is
+being obliged to work without remuneration for another man. Nothing was
+farther from the Indians than such a state of things. Their work was
+done for the community, and though the Jesuits, without doubt, had the
+full disposition of all the money earned in commerce,[210] and of the
+distribution of the goods, neither the money nor the goods were used
+for self-aggrandisement, but were laid out for the benefit of the
+community at large. The total population of the thirty towns is
+variously estimated from one hundred and forty to one hundred and
+eighty thousand,[211] and, curiously enough, it remained almost at the
+same figure during the whole period of the Jesuit rule. This fact has
+been adduced against the Jesuits, and it has been said that they could
+not have been good rulers, or the population must have increased; but
+those who say so forget that the Indians of Paraguay were never in
+great numbers, and that most writers on the wild tribes, as
+Dobrizhoffer[212] and Azara, remark their tendency never to increase.
+
+All this relatively large population of Indians was ruled, as has been
+seen, by a quite inconsiderable number of priests, who, not disposing
+of any European force, and being almost always on bad terms with the
+Spanish settlers in Paraguay on account of the firm stand they made
+against the enslaving of the Indians, had no means of coercion at their
+command. Hence the Indians must have been contented with their rule,
+for if they had not been so the Jesuits possessed no power to stop them
+from returning to their savage life. Azara,[213] although in the main
+an opponent of the Jesuits, in the same way that a ‘good Liberal’ of
+to-day would oppose anything of a Socialistic tendency, yet has this
+most significant passage in their favour. After enumerating the amount
+of taxes paid by the missions to the Crown, he says ‘en faisant le
+bilan tout se trouvait égal, et s’il y avait quelque excédant, il était
+en faveur des Jésuites ou des peoplades.’[214] Seldom enough does such
+a result take place when the balance is struck to-day in any country
+between the rulers and their ‘taxables’. Following their system of
+perfect isolation from the world to its logical sequence, the Jesuits
+surrounded all the territories of their different towns with walls and
+ditches, and at the gates planted a guard to prevent egress or ingress
+between the missions and the outer world.[215] Much capital has been
+made out of this, as it is attempted to be shown that the Indians were
+thereby treated as prisoners in their own territories. Nothing,
+however, has been said of the fact that, if the ditches, palisades, and
+guard-houses kept in the Indians, they also had the effect of keeping
+the Spaniards out. When men who looked upon the Indians as without
+reason, and captured them for slaves when it was possible, began to
+talk of liberty, it looks as if the ‘sacred name of liberty’ was used
+but as a stalking-horse—as greasy Testaments are used to swear upon in
+police-courts, when the witness, with his tongue in his cheek, raises
+his eyes to heaven, and then with fervency imprints a kiss upon his
+thumb.
+
+It will be seen that the communism of the missions was of a limited
+character, and, though the land was cultivated by the labour of the
+community, that the products were administered by the Jesuits alone.
+Though it has been stated by many polemical writers, such as Ibañez and
+Azara, and more recently by Washburne, who was American Minister in
+Paraguay during the war with Brazil and the Argentine Republic
+(1866-70), that the Jesuits had amassed great wealth in Paraguay, no
+proof has ever been advanced for such a charge. Certainly Cardenas made
+the same statement, but it was never in his power to bring any
+confirmation of what he said. This power alone was in the hands of
+Bucareli (1767), the Viceroy of Buenos Ayres, under whose auspices the
+expulsion of the Jesuits was carried out. By several extracts from
+Brabo’s inventories, and by the statement of the receivers sent by
+Bucareli, I hope to show that there was no great wealth at any time in
+the mission territory, and that the income was expended in the
+territory itself. It may be that the expenditure on churches was
+excessive, and also that the money laid out on religious ceremonies was
+not productive; but the Jesuits, strange as it may appear, did not
+conduct the missions after the fashion of a business concern, but
+rather as the rulers of some Utopia—those foolish beings who think
+happiness is preferable to wealth.
+
+Nothing can give a better idea of the way of life of a Jesuit priest
+and of his daily labours than the curious letter of Nicolas Ñeenguiru,
+originally written in Guaraní, but of which a translation is extant in
+the National Spanish Archives in Simancas:[216]
+
+‘The manner of living of the father is to shut all the doors, and
+remain alone with his servant and his cook (who are Indians of a
+considerable age), and these only wait on him; but by day only, and at
+twelve o’clock, they go out, and an old man has care of the porter’s
+lodge, and it is he who shuts the gate when the father is asleep, or
+when he goes out to see his cultivated ground, and even then they go
+alone, except it be with an old Indian, who guides them and attends to
+the (father’s) horse; and after that he goes to Mass, and in the
+evening to the Rosary of the Blessed Virgin, calling us together by the
+sound of the bell, and before that he calls the boys and girls with a
+small bell, and after that the good father begins to teach them
+doctrine and how to cross themselves. In the same way, on every feast
+day, he preaches to us the Word of God, in the same way the Holy
+Sacrament of Penitence and of the Communion; in these things does the
+good Father employ himself, and every night the porter’s lodge is
+closed, and the key taken to the Father’s room, which is only opened in
+the morning in order that the sacristan and the cooks may enter. . . .
+
+‘The Fathers every morning say Mass for us, and after Mass they go to
+their rooms, and then they take some hot water and _yerba_ (_maté_),
+and nothing more; after that he comes to the door of his apartment, and
+then all those who heard Mass come to kiss his hand, and after that he
+goes out to see if the Indians are diligent at their tasks, and
+afterwards they go to their room to read the divine service for the day
+in his book, and to pray that God may prosper him in all his affairs.
+At eleven o’clock they go to eat a little, not to eat much, for he only
+has five dishes, and only drinks wine once, not filling a little glass;
+and spirits they never drink, and there is no wine in our town, except
+that which is brought from Candelaria, according to that which the
+Superior sends, and they bring it from somewhere near Buenos Aires. . .
+. After he has finished eating, to rest a little he goes into the
+church; afterwards—yes, he retires to rest a little, and whilst he is
+resting those who work in the father’s house go out, and those who do
+any kind of indoor work, and also the sacristan and the cook: all these
+go out, and as long as the bell does not ring the doors are shut, and
+only an old man guards the gate, and when they ring the bell again he
+opens the doors so that those who work indoors may go inside, and the
+father takes his breviary and goes nowhere. In the evening they ring
+the bell so that the children may come home, and the father comes in to
+teach them Christian doctrine.’
+
+Perhaps the foregoing simple description, written by an Indian in
+Guaraní, and translated by someone who has preserved in Spanish all the
+curious inversions of the Guaraní, presents as good a picture of the
+daily life of a mission priest in Paraguay as any that has ever been
+given to the public by writers much more ambitious than myself or
+Ñeenguiru. Nicolas Ñeenguiru, the writer of the letter, afterwards
+figured in the war against the Portuguese, and several of his letters
+are preserved in the archives of Simancas, though none so interesting
+and simple as that I have transcribed.
+
+Dobrizhoffer, in his history of the Abipones, says of him that he was a
+simple Indian, whom often he had seen put in the stocks for petty
+faults; at any rate, he seems to have been one of those Indians whom
+the Jesuits had at least favourably impressed by the system they
+employed. After the manner in which he wrote, hundreds of Indians must
+have thought, or else the missions, placed as they were, surrounded on
+all sides by enemies, could not have endured a single day. What was it,
+then, which raised the Jesuits up so many and so powerful enemies in
+Paraguay, when in the districts of the Moxos[217] and the Chiquitos
+where their power was to the full as great, amongst the Indians, they
+never had a quarrel with the Spaniards till the day they were expelled?
+Many and various causes contributed to all they underwent, but most
+undoubtedly two reasons must have brought about their fall.
+
+Since the time of Cardenas, the report that the Jesuits had rich mines,
+which they worked on the sly, had been persistently on the increase.
+Although disproved a thousand times, it still remained; even to-day, in
+spite of ‘science’ and its wonderful discoveries, there are many in
+Paraguay who cherish dreams of discovering Jesuit mines. Humanity loves
+to deceive itself, although there are plenty ready to deceive it; and
+if men can both forge for themselves fables and at the same time damage
+their neighbours in so doing, their pleasure is intense. I take it that
+many really believed the stories of the mines, being unable to credit
+that anyone would live far from the world, surrounded but by Indians,
+for any other reason than to be rich. But let a country have rich
+minerals, even if they exist but in imagination, and it becomes a crime
+against humanity to shut it up. So that it would appear one of the
+reasons which induced hatred against the Jesuits was the idea that they
+had enormous mineral wealth, which either they did not work or else
+worked in secret for the benefit of their society.
+
+The other reason was the question of slavery. Once get it well into
+your head that you and yours are ‘reasoning men’[218] (_gente de
+razon_), and that all coloured people are irrational, and slavery
+follows as a natural sequence; for ‘reasoning men’ have wit to make a
+gun, and on the gun all reason takes it stand. From the first instant
+of their arrival in America, the Jesuits had maintained a firm front
+against the enslavement of the Indians. They may have had their faults
+in Europe, and in the larger centres of population in America; but
+where they came in contact with the Indians, theirs was the sole voice
+raised upon their side.
+
+In 1593 Padre Juan Romero, sent from Peru as Superior to Paraguay, on
+his arrival gave up an estate (with Indians in _encomienda_) which his
+predecessors had enjoyed, alleging that he did not wish to give the
+example of making profit out of the unpaid labour of the Indians,[219]
+and that without their work the estate was valueless.
+
+On many occasions, notably in the time of Cardenas, the Jesuits openly
+withstood all slavery, and amongst the concessions that Ruiz Montoya
+obtained from the King of Spain was one declaring all the Indians to be
+free.[220] If more examples of the hatred that their attitude on
+slavery called forth were wanting, it is to be remembered that in 1640,
+when Montoya and Taño returned from Spain, and affixed the edict of the
+Pope on the church doors in Piritinanga, threatening with
+excommunication all slave-holders, a cry of robbery went forth, and the
+Jesuits were banished from the town. But in this matter of slavery
+there is no saying what view any one given man will take upon it when
+he finds himself in such a country as America was during the time the
+Jesuits were in Paraguay. Don Felix de Azara, a liberal and a
+philosopher, a man of science, and who has left us perhaps the best
+description both of Paraguay and of the River Plate, written in the
+eighteenth century, yet was a partisan of slavery.[221] In a most
+curious passage for a Liberal philosopher, he says:[222] ‘The Court
+ordered Don Francisco, Judge of the High Court of Charcas, to go to
+Peru in the character of visitor. The first measure which he took, in
+1612, was to order that in future no one should go to the Indians’
+houses with the pretext of reducing them (_i.e._, to civilization), and
+that no _encomiendas_ (fiefs) should be given of the kind we have
+explained—that is to say, with personal service (of the Indians). I
+cannot understand on what he could have founded a measure so
+politically absurd; but as that judge favoured the _ideas of the
+Jesuits_, it is suspected that they dictated his conduct.’
+
+What stronger testimony (coming from such a man) could possibly be
+found, both that the Jesuits were opposed to the enslaving of the
+Indians and that their opposition rendered them unpopular? In the same
+way, no doubt, some modern, unwise philosopher, writing in Brussels,
+would uphold the slavery and massacres in Belgian Africa as evidences
+of a wise policy, because the end condones the means, and in the
+future, when progress has had time to fructify, there will be
+workhouses dotted all up and down the Congo, and every ‘native’ will be
+forced to supply himself, at but a trifle above the cost in Belgium,
+with a sufficiency of comfortable and thoroughly well-seasoned wooden
+shoes.
+
+So it appears that the aforesaid were the two chief reasons which made
+the Jesuits unpopular with the Spanish settlers in Paraguay. But in
+addition it should be remembered that there were in that country
+members of almost all the other religious Orders, and that, as nearly
+every one of them had quarrelled with the Jesuits in Europe, or at the
+best were jealous of their power, the enmities begun in Europe were
+transmitted to the New World, and constantly fanned by reports of the
+quarrels which went on between the various Orders all through Europe,
+and especially in Rome.
+
+But if it were the case that the Jesuits excited feelings of hatred in
+their neighbours, yet they certainly had the gift of attaching to
+themselves the Indians’ hearts. No institution, condemned with
+contumely and thrust out of a country where it had worked for long, its
+supposed crimes kept secret, and its members all condemned unheard,
+could have preserved its popularity amongst the descendants of the men
+with whom it worked, after more than one hundred years have passed, had
+this not been the case.
+
+I care not in the least for theories, for this or that dogma of
+politicians or theologists, but take my stand on what I heard myself
+during my visits to the now ruined Jesuit missions in Paraguay.
+Horsemen say horses can go in any shape, and, wonderful as it may seem,
+men can be happy under conditions which no writer on political economy
+would recognise as fit for human beings. Not once but many times have
+aged Indians told me of what their fathers used to say about the
+Jesuits, and they themselves always spoke of them with respect and
+kindness, and endeavoured to keep up to the best of their ability all
+the traditions of the Church ceremonies and hours of prayer which the
+Jesuits had instilled.
+
+That the interior system of their government was perfect, or such as
+would be suitable for men called ‘civilized’ to-day, is not the case.
+That it was not only suitable, but perhaps the best that under all the
+circumstances could have been devised for Indian tribes two hundred
+years ago, and then but just emerged from semi-nomadism, is, I think,
+clear, when one remembers in what a state of misery and despair the
+Indians of the _encomiendas_[223] and the _mitas_ passed their lives.
+That semi-communism, with a controlling hand in administrative affairs,
+produced many superior men, or such as rise to the top in modern times,
+I do not think; but, then, who are the men, and by the exercise of what
+kind of virtues do they rise in the societies of modern times? The
+Jesuits’ aim was to make the great bulk of the Indians under their
+control contented, and that they gained their end the complaints
+against them by the surrounding population of slave-holders and hunters
+after slaves go far to prove.
+
+Leaving upon one side their system of administration, and discounting
+their unalterable perseverance, there were two things on which the
+Jesuits appealed to the Indians; and those two things, by the very
+nature of their knowledge of mankind, they knew appealed as much to
+Indians as to any other race of men. Firstly (and in this writers
+opposed to them, as Brabo[224] and Azara,[225] both agree), they
+instilled into the Indians that the land on which they lived, with
+missions, churches, herds, flocks, and the rest, was their own
+property. And in the second place they told them they were free, and
+that they had the King of Spain’s own edict in confirmation of their
+freedom, so that they never could be slaves. Neither of these two
+propositions commends itself to many writers on the Jesuits in
+Paraguay, but for all that it seems to me that in themselves they were
+sufficient to account for the firm hold the Jesuits had on their
+neophytes.
+
+The freedom which the Indians enjoyed under the Jesuit rule might not
+have seemed excessive to modern minds and those attuned to the mild
+rule of the Europeans of to-day in Africa. Such as it was, it seemed
+sufficient to the Guaranís, and even, in a limited degree, placed them
+above the Indians of the Spanish settlements, who for the most part
+passed their lives in slavery.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter VIII
+
+
+Don José de Antequera—Appoints himself Governor of Asuncion—Unsettled
+state of affairs in the town—He is commanded to relinquish his illegal
+power—He refuses, and resorts to arms—After some success he is defeated
+and condemned to be executed—He is shot on his way to the
+scaffold—Renewed hatred against the Jesuits—Their labours among the
+Indians of the Chaco
+
+From the departure of Cardenas in 1650, to about 1720, was the halcyon
+period of the Jesuit missions in Paraguay. During that time things went
+on in the missions after the fashion I have attempted to describe. The
+people passed their time in their semi-communistic labour, sweetened by
+constant prayer; their pastors may or may not have done all that was
+possible to instruct them in the science of the time; but, still, the
+Indian population did not decrease, as it was observed to do from year
+to year in other countries of America and in the Spanish settlements in
+Paraguay.[226] During this period the Jesuits had made repeated
+efforts, but without much real success, to establish missions amongst
+the wild equestrian tribes in the Gran Chaco upon the western bank of
+the river Paraguay. Nothing, apparently, pointed to the events which,
+beginning in the year 1721, finally led to their expulsion, or, at
+least, furnished additional reasons to King Charles III. to include the
+Jesuits in Paraguay in the general expulsion of their order from the
+dominions of the Spanish crown.
+
+In that year (1721) Don José de Antequera was appointed to succeed the
+Governor of Paraguay, Don Diego de los Reyes Balmaceda, when his term
+of office had expired. The situation was, as often happened in the
+Spanish colonies, complicated by an inquiry into the conduct of the
+Governor (Balmaceda), in progress at the High Court of Charcas, which
+court, as in the case of Cardenas, acted most cautiously, both on
+account of its position, so far from Paraguay, and on account of the
+inordinate procrastination of everything connected with the Spanish
+law. If Balmaceda were condemned, then Antequera would step into his
+shoes at once. If, on the other hand, he were acquitted, Antequera
+would have to wait until the legal time of office had run its course.
+So far all was in order, but the High Court, either in doubt of its own
+wisdom or of its power to pronounce judgment definitely, had issued a
+decree suspending Balmaceda from his functions, but without either
+condemning or acquitting him. This, too, they did after having taken
+more than three years to sift the evidence and summon witnesses, who
+either had to cross the country on a mule at the imminent risk of death
+by famine or by Indians, or, having descended the river Plate to Buenos
+Ayres (which journey often took a month), wait for a ship to take them
+round Cape Horn to Lima, and from thence travel to Charcas on muleback,
+following one of the Incas’ roads.
+
+Don José de Antequera y Castro was born at Lima, and being, as Father
+Charlevoix[227] says, an able, eloquent, but vain and most ambitious
+man, endowed with plenty of imagination, some talent, and but little
+ballast, was not content to wait till time should place him in his
+governorship. So, hearing that a judge inquisitor was to be sent to
+Paraguay to inquire into the case, and having graduated himself and
+held the position of procurator fiscal in the Charcas, he solicited the
+post, and by some error was appointed.
+
+No sooner was the appointment signed than straight he posted off to
+Paraguay. As he had studied in the college of the Jesuits at La Plata,
+his first visit was to the reductions of the Jesuits. The missionaries
+received him well, and sent a troop of Indians to escort him to the
+boundary of their territories, never suspecting what Antequera was
+about to do. Having heard that the Governor, Balmaceda, was at a
+distant port upon the Paraná, Antequera hastened to Asuncion. Arrived
+there, the same madness of authority seems to have come on him which
+came fifty or sixty years before his time on Cardenas. Finding no
+special seat reserved for him in the Cathedral, he publicly reproved
+the dean, to the great scandal of the worshippers. This seems not to
+have lost him the respect of the citizens of Asuncion, who were
+accustomed to all kinds of vagaries, both of their rulers and their
+spiritual guides. No sort of violence to laws and customs seems ever to
+affect a people unless the violence is done to benefit them, when
+instantly they rise against the breaker of the law, however heavily it
+may bear upon themselves.
+
+But the devoted citizens of Asuncion were so accustomed to perpetual
+turmoil that, as Dean Funes[228] says, ‘they only stopped when it was
+absolutely necessary for them to breathe.’ Even the overpraised
+citizens of Athens at the time of Pericles, who must have been in all
+their ways so like the Athenians of to-day, were not more instant in
+the Agora or diligent in writing patriots’ names on oyster-shells than
+the noisy mob of half-breed patriots who in the sandy streets of
+Asuncion were ever agitating, always assembling, and doing everything
+within their power to show the world the perfect picture of a
+democratic State. Strange that such turbulent and patriotic people
+should have been ancestors of those whom I, after the termination of
+the war with Buenos Ayres and Brazil in 1870, knew as lethargic and
+downtrodden, as if the great dictator, Dr. Francia, whom the country
+people, speaking in bated breath, called ‘El Difunto’, had still
+oppressed the land. Into the turbulent hotbed of Asuncion fell
+Antequera, one of those Creoles of Peru who, born with talent and well
+educated, seemed, either from the circumstances of their birth or the
+surroundings amongst which they passed their youth, to differ as
+entirely from the Spaniards as if they had been Indians and not Creoles
+of white blood. Like Cardenas, Antequera was endowed with eloquence;
+but, unlike Cardenas, he set no store on eloquence upon its own
+account, but only used it for his own advancement in the world. Finding
+the Governor absent from Asuncion and lying under a decree suspending
+him from all his functions, it seems at once to have occurred to
+Antequera to seize his place. On this account, having ingratiated
+himself with some of those opposed to Balmaceda, he raised an army, and
+sent to seize him; but the Governor, having notice of the plot, escaped
+to Corrientes, and Antequera instantly assumed his post. This was too
+much for the Viceroy of Peru, who, though he had befriended Antequera
+in the past, had some respect for law. Immediately he issued a decree
+replacing Balmaceda in the governorship, and ordering Antequera to give
+him back the power he had usurped. This Antequera had no thought of
+doing, and he embarked on a career of violence which induced some to
+believe he intended to proclaim himself an independent king. Whether
+this was or was not the case, a state of things arose in Paraguay more
+pandemonic even than in the good old times of Cardenas. The Jesuits,
+not having seen their way to sustain the cause of their ex-pupil, were
+expelled once more (1725), and as before took ship for Corrientes
+amongst the tears of the people, their historians say,[229] and as
+Ibañez and those who have written against them affirm as strongly,
+amongst universal joy. Certain it is that in Asuncion they played a
+different part from that played by them in the mission territory, and
+no doubt mixed, as did the other Orders of religion, in the intrigues
+which never seemed to cease in the restless capital of Paraguay.
+
+Not being content with the expulsion of the Jesuits, Antequera defeated
+several generals sent against him by the Viceroy of Peru, and by a
+_coup de main_ took prisoner the ex-Governor Balmaceda, having
+surprised him in his house in Corrientes, and carried him back to
+Asuncion under a close guard. The usual reign of terror then began, and
+everything fell into confusion, till at last the King (Philip V.) in
+1726 commanded that the Jesuits should be reinstated in their college
+in Asuncion, and that the missions should be taken from the
+jurisdiction of the Governors of Paraguay and placed under the control
+of the Governor of the River Plate, as had been previously done in the
+case of the other Jesuit missions beyond the Uruguay. But Spain was far
+away, and on one pretext or another so much delay occurred that it was
+not till March 18, 1728, that the Jesuits were reinstated in the
+college in Asuncion, which they were now fated to hold but for a little
+space. At last the Viceroy of Peru, the Marquess of Castel Fuerte, sent
+Don Bruno de Zavala with a sufficient army and six thousand Indians
+from the missions against the usurper Antequera, who fled for refuge to
+the Franciscan convent in Cordoba, where he remained, till, finding his
+position quite untenable, he fled to Charcas, where he was arrested,
+and sent to Lima to await his trial. Four years he waited in perfect
+liberty, going and coming about the town as it best pleased him, whilst
+the High Court heard evidence, wrote to Madrid, received instructions
+from the King, and generally displayed the incapacity which in all ages
+has been the chief distinctive features of every court of law.
+
+In 1731 an order came from Madrid to execute him, and without loss of
+time he was placed on a horse draped all in black, and, preceded by a
+herald and guarded by a troop of guards, taken out to the public square
+to be beheaded. But the good people of the capital, who, in the fashion
+of the world, would not most probably have stirred a step to save a
+saint, were mightily concerned to see a rogue receive his due deserts.
+The streets were filled with thousands crying out ‘Pardon!’ stones
+flew, and the affair looked so threatening that the Viceroy had to get
+on horseback and ride amongst the crowd to calm the tumult. The people
+met him with a shower of stones, and he, fearing the prisoner would
+escape, called on his guards to fire upon him. Four balls pierced
+Antequera, who fell dying from his horse into the arms of two
+accompanying priests. Thus the most turbulent of all the Governors of
+Paraguay ceased troubling, and the executioner, after having cut off
+his head, exhibited it to the people from the scaffold, with the usual
+moral aphorism as to the traitor’s fate.
+
+The triumph of the Jesuits in Asuncion was but momentary, following the
+general rule of triumphs, which take their way along the street with
+trumpets and with drums amid the acclamations of the crowd, and then,
+the pageant over, the chief actors fall back again into the struggles
+and the commonplace of ordinary life.
+
+Between the years 1728 and 1730 the people of Asuncion had been more
+eager in pursuit of liberty[230] than was their usual wont. The
+citizens were divided into camps, and daily fought amongst the sandy
+streets and shady orange-bordered lanes which radiate from almost every
+quarter of the town. The rival bands of madmen were styled respectively
+the ‘Communeros’ and the ‘Contrabandos’, and to the first Antequera
+throughout his residence in Lima gave all the assistance in his power.
+Neither of the two seems to have had the most elementary idea of real
+patriotism, or any wish for anything beyond the momentary triumph of
+the miserable party to which each belonged. One doctrine they held in
+common—a hatred of the Jesuits, and of the influence they exercised
+against the enslaving of the Indians, which was the aim of
+‘Contrabandos’ and of ‘Communeros’ alike. One of the rival chieftains
+of the factions having fled for refuge to the missions, the people of
+Asuncion assembled troops to take him from his sanctuary by force.
+Arrived upon the frontier of the Jesuit territory, they found
+themselves opposed by an army of the Indians, who looked so formidable
+that the troops retired to Asuncion, and the leaders, foiled in the
+field, and not having force to attack the Jesuits in their own
+territory, set vigorously to inflame the minds of the people against
+them.
+
+They worked with such success that when, in 1732, the news of
+Antequera’s death reached Paraguay, the people, inflamed with the idea
+that he was sacrificed to the hatred of the Jesuits, rose and expelled
+them once again. The constant expulsions of the Jesuits from Asuncion,
+the turmoils in the State, and the fact that every now and then the
+Indians had to take arms to defend their territory, acted most
+mischievously on the reductions, both in Paraguay and in those between
+the Paraná and Uruguay. Whole tribes of Indians, recently converted,
+went back to the woods; land was left quite untilled, and on the
+outskirts of the mission territory the warlike tribes of Indians, still
+unsubdued, raided the cattle, killed the neophytes, and carried off
+their wives as slaves. But still, in spite of all, the Indians clung to
+their priests—as they said, from affection for the religious care they
+had bestowed, but quite as possibly from the instinctive knowledge
+that, between the raiding Portuguese and the maddening patriots in
+Asuncion, their only safeguard against slavery lay in the Jesuits. Most
+fortunately for Paraguay at the time (1734), Don Bruno de Zavala,
+perhaps the most energetic of the Spaniards in the King’s service in
+America, was Viceroy in the River Plate. Having received orders to
+quiet the dissensions in Asuncion, in spite of being nearly seventy
+years of age, and having lost an arm in the Italian wars, he marched at
+once, taking but forty soldiers in his train, as, war being imminent
+with Portugal, it was not safe to deplete the slender forces in the
+River Plate. Arrived in Paraguay, he entered the Jesuit missions at the
+Reduction of San Ignacio Guazu,[231] and, having appealed to the
+provincial of the Order for his aid, speedily found himself at the head
+of a large army of the Indians. After some skirmishes he was in a
+position to enter Asuncion and force the people to receive him as their
+Governor. By one of those revulsions so frequent in a crowd of
+reasonable men, the people begged him to invite the Jesuits to return.
+They did so (1735), and were received in state, the Governor, the
+Bishop, and the chief clergy and officials of the place attending Mass
+in the Cathedral with lighted candles in their hands. His duty over,
+Don Bruno de Zavala set off for Chile, where he had been appointed
+Governor, and on his journey, at the town of Santa Fe, died suddenly,
+exhausted with the battles, marchings and countermarchings, rebellions,
+Indian incursions, the turbulence of the people in the towns, and the
+other cares which formed the daily duties of a Spanish officer in South
+America at the middle of the eighteenth century.[232] The next ten
+years were on the whole peaceful and profitable for the Indians of the
+missions and for the Jesuits. The Indians followed quietly their
+Arcadian lives, except when now and then a contingent of them was
+required to assist in any of the wars, which at that time were
+ceaseless throughout the eastern part of South America. The Jesuits
+pushed out their spiritual frontiers, advancing on the north amongst
+the Tobatines of the woods, and on the west endeavouring to spread
+their colonies amongst the Chiriguanas and other of the Chaco tribes.
+
+From the conquest of Peru, when those Indians who had been but recently
+brought under the empire of the Incas retreated into the Chaco, it had
+been the refuge of the fiercest and most indomitable tribes. The
+Spanish colonists, the ardour of the first conquest spent, had settled
+down mainly to agricultural pursuits. Few had efficient firearms, and
+on the whole, though turbulent amongst themselves, they had become
+unwarlike.[233] The very name of the wild Indians (Los Indios Bravos)
+spread terror up and down the frontiers. This terror, which I remember
+still prevalent both in Mexico and on the pampas of the Argentine
+Republic, not more than five-and-twenty years ago, was keener upon the
+confines of the Chaco than anywhere in South America, except, perhaps,
+in Chile, upon the frontiers of Araucania.
+
+The Tobas, Mataguayos, Lules, Aguilotas, Abipones, and the rest,
+together with the warlike nations of the Vilelas and the Guaycurús, had
+from the first rejected Christianity. Attempts had several times been
+made to establish settlements amongst them, but the ferocity of all the
+tribes, their nomad habits—for many of them passed their lives on
+horseback—and the peculiar nature of their country, a vast domain of
+swamp, pierced by great rivers quite unknown to the Spanish settlers,
+had hitherto combined to render every effort vain. But, notwithstanding
+this, the Jesuits laboured incessantly, and not without success,
+amongst the wildest of the Chaco tribes. The gentle and eccentric
+Father Martin Dobrizhoffer passed many years amongst the Abipones, of
+whom he wrote his charming book. He enumerates many tribes, of whom he
+says[234] ‘these are for the most converted by us, and settled in
+towns.’
+
+Nothing, perhaps, displays the Jesuits at their best, more than their
+efforts in the Chaco. The enormous territory was sparsely peopled by
+about seventy tribes,[235] whereof there were fifteen or sixteen of
+considerable size. Hardly two tribes spoke dialects by which they could
+communicate with one another, and almost every one of them lived in a
+state of warfare, not only with the Spaniards, but with the
+neighbouring tribes. The inventories preserved by Brabo[236] show us
+the town of Paisanes in the Chaco, with its rough wooden houses, and
+the Jesuits’ habitation in the middle of the place, stockaded, and
+without doors, and with but narrow openings in the wall, through which
+the missionaries crept. The inside of the house contained five or six
+rough rooms, almost unfurnished, but for a few religious books and a
+plentiful supply of guns.[237] Their beds were of unvarnished wood,
+with curtains of rough cotton spun by the Indians. Sometimes they had a
+sofa of leather slung between four stakes, a rack for medicine bottles,
+and for the wine for Mass. Lastly, one priest, in the settlement
+amongst the Toquitistines, had among his books copies of Cervantes and
+Quevedo; one hopes he read them half smiling, half with a tear in his
+eye, for your true humour is akin to tears. Perhaps, reading ‘Don
+Quixote’ or ‘El Gran Tacaño’, the poor priest forgot his troubles, and,
+wandering with Sancho in La Manchan oak-woods or through Castilian
+uplands, thought he was in Spain.[238]
+
+Throughout the territory of the Gran Chaco there were but seven
+reductions established by the Jesuits. These were San José de Bilelas,
+with its little town Petacas; San Juan Bautista de los Iristines, with
+its townlet of the same name; San Esteban de los Lules, with the town
+of Miraflores; Nuestra Señora del Buen Consejo de los Omarapas, capital
+Ortega; Nuestra Señora de Pilar de los Paisanes, with Macapillo as its
+centre; Nuestra Señora del Rosario de los Tobas, with its chief place
+called San Lucas; and, lastly, the establishment amongst the Abipones,
+known as La Concepcion. In all these missions the Jesuits lived in
+constant peril of their lives. In reading their old chronicles one
+finds the records of their obscure and half-forgotten martyrdoms, their
+sufferings, and the brief record of their deaths by an arrow or a club.
+In 1711 Father Cavallero, with all his following, was slain by the
+savage Pinzocas. In 1717 Father Romero, having, as a Jesuit writer
+says, ‘nothing but moral force behind him,’[239] was slain with twelve
+companions of the Guaranís of Paraguay. In 1718 Fathers Arco and
+Blende, Sylva and Maceo, received their dusted-over martyrs’ crowns.
+
+Right up the western bank of the river Paraguay, in the old maps, the
+crosses mark the sites where Jesuits were slain. That they all died to
+further crafty schemes, or for some hidden purpose of a Machiavelian
+nature, even a Dominican will scarcely urge. That they did good—more or
+less good than Protestant fanatics of the same kidney might have
+achieved—it were invidious to inquire. That which is certain is that
+they were single-hearted men, faithful unto the end to what they
+thought was right, faithful even to the shedding of their own blood,
+which is, one may believe, the way in which the scriptural injunction
+should be rightly read.
+
+In the dim future, when some shadow of common-sense dawns on the world,
+and when men recognise that it is better to let others follow their
+destiny as it best pleases them, without the officious interference of
+their fellows, it may be that they will say all missionaries of
+whatsoever sect or congregation should have stayed at home, and not
+gone gadding to the desert places of the earth seeking to remedy the
+errors of their God by their exertions; but whilst the ideal still
+remains of sacrifice (which may, for all I know, be useless in itself,
+or even harmful), they must perforce allow the Jesuits in Paraguay high
+rank, or else be stultified.
+
+But in the Chaco the Jesuits found conditions most different from those
+prevailing in their missions between the Uruguay and Paraná. Instead of
+open plains, vast swamps; instead of docile semi-Arcadians like the
+Guaranís, who almost worshipped them, fierce nomad horsemen, broken
+into a hundred little tribes, always at war, and caring little for
+religion of any sort or kind. Again, there seems in the Chaco to have
+been no means of amassing any kind of wealth, as all the territory was
+quite uncultivated and in a virgin state; but, still, the settlements
+had existed long enough for cattle to increase.[240] Lastly, the
+incursions of the barbarous tribes were a constant menace both to the
+Jesuits and their neophytes. Yet in their indefatigable way the Jesuits
+made considerable progress amongst the Chaco tribes, as both the
+curious ‘History of the Abipones’ by Father Dobrizhoffer and the
+inventories preserved by Brabo prove.[241]
+
+Besides their seven establishments in the Gran Chaco, they had three
+establishments in the north of Paraguay in the great woods which fringe
+the central mountain range of the country, known as the Cordillera de
+M’baracayu. These missions, called San Joaquin del Taruma, San
+Estanislao, and Belen, were quite apart from all the other missions of
+the Guaranís, far distant from the Chaco, and removed by an enormous
+distance from those of the Order in the Moxos and amongst the
+Chiquitos, forming, as it were, an oasis in the recesses of the
+Tarumensian woods. These three reductions, founded respectively in
+1747,[242] 1747, and 1760, were, as their dates indicate, the swansong
+of the Jesuits in Paraguay. Founded as they were far from the Spanish
+settlements, they were quite removed from the intrigues and
+interferences of the Spanish settlers, which were the curse of the
+other missions on the Paraná. The Tobatines Indians[243] were of a
+different class to the Guaranís, though possibly of the same stock
+originally. Not having come in contact until recent years with the
+Spaniards, and having had two fierce and prolonged wars with the
+nearest settlements, they had remained more in their primitive
+condition than any of the Indians with whom the Jesuits had come in
+contact in Paraguay. During the short period of Jesuit rule amongst
+them (1746-1767) things seem to have gone on in a half-Arcadian way. In
+San Joaquin, Dobrizhoffer, as he says himself, devoted eight years of
+unregretted labour to the Indians. Most certainly he was one of the
+Jesuits who understood the Indians best, and his descriptions of them
+and their life are among the most delightful which have been preserved.
+He tells of the romantic but fruitless search during eighteen months
+throughout the forests of the Taruma by Fathers Yegros, Escandon,
+Villagarcia, and Rodriguez, for the Itatines who had left the reduction
+of Nuestra Señora de Santa Fe, and had hidden in the woods.
+
+Then, commenting upon the strangeness of all affairs sublunary, he
+relates that accident at length effected what labour could not do. In
+1746 Father Sebastian de Yegros, after a search of forty days, came on
+the Indians—as it were, directed by Providence, or, as we now say,
+accident. He built a town for them, and, as Dobrizhoffer says,
+‘assembled them in Christian polity.’ To the new-founded village cattle
+of every kind were sent, with clothes—useful, of course, to those who
+had never worn them—axes, and furniture, and lastly a few music
+masters,[244] without whose help those who build cities spend their
+toil in vain.
+
+To the new town (in which the simple-hearted priest remained eight
+years), in 1753, came Don Carlos Morphi, an Irishman, and Governor of
+Paraguay; and, having stayed five days with Dobrizhoffer, departed,
+marvelling at the accuracy with which the new-made Christians
+(_Cristianos nuevos_) managed their double-basses, their flageolets,
+their violins, and, in general, all their instruments, whether of music
+or of war.
+
+Modestly, but with prolixity, as befits a virtuous, God-fearing man,
+the simple Jesuit relates a special instance of the way in which he was
+enabled to work both for his own glory and for the profit of the Lord.
+Not far from San Estanislao was situate the forest of M’baevera, in
+which grew quantities of trees from which the _yerba-maté_ (Paraguayan
+tea) was made. To reach it was a work of pain and trouble, for through
+the woods a track called a _picada_ had to be cut; the rivers were
+deep, bridgeless, and had to have branches strewed along the track to
+give a footing to the struggling mules.[245]
+
+An expedition having been sent under a certain Spaniard called Villalba
+to collect _yerba_, came suddenly upon a deserted Indian hut. As they
+had started quite unarmed, except with knives and axes to cut down the
+boughs, a panic seized them, and, instead of collecting any
+leaves,[246] they hurried back to San Estanislao. No sooner did
+Dobrizhoffer hear the news than he set out to find the Indians, with a
+few neophytes, upon his own account. Having travelled the ‘mournful
+solitudes’ for eighteen days, they came upon no sign of Indians, and
+returned footsore and hungry, ‘the improvement of our patience being
+our sole recompense.’
+
+He himself walked all the way, and ‘often barefoot’, suffering ‘what
+neither I can describe nor yet my reader credit.’ The missionary
+calling has undergone considerable change since 1750. Hardships which
+the greater faith or stronger constitutions of the missionaries of the
+last century rendered endurable are now largely fallen out of fashion,
+and your missionary seldom walks barefoot, even in a wood, because to
+do so would give offence, and bring discredit on the society for which
+he works.
+
+Though unsuccessful in his search that year, Dobrizhoffer, not daunted
+by his barefoot marching, set out again upon the Gospel trail next
+spring. After another journey of some twenty days, during the whole
+course of which it rained incessantly, he came on a community of
+seemingly quite happy sylvans, whom he proceeded to convert. In the
+first hut he met with there were eight doors, and in it dwelt some
+sixty Indians—a palm-built, grass-thatched phalanstery, with hammocks
+slung from the rude beams, in which ‘these heathen’ used to sleep. Each
+separate family had its own fire, on the hearth of which stood mugs and
+gourds and pots of rudely-fashioned earthenware. Naked and not ashamed
+‘these savages’, and the men wore upon their heads high crowns of
+parrot feathers. For arms they carried bows and arrows, and the first
+man Dobrizhoffer saw was holding a dead pheasant in one hand, and in
+the other a short bow. In the woods around the phalanstery was an
+‘amazing’ quantity of maize, of fruits of divers sorts, and of tobacco.
+From the hives which the wild bees make in hollow trees, they collected
+honey in large quantities, which served them (at least so Dobrizhoffer
+says) for meat and drink alike.
+
+Their name for the god they worshipped was Tupá, but ‘of that God and
+his commandments they care to know but little.’ This sounds ambiguous,
+and would appear at first sight as if the confidence betwixt the
+creators and their God had been but slight. Perhaps the ambiguity may
+be set down to the translator[247] who turned the Latin in which the
+memoirs first were formed into the vulgar tongue.
+
+A thing remarkable enough when one considers how prone mankind is to
+act differently was that, although the Itatines knew an evil spirit
+under the name of Aná, yet they paid little adoration to him,
+apparently content to know as little of him and his laws as they did of
+their God.
+
+Those hapless, harmless folk, as innocent of God and devil, right and
+wrong, and all the other things which by all rights they should have
+known, as they are said to be implanted in the mind of man, no matter
+what his state, seem to have lived quite happily in their involuntary
+sin.[248] But Dobrizhoffer, in his simple faith and zeal for what he
+thought was right, wept bitter tears when he thought upon their
+unregenerate state.
+
+A sycophantic Guaraní from the reductions then took up his parable, and
+said: ‘God save ye, brothers; we are come to visit you as friends. This
+father-priest is God’s own minister, and comes to visit you, and pray
+for your estate.’ An aged Indian interrupted him, saying he did not
+want a father-priest, and that St. Thomas in the past had prayed
+sufficiently, as fruits of every sort abounded in the land. The Indian,
+in his unsophisticated way, seems to have thought the presence of a
+priest acted but as manure on the ground where he abode; but the
+Jesuit, almost as simple-minded as himself, took it in kindliness, and
+journeyed with the Indian to a large village about three days away.
+Arrived there, all the inhabitants of the place sat in a circle round
+the missionary. They appeared (he says) in so much modesty and silence
+‘that I seemed to behold statues, and not live Indians.’ To awaken
+their attention he played upon the viol d’amore, and, having thus
+captured their ears, began to preach to them. The good priest probably
+believed all that he said, for, after dwelling on the perils of the
+road, he said: ‘My friends, my errand is to make you happy.’ It did not
+seem to him that their free life in woods, in which abounded maize,
+fruits, and tobacco, with game of every kind, could possibly have
+induced content. Content, as Christians know, comes but with faith, and
+a true knowledge of the dogma is above liberty. Kindly, but
+muddle-headedly, he deplored their lot, their want of clothes, their
+want of interest in their God, their lack of knowledge of that God’s
+commands. Then, coming to the point, he spoke of hell, and told the
+astonished Indians that it was quite impossible for them to avoid its
+flames, unless, taught by a priest, they came to know God’s law. He
+then briefly (as he says) explained the mysteries of our faith. They
+listened rapt, except that ‘the boys laughed a little’ when he spoke of
+hell.[249] Nothing more painful than to see a child laughing
+unconscious of its peril in the traffic of a crowded street, and we may
+well believe that the kind-hearted Dobrizhoffer shuddered at the
+laughter of these children when he reflected that had he taken the
+wrong path, crossing the marshes or in the woods, the laughers had been
+damned. Much more he said to them after exhausting hell, and, to ‘add
+weight’ to his oration, presented each of them with scissors, knives,
+glass beads, axes, small looking-glasses, and fishing-hooks, for he
+knew well that sermons which end in ‘give me’ have but a small effect.
+
+He says himself quite frankly, ‘I seemed to have borne down all before
+me because I had mingled my oration with a copious largess.’[250] Glass
+beads and looking-glasses have from the time when the first Christian
+missionary preached to the Indians been potent factors in conversion,
+and still to-day do yeoman service in the great work of bringing souls
+to God.
+
+Seated around the fire ‘smoking tobacco through a reed’, and pondering
+perchance over the mysteries of the new expounded faith, the _cacique_
+of the Itatines took up his parable.
+
+‘I have’ (said he) ‘conceived an affection for the father-priest, and
+hope to enjoy his company throughout my life. My daughter is the
+prettiest girl in the whole world, and I am now resolved to give her to
+the father-priest, that he may always stay with me, and with my family,
+here in the woods.’
+
+The Indians from the missions broke into laughter, after the fashion of
+all those who, knowing but a little, think that they are wise. The
+_cacique_, who knew nothing, was astounded that any man, no matter what
+his calling, could live without a wife, and asked the Jesuit if the
+strange thing was true. His doubts being satisfied, they fell
+discoursing on the nature of the Deity, a subject not easy of
+exhaustion, and difficult to treat of through the medium of an
+interpreter. ‘We know’ (the _cacique_ said) ‘that there is someone who
+dwells in heaven.’ This vagueness put the missionary upon his mettle,
+and he set out at once to expatiate upon the attributes of God. They
+seemed to please the _cacique_, who inquired, ‘What is it that
+displeases, then, the dweller in the skies?’
+
+Lies, calumnies, adulteries, thefts, all were enumerated, and received
+the Indian’s assent; but the injunction not to kill provoked a
+bystander to ask if it was not permitted to a man to slay those who
+attacked his life. He added, ‘I have endeavoured so to do since the
+first day I carried arms.’
+
+‘Fanatical casuist’ is a stout argument in the mouth of a man nurtured
+upon Suarez and Molina, but no doubt it did good service, and
+Dobrizhoffer uses it when speaking of the chief. But Dobrizhoffer did
+better work than mere theological disputation, for he prevailed upon
+eighteen of the Indians to accompany him to the settlement of San
+Joaquin; and after having ‘for some months tried the constancy’ of a
+youth called Arapotiyu, he admitted him to the sacrament of baptism,
+and ‘not long afterwards united him in marriage according to the
+Christian rites.’ It is evident that baptism should precede marriage;
+but it is an open question as to the duration of the interval between
+the two ceremonies, and we may be permitted to wonder whether, after
+all, both might not be advantageously dispensed at the same time. In
+the case of Arapotiyu the system worked satisfactorily, for he
+‘surpassed in every kind of virtue, and might have been taken for an
+old disciple of Christianity.’ Even ‘old Christians’ occasionally,
+despite their more laborious induction into the rites and customs of
+their faith, have fallen from grace, perhaps from the undue
+prolongation of the term between the ceremonies.
+
+In the case of another youth (one Gato) things did not go so smoothly,
+for though he, too, by his conduct obtained both baptism and Christian
+wedlock, Dobrizhoffer adds without comment, ‘not many months after he
+died of a slow disease.’[251] The slow disease was not improbably the
+nostalgia of the woods, from which the efforts of the good missionary
+had so successfully withdrawn him.
+
+The labours of the Jesuits in the three isolated missions in the north
+of Paraguay[252] seem to have been as successful as those in the Chaco
+were unfortunate. In dealing with the wild equestrian tribes of the
+Gran Chaco, the system of the Jesuits was not so likely to achieve
+success as amongst the peaceful Guaranís. That of the Spanish settlers
+was entirely ineffectual, and has remained so down to the present day,
+when still the shattered remnants of the Lules, Lenguas, Mocobios, and
+the rest, roam on their horses or in their canoes about the Chaco and
+its rivers, having received no other benefits from contact with the
+European races but gunpowder and gin.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter IX
+
+
+The Spanish and Portuguese attempt to force new laws on the Indians—The
+Indians revolt against them—The hopeless struggle goes on for eight
+years—Ruin of the missions
+
+The missions in the Chaco and the Taruma, all founded between 1700 and
+1760, the last (Belen) but seven years before the expulsion of the
+Jesuits from America, go far towards disproving the allegations of some
+writers,[253] that the apostolic energy of the first foundations had
+decayed, and that the Jesuits were merely living on the good name of
+the first founders in the beginning of the past century. But let the
+zeal of any class of men be what it may, if they oppose themselves to
+slavery and at the same time are reported to have lands in which is
+gold, and resolutely exclude adventurers from them, their doom is
+sealed. Both crimes were set down to the Jesuits. Writing in 1784, or
+twenty years after the expulsion of his order, Dobrizhoffer refers to
+the Indians of the reductions as ‘being in subjection[254] only to the
+Catholic King and the royal Governors, not in dreaded slavery amongst
+private Spaniards as the other Indians;’ and Montoya, Lozano, and Del
+Techo, writing in earlier times, all confirm the statement, which is
+also doubly confirmed by the various royal edicts on the subject.[255]
+The reports of gold-mines, too, had never ceased, although they had
+been repeatedly disproved, and those, together with the stand for
+freedom for the Indians, led to the events which finally brought about
+the expulsion of the Order from the territories where they had worked
+so long.
+
+In 1740, Gomez de Andrade, Governor for the King of Portugal in Rio de
+Janeiro, being one of those who was convinced that the reason why the
+Jesuits guarded their territories so religiously was that they had
+mines, bethought him of a plan. His plan, like most of those conceived
+on the fantastic reasons which are called ‘of State’, took no account
+of sentiment, and therefore, as mankind are and will ever be a thousand
+times more influenced by sentiment than by hard reasoning, was from the
+first bound of itself to fail.
+
+The colony of Sacramento upon the river Plate had for a hundred years
+been the source of conflict between the Spaniards and the
+Portuguese.[256] Situated as it was almost in front of Buenos Ayres, it
+served as a depot for smugglers; and, moreover, being fortified,
+menaced the navigation both of the Paraná and Paraguay. Slavers from
+England, Holland, and the German ports crowded the harbour. Arms of all
+kinds were stored there, and were distributed to all adventurers who
+meditated assaults against the crown of Spain. Twice or three times it
+had been taken and restored, the Indians of the missions always
+rendering most efficient help. At the time of which I write (1740) it
+had passed again by treaty under the dominion of the Portuguese, but
+still remained a standing menace to the Spaniards. Gomez Andrade
+advised the court of Lisbon to exchange it against the seven
+reductions[257] of the Uruguay, and thus at once to secure a country
+rich in gold and to adjust the frontier at the river Uruguay. Nothing
+appears so simple to a statesman as to exchange one piece of territory
+for another. A parchment signed after some international negotiations,
+and the whole thing is done. If, though, as happened in this case, one
+of the territories contains a population such as that which inhabited
+the seven towns upon the Uruguay, and which has conquered the country
+in which it lives from virgin forest, and defended it against all
+comers, it sometimes happens that the unreasonable inhabitants, by
+clinging to their homes, defeat the statesmen’s plans. Yet statesmen,
+once embarked in any plan, do not stick at such trifles as the
+affection of a people for its home, but quietly pursue their path,
+knowing that that which is conceived by ministers of State must in the
+end be beneficial to mankind. Without this patriotic abnegation of
+their feelings, no statesmen would be worthy of the name. Indifference
+to the feelings of others is perhaps the greatest proof a public man
+can give of his attachment to the State. After negotiations, lasting
+many years, in 1750 a treaty was signed between Portugal and Spain
+agreeing that the former should give up the Colonia del Sacramento to
+the Spaniards in exchange for the seven Jesuit towns upon the Uruguay,
+and that both nations should furnish a commission to fix the frontiers
+of the two nations on the Uruguay.[258] On February 15, 1750, the
+Spanish court sent to the Jesuits of the seven towns to prepare their
+Indians to leave their homes and march into the forests, and there
+found new towns.
+
+At that date François Retz was General of the Jesuits, and on him
+devolved the duty of communicating the orders of the courts of Spain
+and Portugal to the Jesuits in the missions of the Uruguay. Father
+Bernard Neyderdorffer was the man on whom the Provincial of Paraguay
+(Father Barreda) imposed the task of communicating to the Indians the
+wishes of the two courts. Though he had lived already thirty-five years
+in the missions, and knew the Indians well, and was respected by them
+as a father, he seems at first to have shrunk from such a task. When
+the news was brought to the towns upon the Uruguay, none of the Indians
+at first would credit it. The _caciques_ (chiefs) of the seven towns
+declared that they would rather die than leave their native place.
+Nothing was heard but lamentations and expressions of hatred of the
+Portuguese, mingled with denunciations of the Jesuits themselves, who
+the poor Indians not unnaturally believed were in league with Spain to
+sell them to the Portuguese. But in a little the clamours turned to
+action, and, not content with refusing to obey the edict of the two
+courts, the Indians broke into revolt. Two most important narratives of
+this revolt exist, one by Father Cardiel and one by Father Ennis, both
+of whom were witnesses of the events. After considerable negotiations,
+which lasted till 1753,[259] the united troops of Portugal and Spain
+advanced into the mission territory to arrange the occupation of the
+ceded towns. The commissioners of the two nations were, for Spain, the
+Marques de Valdelirios, and for Portugal General Gomez Freyre de
+Andrade, and both of them appear to have come to America already
+prejudiced against the Jesuits. On March 24, 1753, Andrade wrote to
+Valdelirios, almost before he could have heard anything definite about
+the mission territory, to which they both were strangers, telling him
+that opposition was to be expected, and that the Jesuits were urging
+the Indians to revolt.[260] The opposition that the two commissioners
+so confidently hoped to find,[261] and which contemporary writers have
+set forth in its true colours as but the revolt of ignorant Indians
+rendered desperate by being arbitrarily dispossessed of lands which
+they themselves had settled and held for almost a hundred years, was
+fraught with serious consequences, not only to the Jesuits in Paraguay,
+but to the Order throughout the world at large. For years their enemies
+had said the Jesuits were endeavouring to set up in the missions a
+State quite independent of the Spanish crown. By their own conduct the
+Jesuits to some extent had given colour to the report, for by excluding
+(in the interest of the Indians) all Spaniards from the mission
+territories, it looked as if they were at work at something which they
+wished to keep a secret, as no one at that time deemed it a serious
+plea to enter into any line of conduct for the good of Indians, whom in
+general the Spanish settlers looked upon as beasts. That it was the
+best policy they could have possibly pursued under the circumstances is
+proved abundantly by the code of instructions laid down by Don
+Francisco Bucareli, the Viceroy of Buenos Ayres, under whose auspices
+the expulsion of the Jesuits in 1760 was carried out. In that code
+occurs the following article:[262] ‘You will not allow any strangers,
+of whatever estate, quality, or condition they may be, to reside in the
+town (that is, of the missions), even if they be artisans,[263] and
+much less that they deal or take contracts in them either for
+themselves or for others, and you shall take especial care that the
+Laws of the Indies be executed, and specially those which are contained
+in Article 27 of Book IX.;[264] and also if any Portuguese deserters or
+other persons of whatever conditions should come to the towns, you will
+instantly conduct them to this city, taking every precaution to prevent
+their escape.’
+
+Still, though their policy was pursued, it did not stop the opponents
+of the Jesuits from denouncing that very policy, both at the cession of
+the seven towns and at the expulsion of the Order from America. The
+commissioners, after innumerable delays, having found themselves in
+1753 at Santa Tecla, a village near the Uruguay, it becomes necessary
+to cast a glance at what the Jesuits themselves were doing, and how
+they tried to do their duty as they saw it both to their Sovereign,
+their Order, and the Indians over whom they ruled. It seems as if,
+whilst the superiors of the Order recognised at once the futility of
+striving against Portugal and Spain, some of the inferior members
+secretly set on the Indians to armed resistance to the impolitic
+decree. The council of the province (Paraguay)[265] assembled at the
+Jesuit college in Cordoba, composed of Fathers Masala, Horos,
+Caballero, Lopez, and Lozano, sent a memorial[266] both to the Viceroy
+of Peru and to the High Court of Charcas. In the memorial they first
+set forth their loyalty, and then exposed the deceit to which the
+ministers of Spain and Portugal had been subjected by their advisers in
+America. They pointed out most justly that the treaty was damaging to
+both the countries concerned,[267] and that in regard to the Indians of
+the seven towns peculiarly unjust. Both at Charcas and at Lima their
+memorial (though diffuse) was favourably received, and a copy remitted
+to the King and Council at Madrid. Ibañez, in his ‘Republica
+Jesuitica’, qualifies the action of the Jesuits in this matter as a
+‘great crime’. Dean Funes only sees duplicity of language, but seems to
+excuse it in the circumstances in which the Jesuits were placed.
+Certainly, after efforts extending over almost two hundred years, it
+was hard on them to see seven of their most flourishing missions
+arbitrarily broken up, the Indians driven from their homes, and their
+territory occupied by those very Portuguese who for a hundred years had
+been their persecutors. There was much to say in extenuation, even for
+‘duplicity of language’, when one remembers that the Jesuits alone (no
+matter how mistaken their views of treatment may seem to modern eyes)
+stood out against the assumption that the Indians were a mere flock of
+sheep, who might be driven from their homes on any pretext, or at the
+exigencies of ministers at courts who lived ten thousand miles away,
+and were completely ignorant of the local circumstances. Whether the
+memorial influenced the court of Spain is hard to say; but it is
+certain that when, in 1752, the Marques de Valdelirios arrived in
+Buenos Ayres, with him came as a commissioner to fix the boundary
+between the two nations of the Uruguay Father Luis de Altamirano,
+accompanied by his secretary, Rafael de Cordoba, both members of the
+Order, and that the Marquis took up his lodging in the college of the
+Jesuits. There papers and memorials rained on him: one came from the
+Bishop of Tucuman, and one from Don Jaime de San Just, the Governor of
+Paraguay, with many others from people of inferior note, all in the
+interest of the Company. It appears as if Valdelirios thought that
+these memorials were inspired, for his first action was to publish to
+the priests of the seven towns the wishes of his government as to
+evacuation by the Indians of the territory. This he did through the
+prefect of the missions, who seems to have acted in good faith in his
+endeavours to carry out the wishes of the Spanish court. Just at that
+moment Barreda, the Provincial of Paraguay, arrived in Buenos Ayres,
+and Valdelirios asked him his opinion as to the measures best
+calculated to insure the treaty being quietly carried out. Barreda,
+though all his interests were against the execution of the treaty,
+seems to have acted in good faith. He gave the sensible advice that, as
+the treaty had been made entirely without taking into consideration the
+difficulties of carrying it out, it could not be held a crime to ask
+the King for some delay.[268] He advised consulting three ex-Governors
+of Paraguay, who happened to be in Buenos Ayres,[269] and, lastly, that
+all hurry, or anything likely to excite the Indians, should be avoided;
+for it was possible that they, relying on their numbers and local
+knowledge, might be able to give much trouble even to the joint forces
+of both crowns. He laid before Valdelirios the condition of the
+reductions, telling him that they were fertile and well
+cultivated,[270] and that this of itself would incline the Indians
+against migrating from their lands. Lastly, he said it was the opinion
+of the most experienced of the priests that the Indians would yield
+neither to arguments nor reason, for the hatred of the Portuguese had
+put them quite beside themselves with fury at the idea of giving up
+their lands. Valdelirios must have found himself not in too comfortable
+a state. Lodged as he was in the college of the Jesuits, he must have
+felt that most of the advice which was so freely tendered him was
+biassed, and to relieve his mind he called a council, at which the
+Provincial Barreda, Juan Escadon, his secretary, Altamirano, and Rafael
+de Cordoba appeared. The council recommended prudence, and, as the
+majority were Jesuits, pushed their prudence even beyond Lowland Scotch
+or north of Ireland limits, for they proposed to institute a commission
+which, after three years’ investigation, should report at Buenos Ayres
+on what it had found out. Commissions, royal or otherwise, have always
+been a trump-card in the hands of governments, since peddling
+democracy, with show of noses and the like, came in and put an end to
+those good old methods which are as dear to-day to rulers’ hearts as
+they have ever been since the beginning of the world, and will be
+whilst election, battle, fitness, talents, wealth, unfitness, or any
+other cause, gives power into the hands of anyone to rule.
+
+Valdelirios, who was not a fool, saw their design, and instantly
+despatched Altamirano (1752) to Castillos to meet Freire de Andrade and
+the Portuguese, and set about drawing the new frontier line at once.
+Altamirano, though a Jesuit, appears (at first at any rate) to have
+been anxious that the treaty should be carried out. In 1752 (September
+22) he wrote[271] from the reduction of San Borja to P. Mathias
+Stroner,[272] ordering all the Jesuits to assist in carrying out the
+evacuation of the seven towns. By his advice Freire de Andrade and
+Valdelirios met at Castillos, and, after having laid off some twenty
+leagues of boundary line, returned respectively to the Colonia and to
+Buenos Ayres.
+
+But in the missions things were in a state bordering on revolution.
+When the letter from the prefect of the missions reached San Miguel,
+the Indians assembled outside the church,[273] and having learned the
+situation of the lands to which they were to move, their fury knew no
+bounds. They all refused to stir, saying they had inherited their lands
+from their forefathers and by the grace of God.[274] Their example was
+at once followed by three more of the towns, and virtually a state of
+absolute defiance to the orders of the Spanish crown ensued.
+
+Just at this moment Altamirano, the commissary, arrived, and found the
+state of things most serious.[275] The commissary Altamirano set to
+work at once to place before the Jesuits of the seven towns the danger
+they exposed themselves to if they refused to help him to carry out the
+orders of the crown. Almost immediately on his arrival he wrote[276] to
+Don José de Caruajal y Lancastre to send more troops, and to the
+various priests[277] to destroy their powder, and cease to manufacture
+any more.[278] It is most likely that, if Altamirano had no secret
+understanding with his brother Jesuits, his letters must have
+considerably amazed them, and certainly they gave offence to the
+Indians, who declared he could not be a Jesuit at all. Six hundred
+Indians, under a chief called Sepe Tyaragu, marched upon Santo Thomé,
+where Altamirano had taken up his residence, with the avowed purpose of
+discussing whether he was a Jesuit or not, and, if the latter
+supposition proved correct, of throwing him into the river
+Uruguay;[279] but Altamirano did not wait their coming, and returned
+precipitately to Buenos Ayres. The commission which had set out to mark
+the limits between the countries,[280] buried in the woods, or marching
+along the river, was absolutely unaware of what was going on amongst
+the Indians till they arrived in Santa Tecla on February 26, 1753. The
+first notice that they had of it was when they found themselves
+surrounded by a strong force of Indians. One of the commissaries, Don
+Juan de Echevarria, is known to have left a curious account of the
+proceedings, from which Dean Funes, Ibañez, and most of the writers on
+the subject must have copied.[281]
+
+Historians, like lawyers in conveyancing, catch errors one from
+another, and transmit them as truths or titles to posterity. Certain it
+is that Echevarria sent for the nearest Jesuit priest to mediate, and
+he luckily, or unluckily, proved to be that Father Thadeus Ennis, who
+played so prominent a part in the futile rising which the enemies of
+the Jesuits have chosen to dignify with the high-sounding title of the
+‘Jesuit War’.
+
+If Father Ennis really thought the Indians could hold head to both the
+Spaniards and the Portuguese, or if he thought that the rising would
+draw attention to the injustice of the treaty, is difficult to say.
+Whether, indeed, he headed it himself, or if he merely accompanied the
+Indians as their spiritual guide, giving them now and then the benefit
+of his advice on matters temporal, after the fashion of the ambitious
+churchman of all time,[282] is now unknown. Whatever his opinions were
+upon this matter, Father Ennis showed himself almost from the first
+irreconcilable. He refused to meet the commissioners, and in his place
+sent a _cacique_ (chief) of the Indians, one Sepe Tyaragu, an official
+of the reduction of San Miguel. This chief, seeing the escort of the
+commission was but small, ‘put on his boots’,[283] and took high
+ground, daring to talk about the rights of man, of the love of country,
+and said that liberty consisted in being allowed to enjoy his property
+in peace, sentiments which, though admirable enough in a white man’s
+mouth, for men of colour are but fit for copy-books.
+
+The _cacique_ firmly refused to vacate his lands, and said the King of
+Spain, as he lived far away, could not have understood the bearing of
+affairs in Paraguay. Such arguments as these, together with the perhaps
+offensive tone of the _cacique_, had such effect on the commissioners
+that, after having threatened him with vengeance, which at the time
+they had no power to carry out, they both withdrew out of the
+territory.
+
+As Funes[284] well observes, the Spaniards had established themselves
+in these parts (the River Plate and Paraguay) to obtain a limitless
+submission from the Indians. Any resistance drove them to fury, and
+excited them to take revenge. As all the Indians’ crime was their
+unwillingness to quit the lands on which they had been born, it seemed
+a little hard to slaughter them, even before their petition to the King
+had been refused. Most probably all had been prepared before, for
+Valdelirios at once issued an order, which he had the power to do under
+a sealed letter from the King, to the Governor of Buenos Ayres,
+Andonaegui, to prepare for war. Active hostilities broke out in 1754,
+and Father Ennis has preserved a day-by-day account, written in
+priestly Latin,[285] of what took place. After some skirmishes, which
+at the first were favourable to the Indians, who took great courage
+from them,[286] the first encounter of a serious nature occurred on
+February 24, 1754. Quite naturally, the victory was on the side of the
+best-armed battalions, and the Indians lost many of their best men, and
+their largest piece of ordnance.[287]
+
+With varying success the war dragged on for several years, after the
+style of the Gaucho warfare in the River Plate which was common twenty
+years ago, or that in Venezuela which obtains to-day. Alternately each
+party carried off the other’s horses, drove each other’s cattle, or, if
+they caught a straggler, tied his hands and cut his throat or lanced
+him, the party who had lost the man protesting he was ‘massacred’—a
+term in use even to-day when the party to which one’s self belongs
+sustains reverse. For the first two years—for wars in South America
+till twenty years ago were to the full as interminable as that of
+Troy—Father Thadeus Ennis kept his journal, faithfully chronicling all
+that he saw. Occasionally in a perfunctory way he says his mission with
+the revolted Indians was as a priest and physician to the souls and
+bodies of his flock; but now and then he sets down the capture of a
+convoy of some thirty carts, or the cutting off some messenger carrying
+despatches from the Generals. In this he sees the hand of God (put
+forth to help his Jesuits[288]), although he now and then complains the
+Indians were remiss in following up any success they had. After the
+first encounter, the Indians seem to have employed the immemorial
+guerilla tactics which so often waste all the strength of an army which
+has conquered in the field. Father Cardiel[289] describes the Indian
+army, quoting from the writing of a Spanish officer who served against
+them, as quite contemptible. Their cannon were but hollow reeds, bound
+round with hide, which could only be fired two or three times, and
+carried balls a pound in weight.[290] Some lances and bows and arrows
+which they had appeared to him more formidable. Most of them carried
+banners with the painted figure of a saint, under whose ægis they
+deemed themselves secure from cannon-balls. Their trenches were but
+shallow ditches, with a few deeper holes to shelter in, but which, as
+Cardiel observes, served many of them for graves, as they were open to
+artillery, having been constructed without ‘an ounce of military art’.
+The officer adds that no sooner had the Indians heard the cannon than
+they fled, leaving almost nine hundred on the field and losing
+one-sixth prisoners.[291] Finally, the officer remarks with disgust
+that the official chronicler of the affair ‘lies from first to
+last’[292] when he declares that the Indians could make any resistance
+against disciplined troops. With varying fortune the campaign dragged
+on, until in 1756 the diary of Father Ennis, bad Latinity and all,
+comes to an abrupt conclusion at the taking of San Lorenzo, where the
+stout-hearted priest was taken prisoner. His papers fell into
+unfriendly hands, and were made use of by Ibañez, with the context duly
+distorted in various passages, and served as one of the most formidable
+indictments against the Jesuits in the expulsion under Charles III.
+
+Although Thadeus Ennis and other Jesuits accompanied the troops, and no
+doubt aided much by their advice, the Indians had as a general one
+Nicolas Ñeenguiru, styled in the Gazettes of the time the King of
+Paraguay. About this man all kinds of monstrous legends soon sprang up.
+One little lying book, entitled ‘Histoire de Nicolas I., Roy du
+Paraguai et Empereur des Mamalus’,[293] which bears upon its title-page
+‘Saint Paul’,[294] 1756, especially excels. In that brief work of but
+one hundred and seventeen pages, printed on yellowish paper, and with
+one of the finest little vignettes of a basket of fruit and flowers
+upon its title-page that one could wish to see, a sort of parody of a
+Spanish picaresque novel in duodecimo is set forth with circumstance.
+
+Nicolas Roubioni is duly born in 1710, in a small ‘bourgade de
+l’Andalousie’ bearing the name of Taratos. The name carries conviction
+from the start, and pronounced à la française, with the accent equal
+upon all the syllables, is quite as Spanish as the most exigent of
+comic operas could possibly desire. His father, ‘ancien militaire’,
+left him alone to educate himself as he best liked. Arrived at eighteen
+years of age he runs away to Seville, and after several adventures in
+the style of those of Rinconete and Cortadillo, seen through French
+spectacles, enters the service of a lady bearing the well-known Spanish
+name of Donna Maria della Cupidità. Under the unnecessary alias of
+Medelino, and in the capacity of cook, he becomes the lady’s lover as
+in duty bound. ‘Chassé’ from Seville by a jealous brother of his love,
+he flies for refuge to a ‘bourgade’ (name not chronicled) some seven
+leagues away. He then becomes a muleteer, and at Medina Sidonia kills a
+man, and, forced to flee, repairs to Malaga, where he lives peacefully
+ten years. Finding life dull there, he journeys to Aragon and joins the
+Jesuits, and from henceforth his future is assured. After an interval
+he reappears at Huesca, and at once falls in love with ‘une belle
+espagnole’, Donna Victoria Fortini, whom he courts under the guise of a
+gentleman of Seville, returning every night to the convent of the
+Jesuits to change his clothes. So great becomes his effrontery that
+under the style and title of ‘Comte de la Emmandés’, he publicly
+marries ‘sa belle’, the Jesuits either consenting, or too astounded at
+the fact to intervene. Things getting hot in Huesca, he embarks for
+Buenos Ayres as a missionary, leaving poor Donna de la Victoria ‘dans
+une inquiétude mortelle’, as she might well have been. Arrived in
+Buenos Ayres just at the moment of the cession of the seven Jesuit
+towns, he sees his opportunity, learns Guaraní in the brief space of
+six or seven weeks, and joins the Indians. They naturally, having been
+trained to look on every foreigner outside the Order of the Jesuits as
+an enemy, receive him as their King. Under the title of the ‘Son of the
+Sun and Star of Liberty’ he rules them, looked on as a God. The brief
+mendacious chronicle leaves him on the throne, just after having joined
+the empire of the Mamalucos to that of Paraguay, and promising to give
+the world more of his history when it comes to hand.
+
+By stories such as those contained in the mendacious little book
+imprinted at St. Paul, the easy-minded public—then, as now, always more
+easily impressed with lies than with the truth—was biassed against the
+Jesuits in Paraguay. Father Dobrizhoffer,[295] who knew ‘King’ Nicolas
+from his youth up, has left a very different version of his history, in
+which no Donna della Cupidità or de la Victoria even remotely
+flourishes. Nicolas Ñeenguiru was born in the township of La
+Concepcion, of which in after-life he rose to be the mayor. He married
+an Indian woman, not ‘une belle Andalouse’, and Dobrizhoffer says a
+friend of his, one Father Zierheim, had him whipped publicly for petty
+theft when a young man. At the time (1753) when, in company with
+another Indian, one José, mayor of San Miguel, he headed the Indian
+revolt, he was a man of middle age, tall, taciturn and grave, and not
+ill-looking, though marked across the cheek with a disfiguring scar. At
+no time was he even a lay brother of the Jesuit Order, as by their
+rules in Paraguay no Indians were ever taken either as lay brothers or
+as priests. So little was the man feared by the authorities that, once
+the Indians’ resistance was over, Nicolas went to the Spanish camp, was
+quietly heard, dismissed, and then continued in his office as the mayor
+of his native place. The legend sprang from a mistake in Guaraní, to
+which perhaps a little malice gave its artful charm. In Guaraní the
+word ‘Rubicha’ signifies a chief, whereas ‘Nfurabicha’ means king. The
+two, pronounced by one but ill acquainted with the language sound
+identical. Nothing was more likely than that the Indians should call
+their general their chief; had they thought really of settling upon a
+king, it is certain that they would have chosen one of the family of
+some well-known chief, and not an Indian merely appointed mayor by the
+Jesuits. But be that as it may, General Ñeenguiru, though he has left
+some interesting letters, which are preserved in the archives of
+Simancas, showed no capacity for generalship.[296] Throughout the
+course of the campaign he endeavoured to replace his want of skill by
+tricks and by intrigues, but of so futile a nature that they were
+frustrated and rendered useless at once. His first endeavour was to
+gain time, when he found himself with seventeen hundred men opposed to
+Andonaegui, Governor of Buenos Ayres, who had an army well equipped
+with guns, of about two thousand men. Ñeenguiru wrote to Andonaegui,
+telling him that the Indians were ready to submit, and then, whilst
+waiting for an answer, set about fortifying the position which he held.
+Warned by a spy, Andonaegui attacked at once, and drove the Indians
+from their trenches like a flock of sheep, taking their wooden cannon,
+lances, and banners, and killing thirteen hundred of them.
+
+A glorious victory, and, as Father Ennis says, ‘to be expected, and
+which, had it chanced otherwise, must have covered the Spaniards and
+the Portuguese with shame.’ In fact, a victory of the same kind as
+those which since that time have been most usual when well-armed
+European troops have faced half-naked, ill-armed savages, but which, of
+course, reflect no credit on the victor, or, at best, just as much
+credit as a butcher rightfully receives when he defeats a calf.
+
+But even after the victory over the Indians of Nicolas Ñeenguiru the
+troubles of the allies were not quite at an end. The usual dissensions
+between allies who mutually detest each other soon broke out, and Gomez
+Freire, the General of the Portuguese, only prevented a collision with
+the Spaniards by considerable tact. After a short campaign of a few
+months, the allies entered the rebellious towns and took possession of
+them all, with the exception of San Lorenzo, which continued to hold
+out. A month or two served to reduce it, too, and the whole territory
+of the seven towns submitted to the power of the joint forces of
+Portugal and Spain. The struggle over, Ñeenguiru was quietly again
+reinstated mayor of Concepcion, the bruised wooden cannon duly set up
+as monuments, the dead left on the plains and the _esteros_ for the
+chimangos[297] and the caranchos[298] to gorge upon, and, law’s due
+majesty once more vindicated, the conquerors set about, in 1757, to
+trace the limits between the territories of the two Christian Kings.
+
+Most of the seven towns were half deserted, the Indians having fled for
+refuge to the woods,[299] and the commission set to work upon its
+labours in a desert which it itself had made. Out of the fourteen
+thousand Indians who had inhabited the seven flourishing towns upon the
+Uruguay but few remained; yet still the work of pacification and
+working at the boundary went on slowly, for from 1753 to 1759 nothing
+of consequence was done. In 1760 Ferdinand VI. died, and his son
+Charles III. succeeded him, and still the boundary commission worked on
+hopelessly in Paraguay. The Jesuits, who had worked unceasingly during
+the last eight years to annul the treaty handing the seven missions
+over to the Portuguese, at length, in 1761, obtained from Charles III.
+a treaty annulling all that had been done, and providing that the seven
+towns should remain part of the dominions of the Spanish crown.
+
+They triumphed; but their triumph added another step towards their
+ruin, for the jealousy which they evoked by their persistent fight
+raised up much animosity towards themselves in Spain. How great a share
+they had in the resistance of the Indians cannot be known with
+certainty. Papers preserved in the archives of Simancas charge them
+with stirring up the Indians to resist;[300] but they are chiefly from
+Valdelirios and others, who, naturally finding resistance, put it down
+at once to the Jesuits, whom then, as now, it was the fashion to abuse.
+The Indians themselves seem to have been perplexed, no doubt encouraged
+by their priests on one hand, and on the other seeing the commissary
+Altamirano, himself a Jesuit, calling upon them to submit. In a
+pathetic letter written to the Governor of Buenos Ayres, and dated ‘en
+la estancia de San Luis, Feb. 28 de 1756’, Primo Ibarrenda, of San
+Miguel, says:[301] ‘This our writing I send to you that you may tell us
+finally what is to be our lot, and that you take a resolution what it
+is that you shall do. You see how that last year the father
+commissary[302] came to this our land to bother us to leave it: to
+leave our towns and all our territories, saying it was the will of our
+lord the King: besides this you yourself sent us a rigorous letter
+telling us to burn our towns, destroy the fields, even pull down our
+church, which is so beautiful (_tan lindo_), and saying also that you
+would kill us. You also say, and therefore we ask you if it is the
+truth, for if it is, we will all die before the Holy Sacrament; but
+spare the church, for it is God’s, and even the infidels would not do
+it any harm.’ They go on to say they have always been obedient subjects
+of the King, and that it is impossible that his wish could be to injure
+them—in fact, the letter of innocent men, half civilized, and thinking
+justice, mercy, and right-doing were to be found with Governors and
+Kings. Had many of the Jesuits chosen to take the field, their
+knowledge of the country and the vast influence that they had upon the
+Indians would have made the campaign perilous enough even for the
+united military power of Portugal and Spain. As it was, the miserable
+war dragged on for eight long years, and for result ruined seven
+missions where before the Indians lived happily. Then, when the fields
+were desolate, the villages deserted, and the Indian population half
+dispersed, statesmen in Spain and Portugal saw fit to change their
+minds, to annul the treaty, and to pass a diplomatic sponge over the
+ruin and the misery they had caused.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter X
+
+
+Position of the Jesuits in 1761—Decree for their expulsion sent from
+Spain—Bucareli sent to suppress the colleges and drive out the
+Jesuits—They submit without resistance—After two hundred years they are
+expelled from Paraguay—The country under the new rule—The system of
+government practically unchanged
+
+‘No storm is so insidious’ (said St. Ignatius) ‘as a perfect calm, and
+no enemy so dangerous as the absence of all enemies.’
+
+This dangerous state of calm without an apparent enemy in sight was the
+position of the Jesuits in Paraguay in 1761. By desperate efforts and
+intrigues in Spain they had kept their thirty missions from being
+mutilated; their influence amongst the Indians had never been more
+absolute. The governors of Buenos Ayres and of Paraguay had tried a
+fall with them, and the honours of the struggle were with the Jesuits.
+They had succeeded in getting put into force the clauses of the ‘Laws
+of the Indies’, which kept Spaniards out of the Indian settlements.
+Even those sent against them had been forced to testify to their
+utility[303] in Paraguay. But throughout Spain and her enormous empire
+in America and in the East perpetual hostility between the Jesuits and
+the regular clergy had been going on for years. In every portion of
+America the Jesuits were unpopular, the excuse alleged being their
+wealth and power;[304] but the real reason was their attitude on
+slavery. After repeated grumblings of distant thunder, at length the
+storm broke, and the decree for the expulsion of the Jesuits in Spain
+and her dominions was signed, and the order sent to Bucareli, Governor
+of Buenos Ayres, in June of 1767, to put it into force in Paraguay. The
+reasons which induced King Charles III. to expel the Jesuits,
+mysterious as they were, and locked up a dead secret in the royal
+breast,[305] may or may not have been sufficient in Spain, but could in
+no respect have held good for Paraguay, where there existed little
+scope for court intrigue, and where the Jesuits were far removed from
+their fellow Spanish subjects, and occupied entirely with their mission
+work. Many and various have been the explanations which historians have
+set forth for this decree. Certain it is in Spain this Order had
+attained to considerable power, and that in Rome the abler of their
+Generals occasionally kept the Popes in mental servitude.
+
+Some have accounted for the act of Charles III. as being but revenge
+for the tumult of Aranjuez under the ministry of Esquilace,[306]
+arguing that the Jesuits were in fact the authors of it, and that it
+was but the precursor of a plot to dethrone the King and place his
+brother Don Luis upon the throne, as being not so liberal in his ideas.
+Others, again, have stated[307] that the Jesuits set about a calumny
+that Charles III. was not the Queen’s son by her husband, but by a
+lover whom they said she had. The only reason which seems feasible is
+that the King was worked on by the fear that the Order had risen to too
+much power, and that if he did not at once take steps the monarchy
+would be rendered but a mere appendage of the General of the
+Jesuits.[308]
+
+Whether it is sound policy of any government to expel a race, or sect,
+or order from its domains, no matter what the immediate exigencies of
+the times seem to require, is a moot point. The expulsions of the Jews,
+Moriscos, and Huguenots, and the dissolution of the monasteries in the
+times of that true Protestant Henry VIII. of ever pious memory, do not
+exactly seem to have had the effect upon the countries where they took
+place that was at first expected by their instigators. Expelled by
+Charles III., the Jesuits to-day in Spain have re-acquired much of
+their influence. So that it seems that persecution, to be effectual,
+must not stop on this side of extermination, and this our Lord
+Protector Cromwell understood full well.
+
+The Viceroy Bucareli[309] to whom the task of the expulsion of the
+Order in the viceroyalty of Buenos Ayres and of Paraguay was entrusted,
+was no ordinary man.[310] Appointed Viceroy of Buenos Ayres after a
+distinguished career of public service, he found himself, almost
+without warning, and without any adequate forces at his command,
+obliged to execute by far the most important and far-reaching task that
+had ever fallen to the lot of any Spanish Governor in America to carry
+out. But as his services had not been chiefly in America, he held the
+idea which at the time was generally received in Europe, that the
+Jesuits possessed great wealth, had bodies of trained troops, and so
+would resist all efforts at expulsion to the death.
+
+Full of these visions, says Dean Funes,[311] he considered the order,
+which was transmitted to him from Spain, as involving serious military
+risk, and evidently seems to have looked on every Jesuit village as a
+strong place of arms. July 22, 1767, was the day he chose, keeping his
+design a secret, and preparing to strike in Corrientes, Cordoba, Monte
+Video, and Santa Fe, on the same day, or rather night, for the terror
+of the Jesuits was so great that he designed to expel them all by
+night.
+
+On July 2 two ships arrived in Buenos Ayres bringing the news that the
+decree had been put in force in Spain on April 2 with success. As all
+the crew of both the ships knew what had happened in Spain, concealment
+of his plan became no longer possible. Thus, had the Jesuits possessed
+either the wish or the means to make an armed resistance, they had
+ample time to stand on their defence.
+
+Nothing was further from their minds, though they had complete dominion
+over a territory as large as France, and which contained a population
+of over one hundred and fifty thousand souls.[312] For arms, they had
+as chief defence some ‘very long English guns, with rests if they
+wished to use them, which were not very heavy, and had a tolerable
+range.’[313] These were the preparations that the Jesuits (who, not in
+Paraguay alone, but throughout all the American dominions of the
+Spanish crown, ruled over territories stretching from California to
+Cape Horn)[314] had made, and they were found alone in the missions of
+Paraguay, where, by a special permission of the Kings of Spain, arms
+were allowed for defence against the Portuguese.
+
+Bucareli, who seems to have been a timid but honest and upright man,
+made his first experiment upon the Jesuits of Buenos Ayres, Cordoba,
+and Santa Fe. The colleges in all these places were suppressed on the
+same night, and without the least resistance from their occupants. He
+who suppresses a religious Order, takes a town or country, or, in fact,
+puts into operation any of the forces of the law or military power,
+always expects, no matter how exalted be his motives at the start, to
+recoup himself from the treasure of the conquered. _Væ victis_,
+together with the vestments of the church, the plainsong, and the
+saints, came as a pagan heritage to the new faith, and has been held as
+canon law since Constantine looked at the sky and thought he saw a
+cross.
+
+Great must have been the disgust of the Governor to find the spoil so
+paltry, and not to have the satisfaction even of saying that the
+Jesuits had hidden all their gold, as, his own measures having been
+taken secretly, they had no knowledge of what was in the wind. In the
+college of Cordoba, esteemed to be a mine of wealth, was found only
+nine thousand dollars,[315] which sum Ferando Fabro, the commissioner
+sent by Bucareli to take over the effects of the Jesuits at Cordoba,
+duly chronicles in his report.
+
+But if the college of Cordoba[316] proved a miserable prey, there still
+remained the Jesuit missions on the Uruguay and Paraná, with all the
+riches of their fertile territory, and the enormous wealth which every
+Spaniard firmly believed the Jesuits had acquired. None of the Jesuits,
+either in Buenos Ayres, Cordoba, Santa Fe, Corrientes, or Monte Video
+having made the least resistance, but having opened wide their doors to
+the soldiers, who in all the towns on the same day at two o’clock in
+the morning came to signify their expulsion to them, it was only
+natural to think that the same conduct would be observed in Paraguay.
+But Governors and Governments never seem in the least accessible to
+common-sense. Almost a year had passed before he plucked up courage for
+his dangerous task.[317] He set about it with more preparation than
+either Cortez or Pizarro made for the conquest of Mexico or of Peru.
+Having embarked for Spain in the frigate _La Esmeralda_ one hundred and
+fifty Jesuits from the towns of Cordoba, Buenos Ayres, Monte Video, and
+Santa Fe, he prepared to march upon the missions, when a suspicion of
+resistance caused him to take precautions which the result proved quite
+ridiculous. He sent two hundred of the best of the militia of Asuncion
+to occupy the fords upon the Tebicuari,[318] and a body of equal
+strength to occupy the port of San Miguel. All these measures being
+taken for his safety, the conqueror embarked upon May 24, taking with
+him three companies of grenadiers and sixty dragoons. He disembarked at
+the town of Salto on the Uruguay, and from thence despatched Captain
+Don Juan Francisco de la Riva Herrera to occupy the towns upon the
+Paraná. Don Francisco de Zabala was sent to seize six of the towns upon
+the Uruguay. Bucareli himself, with several hundred men, marched upon
+Yapeyu,[319] the southernmost of all the mission towns. The Jesuits,
+however, gave no trouble to any of the troops, and even stopped the
+Governor from gathering any laurels, however withered, with which to
+crown his arms.
+
+As he advanced from town to town, the priests, on his arrival at each
+place, although living in the midst of Indians, some of whom were
+armed, and many of whom had served the King of Spain in various wars,
+and all of whom looked on the Jesuits almost as gods, came out and
+peacefully gave up the keys of all their houses, and submitted quietly
+to be made prisoners and be carried off in chains from the territories
+which they and their order had civilized and ruled over almost two
+hundred years. Seventy-eight Jesuits and their provincials were sent
+prisoners to Buenos Ayres, and their places all filled up with other
+priests taken from different Orders, and none of whom had any
+experience in mission-work. As Dean Funes tartly writes, the miracle
+that Bucareli wished, but scarcely dared to hope for, had taken place.
+The Jesuits, in Paraguay, at least, by their conduct in their last
+public act, most amply vindicated their loyalty to the Spanish crown.
+Nothing would have been easier, depleted as the viceroyalty was at the
+time of troops,[320] than to have defied the forces which Bucareli had
+at his disposal, and to have set up a Jesuit State, which would have
+taxed the utmost resources of the Spanish crown to overcome. No doubt
+the very facility with which Bucareli carried out his plans confirmed
+him in his own mind of their expediency, for men in general are prone
+to think that right which they accomplish with success. However, be
+that as it may, he returned in triumph to Buenos Ayres on September 16,
+having expended in his expedition less than four months. So in a
+quarter of a year the Jesuits, after more than two hundred years of
+rule, were all expelled from Paraguay.
+
+They made no fight, nor offered any resistance, letting themselves be
+taken as a butcher takes a sheep, and that surrounded as they were by a
+population of upwards of one hundred and fifty thousand souls, cut off
+by countless leagues from the outside world, defended on three sides by
+virgin forests and by marshes hardly passable to European troops. One
+word from the Provincial would have set the missions in a blaze. A word
+would have brought clouds of horsemen—badly armed, ’tis true, but
+knowing every foot of marsh and forest, all the deep-beaten tracks
+which wind in the red earth across the lonely plains, the passes of the
+rivers, springs, natural fastnesses, and having the varied knowledge of
+a country which of old made Border horsemen and Northumbrian prickers
+formidable upon the Scottish marches—into the field.
+
+The dogged Paraguayan Indians, ancestors of the infantry which, under
+Lopez,[321] died so bravely under the fire of the Brazilian guns,
+would, in their red cloaks and scanty linen clothes, have marched from
+_capilla_[322] and from mission against the enemies of the
+‘father-priests’. Seventy-eight Jesuits were marched off to Buenos
+Ayres, and then shipped off to Europe[323] to join their fellows, who
+had been brought together by the ministers of the most liberal King who
+ever filled the Spanish throne from every quarter of the world. Having
+expelled the Jesuits, Bucareli was bound by the exigencies of his
+position to calumniate them. Perhaps, as an official, hidebound in his
+belief in the inalterable right of Governments to commit injustices, he
+believed all that he wrote. For the welfare of humanity, one could hope
+he knew all that he wrote was false. What hope is there left for
+mankind as long as addle-headed, honest men see naught but justice in
+whatever order they receive? Better a thousand times a rogue who knows
+he is a rogue than a good, well-intentioned, blundering man quite
+unaware he is a fool.
+
+But, still, he had to justify himself either upon his own account or
+for the benefit of that posterity to conciliate which so many public
+men have paltered with the truth. So his first care was to extract a
+letter from thirty Indians whom he chose to dignify with the title of
+the mayors of the thirty towns, first having, as he says himself in a
+letter to the Conde de Aranda, the minister of Charles III., dressed
+them in the Spanish fashion, and treated them in such a way that they
+might know how much their lot had been improved.[324] The letter,
+written originally in Guaraní,[325] bears upon every line of it the
+dictation of the Governor. After a fine paragraph of salutations, it
+goes on to give the King many and repeated thanks (‘muchas y repetidas
+gracias’) for having sent his Excellency Captain-General Don Francisco
+Bucareli, ‘who has fulfilled, for the love of God and for the love of
+your Majesty, all the just orders which your Majesty laid to his
+charge, aiding our poverty, and clothing us like gentlemen.’ Most
+people, even the heathen, like those who help their poverty and clothe
+them in the garb of gentlemen. It had not occurred to the poor Indians
+that the fine clothes might turn out liveries. The mayors all sign
+their Indian names, which seems to give the lie to the accusation that
+the Jesuits kept them ignorant. The letter, dated Buenos Ayres, March
+10, 1768, seems to show that the Indians, be they who they might have
+been, were not free agents at the time they wrote. The Indians’ letter
+duly despatched, the Governor indited a report, in which he fairly and
+with circumstance reiterates all the old charges against the Jesuits in
+Paraguay which the inventive brain of Cardenas had first conceived; but
+to them he adds several little touches of his own, which show he had
+some observation and an imaginative mind.
+
+Amongst his numerous letters to Aranda and to the King, one dated
+Buenos Ayres, October 14, 1768,[326] contains the fullest account of
+his proceedings in the missions and of his views (or of what he thought
+to be his views) about the work in which he was engaged. Time was of
+small account in 1768 either in Paraguay or in Madrid, so Bucareli
+relates with some prolixity all that he did, with comments, movements
+of troops, regrettable occurrences—as when his soldiers let themselves
+be surprised and lost their horses—and now and then scraps of morality
+and theology, which shows quite plainly that the art of writing
+maundering despatches is not so new as optimists may have supposed.
+Quite in the manner of a modern special correspondent, he sets down all
+that he suffered from the weather; that it rained incessantly, and,
+marvellous to tell, that after rain the rivers rose, and gave him
+difficulty to cross. The roads were bad, provisions scarce and dear,
+and now and then wild Indians ‘massacred’ an outpost of his men, whilst
+his brave fellows, when God willed it, occasionally ‘chastised’ the
+infidel, and by the grace of Heaven slew no small number of them.
+Still, in the monstrous farrago of words, extending to some sixteen
+pages of close print, he lets us see he was a man of some capacity, but
+leaves it doubtful whether he really thought he was engaged upon a
+noble work, or if he wrote ironically, or if his only object was to
+satisfy his conscience and his King. But making much of little
+difficulties is but to be expected from a leader of an expedition or
+from a General in the field. Without it, how could they justify their
+existence, or prove to the world at large that they were needed, or but
+more important than a mere ceremony?[327]
+
+When the land troubles were got over, and Bucareli, having arrived at
+Yapeyu, embarked upon the river, the very winds proved contrary, so
+that it took him many days to arrive at Candelaria, which port he
+reached upon August 27, 1768. But before quitting Yapeyu the Governor
+made a solemn feast, riding himself before his grenadiers, whose caps,
+he says, caused much amazement, the Indians never having seen such
+headgear in their lives. The difficulties of his journey over, the
+Jesuits dispossessed and sent down-stream to be remitted home, Bucareli
+in his letter next deals with questions of religion, about which he
+shows himself as well informed as all the Spanish conquerors seem to
+have been in the New World. If for the dogma of the faith he was a bar
+of iron, for ‘cold morality’, as Scottish preachers of the perfervid
+type used to refer to it, he was most keen. The Indians’ clothes,
+especially the graceful _tupoi_ worn by the women, shocked him
+exceedingly. It was impossible to touch upon it without an outrage upon
+modesty.[328] Masculine virtue is a most precarious thing, but little,
+if at all, more stable than its female counterpart; therefore perhaps
+the Governor was right not to expose his soldiers to temptation, so he
+did well, as he informs us, in serving out clothes which obscured their
+charms, or perhaps hid them quite from view. ‘Such tyrannies,’[329]
+says the modest Governor, ‘occasioned many offences against God, and
+frequent illnesses and epidemics.’ The sentence is a little doubtful in
+its meaning, for if a scantiness of women’s dress occasioned illnesses
+and epidemics amongst the population of a town, Belgravia and Mayfair
+should surely be the most unhealthy spots on earth; though even there,
+I verily believe, no more offences against God occur than amongst the
+Moors, whose women show only their eyes to the shrinking gaze of easily
+offended men.
+
+As in duty bound, Bucareli kept for the end of his despatch a rehash of
+all the old charges made against the Jesuits. They kept the Indians in
+slavery, would never let them learn Spanish, and were themselves
+inordinately rich. The first two accusations Father José Cardiel, in
+his ‘Declaracion de la Verdad’, abundantly disproves.[330] The last the
+Governor disproves himself; for had he found much treasure he most
+assuredly would have made haste to send it to the King. What he did
+find, a reference later to Brabo’s inventories will show, and the same
+source discloses all the wealth the richest Order in the world,
+according to their enemies, took with them in their involuntary journey
+back to Spain. All being finished in the missions and the Jesuits
+expelled, Bucareli found himself obliged to institute some system for
+the government of the Indian population, which he had deprived both of
+its spiritual and of its temporal guides.
+
+The Jesuits’ government having been so bad, according to his own
+despatch, the Indians having been kept in such a miserable state, their
+education having been so neglected, and, above all, their women having
+been dressed in such light attire that Bucareli could not with modesty
+even describe their dress, it might have seemed but natural that he
+should have evolved some system of government differing in all respects
+from that he had destroyed. So far from that, in his instructions to
+his interim successor, dated at Candelaria,[331] August 23, 1768, he
+practically followed slavishly all the policy which the Jesuits had
+pursued. He ordered Captains Riva Herrera and Bruno de Zavala, to whom
+the arrangements were committed, to see that the Indians were
+instructed ‘in the true knowledge of our holy faith’, a work which the
+Jesuits, whatever might be their faults, had not neglected to insure.
+After some platitudes as to the vivifying effects of free and open
+trade, and an injunction to his captains to take care the Indian girls
+were decorously and virtuously dressed, he launched into a sermon about
+honest work, which, as he said, would make the Indians rich, happy, and
+virtuous, and alone could ever make a kingdom prosper; in fact, he used
+almost precisely similar language to that to-day used by a European
+Governor in Africa when about to make a people slaves. On the whole,
+however, his instructions were wise and liberal, and had they been
+carried out in the same spirit, and with fidelity, the Indians might
+have long continued in the same half-Arcadian, half-Christian state in
+which the Jesuits left them, and to which it seems they could attain,
+but not go farther without exposure to that vivifying commerce without
+which nations cannot prosper, but with which the greater portion of
+their citizens must remain ever slaves.
+
+The instructions given, he left the missions never to return, leaving
+behind him the reputation of an honest man, having made, as it would
+appear, no money during his sojourn in their territories. On October
+20, 1768, he wrote from Buenos Ayres to Aranda, telling him that his
+work was done, and asking him as a particular favour to implore the
+King to give him some employment ‘out of America, and particularly not
+under either the secretaryship or the Council of the Indies.’[332] Thus
+it appears that either the work in which he had been engaged was
+uncongenial to him, or he mistrusted the future and the Indians when
+the Jesuits’ sheltering hands had been withdrawn, and thought the King
+might blame him for what was sure to come. One passage in his letter of
+instructions shows that the antique, but still current, fashion of
+going to any length to obtain a country in which are situated even
+supposititious gold-mines had its influence even with such an honest
+man as Bucareli was. He specially enjoins upon the officials left in
+charge ‘to find out from what quarter the Indians of those towns
+extract those pieces of the precious metals which they sometimes bring
+to their priests.’ So that the fable of the false mines started by
+Cardenas, although a thousand times disproved, still lingered in the
+minds of those who could not understand what motive except that of
+growing rich could cause the Jesuits to bury themselves in the recesses
+of the Paraguayan woods. The release from things American and under the
+jurisdiction of the Council of the Indies did not come to Bucareli for
+almost two more years, during which time he struggled manfully with the
+affairs of the Jesuit missions, repelled the Chaco Indians on one side,
+and on the other implored for troops to defend the island of Chiloe
+against the heretic English, who at that time appear to have been
+meditating the advancement of their empire in the extremest south. One
+curious letter was reserved for Bucareli to indite before he quitted
+Buenos Ayres for the last time. On January 15, 1770, he sent a long
+declaration signed by the celebrated Nicolas Ñeenguirú and other
+Indians, giving an account of the part played by him in the abortive
+resistance which he made against the cession of the seven towns. This
+is the last time that Nicolas, the ‘King’ of Paraguay and ‘Emperor of
+the Mamelucos’, appears in any document as far as I can find. His name
+at one time was well known in Paraguay, the River Plate and Spain, and
+served to father many lies upon; and at the last, the Jesuits gone, he
+seems to have turned against them, and said all that was required by
+Bucareli to get up his case. It appears from Bucareli’s letter that the
+family of the Ñeenguirú had been well known in the missions from the
+time of Cardenas. In 1770[333] we find him shorn of his kingly and
+imperial dignities, the mayor of Concepcion in Paraguay, tall,
+taciturn, with long, lank hair, and much respected by his brother
+Indians, who held his stirrup for him when he got upon his horse. To
+find him in the humour to give tongue about the Jesuits was a
+trump-card in Bucareli’s hand, for if it could be proved that in 1750
+they had resisted the forces of the crown of Spain, the public, always
+anxious to believe a lie, would naturally applaud the action of the
+King in their expulsion from his territories. Nicolas, who seems to
+have been but a poor creature at the best, testified that everything
+which he had done as General of the Indians was by the order of Fathers
+Limp and Ennis, and that he was a poor Indian who did but that which he
+was told. He finished up his testimony with thanks to the good King for
+having taken him out of the power of the Jesuits, and kept him in his
+post of mayor at Concepcion. In fact, all was the same to him as long
+as he was left with his alcalde’s staff.[334]
+
+Upon August 14, 1778, Bucareli sailed for Spain, leaving Don Juan José
+Vertiz as his successor in the viceroyalty of the provinces of the
+River Plate. The missions were all placed under the care of friars of
+the begging Orders, chiefly Franciscans, and the system of the Jesuit
+government was left unchanged. In 1771, writing from San Lorenzo (el
+Escorial) in Spain, Bucareli, who seemed fated never to escape from the
+affairs of Paraguay, sends a long constitution for the thirty towns
+which follows all the Jesuits’ rules of government to the last tittle
+of their policy. Brabo has preserved the document, which runs to
+forty-seven pages of close print in its entirety. A carefully
+thought-out and well-conceived digest of a constitution it most
+certainly is, and yet it follows to the most minute particular the
+policy the Jesuits laid down.
+
+Dean Funes[335] seemed to see that the flattering of Nicolas Ñeenguiru
+and the other Indian chiefs was an entire affair of artifice, and that
+it was but a mere crowning of the victims who were destined to be
+sacrificed. It may be that the constitution made by Bucareli at the
+Escorial was similarly but a blind to keep the Indians quiet till the
+Government had time to exploit them at its ease. Still, Bucareli in all
+his actions seems to have been an honest man; one of those honest,
+narrow-minded men who have sown more misery in the world than all the
+rogues and scoundrels since the flood. Be all that as it may, his
+constitution in a thousand ways recalled the Jesuits’ polity in their
+days of rule. In a former chapter[336] I have pointed out a curious
+instance in which this constitution traverses entirely statements made
+by the Jesuits’ enemies that their exclusive policy was for their own
+ends, and not, as they alleged, for the protection of the Indians. But
+there are other instances quite as remarkable which show that the
+Jesuits not only had grasped perfectly what the best course of
+treatment was for their subjects, but that the official mind of
+Bucareli, trained as he was, so to speak, in the strictest sect of
+Pharisees, and prejudiced against the Jesuits in every way, yet
+discerned clearly as an honest man that the plan they had laid down was
+the most suitable for future rulers to pursue.
+
+At the time of forming his constitution he had been gone but scarce a
+year from Buenos Ayres, and yet he writes[337] complaining bitterly of
+what was happening in the missions of Paraguay. He points out that all
+his trouble will have been in vain ‘if the Governor and his lieutenants
+are not stimulated to address themselves to the service of God and of
+the King, with that zeal which everyone should impart to his duty.’
+Then, after a puff preliminary of the beauty of freedom, human and
+Divine, he sets forth how the Indians are in future to be ruled. First,
+as in duty bound, he points out that anything savouring of communism is
+against the laws of Heaven and of man; that the Indians in their
+semi-communism were really slaves, the industrious working for the
+idle, and so forth; that their clothes were scanty; that they were not
+allowed to freely mix with Spaniards, and were kept a race apart. Then
+like a prudent statesman having made his apologia ‘pro existentia sua’,
+and blown off much virtuous steam, he comes to business, and business,
+as we know, is the great soberer of theorists, no matter on what side
+they theorize.
+
+After the article to which I have referred in Chapter IX. comes this
+most curious paragraph, taken in connection with the inalienable right
+which, according to himself, the Indians had of free communication with
+the outer world:[338] ‘And because I am informed that many Indians who
+have been absent in the army of the Portuguese, and have resided for
+lengthened periods in Rio Pardo, Viamont and other parts, have returned
+to their towns, you will take care that all these with their families
+shall be removed to those (towns) either in the interior or distant
+from those frontiers, as it is not convenient that they should remain
+on them (the frontiers) or close to them; and thus you will proceed
+successively with the Indians who return, without leaving one, in order
+to avoid any chance of communication, which might be most prejudicial.’
+Surely a satire on his own abuse of the Jesuits for keeping the Indians
+mewed up from intercourse with the outside world. It may be that he had
+perceived the Indians were not fit to hold their own; indeed, it is
+certain he had done so, for on p. 326 he writes, ‘It is not convenient
+to leave them (the Indians) entire liberty,[339] for it would be in the
+extreme fatal and prejudicial to their interests, because the
+astuteness and sagacity of the Spaniards would triumph easily over
+their rusticity.’ ‘Sagacity’ is an ingenious euphuism, and might well
+be used with good effect in the like circumstances, when occasion
+serves, to-day. But as no single article of any document set forth by
+any Government can be straightforward and single in its purpose, and as
+all laws are made with an eye upon some party presently in power, after
+the paragraph just quoted, on the next page occurs the following
+sentence under the head of ‘Commerce with the Spaniards is to be
+free’.[340] ‘It is laid down that between the Indians and the Spaniards
+commerce should be free, in order that mutual dealings should unite
+them in friendship.’ Therefore to the ordinary mind it is impossible to
+make out what really was intended, and whether commerce was to be free
+or not. Those little differences apart, the constitution ran entirely
+upon Jesuit lines. That semi-communism which was so prejudicial during
+the Jesuits’ rule was formally re-organized in chapter iv. of the
+constitution (p. 343) the instant that their power was placed in other
+hands. Even the prohibition to the Spaniards to enter the Jesuit towns,
+and reside there, was formally kept up in chapter iii., with the sole
+alteration that for three months of the year they might reside amongst
+the Indians on certain well-defined conditions most prolixly set forth.
+So that it will be seen that, if the Jesuits did ill, as usual, any ill
+they did was carefully perpetuated by their successors, and, quite as
+naturally, all that they strove to do in favour of the Indians was most
+carefully undone.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter XI
+
+
+Conclusion
+
+It is the fashion of some to say that history, of whatever nature, can
+but be written dispassionately at a period sufficiently removed from
+the events of which it treats to have allowed the heat of passion to
+evaporate. This is as false as almost every other dictum which men take
+on trust, forgetting that to have passed into the proverbial stage a
+saying must have been foolish at the start, in order that it should
+have got itself commended by the majority of mankind.
+
+The heat of passion never evaporates in regard to events which at the
+epoch of their acting caused great controversies. From writings of
+contemporaries the coolest-headed take a bias, in the same way that men
+unconsciously pass on the microbes of disease to their best friends.
+Only from inventories and rolls of court, State Papers and the like is
+it possible to get unbiassed matter, and even then figures, those chief
+deceivers of mankind, can be well cooked for or against, according to
+the bias of the man who draws them up. Still, when they are drawn up by
+enemies, they often quite unwittingly show out the truth. In a letter
+dated October 30, 1768, Bucareli sends a list to Aranda of the effects
+of many of the Jesuits taken from Paraguay and sent by him to Spain.
+The list itself speaks volumes in defence of the Jesuits in Paraguay.
+Whatever may have been their faults, the Governor himself (or even
+Charles III.) could not have charged upon the captured priests that
+they had got together a large stock of property during their mission
+life.[341] The first upon the list, P. Pedro Zabaleta, took ten shirts,
+two pillow-cases, two sheets, three pocket-handkerchiefs, two pairs of
+shoes, two pairs of socks, and a pound and a half of snuff. The others
+were in general less well set up with shirts,[342] some few had cloaks,
+and one (P. Sigismundo Griera) a nightcap; but all of them had their
+snuff, the only relic of their luxurious mission life. Manuel Vergara,
+their Provincial, testifies in a paper sent with the list that most of
+the clothes were taken from the common stock, and all the snuff. What
+sort of treatment they endured upon their passage in the two frigates
+_San Fernando_ and _San Nicolas_ is quite unknown, but certainly their
+luggage could not have been in the way; and for their snuff, no doubt
+they husbanded it with care during the long two months, which in those
+days was thought a record run.[343] In the missions which they had so
+long tended with such care, giving their muddle-headed love to the
+Indians in their Machiavelian way, all was confusion in the space of
+six short months. Dean Funes and Don Feliz de Azara[344] are the only
+two contemporary writers who treat of the expulsion of the Jesuits from
+Paraguay outside the official world. The Dean, a man of the old school,
+was kindly and humane, well educated, and, having been brought up in
+Tucuman amongst an Indian population, looked on the Indians in a kindly
+way as fellow-creatures, though differing in essential points from
+races which had been for centuries exposed to civilization and its
+effects. His description of the Indians has for veracity and
+observation not often been surpassed. ‘Those natives[345] (he says) are
+of a pale colour, well made, and well set up. Their talent and capacity
+are capable of much advancement. Though they lack invention in
+themselves, yet are they excellent in imitation. Idleness seems natural
+to them, although it may be more the effect of habit than of
+temperament; their inclination towards acquiring knowledge is decided,
+and novelty has its full effect upon their minds. Ambitious of command,
+they acquit themselves with honour in the positions to which they may
+attain. Eloquence is held amongst them in the first place, and avarice
+in no respect degrades their minds. An injurious word offends them more
+than punishments, which they solicit rather than undergo the former
+outrage. Incontinency in their women they look upon but with
+indifference, and even husbands are little sensible to acts of
+infidelity. Conjugal love has but slight influence upon the treatment
+which they give their wives. Fathers of families care for their sons
+but little. The serenity of mind of all these Indians in the midst of
+the greatest troubles is without equal in the world; never a sigh with
+them takes off the bitterness of suffering.’
+
+No one who knows the Indians but must confess that Dean Funes had made
+a study of their character deeper than is his own. Azara, on the other
+hand, was a man of science; his books upon the birds and quadrupeds of
+Paraguay still hold the field, and are esteemed for curious and minute
+observation and accuracy as to scientific facts. The man himself was an
+extremely able writer, a captain in the Spanish navy, and well
+educated. For twenty years he served in Paraguay and in the River
+Plate, with credit to himself and profit to the country which he
+served. Educated as he was in the school of the Encyclopædists, amongst
+the strictest of the pharisees of Liberalism, to him the very name of
+Jesuit was anathema. After the fashion of his kind, he seemed unable to
+distinguish between the scheming Jesuits at European courts and the
+simple and hard-working missionaries in Paraguay. All were anathema,
+and therefore all their system was repugnant to him; and though a
+kindly man, as is set forth abundantly in all his works, he never
+paused to think that there could be a difference between his ideal free
+Liberal citizen, voting and exercising all his right of citizenship in
+a free commonwealth, after the fashion of a dormouse freely exercising
+his natural functions in the receiver of an air-pump, and a simple
+Indian of the Paraguayan woods.
+
+Freedom to him, as it has been to many theorists, was an abstract
+thing, possessing which a man, even though starving, must in its mere
+possession find true happiness. He never paused to inquire, as even
+Bucareli did, if the mission Indians could hold their own under free
+competition with the ‘sagacity’ of the surrounding Spanish settlers.
+Therefore he is the authority whom Liberals always quote against the
+system of the Jesuits. When he inveighs against their semi-communism,
+the modern Liberal claps his hands, and sees a kindred Daniel come to
+judgment, as he would do to-day if in Damaraland the Germans set up a
+Socialistic settlement amongst the negro tribes, and some Liberal
+economist denounced it with an oath. Azara quite forgets that, as Dean
+Funes says, the ‘sentiment of property was very weak amongst the
+Indians,’ and that their minds were ‘not degraded by the vice of
+avarice.’ Still, Azara was an honest man—a keen observer and impartial,
+as far as his upbringing and the tenets he had imbibed in youth
+permitted him to be. Upon the question of the Jesuits he was entirely
+prejudiced, although few have stood up more stoutly to condemn the
+faulty system which the Spaniards pursued towards the Indians in both
+Americas. But on account of his political proclivities Azara is quite
+silent as to the state into which the missions fell after the Jesuits
+had been expelled. No doubt he thought that, once their faulty system
+was removed, the Indians would soon become what he judged civilized,
+and hold their own with those around them, though of another race and
+blood.
+
+Funes, upon the contrary, fully exposes all the rapacity and
+incompetence of the new shepherds left by Bucareli to guard the
+Jesuits’ sheep.
+
+‘Ignorant[346] of Guaraní, and without patience to acquire it,
+confusion reigned in the missions as in a tower of Babel,’ and he goes
+on to say ‘an imperious tone of order was substituted for the paternal
+manner (of the Jesuits), and as a deaf man who cannot hear has to be
+taught by blows, that was the teaching they (the Indians) had to bear.’
+Shortly, he says, ‘a wall of hatred and contempt began to rise between
+the Indians and their masters; and the priests, who by the virtue of
+their office ought to have been the ministers of peace, being without
+influence to command . . . and not entirely irreproachable in their
+ministry . . . added themselves to the discord and dissension which
+arose.’
+
+Bucareli, as soon as he knew what was going on, advised that all the
+priests appointed by himself should be replaced by others. This
+accordingly was done, but it was even then too late: the missions went
+from bad to worse; of the vast quantities of cattle few were left; the
+priests followed the example of their prototypes Hofni and Phineas,
+went about armed, took Indian mistresses, and neglected all religious
+duties, treating the Indians after the fashion of the Spaniards in the
+settlements. Thus the Arcadian life, which had subsisted more than two
+hundred years, in the brief space of two short years was lost.
+
+The vast estancias, in which at the expulsion more than a million head
+of cattle pastured,[347] were but bare plains, in which the cattle that
+were left had all run wild or perished from neglect. Wild beasts roamed
+round the outskirts of the half-deserted towns. A dense low scrub of
+yatais and of palmettos invaded all the pasture-lands, and in the
+erstwhile cultivated fields rank weeds sprang up, and choked the crops
+which in the Jesuits’ times had made the mission territories the most
+productive of the American possessions of the Spanish crown. The
+churches were unserved, and in the evening air no more the hymns
+resounded, nor did the long white-robed processions headed by a cross
+pass to the fields to peaceful labour, marshalled by their priests. The
+fruit-trees round the missions were either all cut down for firewood or
+had degenerated, and the plantations of the Ilex Paraguayensis,[348]
+from which they made their _yerba_, which had been brought from the
+up-country forests with vast pains, were in decay, and quite
+uncultivated.
+
+The Indian population had almost disappeared within the space of
+eight-and-twenty years.[349] The Guaranís collected from the woods with
+so much effort to the missionary, then guided down the Paraná by the
+most noble and self-sacrificing of their priests, Ruiz Montoya, and
+after that redeemed with blood from the fierce Mameluco bands, had
+shrunk away before the baneful breath of unaccustomed contact with the
+civilizing whites.
+
+The simple ceremonious, if perhaps futile, mission-life had withered up
+at the first touch of vivifying competition—that competition which has
+made the whole world gray, reducing everything and everyone to the most
+base and commonest denominator.
+
+The self-created goddess Progress was justified by works, and all the
+land left barren, waiting the time when factories shall pollute its
+sky, and render miserable the European emigrants, who, flying from
+their slavery at home, shall have found it waiting for them in their
+new paradise beyond the seas.
+
+The world, it would appear, is a vast class-room, and its Creator but a
+professor of political economy, apparently unable to carry out his
+theories with effect. Therefore, to us, the Western Europeans, he has
+turned for help, and upon us devolved the task of extirpating all those
+peoples upon whom he tried his ’prentice hand. On us he laid
+injunctions to increase at home, and to the happier portions of the
+world to carry death under the guise of life unsuitable to those into
+whose lands we spread.
+
+Let those made cruel by the want of sympathy with men that the mere
+poring over books so often superinduces in the mind protest when
+judging of the Jesuits in Paraguay against the outrage done to their
+theories by the scheme the Jesuits pursued.
+
+It has been nobly said[350] ‘that the extinction of the smallest animal
+is a far greater loss than if the works of all the Greeks had
+perished.’ How much the greater loss that of a type of man such as the
+Indians, whom the semi-communistic Jesuit government successfully
+preserved, sheltering them from the death-dealing breath of our cold
+northern life and its full, fell effects!
+
+There are those, no doubt, who think that a tree brought from the
+tropics should be planted out at home, to take its chance of life in
+the keen winter of the north, in holy competition with the ash and oak;
+and if it dies, there are still pines enough, with stores of dogwood,
+thickets of elder, and a wilderness of junipers. They may be right;
+but, after all, that which has felt the tropic sun is for the tropics,
+and to grow under the tantalizing sunshine of the north, which lights
+but does not warm, it must have glass, and shelter from the cold.
+
+But of aforethought to deliberately transplant our fogs and chilling
+atmosphere, and so to nip and kill plants which crave only the sun to
+live, that is a crime against humanity; a crime posterity with
+execration will one day taunt us with, and hold us up to execration, as
+we to-day in our hypocrisy piously curse the memories of Pizarro and
+Cortés.
+
+In the eternal warfare between those who think that progress—which to
+them means tramways and electric light—is preferable to a quiet life of
+futile happiness of mind there is scant truce, so that my readers have
+to take their choice whether to side with Funes or Azara in judging of
+the Jesuits’ rule in Paraguay. There is no middle course between the
+old and new; no halting-place; no chink in which imagination can drive
+in its nail to stop the wheels of time; therefore, no doubt, the Jesuit
+commonwealth was doomed to disappear. But for myself, I am glad that
+five-and-twenty years ago I saw the Indians who still lingered about
+the ruined mission towns, mumbling their maiméd rites when the Angelus
+at eventide awoke the echoes of the encroaching woods, whilst
+screeching crowds of parrots and macaws hovered around the date-palms
+which in the plaza reared their slender heads, silent memorials of the
+departed Jesuits’ rule.
+
+Indians and Jesuits are gone from Paraguay, the Indians to that
+Trapalanda which is their appointed place; and for the Jesuits, they
+are forgotten, except by those who dive into old chronicles, or who
+write books, proposing something and concluding nothing, or by
+travellers, who, wandering in the Tarumensian woods, come on a clump of
+orange-trees run wild amongst the urundéys.
+
+FINIS NON CORONAT OPUS
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+
+
+Notes
+
+
+About the author:
+
+           Robert Bontine Cunninghame Graham (1852-1936)
+
+Born in London. Lived in Argentina, mostly ranching, from 1869 to 1883,
+when he returned to Scotland. Member of the British House of Commons
+for North West Lanark (1886-1892). Strong socialist tendencies. Was
+elected first president of the Scottish Labour Party in 1888, first
+president of the National Party of Scotland in 1928, and first Honorary
+President of the Scottish National Party in 1934. Died in Argentina. He
+was the model for a number of fictional characters in books by his
+friend, Joseph Conrad, and also by G. B. Shaw.
+
+Notes to the etext:
+
+Corrections made:
+
+Chapter I:
+
+(p. 6) (footnote)
+
+[‘Commentarios Reales’ (en Madrid CI}. I}CCXXIII., en la oficina]
+
+where “}” marks a character that is the mirror image of “C”, which was
+formerly used in Roman Numerals as follows: “CI}” = “M” [1,000]; “I}” =
+“D” [500]; and subsequent “}”s multiply by ten, as “I}}}” = 50,000.
+
+changed to:
+
+[‘Commentarios Reales’ (en Madrid 1723, en la oficina]
+
+Let us all take this moment to give thanks for Hindu-Arabic numerals,
+Amen.
+
+(p. 19)
+
+[‘Descripcion y Historia del Paraguay, ‘the Guaranís were spread]
+
+changed to:
+
+[‘Descripcion y Historia del Paraguay’, ‘the Guaranís were spread]
+
+(p. 24) (footnote)
+
+[del Sr Provisor Alonso Joseph Gomez de Lara.]
+
+changed to:
+
+[del Sr. Provisor Alonso Joseph Gomez de Lara.]
+
+(p. 34)
+
+[and his mother Doña Teresa Cabeza de Vaca,]
+
+changed to:
+
+[and his mother ‘Doña Teresa Cabeza de Vaca,]
+
+as the best guess as to where the quoted section begins, which is later
+marked with a closing quote.
+
+Chapter II:
+
+(p. 52) (footnote)
+
+[de la Compagnie de Jésus, vol. iii., cap v., p. 322]
+
+changed to:
+
+[de la Compagnie de Jésus’, vol. iii., cap v., p. 322]
+
+(p. 74)
+
+[militia of the missions could no nothing with their bows and arrows]
+
+changed to:
+
+[militia of the missions could do nothing with their bows and arrows]
+
+Chapter V:
+
+(p. 129)
+
+[to divine will, which, will, as the Bishop]
+
+changed to:
+
+[to divine will, which will, as the Bishop]
+
+(p. 131) (footnote)
+
+[[121] Exod. xxxii. 27.]
+
+updated to:
+
+[[121] Exod. 32:27.]
+
+(p. 138)
+
+[sending to him one Father Lopez, Provincial of the Dominicians.]
+
+changed to:
+
+[sending to him one Father Lopez, Provincial of the Dominicans.]
+
+Chapter VI:
+
+(p. 181) (footnote)
+
+[‘Declaracion de la Verdad, p. 295:]
+
+changed to:
+
+[‘Declaracion de la Verdad’, p. 295:]
+
+(p. 184) (footnote)
+
+[la Historia del Paraguay’, etc., cap. i., vol. ii.]
+
+changed to:
+
+[la Historia del Paraguay’, etc., cap. i., vol. ii.).]
+
+Chapter IX:
+
+(p. 237)
+
+[After negotiations, lasting many years, in 1758 a treaty was signed]
+
+changed to:
+
+[After negotiations, lasting many years, in 1750 a treaty was signed]
+
+15 January 1750, to be exact.
+
+Chapter X:
+
+(pp. 263-264) (footnote)
+
+[Ibañez rarely spoke he truth, not even when it would]
+
+changed to:
+
+[Ibañez rarely spoke the truth, not even when it would]
+
+(p. 268) (footnote)
+
+[The war commenced in 1868 and finished in 1870,]
+
+changed to:
+
+[The war commenced in 1865 and finished in 1870,]
+
+(the dates generally given for this war, though the opening stages
+arguably occurred late in 1864.)
+
+(p. 275)
+
+[signed by the celebrated Nicolas Ñeengiurú and other Indians,]
+
+changed to:
+
+[signed by the celebrated Nicolas Ñeenguirú and other Indians,]
+
+   and:
+
+[the family of the Ñeengiurú had been well known]
+
+ changed to:
+
+[the family of the Ñeenguirú had been well known]
+
+(as it appears elsewhere in the text)
+
+(p. 276)
+
+[the flattering of Nicolas Ñeengiuru]
+
+ changed to:
+
+[the flattering of Nicolas Ñeenguiru]
+
+This wrong spelling is given throughout Chapter X, but Chapter X only.
+Elsewhere, the accents are occasionally missing from a name that seems
+to be the same.
+
+The original Index has been omitted as unnecessary in a searchable
+text.
+
+This etext was transcribed from the edition published in London in
+1901.
+
+The excellent film, “The Mission” (1986), was based on events
+apparently related to the ‘Jesuit War’ referred to in Chapter IX.
+
+HTML 4.0, the current standard at the time this file was created, does
+not recognize the breve accent for the letter i, but following the
+standard for (a breve), I have gone ahead and coded i breve, as there
+are only two instances, and it may yet become a standard.
+
+
+
+
+Footnotes:
+
+[1] The doctrine of the ‘Ciencia Media’ occurs in the celebrated
+‘Concordia gratiæ et liberi arbitrii’, by Luis de Molina (1588). The
+concilium de Auxiliis was held to determine whether or not _concordia_
+was possible between freewill and grace. As the Jesuits stuck by Molina
+and his doctrines in despite of councils and of popes, the common
+saying arose in Spain: ‘Pasteles en la pasteleria y ciencia media en la
+Compañia.’
+
+[2] Dean Funes, ‘Ensayo de la Historia Civil del Paraguay’, etc.,
+Buenos Aires, 1816.
+
+[3] _Idem._ The letter is dated 1771 and the Jesuits were expelled in
+1767. As the writer of the letter was on the spot in an official
+position, and nominated by the very Viceroy who had been the expeller
+of the Jesuits, his testimony would seem to be as valuable as that of
+the ablest theorist on government, Catholic or Protestant, who ever
+wrote.
+
+[4] This, of course, applies to the possessions of all European States
+in America equally with Spain.
+
+[5] Madrid, 1770.
+
+[6] Though in this respect Charlevoix is not so credulous as Padre Ruiz
+de Montoya and the older writers, he yet repeats the story of the bird
+that cleans the alligator’s teeth, the magic virtues of the tapir’s
+nails, and many others. See Charlevoix, vol. i., bk. i., p. 27, Paris,
+1756.
+
+[The story of the bird that cleans the teeth of alligators is very
+nearly true—_Pluvianus aegyptius_ has a symbiotic relationship with
+crocodiles in parts of Africa, and similar relationships exist
+throughout the natural world.—A. L., 1998.]
+
+[7] Dobrizhoffer’s book was written in Latin, and printed in Vienna in
+1784 under the title of ‘Historia de Abiponibus’, etc. A German
+translation by Professor Keil was published at Pesth in the same year.
+The English translation is of the year 1822.
+
+[8] It is to be remembered that the Spanish colonists were as a rule
+antagonistic to the Jesuits, and that, therefore, Spanish writers do
+not of necessity hold a brief for the Jesuits in Paraguay. Moreover,
+the names of Esmid (Smith), Fildo (Fields), Dobrizhoffer, Cataldini and
+Tomas Bruno (Brown, who is mentioned as being _natural de Yorca_),
+Filge, Limp, Pifereti, Enis, and Asperger, the quaint medical writer on
+the virtues of plants found in the mission territory, show how many
+foreign Jesuits were actually to be found in the reductions of
+Paraguay. For more information on this matter see the ‘Coleccion de
+Documentos relativos á la Expulsion de los Jesuitas de la Republica
+Argentina y Paraguay’, published and collected by Francisco Javier
+Brabo, Madrid, 1872.
+
+[9] The Inca Garcilaso de la Vega, in his ‘Commentarios Reales’ (en
+Madrid 1723, en la oficina Real y á costa de Nicholas Rodriguez Franco,
+Impressor de libros, se hallaran en su casa en la calle de el Poço y en
+Palacio), derives the word from the Quichua _Chacú_ = a surrounding. If
+he is right, it would then be equivalent to the Gaelic ‘tinchel’.
+Taylor, the Water-poet, has left a curious description of one of these
+tinchels. It was at a tinchel that the rising under the Earl of Mar in
+the ’15 was concocted.
+
+[10] See the curious map contained in the now rare work of P. Pedro
+Lozano, entitled, ‘Descripcion Chorographica . . . del Gran Chaco,
+Gualamba’, etc. Also in the interesting collection of old maps
+published in 1872 at Madrid by Francisco Javier Brabo.
+
+[11] It is, of course, to be taken into consideration that my two
+journeys in Paraguay were made after the great war which terminated in
+1870, after lasting four years; but the writings of Demersay (‘Histoire
+du Paraguay et des Établissements des Jésuites’, Paris, 1862), those of
+Brabo, and of Azara, show the deserted state of the district of
+Misiones in the period from 1767, the date of the expulsion of the
+Jesuits, to the middle of the nineteenth century.
+
+[12] _Cocos Australis_.
+
+[13] See the reports of the Marques de Valdelirios and others in the
+publications of Francisco Javier Brabo, Madrid, 1872, and in the
+‘Ensayo de la Historia Civil de Paraguay, Buenos-Ayres y Tucuman’, por
+Dr. Don Gregorio Funes, Buenos Ayres, 1816.
+
+[14] Bernal Diaz, ‘Historia de la Conquista de la Nueva España’, vol.
+iv., cap. 207, Madrid, 1796.
+
+[15] Especially noting down the appearance and qualities of ‘el caballo
+Motilla’, the horse of Gonzalo de Sandoval. Thus does he minutely
+describe Motilla, ‘the best horse in Castille or the Indies’. ‘El mejor
+caballo, y de mejor carrera, revuelto á una mano y à otra que decian
+que no se habia visto mejor en Castilla, ni en esa tierra era castaño
+acastañado, y una estrella en la frente, y un pie izquierdo calzado,
+que se decia el caballo Motilla; é quando hay ahora diferencia sobre
+buenos caballos, suclen decir es en bondad tan bueno como Motilla.’
+
+[16] ‘La Argentina’, included in the ‘Coleccion de Angelis’, Buenos
+Ayres, 1836.
+
+[17] ‘Historia y Descubrimiento de el Rio de la Plata y Paraguay’,
+Hulderico Schmidel, contained in the collection made by Andres Gonzalez
+Barcia, and published in 1769 at Madrid under the title of
+‘Historiadores Primitivos de las Indias Occidentales’.
+
+[18] The great Las Casas, who made seven voyages from America to
+Spain—the last at the age of seventy-two—to protect the Indians, had a
+strong opinion about ‘conquerors’ and ‘conquests’. In the dedication of
+his great treatise on the wrongs of the Indians, he says: ‘Que no
+permita (Felipe II.) las atrocidades que los tiranos inventaron, y que
+prosiguen haciendo con titulo de “conquistas”. Los que se jactan de ser
+“conquistadores” a que descienden de ellos son muchomas orgullosos
+arrogantes y vanos que los otros Españoles.’ Strange that even to-day
+the same _atrocidades_ of _tiranos_ are going on in Africa. No doubt
+the descendants of these ‘conquerors’ will be as arrogant, proud, and
+vain as the descendants of the _conquistadores_ of whom Las Casas
+writes.
+
+[19] Mendoza left (‘Azara Apuntamientos para la Historia Natural de los
+Quadrupedes del Paraguay’, etc.) five mares and seven horses in the
+year 1535. In 1580 Don Juan de Garay, at the second founding of the
+city, already found troops of wild horses. The cattle increased to a
+marvellous extent, and by the end of the century were wild in
+Patagonia. Sarmiento (‘Civilisation et Barbarisme’) says that early in
+this century they were often killed by travellers, who tethered their
+horses to the carcasses to prevent them from straying at night.
+
+[20] Hulderico Schmidel, ‘Historia del Descubrimiento de el Rio de la
+Plata y Paraguay’.
+
+[21] Perhaps the two most important works upon the language are the
+‘Tesoro de la Lengua Guarani’, by Ruiz de Montoya, Madrid, 1639 (it is
+dedicated to the ‘Soberana Virgen’); and the ‘Catecismo de la Lengua
+Guarani’, by Diego Diaz de la Guerra, Madrid, Año de 1630. He also
+wrote a ‘Bocabulario y Arte de la Lengua Guarani’.
+
+[22] P. Guevara, in his ‘Historia del Paraguay’, relates a curious
+story which he said was current amongst the Indians. Two brothers, Tupi
+and Guaraní, lived with their families upon the sea-coast of Brazil. In
+those days the world was quite unpopulated but by themselves. They
+quarrelled about a parrot, and Tupi with his family went north, and
+populated all Brazil; whilst Guaraní went west, and was the ancestor of
+all the Indians of the race of Guaranís.
+
+[23] Azara, in his ‘Descripcion y Historia del Paraguay’, has a similar
+passage: ‘Recibe bien todo Indio silvestre, al estrangero que viene de
+paz.’
+
+[24] ‘Por lo comun reparten pedazos de este cuerpo, del qual pedazo
+cozido en mucha agua hacen unas gachas (_fritters_) y es fiesta muy
+celebre para ellos que hacen con muchas cerimonias.’
+
+[25] ‘Histoire du Paraguay et des Établissements des Jésuites’, L.
+Alfred Demersay, Paris, 1864.
+
+[26] ‘La Argentina’, a long poem or rhyming chronicle contained in the
+collection of ‘Historiadores Primitivos de Indias’, of Gonzales Barcia,
+Madrid, 1749.
+
+[27] Lozano, in his ‘Historia del Paraguay’, compares it to Greek, but
+in my opinion fails to establish his case; but, then, so few people
+know both Greek and Guaraní.
+
+[28] He passed through the whole Chaco, descending the Pilcomayo to its
+junction with the Paraguay, through territories but little explored
+even to-day. Perhaps the most complete description of the Chaco is that
+of P. Lozano, with the following comprehensive title:
+
+‘Descripcion chorographica de Terreno Rios, Arboles, y Animales de los
+dilatadisimas Provincias del Gran Chaco, Gualamba, y de los Ritos y
+Costumbres de la inumerables naciones barbaros é infideles que le
+habitan. Con un cabal Relacion Historica de lo que en ellos han obrado
+para conquistarlas algunos Gobernadores y Ministros Reales, y los
+Misioneros Jesuitas para reduc irlos à la fe del Verdadero Dios.’ Por
+el Padre Pedro Lozano, de la Compañia de Jesus, Año de 1733. En Cordoba
+por Joseph Santos Balbas.
+
+This book did not appear in a clandestine manner, for it had: 1.
+Censura, por C. de Palmas. 2. Licencia de la Religion, por Geronymo de
+Huróza, Provincial de los Jesuitas de Andalucia. 3. Licencia del
+Ordinario por el Dr. Don Francisco Miguel Moreno, por mandado del Sr.
+Provisor Alonso Joseph Gomez de Lara. 4. Aprobacion del Rdo. P. Diego
+Vasquez. 5. Privelegio de su Majestad por Don Miguel Fernandez Morillo.
+6. Fé de Corrector por el Licenciado, Don Manuel Garcia Alesson,
+Corrector General de su Majestad (who adds in a note, ‘este libro
+corresponde à su original’). 7. Sumo de Tassa, as follows: ‘Tassaron
+los señores del Consejo este libro à seis maravedis cada pliego.’
+
+Palma, in the first _censura_, says that he had read it several times
+‘con repetida complacencia’, and that, though it was ‘breve en volumen’
+(it has 484 quarto pages), that it was also short in its concise style,
+kept closely to the rules of history, and was ‘muy copiosa en la
+doctrina’.
+
+[29] This race at one time spread from the Orinoco to the river Plate,
+and even in the case of its offshoot, the Chiriguanás, crossed to the
+west bank of the Paraguay. Padre Ruiz Montoya, in his ‘Conquista
+Espiritual del Paraguay’, cap. i., speaking of the Guaraní race, says:
+‘Domina ambos mares el del sur por todo el Brasil y ciñiendo el Peru
+con los dos mas grandes rios que conoce el orbe que son el de la Plata,
+cuya boca en Buenos-Ayres es de ochenta leguas, y el gran Marañon, à el
+inferior en nada e que pasa bien vecino de la ciudad de Cuzco.’
+
+[30] Barco de la Centenera, in ‘La Argentina’, canto v., also refers to
+‘La Casa del Gran Moxo’. It was situated ‘en una laguna’, and was ‘toda
+de piedra labrada’.
+
+[31] Their numerals are four in number (_peteî, mocoî, mbohap, irând_);
+after this they are said to count in Spanish in the same way as do the
+Guaraní-speaking Paraguayans. Much has been written on the Guaraní
+tongue by many authors, but perhaps the ‘Gramatica’, ‘Tesoro’, and the
+‘Vocabulario’ of Padre Antonio Ruiz Montoya, published at Madrid in
+1639 and 1640, remain the most important works on the language. Padre
+Sigismundi has left a curious work in Guaraní on the medicinal plants
+of Paraguay. Before the war of 1866-70 several MS. copies were said to
+exist in that country. See Du Gratz’s ‘République du Paraguay’, cap.
+iv., p. 214.
+
+[32] See Demersay, ‘Histoire du Paraguay’, p. 324, for names of Guaraní
+tribes. Alfred Maury also, in his ‘La Terre et l’Homme Américain’, p.
+392, speaks of ‘le rameau brasilio-guaranin, ou Caráibe, qui s’etendait
+jadis depuis les Petites-Antilles jusqu’au Paraguay.’
+
+[33] Few modern ‘conquerors’ in Africa seem to have engaged in personal
+combat with the natives. Even of Mr. Rhodes it is not set down that he
+has killed many Matabele with his own hands. Times change, not always
+for the bettering of things.
+
+[34] Santiago, as in duty bound, usually appeared whenever Spaniards
+were hard pressed. Few writers had the courage of Bernal Diaz, who of a
+similar appearance said: ‘But I, sinner that I was, was not worthy to
+see him; whom I did see and recognise was Francisco de Morla on his
+chestnut horse’ (Bernal Diaz, ‘Historia de la Conquista de Nueva
+España’, cap. xxxiv., p. 141; Madrid, 1795).
+
+[35] Thus it will be seen that the Franciscans were at work in the
+country long before the arrival of the Jesuits. It may be on this
+account that they became such bitter enemies of the later comers.
+
+[36] ‘Comentarios de Alvar Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca’. Published by Don
+Andres Gonzalez Barcia in his collection of ‘Early Historians of the
+Indies’ (Madrid, 1749).
+
+[37] It must be allowed, however, that in their writings few of the
+Spanish _conquistadores_ of America bragged much. They mostly gave the
+credit of all their doings to the God of Battles. The boasting has been
+reserved for the conquerors of Africa in our own time.
+
+[38] _Asiento_ is a contract. The contract which Charles V., at the
+well-meant but unfortunate instigation of Las Casas, made with the
+Genoese to supply negroes for America is known as ‘El Asiento de los
+Negros’.
+
+[39] In the _capitulacion_ made by Alvar Nuñez with the King occurs the
+celebrated clause, ‘Que no pasasen procuradores ni abogados a las
+Indias’, _i.e._, that neither solicitors nor barristers should go to
+the Indies. It is unfortunate it was not held to stringently, as in
+Paraguay, at least, the Reptilia were already well represented.
+
+[40] This is perhaps the first account of the levying of the tithe in
+the New World.
+
+[41] These backwaters are known in Guaraní by the name of _aguapey_.
+
+[42] The vinchuca is a kind of flying bug common in Paraguay. Its shape
+is triangular, its colour gray, and its odour noxious. It is one of the
+Hemiptera, and its so-called scientific appellation is _onorhinus
+gigas_.
+
+[43] R. B. Cunninghame Graham writes elsewhere: “All over South America
+the jaguar is called a tiger (tigre).”—A. L., 1998.
+
+[44] Azara, in his ‘Historia del Paraguay’, etc., tells us that in 1551
+Domingo de Irala at Asuncion bought a fine black horse for five
+thousand gold crowns. He bound himself to pay for him out of the
+proceeds of his first conquest.
+
+[45] ‘Comentarios de Alvar Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca’, contained in Barcia’s
+‘Historiadores Primitivos de las Indias Occidentales’.
+
+[46] The ‘patriots’ are always those of the prevailing party in a
+State.
+
+[47]
+
+‘(I.H.S.)
+
+‘God preserve your Excellency, say we, the Cabildo, and all the
+Caciques and Indians, men, women and children of San Luis, as your
+Excellency is our father. The Corregidor, Santiago Pindo and Don
+Pantaleon Caynari, in their love for us, have written to us of certain
+birds which they desire we will send them for the King. . . . We are
+sorry not to have them to send, inasmuch as they live where God made
+them, in the forests, and fly far away from us, so that we cannot catch
+them. Withal we are the vassals of God and of the King, and always
+desirous to fulfil the wishes of his Minister . . . so we pray to God
+that that best of birds, the Holy Ghost, may descend upon the King. . .
+. Furthermore, we desire to say that the Spanish custom is not to our
+liking—for everyone to take care of himself, instead of helping one
+another in their daily toil.’
+
+This quaint and touching letter was written originally in Guaraní, and
+is preserved at Buenos Ayres. ‘That best of birds, the Holy Ghost,’
+shows faith grounded, at least, on ornithology, and the whole spirit of
+the simple document is as pathetic as its unconscious philosophy is
+true.
+
+[48] Guevara, ‘Historia del Paraguay’ (printed in ‘La Coleccion de
+Angelis’, Buenos Aires, 1836), book vi., p. 108, says of Alvar Nuñez:
+‘Merecia estatua por su rectitud, justicia y Christiandad.’ And in
+another place Guevara says: ‘La Florida lo cautivó con inhumanidad; La
+Asuncion lo aprisionó con infamia; pero en una y otro parte fue
+ejemplar de moderacion . . . recto, prudente y de sano corazon.’ Alvar
+Nuñez died holding the office of ‘Oidor de la Audiencia de Sevilla’,
+according to P. del Techo (‘Historia del Paraguay’); or as a member of
+the Consejo de Indias, according to Charlevoix.
+
+[49] Acquaviva was General of the Order at this time; he was a man of
+marked ability and great energy.
+
+[50] Before this date the Jesuits in Paraguay had been under the
+ecclesiastical jurisdiction of the Bishops of Peru.
+
+[51] Paranapané = the White Paraná, or, according to others, the Paraná
+without fish.
+
+[52] Reduction (_reduccion_) was the Spanish name for a missionary
+establishment.
+
+[53] Some of the Spanish writers refer to Filds as Padre Tom Filds. His
+real name was Fields, and he was a Scotchman.
+
+[54] The Paulistas were the inhabitants of the Portuguese (now
+Brazilian) town of São Paulo. Azara, who hated the Jesuits (his
+brother, Don Nicolas de Azara, having been concerned in their
+expulsion), says that fear of the Paulistas contributed to the success
+of the Jesuits with the Indians. Dean Funes (‘Historia del Paraguay’,
+etc.) says just as reasonably that it was fear of the Spanish settlers.
+
+[55] There was, however, a royal Order (_cedula real_) which applied to
+all America, which especially prohibited Spaniards from living in the
+Indian towns, and, moreover, provided that even for purposes of trade
+no Spaniard should remain for more than three days in an Indian town.
+
+[56] ‘Histoire Politique et Philosophique des Indes’, vol. i., p. 289
+(Genève, 1780).
+
+[57] Cretineau Joly, ‘Histoire Religieuse, Politique et Littéraire de
+la Compagnie de Jésus’, vol. iii., cap. v., p. 322 (Paris, 1846).
+
+[58] ‘Historia General de los hechos de los Castellanos en las Islas y
+tierra firme del Mar Oceano’, decad. v., lib. iv., cap. xl.
+
+[59] ‘Historia General de los hechos de los Castellanos en las Islas y
+tierra firme del Mar Oceano’, decad. v., lib. x., cap. lxxx.
+
+[60] ‘Inventarios de los bienes hallados á la Expulsion de los
+Jesuitas’ (Madrid, 1872).
+
+[61] The Franciscans had already five or six settlements.
+
+[62] The word in Brazil is used to designate a half-breed, but the
+etymology seems unknown.
+
+[63] ‘Me he de salvar a pesar de Dios, porque para salvarse el hombre
+no ha menester mas que creer’ (Ruiz Montoya, ‘Conquista Espiritual’).
+Montoya adds with a touch of humour quite in Cervantes’ vein: ‘Este,
+sabe ya por experiencia la falsedad de su doctrina, porque le mataron
+de tres balazos, sin confesion.’
+
+[64] The Mamelucos sometimes pushed their forays right through Paraguay
+into the district of the Moxos, and Padre Patricio Fernandez, in his
+curious ‘Relacion de los Indios Chiquitos’ (Madrid, 1726), relates
+their adventures in that far-distant district, and the conflicts which
+the Indians, led by their priests and helped by the Spanish settlers,
+sustained.
+
+[65] Lahier (Francisci) S. I., ‘Annæ Paraguarie, Annor. 1635, et duor.
+sequ.’
+
+[66] ‘Relazioni della Provincia del Paraguai’.
+
+[67] Brabo.
+
+[68] An _estero_ is a tract of country covered by water to the depth of
+two or three feet. The bottom is usually hard, but it is full of holes
+and hummocks. High pampa grass and reeds not infrequently obscure the
+view, and clouds of insects make life miserable. If the tract extends
+to more than a day’s journey, the night passed on a dry hummock,
+holding one’s horse and listening without a fire to the wild beasts, is
+likely to remain present to one in after-life, especially if alone; the
+only things that seem to link one to humanity are one’s horse and the
+familiar stars. Perhaps that is why Capella has always seemed to me in
+some sort my own property.
+
+[69] This curious berry, about the size of a large damson, grows on a
+little shrub in sandy and rocky soils. It has a thick yellow rind and
+several large seeds, and the property of being icy cold in the hottest
+weather—a true traveller’s joy. Dr. de Bourgade de la Dardye, in his
+excellent book on Paraguay (the English edition published in London in
+1892), thinks it is either a eugenia or a myrtus.
+
+[70] Charlevoix, vol. i., liv. vii., p. 384.
+
+[71] _Ibid._, liv. vii., p. 359.
+
+[72] Charlevoix, ‘Histoire du Paraguay’, vol. lvi., p. 285.
+
+[73] ‘Conquista Espiritual del Paraguay’, Ruiz de Montoya, introductory
+chapter.
+
+[74] This may either mean to the service of God or to the service of
+the King (Philip III.), for in the time of Montoya ‘Majesty’ was used
+in addressing both the King of Spain and the King of Heaven.
+
+[75] Yapeyu, or Reyes, was the southernmost of the Jesuit reductions.
+It was situated upon the Uruguay in what is now the Argentine province
+of Entre Rios.
+
+[76] ‘Conquista Espiritual’, p. 22.
+
+[77] This time, it is to be hoped, without omissions.
+
+[78] ‘Dando gracias por agravios negocian los hombres sabios.’
+
+[79] Soon afterwards ruined by the Paulistas.
+
+[80] _Cacique_ = chief.
+
+[81] These raids were known as _malocas_.
+
+[82] In Paraguay it was not unusual for foreign Jesuits to hispaniolize
+their names; thus, Smith became Esmid. But it was more usual to add a
+Spanish name, as appears to have been the case with P. Vansurk
+Mansilla. Father Manuel Querini, in his report to the King of Spain in
+1750, mentions the names of Boxer, Keiner, and Limp, with many other
+French, English, and German names, amongst those of priests at the
+various missions.
+
+[83] Montoya, ‘Conquista Espiritual’. Also Charlevoix.
+
+[84] It is certain that the Guaranís, like many other Indians, were
+polygamists, and Xarque, in his ‘Vida Apostolica del P. Joseph
+Cataldino’, thus explains the matter: ‘El tener tanto numero de
+concubinas, no solamente lo ocasiona su natural lascivo, sino tambien,
+el vicio de la embriaguez, pues teniendo tantas criadas tenian con mas
+abundancia su cerveza y vino.’ Thus Xarque seems to agree with the late
+Miss Mary Kingsley, who in one of her books (though she says nothing
+about the ‘natural lascivo’ of the negroes of the West Coast of Africa)
+seems to attribute the polygamy of the negroes to the difficulty a man
+experiences, in the countries in which she travelled, in getting his
+food prepared by one wife.
+
+[85] Charcas is situated in what is now Bolivia, and was extremely
+inconvenient for all dwellers on the eastern side of the Andes to
+reach. Whether this was a masterpiece of policy calculated to
+discourage lawsuits, or whether it was merely due to Spanish
+incuriousness and maladministration, is a moot point.
+
+[86] The Indians of the missions were not allowed to possess firearms
+at this period.
+
+[87] ‘Paraguay’, Dr. E. de Bourgade la Dardye; English edition by
+George Philips junior (London, 1892). The Indians call it Salto de
+Canandiyú, which, according to Azara, was the name of a _cacique_ whom
+the first Spaniards met there.
+
+[88] ‘Descripcion y Historia del Paraguay’, Madrid, 1847.
+
+[89] ‘Y es un espantoso despeñadero de agua’, etc. (‘Descripcion del
+Paraguay’, tomo i., p. 39).
+
+[90] ‘No dan cuartel’.
+
+[91] At least, I have been unable to discover any other account by an
+eye-witness.
+
+[92] This city was situated near the great falls of Guayrá, and was
+destroyed by the Paulistas, as well as the city of Villa Rica, after
+the Jesuits and their Indians left the province.
+
+[93] ‘Conquista Espiritual’, p. 48.
+
+[94] ‘Rigoroso examen’ (‘Conquista Espiritual’).
+
+[95] In all the books and pamphlets I have searched about the Jesuits
+in Paraguay, both friendly and unfriendly to the Order, I have never
+found a charge of personal unchastity advanced against a Jesuit. In
+regard to the other religious Orders it is far otherwise.
+
+[96] Azara, ‘Descripcion e Historia del Paraguay’, tomo i., p. 40: ‘En
+las inmediaciones del Salto hay proporcion para tomar las medidas
+geometricas que se quiera y metiendose por el bosque se puede reconocer
+lo inferior del Salto, bien que para este es menester desnudare
+totalmente porque llueve mucho.’
+
+[97] Azara records (book i.) the Indian fable that no living thing
+could exist near the cataract. Though this is of course untrue, yet in
+most Paraguayan forests near water, game is both scarce and hard to
+find.
+
+[98] ‘Con buenas prendas de su salud eterna’ (‘Conquista Espiritual’).
+
+[99] Fathers Suarez, Contreras, and Espinosa were Montoya’s lieutenants
+in this memorable retreat. It is difficult to give the palm to the
+energy and courage of the four priests, or to the resignation and faith
+of the immense multitude of Indians who were saved by them.
+
+[100] _Culebra_ is the Spanish for a serpent. These fish may have been
+waterboas, or, again, as seems probable by their digestive powers, some
+kind of hypothetical fish not yet catalogued.
+
+[101] The name of this river seems to have passed through the machine
+of some medieval typewriter, for it is like no name in any language,
+and Montoya knew Guaraní well, having written much in that language.
+
+[102] Even so late as the year 1777, in which the last treaty of
+boundaries was signed at San Ildefonso, Portugal was the gainer, though
+not so greatly as by the former treaties of 1681 and 1750.
+
+[103] ‘Efemerides o Diario de la Guerra de los Guaranies’, por P. Tadeo
+Hennis. This journal has, I think, never been published in its
+entirety, but portions of it are to be found in the collection of
+documents, Bulls, despatches, etc., published at Madrid in 1768 under
+the title of ‘Causa Jesuitica de Portugal’. The author of this book
+calls Hennis a German, but his name, Thadeus Ennis (as it is often
+spelt), and his love of fighting look un-Germanic. Portions of the
+diary are also to be found in the work of Bernardo Ibañez de
+Echegarray, entitled ‘Histoire du Paraguay sous les Jésuites’
+(Amsterdam, 1780). Either the original or an old manuscript copy exists
+in the archives of Simancas, where I have seen, but unfortunately did
+not examine, it. A portion of the work is also included in the
+‘Coleccion de Angelis’ (Buenos Ayres, 1836).
+
+[104] ‘Histoire d’un Voyage faict en la Terre du Brésil’.
+
+[105] The way of the neophyte even to-day is hard, so many priests of
+different jarring sects disputing for his soul as hotly as if it were a
+preference stock which they had private intimation was just about to
+rise.
+
+[106] This province was sometimes called Guayrá, and sometimes La
+Provincia de Vera, Vera being the family name of Alvar Nuñez Cabeza de
+Vaca. Its position, etc., may be determined by reference to the curious
+volume of maps published at Madrid by Don Francisco Javier Brabo in
+1872.
+
+[107] That a mission could be so undefended as to need trenches, that a
+Jesuit should ask leave to make such elementary defences, even in the
+face of imminent danger, seems to prove that the Jesuits at least in
+1636 had no intention of defying the sovereign power, as was so often
+alleged against them.
+
+[108] San Joaquin, Santa Teresa, Santa Ana.
+
+[109] ‘Histoire du Paraguay’, liv. ix., p. 446.
+
+[110] This territory is now the Argentine province of Misiones.
+
+[111] This seems to prove the malice of those who set about that the
+Indians of the missions paid no taxes to the Crown.
+
+[112] Vieyra, the great Portuguese Jesuit, said that all miracles were
+possible to God, but yet that he had never heard that our Lord had ever
+cured anyone of folly.
+
+[113] Now a province of the Argentine Republic.
+
+[114] ‘Historia Paraquariæ’, book xii., cap. xii.
+
+[115] La Plata was sometimes called Chuquisaca, and is to-day known as
+Sucre.
+
+[116] ‘Histoire du Paraguay’, vol. i., book ix., p. 478.
+
+[117] Charlevoix, vol. i., book xi. Dean Funes, in his ‘Ensayo de la
+Historia Civil de Paraguay, Buenos Ayres y Tucuman’, vol. ii., book
+iii., p. 10 (Buenos Ayres, 1816), says of him: ‘Se adquirió muy en
+breve una reputacion mas brillante que solida.’
+
+[118] But besides putting into execution all his histrionic talents, he
+had the adroitness to address himself to those feelings of
+self-interest which he knew were perhaps more powerful than those of
+admiration and respect for his own saintly proceedings in his new
+diocese. Crétineau Joly, in his ‘Histoire de la Compagnie de Jésus’,
+vol. iii., p. 333 (Paris, 1845), tells us that Cardenas ‘parle aux
+Espagnols, il s’addresse à leurs interêts, il réveille les vieux levain
+de discorde . . . et il accuse les missionnaires d’être seuls les
+apôtres de la liberté des Indiens.’
+
+[119] ‘Oraculo Manual y Arte de Prudencia’ (Amsterdam, en casa de Juan
+Blau, 1659).
+
+[120] Charlevoix.
+
+[121] Exod. 32:27.
+
+[122] The arroba is about twenty-five pounds weight.
+
+[123] Charlevoix.
+
+[124] Camalote is a species of water-lily which forms a thick covering
+on stagnant rivers and lakes in Paraguay and in the Argentine Republic.
+
+[125] This was untrue, as the Jesuit missions were not at that time
+(1644) apportioned into parishes under the authority of the Jesuits,
+and such tribute as then was customary was all collected by government
+officials.
+
+[126] This was also untrue, as the tithes were never regulated in
+Paraguay till 1649.
+
+[127] This accusation was quite untrue, for the edict referred to was
+not obtained under misapprehension, but after a complete exposition of
+all the facts. Moreover, it was subsequently renewed on several
+occasions by the Spanish Kings.
+
+[128] The Venetians did not expel the Jesuits, they left Venetia of
+their own accord.
+
+[129] Fathers Montoya and Taño went respectively to Rome and to Madrid
+to lay the sorrows of the Indians before the King and Pope. Having
+obtained the edict from the King that Cardenas referred to, and a brief
+from the Pope (Urban VIII.) forbidding slavery, they had the hardihood
+to appear within the city of San Paulo and affix both edicts to the
+church door. As was to be expected, the Paulistas immediately expelled
+them from their territories, and hence the semi-truth of the sixth
+charge made by Bishop Cardenas.
+
+[130] Funes, ‘Historia Civil del Paraguay, Buenos-Ayres, y Tucuman’.
+
+[131] The testimony of Funes is as follows: ‘Á juicio de testigo ocular
+no es más admirable la sangre fria de sus capellanes’ (‘Historia Civil
+del Paraguay’, book iii., cap. viii.).
+
+[132] Literally, ‘taking out the blocks to air’. The effigies are made
+of hard and heavy wood, and I remember once in Concepcion de Paraguay
+assisting on a sweltering day to carry a Madonna weighing about five
+hundredweight.
+
+[133] The proverb says in Paraguay, ‘No se fia de mula ni mulata’.
+
+[134] ‘Pagar y apelar’.
+
+[135] Misque is at least fifteen hundred miles from Tucuman.
+
+[136] ‘Que lo hagan salir de nuestros Reynos y Señorios como ageno y
+estraño, por importar assi para la quietud de aquellas Provincias, y al
+servicio de su Majestad.’
+
+[137] A _yerbal_ is a forest chiefly composed of the _Ilex
+Paraguayensis_, from the leaves of which the _yerba maté_, or
+‘Paraguayan tea’, is made.
+
+[138] Xarque, book ii., cap. xl., p. 30.
+
+[139] This Villalon has left some curious memoirs in the case which he
+submitted to the Council of the Indies which sat in Seville.
+
+[140] Charlevoix, book xii., p. 115.
+
+[141] Chipa is a kind of bread made of mandioca flour.
+
+[142] Rapadura is a kind of coarse sugar, generally sold in little
+pyramid-shaped lumps, done up in a banana leaf. It is strongly
+flavoured with lye.
+
+[143] Mani is ground-nut. [“Peanut” in American English.—A. L., 1998.]
+
+[144] The paraiso is one of the Paulinias.
+
+[145] ‘Obedesco, pero no cumplo.’
+
+[146] ‘Cosas de palacio van despacio.’
+
+[147] Dean Funes, in his ‘Ensayo de la Historia Civil del Paraguay,
+Buenos Ayres y Tucuman’ (book ii., cap. i., p. 10), says he was ‘Dotado
+de un temperamento muy facil de inflamarse, de una imaginacion viva, de
+una memoria feliz, y de un ingenio no vulgar.’
+
+[148] At the date of the expulsion the number of the cattle was
+719,761; oxen, 44,183; horses, 27,204; sheep, 138,827 (‘Inventarios de
+los bienes hallados á la expulsion de los Jesuitas’, Francisco Javier
+Brabo, Madrid, 1872).
+
+[149] _Cocos yatais_.
+
+[150] Urunday (_Astrenium fraxinifolium: Terebinthaceæ_), curapay
+(_Piptadenia communis: Leguminaceæ_), lapacho (_Tecoma curialis_ and
+_varia: Begoniaceæ_), taruma (_Vitex Taruma: Verbenaceæ_), tatane
+(_Acacia maleolens: Leguminaceæ_), and cupai (_Copaifera Langsdorfii_).
+These and many other woods, such as the Palo Santo (_Guaiacum
+officinalis_), butacæ, and the _Cedrela Braziliensis_, known to the
+Jesuits as ‘cedar’, and much used by them in their churches, comprise
+the chief varieties.
+
+[151] ‘Libro compuesto por el Hermano Pedro de Montenegro de la C. de
+J., Ano 1711’, MS. folio, with pen-and-ink sketches, formerly belonged
+to the Dukes of Osuna, and was in their library. Padre Sigismundi also
+wrote a herbal in Guaraní, and a Portuguese Jesuit, Vasconellos, has
+left a curious book upon the flora of Brazil.
+
+[152] Domingo Parodi, in his ‘Notas sobre algunas plantas usuales del
+Paraguay’ (Buenos Ayres, 1886), has done much good work.
+
+[153] _Acacia Cavenia_.
+
+[154] _Prosopis dulcis_. The famous ‘balm of the missions’, known by
+the vulgar name of _curalo todo_ (all-heal), was made from the gum of
+the tree called aguacciba, one of the Terebinthaceæ. It was sold by the
+Jesuits in Europe. It was so highly esteemed that the inhabitants of
+the villages near to which the tree was found were specially enjoined
+to send a certain quantity of the balsam every year to the King’s
+pharmacy in Madrid.
+
+[155] It was from those mountains that the Jesuits procured the seed of
+the _Ilex Paraguayensis_ to plant in their reductions. The leaves
+beaten into a finish powder furnished the ‘Paraguayan tea’, called
+_yerba-maté_ by the Spaniards and _caa_ by the Indians, from which the
+Jesuits derived a handsome revenue. After the expulsion of the Order
+all the _yerba_ in Paraguay was procured, till a few years ago, from
+forests in the north of Paraguay, in which the tree grew wild.
+
+[156] It was by the Bull of Paul III.—given at the demand of two monks,
+Fray Domingo de Betanzos and Fray Domingo de Minaya—that the Indians
+were first considered as reasoning men (_gente de razon_), and not as
+unreasonable beings (_gente sin razon_), as Juan Ortiz, Bishop of Santa
+Marta, wished.
+
+[157] Ibañez (‘Histoire du Paraguay sous les Jésuites M.D.CCIXXX.’), a
+great opponent of the Jesuits, says that European offenders and
+recalcitrant Indians in the missions were sent as a last resource to
+the Spanish settlements. This is not astonishing when we remember the
+curious letter of Don Pedro Faxardo, Bishop of Buenos Ayres (preserved
+by Charlevoix), written in 1721 to the King of Spain, in which he says
+he thinks ‘that not a mortal crime is committed in the missions in a
+year.’ He adds that, ‘if the Jesuits were so rich, why are their
+colleges so poor?’
+
+[158] It is to be remembered that, of the thirty Jesuit missions, only
+eight were in Paraguay; the rest were in what to-day is Brazil and the
+Argentine provinces of Entre Rios, Corrientes, and Misiones.
+
+[159] Sometimes, when they had been assembled, they all deserted
+suddenly, as did the Tobatines, who in 1740 suddenly left the reduction
+of Santa Fé, and for eleven years were lost in the forests, till Father
+Yegros found them, and, as they would not return, established himself
+amongst them (Cretineau Joly, ‘Histoire de la Compagnie de Jésus’, vol.
+v., cap. ii.).
+
+[160] P. Cardiel, ‘Declaracion de la Verdad’, p. 282: ‘Todos los
+pueblos estan bien formados con calles á cordel. Las casas de los
+Indios son en algunos pueblos de piedras cuadradas pero sin cal . . .
+otras de palos y barro todas cubiertas de teja, y todas tienen
+soportales ó corredores, unas con pilares de piedras, otras de madera.’
+
+[161] Don Francisco Graell, an officer of dragoons in service during
+the War of the Seven Towns in 1750, gives the following description of
+the church of the mission of San Miguel: ‘La iglesia es muy capaz, toda
+de piedra de silleria con tres naves y media naranja. Muy bien pintada
+y dorada con un portico magnifico y de bellisima arquitectura, bovedas
+y media naranja son de madera, el altar mayor de talla, sin dorar y le
+falta el ultimo cuerpo.’
+
+[162] ‘Galerias con columnas, barandillas y escaleras de piedra
+entallada’ (Don Francisco Graell). See also P. Cardiel (‘Declaracion de
+la Verdad’, p. 247), ‘En todos los pueblos hay reloj de sol y de
+ruedas,’ etc. The work of Padre Cardiel was written in 1750 in the
+missions of Paraguay, but remained unpublished till 1800, when it
+appeared in Buenos Ayres from the press of Juan A. Alsina, Calle de
+Mexico 1422. It is, perhaps, after the ‘Conquista Espiritual’ of Father
+Ruiz Montoya, the most powerful contemporary justification of the
+policy of the Jesuits in Paraguay. It is powerfully but simply written,
+and contains withal that saving grace of humour which has, from the
+beginning of the world, been a stumbling-block to fools.
+
+[163] The mission of San Miguel had 1,353 families in it, or say 6,635
+souls. San Francisco de Borja contained 650 families, or 2,793 souls
+(Report by Manuel Querini to the King, dated Cordoba de Tucuman, y
+Agosto 1o, 1750).
+
+[164] In their extensive missions in the provinces of Chiquitos and
+Moxos they pursued the same system. As they were much more isolated in
+those provinces than in Paraguay, and consequently much less interfered
+with, it was there that their peculiar system most flourished. After
+the expulsion of the Jesuits from America in 1767, the Spaniards in
+Alta Peru, and subsequently the Bolivians, had the sense to follow the
+Jesuit plan in its entirety; whereas Bucareli, the Viceroy of Buenos
+Ayres, entirely changed the Jesuits’ rule in Paraguay. The consequence
+was that in Bolivia the Indians, instead of dispersing as they did in
+Paraguay, remained in the missions, and D’Orbigny (‘Fragment d’un
+Voyage au Centre de l’Amérique Méridianale’) saw at the missions of
+Santiago and El Santo Corazon, in the province of Chiquitos, the
+remains of the Jesuits’ polity. There were ten missions in Chiquitos,
+and fifteen in Moxos. At the present time the Franciscans have some
+small establishments in Bolivia.
+
+[165] ‘Pillos muy ladinos’ (Robertson, ‘Letters from Paraguay’).
+
+[166] Ferrer del Rio, in his ‘Coleccion de los articulos de la
+Esperanza sobre Carlos III.’ (Madrid, 1859), says: ‘Fuera de las
+misiones de los Jesuitas particularmente en el Paraguay se consideraban
+los Indios entre los seres mas infelices del mundo.’
+
+Jorge Juan and Antonio de Ulloa, in their celebrated ‘Secret Report’
+(‘Noticias Secretas de America’): ‘La compañia (de Jesus) atiende a sus
+fines particularmente con los misioneros que llevan de España; pero con
+todo eso no se olvida de la conversion de los Indios, ni tiene
+abandonado este asunto pues aunque van poco adelante en el, que es lo
+que no se esperimenten en las demas religiones.’
+
+[167] Many travellers, as Azara, Demersay, Du Graty, and D’Orbigny,
+have remarked how fond of music was the Guaraní race, and how soon they
+learned the use of European instruments. D’Orbigny (‘Fragment d’un
+Voyage au Centre de l’Amérique Méridianale’), in his interesting
+account of the mission of El Santo Corazon, in the district of
+Chiquitos, says: ‘Je fus très étonné d’entendre exécuter après les
+danses indigènes des morceaux de Rossini et . . . de Weber . . . la
+grande messe chantée en musique était exécutée d’une manière très
+remarquable pour des Indiens.’
+
+Vargas Machuca, in his most curious and rare ‘Milicia y Descripcion de
+las Indias’, says, under the heading of ‘Musica del Indio’: ‘Usan sus
+musicas antiguas en sus regocijos, y son muy tristes en la tonada.’
+To-day the Indians of Paraguay have songs known as _tristes_. The
+brigadier Don Diego de Alvear, in his ‘Relacion de Misiones’ (Coleccion
+de Angelis), says that the first to teach the Guaranís European music
+was a Flemish Jesuit, P. Juan Basco, who had been _maestro de capilla_
+to the Archduke Albert.
+
+[168] See also P. Cardiel, ‘Declaracion de la Verdad’, p. 274: ‘. . . y
+esta acabada, se toca á Misa á que entran todos cantando el Bendito, y
+alabado en su lengua, ó en Castellano, que en las dos lenguas lo
+saben.’
+
+[169] Dean Funes, in his ‘Ensayo de la Historia del Paraguay’, etc.,
+says that in the _estancia_ of Santa Tecla, in the missions of
+Paraguay, during the time of the Jesuits, there were 50,000 head of
+cattle.
+
+[170] ‘Inventarios de los bienes hallados á la expulsion de los
+Jesuitas’, Introduction, xxvii, Francisco Javier Brabo.
+
+[171] The rare and much-sought-after ‘Manuale ad usum Patrum Societatis
+Jesu qui in Reductionibus Paraquariæ versantur, ex Rituale Romano ad
+Toletano decerptum’, was printed at the mission of Loreto. It contains
+prayers in Guaraní as well as in Latin. Here also was printed a curious
+book of Guaraní sermons by Nicolas Yapuguay, many Guaraní vocabularies,
+and the ‘Arte de la Lengua Guaraní’ of Ruiz Montoya.
+
+[172] P. Cardiel, ‘Declaracion de la Verdad’, p. 295: ‘De estos granos
+comunales se da para sembrar’, etc.
+
+[173] This jerked beef is called _charqui_ in South America.
+
+[174] The poorer classes in Paraguay all used to wear the _tipoi_. They
+covered themselves when it was cold with a white cotton sheet wrapped
+in many folds.
+
+[175] The Jesuits themselves were dressed in homespun clothes, for
+Matias Angles—quoted in the introduction to the ‘Declaracion de la
+Verdad’ of Father Cardiel, published at Buenos Ayres in 1900 (the
+introduction by P. Pablo Hernandez)—says: ‘El vestuario de los Padres
+es de lienzo de algodon teñido de negro, hilado y fabricado por las
+mismas Indias de los pueblos; y si tal qual Padre tiene un capote ó
+manteo de paña de Castilla se sucede de unos á otros, y dura un siglo
+entero.’
+
+[176] In the ‘Relacion de Misiones’ of the Brigadier Don Diego de
+Alvear, written between 1788 and 1801, and preserved in the ‘Coleccion
+de Angelis’, occurs the following curious description of the feast-day
+of a patron saint of a Jesuit reduction: ‘They make a long alley of
+interwoven canes, which ends in a triumphal arch, which they adorn with
+branches of palms and other trees with considerable grace and taste
+(_con bastante gracia y simetria_). Under the arch they hang their
+images of saints, their clothes, their first-fruits—as corn and
+sugar-cane, and calabashes full of maize-beer (_chicha_)—their meat and
+bread, together with animals both alive and dead, such as they can
+procure (_como los pueden haber con su diligencia_). Then, forming in a
+ring, they dance and shout, ‘Viva el rey! Viva el santo tutelar!’
+
+[177] Many and curious are the names by which the office-bearers went.
+Thus, in the Mission of el Santo Corazon, in the Chiquitos, I find the
+following: Corregidor, the Mayor; Teniente, Lieutenant; Alferez,
+Sub-Lieutenant; Alcalde Primero, Head Alcalde; Alcalde Segundo, Second
+Alcalde; Commandante, Captain (of the Militia); Justicia Mayor, Chief
+Justice; Sargento Mayor, Sergeant-Major. Then came fiscales, fiscals;
+sacristan mayor, head-beadle; capitan de estancia, chief of the cattle
+farm; capitan de pinturas, carpinteria, herreros, etc.—captain of
+painters, carpenters, smiths, etc. All the offices were competed for
+ardently, and those of Corregidor and Alcalde in especial were prized
+so highly that Indians who were degraded from them for bad conduct or
+carelessness not infrequently died of grief.
+
+[178] In each reduction there were two priests. In all Paraguay, at the
+expulsion of the Order in 1767, there were only seventy-eight Jesuits
+(Dean Funes, ‘Ensayo de la Historia del Paraguay’, etc., cap. i., vol.
+ii.).
+
+[179] In the mission of Los Apostoles there were 599 of these ‘horses
+of the saint’, according to an inventory preserved by Brabo.
+
+[180] Furnished to Bucareli, Viceroy of Buenos Ayres at the expulsion,
+and first printed by Brabo (‘Inventarios de los bienes hallados á la
+expulsion de los Jesuitas’).
+
+[181] The Jesuits exercised the Indians a great deal in dancing, taking
+advantage of their love of dancing in their savage state. D’Orbigny and
+Demersay (‘Fragment d’un Voyage au Centre de l’Amérique Méridianale’,
+and ‘Histoire Physique, etc., du Paraguay’) found between the years
+1830 and 1855 that the Indians of the Moxos and Chiquitos still danced
+as they had done in the time of the Jesuits.
+
+I have seen them in the then (1873) almost deserted mission of Jesus,
+buried in the great woods on the shore of the Paraná, dance a strange,
+half-savage dance outside the ruined church.
+
+[182] Cardiel, in his ‘Declaracion de la Verdad’, p. 239, says: ‘Todos
+los pueblos ponen su castillo en la plaza y en el medio de el colocan
+el retratro del Rey, y el Indio Alferez Real . . . va al castillo con
+el Estandarte Real y alli hace su homenage con otros rendimientos
+anteel Retratro Real,’ saying in Guaraní, ‘Toicohengatú ñande Mbaru
+bicha guazú! Toicohengatú ñande Rey marangatú! Toicohengatú ñande Rey
+Fernando Sesto!’ (‘Long live our King, the great chief! Long live our
+good King! Long live our King Ferdinand VI.’).
+
+[183] ‘Chupas de damasco carmesi con encajes de plata.’
+
+[184] It may be roughly translated, ‘a good stone wall between a male
+and female saint.’
+
+[185] These clothes were the property of the community, and not of the
+individual Indians.
+
+[186] Brabo, xxxv., Introduction to ‘Los inventarios de los bienes.’
+
+[187] A recent writer in the little journal published on yellow
+packing-paper in the Socialist colony of Cosme, in Paraguay (_Cosme
+Monthly_, November, 1898), has a curious passage corroborating what I
+have so often observed myself. Under the heading of ‘A Paraguayan
+Market’, he says: ‘The Guaraní clings stubbornly to the Guaraní
+customs. This is irritating to the European, but who shall say that the
+Guaraní is not right? . . . European settlement cannot but be fatal to
+the Guaraní, however profitable it may be to land-owning and mercantile
+classes. . . . The Paraguayan market is a woman’s club . . . they will
+come thirty or forty miles with a clothful of the white curd-cheese of
+the country, contentedly journeying on foot along the narrow paths.
+They will cut a cabbage into sixteenths and eat their cheese themselves
+rather than sell it under market price.’ Long may they do so, for so
+long will they be free, and perhaps poor; but, then, in countries such
+as Paraguay freedom and poverty are identical.
+
+[188] As the Gaucho proverb says, ‘Las armas son necesarias pero
+“naide” sabe cuando.’
+
+[189] Corregidores, alcaldes, regidores, alguaciles, etc.
+
+[190] Hereditary or sometimes elected chiefs.
+
+[191] I remember seeing on the tombstone of a Spanish sailor his hope
+of salvation through the intercession of the Lord High Admiral Christ.
+After the Spanish custom, officers were often generals both by sea and
+land, so that soldiers were not excluded from the Lord High Admiral’s
+intercession.
+
+[192] Dean Funes (‘Ensayo de la Historia de Paraguay’, etc.) says:
+‘These Indians went under the command of Don Antonio de Vera Moxica;
+their sergeants were Guaranís and their captains Spaniards. Their
+_cacique_ was Ignacio Amandaá, who commanded in chief under Vera
+Moxica.’ They fought bravely, and returned again and again to the
+assault of the town after several repulses, manifesting the same dogged
+courage and indifference to death which their descendants showed in the
+war against Brazil in 1866-70. In that war bodies of Paraguayans
+frequently attacked strong positions defended by artillery, and allowed
+themselves to be shot down to the last man rather than retire. At other
+times, concealed behind masses of floating herbage, from their canoes
+they sprang on board Brazilian ironclads, and were all killed in the
+vain endeavour to capture the vessels. I knew a little pettifogging
+lawyer, one Izquierdo, who, with ten companions, attempted in a canoe
+to take the Brazilian flagship (an ironclad); left alone on her deck,
+after the death of his companions, he sprang into the water under a
+shower of bullets, and, badly wounded, swam over to the Chaco, the
+desert side of the river. There for three days he remained, subsisting
+on wild oranges, and then swam across again on a raft of sticks, in
+spite of the alligators and many fierce fish which abound in Paraguay.
+He got well, and, though lame, was, when I knew him, as arrant a little
+scrivening knave as you could hope to meet in either hemisphere.
+
+On many other occasions the mission Indians performed notable services
+for the Spanish Government. In 1681, when the French attacked Buenos
+Ayres, a detachment of two thousand Indians was sent to its assistance.
+Philip V. himself wrote to the Provincial of Paraguay on this occasion
+asking him to send troops to the defence of the city.
+
+In 1785 four thousand Guaranís, commanded by Don Baltazar Garcia, were
+at the second siege of the Colonia del Sacramento. Funes says of them:
+‘A juicio de un testigo ocular, no es menos admirable la sangre fria de
+sus capellanes.’
+
+[193] ‘Perro Luterano’. It is astonishing how in Spain the
+comparatively innocuous Luther has fallen heir to the heritage of
+hatred that should more properly have belonged to the inhuman and
+treacherous Calvin.
+
+[194] Philip V. in 1745, after an examination which lasted six years,
+approved of all the actions of the Jesuits in Paraguay (Cretineau Joly,
+‘Histoire de la Compagnie de Jésus’, vol. v., p. 103). So that a
+curious letter of a Jeronimite friar (one Padre Cevallos), written in
+1774, is well within due limits when it says that all the Jesuits did
+in Paraguay was ‘todo probado por reales cedulas ó procedia de ordenes
+expresas.’
+
+[195] One is obliged to allow, in common fairness, that Calvin carried
+out in his own practice what he advocated—as witness his conduct with
+Servetus, whom he first calumniated, then entrapped, and lastly
+murdered in cold blood.
+
+[196] Don Francisco Corr sent the following list of arms to the Viceroy
+Zabala, of Buenos Ayres (Funes, ‘Ensayo’, etc.): ‘Armas buenas, 850;
+lanzas de hierro, 3,850; pedreras (culverins), 10. Las flechas no se
+cuentan.’ He says: ‘Todos los Indios quando han de salir a compaña
+llevan 150 flechas de hierro, menos los que llevan armos de fuego. Asi
+mismo cargan “bolas” que son dos piedras en una cuerda. Los de a pie
+que no llevan escopetas tienen lanza, flecha, y honda con su provision
+de piedras en un bolson como de granaderos. Se prestan caballos entre
+los pueblos.’
+
+[197] Ibañez (‘Histoire du Paraguay sous les Jésuites’) states the
+hides sold at about three dollars apiece.
+
+[198] The arroba was twenty-five pounds.
+
+[199] These figures are from Brabo’s inventories.
+
+[200] Ibañez states that only eighty-four dollars a year were set apart
+for the maintenance of each priest.
+
+[201] Dean Funes (‘Ensayo de le Historia Civil del Paraguay’, etc.)
+puts it at a million reales, which almost equals £20,800.
+
+Ibañez (‘La Republica Jesuitica’), with the noble disregard of
+consequences so noticeable in most polemical writers, boldly alters
+this to a million dollars, his object being to prove that the Jesuits
+exacted exorbitant taxation from the neophytes.
+
+[202] The honey of the missions was celebrated, and the wax made by the
+small bee called ‘Opemus’, according to Charlevoix (livre v., p. 285),
+‘était d’une blancheur qui n’avait rien de pareil, et ces neophytes ont
+consacré tout qu’ils en peuvent avoir à bruler devant les images de la
+Ste. Vierge.’
+
+[203] In the inventory of the mission of San José I find: ‘Item, doce
+pares de grillos’; but I am bound to say that in this instance they
+were for the use of ‘los Guaicurus infieles prisioneros que estan en
+dicha mision.’
+
+[204] ‘Il Cristianesimo Felice nelle Missione dei Padri della Compagnia
+di Jesu nel Paraguay’.
+
+[205] ‘L’Histoire du Paraguay sous les Jésuites’, Amsterdam, 1700,
+lxxv.
+
+[206] In all, the missions amounted to thirty; and for their relative
+situations _vide_ the curious map, the original of which was published
+in the work of Padre Pedro Lozano, C. de J., ‘Descripcion chorographica
+del terreno, rios, arboles y animales de las dilatadissimas provincias
+del Gran Chaco, Gualanba’, etc. Cordoba, del Tucuman, en el Colegio de
+la Assumpcion, por Joseph Santos Balbas, 1733.
+
+[207] A letter of a certain Jesuit (name lost, but dated 1715) says
+that there were at least two thousand canoes in constant use on the
+Paraná, and almost as many more on the Uruguay (Brabo, ‘Inventarios’,
+etc.).
+
+[208] Corregidores, regidores, alcaldes, etc.
+
+[209] It is not to be supposed, however, that the Indians were kept in
+ignorance. P. Cardiel (‘Declaracion de la Verdad’, p. 222), quoting
+from the Cedula Real of 1743, says that ‘in every one of the towns
+there is a school established to teach reading and writing in Spanish,
+and that on that account a great number of Indians are to be met who
+write well.’ Cardiel adds, on the same page, ‘Dos de ellos estan
+copiando ahora esto que yo escribo, y de mejor letra que la mia.’
+
+[210] Dean Funes (‘Ensayo Critico’, etc.) puts the income from commerce
+of the thirty towns at a hundred thousand dollars, and informs us that,
+after taxation (to the Crown) had been deducted from it, it was applied
+to the maintenance of the churches and other necessary expenses, and by
+the end of the year little of it remained.
+
+[211] Don Martin de Barua, in his memorial to the King (1736),
+complaining of the Jesuits, puts the number of taxable Indians at forty
+thousand. The Commission appointed to examine into the charges in 1736,
+which reported in 1745 (a reasonable interval), affirmed that the
+taxable Indians only numbered 19,116. Each Indian paid an annual
+poll-tax of one dollar a year to the Crown. In addition to that, every
+town gave one hundred dollars a year. The salary of the priests was six
+hundred dollars a year (Azara, ‘Voyage dans l’Amérique Méridionale’).
+
+[212] ‘Account of the Abipones’. London: John Murray, 1822.
+
+[213] ‘Voyage dans l’Amérique Méridionale’. Paris: Denton, 1809.
+
+[214] Perámas (‘De vita et moribus sex sacerdotum Paraguaycorum, Petrus
+Joanes Andrea’, lxxxiv.) states that it appeared, from papers left
+after their expulsion, that the income of the Jesuit College of Cordoba
+just paid the expenses of administration (‘era con escasa diferencia
+igual á los gastos’).
+
+In the Archivo General of Buenos Ayres, legajo ‘Compañia de Jesús’,
+there is a document referred to by P. Hernandez in his introduction to
+the work of P. Cardiel (‘Declaracion de la Verdad’), which states that
+in the year of the expulsion the income of the thirty towns fell a
+little short of the expenses.
+
+[215] Azara, ‘Voyage dans l’Amérique Méridionale’; also Funes, ‘Ensayo
+Critico de la Historia del Paraguay’; and Padre Guevara, ‘Historia del
+Paraguay, Rio de la Plata y Tucuman’.
+
+[216] Archivo General de Simancas, Estado, legajo 7,450, folios 21 y
+22, 5_a_, Copia de las cartas (sin firma; la siguiente es de Nicolas
+Neenguirú) que se hallaron en letra Guaraní traducidas por los
+interpreteo nombrados en las sorpresa hecha al pueblo de San Lorenzo
+por el Coronel D. José Joaquin de Viana, Gobernador de Montevideo, el
+dia 20 de Mayo de 1756:
+
+‘El modo de vivir del Padre es, cerrar bien todas las puertas y
+quedarse el solo, su Mayordomo, y su muchacho. Son ya Indios de edad, y
+solo estos asisten solo de dia adentro, y á las doce salen afuera, y un
+viejo es quien cuida de la Porteria, y es quien Sierra la puerta quando
+descansa el Padre, ó quando sale el Padre á ver su chacara. Y aun
+entonces van solos, sino es con un Indio de hedad quien los giua y
+cuida de el caballo y despues de esto á misa y á la tarde al Rosario de
+Maria Santisima llamandonos con toque de campana, y antes de esto á los
+muchachos y muchachittas los llama con una campánilla y despues de eso
+el bueno de el Padre entra ha enseñarles la Doctrina, y el persinarse
+de el mismo modo, todos los dias de fiesta nos Predica la palabra de
+Dios, del mismo modo el Santo Sacramento de la Penitencia y de la
+Communion, en estas cosas se exercitta el bueno del Padre y todas las
+noches se sierra la porteria y la llave se lleva al aposento del Padre
+y solo se vuelve á abrir por la mañana quando entra el Sachristan y los
+cosineros. . . .
+
+‘Los Padres todas las mañanas nos dicen misas, y despues de misa, se
+van a su aposento y hai cogen un poco de aqua caliente con Yerva y no
+otra cosa mas; despues de esto sale a la puerta de su aposento y ahai
+todos los que oyeron misa se arrimen a besarle la mano, y despues de
+esto sale afuera a ver los Indios si trabajan en los oficios que cada
+uno tiene, y despues se van a su aposento a resar el oficio divino, en
+su libro, y para que Dios le ayude en todas sus cosas. A las once de el
+dia van a comer un poquitto, no á comer mucho solo coge cinco plattitos
+y solo beve una vez el vino, no llenando un vaso pequeño, y aguardiente
+nunca lo toman y el vino no lo hai en nuestro pueblo, solo lo traen de
+la Candelaria segun lo que envia el Padre Superior lo trahen de acia
+Buenos Aires. . . . Despues que sale de comer y para descansar an poco,
+y mientras descansa salen fuera los que assisten en la casa del Padre,
+y los que trabajan dentro en algunas obras y tamvien el Sachristan y el
+cosinero: todos estos salen fuera y quando no se toca la campana estan
+serradas las puertas, y solo un viejo es el que cuida de las puertas, y
+quando vuelvan a tocar la campana, vuelve este a abrirlas para que
+vuelvan a entrar los que trabajan dentro, y el Padre Coge el Brebiario
+no a ir a parte ninguna. A la tarde tocan la campanilla paraque se
+recojan las criatturas, y entre el Padre á ensenarles la doctrina
+christiana.’
+
+[217] Perhaps the entire isolation of the Jesuits in these two
+provinces accounts for their absolute quiet; and if this is so, it goes
+far to prove that they were right to attempt the same isolation in
+Paraguay. The comparative nearness of the Spanish settlements
+frustrated their attempts in this instance.
+
+[218] For ‘reasoning men’, and how this monstrous superstition still
+prevails in Venezuela, see the charming book of S. Perez Triana, ‘De
+Bogota al Atlantico’, etc., pp. 156-158 (Paris: Impresa Sud Americana).
+A really interesting book of travels, without cant, and without an eye
+on the public. Strange to relate, the author seems to have killed
+nothing during his journey.
+
+[219] Charlevoix, book iv.
+
+[220] ‘Conquista Espiritual’, Ruiz Montoya.
+
+[221] ‘Voyage dans l’Amérique Méridionale’.
+
+[222] Azara, ‘Viage al America Meridional’, tomo 2, cap 12. ‘La corte
+ordenó a Don Francisco de Alfaro oidor de la Audiencia de Charcas pasar
+al Perú en calidad de visitador. La primera medida que tomó en 1612 fue
+ordenar que ninguno en lo sucesivo pudiese ir a casa de Indios, con el
+pretexto de reducirlos, y que no se diesen encomiendas del modo que
+hemos explicado, es decir con servicio personal. No alcanzo sobre que
+podia fundarse una medida tan politicamente absurda: pero como este
+oidor favorecia las _ideas de los Jesuitas_, se sospechó que por aquel
+tiempo que ellos dictaron su conducta.’
+
+[223] For _mitas_ and _encomiendas_, see foregoing chapters.
+
+[224] Brabo, ‘Inventarios de los bienes hallados a la expulsion de las
+Jesuitas’.
+
+[225] ‘Voyage dans l’Amérique Méridionale’.
+
+[226] P. Cardiel (‘Declaracion de la Verdad’, p. 449), quoting from
+Xarque (‘La Vida Apostolica del Padre Joseph Cataidino’, Zaragoça por
+Juan de Ypa, 1664), says, _re_ the diminution of the Indians under the
+Spanish rule: ‘Para que se vea cuanta razon tiene el Juez reparese que
+segun los padrones del siglo pasado (vg. 1600-1700) en la ciudad y
+jurisdicion de Santiago del Estero habia 80,000 Indios y ahora, apenas
+hay ochenta. En la jurisdicion de Cordoba de Tucuman, habia 40,000; hoy
+no hay 40. En la jurisdicion y cercanias de la ciudad de Buenos Ayres,
+habia 30,000; hoy apenas hay 30.’
+
+[227] Charlevoix, vol. ii., livre xvii.
+
+[228] Funes, ‘Ensayo de la Historia Civil del Paraguay’, etc., vol.
+ii., cap. v., p. 231.
+
+[229] Del Techo, Lozano, Guevara, Charlevoix, etc., etc.
+
+[230] Liberty is commonly only attained by blood. It is, I think, quite
+legitimate in playing the liberty game to kill all who disagree with
+your party, or to banish them. In these degenerate times, lovers of
+liberty have to stop short at calumny, just as if they were mere
+tyrants.
+
+[231] _Guazu_ = ‘great’ in Guaraní. It is frequent in place-names both
+in Paraguay and Corrientes.
+
+[232] Dean Funes, vol. ii., cap. xii., p. 372, says of Zavala: ‘Por
+caracter era manso, pero usó algunas veces de severidad, porque sabia
+que para servir bien a los hombres es preciso de cuando en cuando tener
+valor de desagradarlos. . . . La pobreza en que murio despues de tantos
+años de mando, es una prueba clasica de que no estaba contagiado con
+esa commun flaqueza de los que gobieran en America.’
+
+[233] In the long and interesting letter of Jaime Aguilar, the
+provincial of the Jesuits in Paraguay, to the King of Spain (Philip V.,
+1737), occurs the following passage:
+
+‘Y si alguna vez, que no son muchas, se animan los Españoles a
+perseguir y castigar los Indios, muchos huyen de la tierra, o se
+esconden, por no ir a la entrada. . . . Otras (vezes) quando llegan
+allá, el Enemigo les quitan la Cavallada, dexandolos a pie y se vuelven
+a casa como pueden.’
+
+This I have seen myself, not thirty years ago, on the frontiers of the
+Argentine Republic. The popular Argentine poem, ‘La Vuelta de Martin
+Fierro’, by José Hernandez (Buenos Ayres, 1880), has an illustration
+showing an expedition against the Indians returning. Some of the men
+are on foot; others are riding two on the same horse, and officers are
+animating their men with the flat of their swords.
+
+[234] ‘Account of the Abipones’, p. 125.
+
+[235] Brabo, ‘Inventarios’, p. ix.
+
+[236] Francisco Xavier Brabo, ‘Inventarios de los bienes hallados á la
+expulsion de los Jesuitas’ (Madrid, 1872).
+
+[237] The lists of cannons, guns, and arms of all kinds in the
+inventories of the Chaco towns, preserved by Brabo, serve to show not
+only the dangers to which the Jesuits were exposed, but also how
+thoroughly the Jesuits understood the fickle nature of those with whom
+they lived.
+
+[238] Another priest, the list of whose effects Brabo has preserved in
+his ‘Inventarios’, had a book called ‘El Alivio de Tristes’. Even a
+Protestant may be excused for hoping that it merited its title.
+
+[239] Cretineau Joly, tome v., chap. ii., p. 95. Your moral force is
+excellent in a civilized country; but your modern missionary usually
+prefers something more in accordance with the spirit of the times.
+
+[240] The total number of cattle was 78,171, as against 698,353 in the
+towns of the Guaranís. See Brabo, ‘Inventarios de los bienes hallados á
+la expulsion de los Jesuitas’, Appendix, p. 668.
+
+[241] ‘History of the Abipones’, from the Latin of Martin Dobrizhoffer,
+London, 1822.
+
+It is a curious circumstance that in the missions in the Chaco there
+were negro slaves, though in the Paraguayan missions they were unknown.
+In the inventory of the town of San Lucas appear the following entries,
+under the head of ‘Negros Esclavos’:
+
+‘Justo, que sirve de capataz en el campo; será de edad de veinte y
+siete años, mas ó menos segun su aspecto.’
+
+‘Item, Pedro, será de diez y seis años y es medio fatuo.’
+
+‘Item, José Felix, será de un mes y medio.’
+
+[242] Though 1747 was the date of the final founding of these
+reductions, as early as 1697 about four hundred Indians were discovered
+in the woods of the Taruma by Fathers Robles and Ximenes, and
+established in the mission of Nuestra Señora de Fe; but in the year
+1721 they all returned to the woods, a famine and an outbreak of the
+small-pox having frightened them. After being again established in a
+mission, and again having left it, in 1746, they were established
+definitely at San Joaquin.
+
+[243] Dobrizhoffer calls the Tobatines by the name of Itatines.
+Charlevoix and others refer to them as Tobatines.
+
+[244] ‘Account of the Abipones’, p. 54.
+
+[245] In 1873, when I visited the outskirts of this forest, the
+conditions were similar to those which Dobrizhoffer describes, with the
+addition that the depopulation of the country, owing to the recent long
+war, had allowed the tigers to multiply to an extraordinary degree, and
+my guide and myself, after feeding our horses, had to sleep
+alternately, the waker holding the two horses hobbled and bridled.
+
+[246] The whole operation of collecting and preparing the leaves of the
+_Ilex Paraguayensis_, to make the _yerba-maté_, was most curious. Bands
+of men used to sally out for a six-months’ expedition, either by land
+with bullock-waggons, or up one of the rivers in flat-bottomed boats,
+which were poled along against the rapid current by crews of six to
+twelve men. Arrived at the _yerbal_, as the forest was called, they
+built shelters, after the fashion of those in use amongst the larger of
+the anthropoid apes. Some roamed the woods in search of the proper
+trees, the boughs of which they cut down with machetes, whilst others
+remained and built a large shed of canes called a _barbacoa_. On this
+shed were laid the bundles of boughs brought from the woods, and a
+large fire was lighted underneath. During forty-eight hours (if I
+remember rightly) the toasting went on; then, when sufficiently dry,
+the leaves were stripped from the twigs, and placed on a sort of open
+space of hard clay, something like a Spanish threshing-floor. On this
+they were pounded fine, and the powder rammed into raw-hide bags. This
+concluded the operations, and the _yerba_ was then ready for the
+‘higgling of the market’.
+
+[247] _Traduttore traditore_, as the proverb says.
+
+[248] Charlevoix says, in his ‘Histoire de la Nouvelle France’,
+speaking of the Indians in general: ‘L’expérience a fait voir qu’il
+étoit plus à propos de les laisser dans leur simplicité et dans leur
+ignorance, que les sauvages peuvent être des bons Chrétiens sans rien
+prendre de notre politesse et de notre façon de vivre, ou du moins
+qu’il falloit laisser faire au tems pour les tirer de leur grossièreté,
+qui ne les empêche pas de vivre dans une grande innocence, d’avoir
+beaucoup de modestie, et de servir Dieu avec une piété et une ferveur,
+que les rendent très propres aux plus sublimes opérations de la grâce.’
+Had more people thought with Charlevoix, and not been too anxious to
+draw savages incontrovertibly to our ‘politesse’ (_sic_) and ‘façon’,
+and left more to time (‘au tems’), how much misery might have been
+saved, and how many interesting peoples preserved! For, in spite of the
+domination of the Anglo-Saxon race, it might have been wise to leave
+other types, if only to remind us of our superiority.
+
+[249] Hell not infrequently seems to have struck the Indians as a joke,
+for Charlevoix relates that when the first missionaries expatiated on
+its flames to the Chirignanós, they said, ‘If there is fire in hell, we
+could soon get enough water to put it out.’ This answer scandalized the
+good priest, who could not foresee that the flames of Tophet would be
+extinguished without the necessity of any other waters than those of
+indifference.
+
+[250] ‘Account of the Abipones’, p. 74.
+
+[251] Padre del Techo, in his ‘History of Paraguay’, says of the wood
+Indians that ‘they died like plants which, grown in the shade, will not
+bear the sun.’
+
+[252] San Joaquin, San Estanislao, and Belen.
+
+[253] Notably those of Azara.
+
+[254] ‘Account of the Abipones’, p. 15.
+
+[255] As that of Philip V., from the palace of Buen Retiro, December
+28, 1743, and his two letters to the Jesuits of Paraguay. Also the
+previous edict obtained by Montoya from Philip II., and by the various
+additions on the same head made from time to time to the code known as
+‘The Laws of the Indies’.
+
+[256] Since the discovery of America the Spaniards and the Portuguese
+had been in constant rivalry throughout the south-eastern portion.
+Their frontier, between what are now Brazil and Argentina, had never
+been defined. In 1494 King John II. of Castile concluded a treaty
+signed at Tordesillas with the King of Portugal, placing the
+dividing-line between the countries two hundred leagues more to the
+westward than that of the famous Bull of Pope Alexander VI. (May 4,
+1493), which placed it at one hundred leagues west of Cape Verd,
+cutting the world in two from the Arctic to the Antarctic Pole. From
+the signing of the treaty of Tordesillas trouble began in South America
+between the Powers, as by that treaty a portion of Brazil came into the
+power of Portugal.
+
+[257] These were the towns of San Angel, San Nicolas, San Luis, San
+Lorenzo, San Miguel, San Juan, and San Borja.
+
+[258] According to the 1913 edition of the Catholic Encyclopedia (in
+the article titled “Reductions of Paraguay”) this treaty, signed in
+secret on 15 January 1750, was a deliberate assault on the Jesuit Order
+by the Ministers of Spain and Portugal, the latter of whom, Pombal, is
+said to have been responsible also for the false and libelous ‘Histoire
+de Nicolas I., Roy du Paraguai et Empereur des Mamalus’ (referred to in
+this chapter) which was distributed throughout Europe as another attack
+on the Jesuits. As anyone familiar with the situation could see that
+the Indians would not be happy about the treaty’s requirement to
+abandon their homes, it was a well-calculated, though detestable,
+move.—A. L., 1998.
+
+[259] Most of the dates of the events subsequent to the cession of the
+seven reductions on the Uruguay are taken from ‘La Causa Jesuitica de
+Portugal’ (Madrid, 1768), written by Ibañez, a great enemy of the
+Jesuits. In it is also an account of the events in Paraguay between
+1750 and 1756, called ‘Relacion de la Guerra que sustentaron los
+Jesuitas contra las tropas Españolas y Portuguesas en el Uruguay y
+Paraná’. No proof has ever been brought forward that the Jesuits as a
+body ever incited the revolt of the Indians, though undoubtedly Father
+Tadeo Ennis, a hot-headed priest, stirred up his own particular
+reduction to resist. It does not seem likely that the Jesuits could
+have thought it possible to wage a successful war against Spain and
+Portugal. The dates taken from Ibañez tally with original letters from
+the Marques de Valdelirios, the Spanish boundary commissioner, and
+others, which are preserved in the Spanish national archives at
+Simancas.
+
+[260] _Vide_ ‘Exc. por los cartas que recibi con los avisos, y llegada
+del P. Altamirano, entiendo acabará de persuadirse a que los Padres de
+la Campañia son los sublevados, sino los quitan de las aldeas sus
+Santos Padres (como ellos los llaman) no experimentarán mas que
+rebeliones insolencias y desprecios. . . .’—Letter quoted by Ibañez
+(‘Causa Jesuitica’), and also preserved at Simancas.
+
+[261] The Marques de Valdelirios, writing to Don José de Carvajal from
+Monte Video, June 28, 1752 (Simancas, Legajo 7,447), says: ‘Estoy
+cierto de que los padres estan ya en la persuasion de que el tratado no
+se ha de dejar de executar.’ This being so, it was evident that the
+Marquis, at the date of writing, was of opinion that the Jesuits were
+not going to oppose the execution of the treaty, as he goes on to say:
+‘Y es credible que con este desengaño trabajan seriamente en la mudanza
+de sus pueblos.’
+
+[262] The instructions were prepared in 1768 by Bucareli for the
+guidance of Don Juan Joseph de Vertiz, his interim successor in the
+government of the River Plate, and were delivered to him in 1770 when
+Bucareli returned to Spain. They are printed by Brabo in his ‘Coleccion
+de Documentos relativos á la Expulsion de los Jesuitas’, Madrid, 1872,
+p. 320.
+
+[263] ‘Oficiales mecanicos’.
+
+[264] This refers to the same subject, and prohibits any Spaniard from
+settling in an Indian town in any part of America.
+
+[265] Dean Funes, ‘Ensayo de la Historia Civil del Paraguay’, etc.,
+tome iii., p. 45.
+
+[266] Dean Funes says ‘una difusa memoria’; but, then, even though
+friendly, churchmen and cats rarely forego a scratch. The proverb has
+it, ‘Palabras de santo, uñas de gato’.
+
+[267] Though Ibañez (‘Republica Jesuitica’, tome i., cap. i.) says:
+‘This treaty caused entire satisfaction to all the world except the
+English, who feared their commerce would suffer by it (_i.e._, by the
+closing of the Colonia del Sacramento as an entry for smuggled goods),
+and the Jesuits.’
+
+Raynal, also an ex-Jesuit, but a man of far higher character than
+Ibañez, says (tome iii., lib. 97): ‘This treaty met censure on both
+sides, the ministers in Lisbon themselves alleging that it was a false
+policy to sacrifice the Colonia del Sacramento, the clandestine
+commerce of which amounted to two millions of dollars a year . . . for
+possessions whose advantages were uncertain and position remote. The
+outcries were even stronger in Madrid. There they imagined that the
+Portuguese would soon rule all along the Uruguay . . . and from thence
+penetrate up the rivers into Tucuman, Chile, and Potosi.’
+
+[268] Quoting the Pope who advised St. Augustine on his first mission
+visit to England, to convert the natives to Christianity, to go slowly.
+
+[269] D. Martin de Echaria, Don Rafael de Menedo, and Don Marcos de
+Lauazabel.
+
+[270] From a letter preserved at Simancas (Legajo 7,447), written by P.
+Diego Palacios to P. Luiz de Altamirano, dated San Miguel, June 20,
+1752, it appears that there were in the territory of the seven towns
+plantations of _yerba_ trees, cotton, and valuable woods.
+
+[271] Archivo de Simancas, Legajo 7,378, folio 17—a long and curious
+letter.
+
+[272] ‘Stroner’ may have been ‘Stoner’, in which case he must have been
+an Englishman. There were few English names amongst the Paraguayan
+Jesuits, if one except Juan Bruno de Yorca (John Brown of York), Padre
+Esmid (Smith), the supposititious ‘Stoner’, and the doubtful Taddeo
+Ennis, who, though said to be a Bohemian, was not impossibly a
+Milesian.
+
+[273] Dean Funes, ‘Ensayo de la Historia Civil de Paraguay’, etc., book
+v., p. 52.
+
+[274] They also said, in a memorial presented to the Marquis of
+Valdelirios by the Provincial Barreda, preserved at Simancas (Legajo
+7,447), ‘That they had voluntarily made themselves vassals of the King
+of Spain—despues de Christianarnos, nos hizimos voluntariamente
+vasallos de nuestro Catholico Rey de España para que amparandonos con
+su poder fomentase nuestra devota Christiandad.’ It was not likely,
+therefore, that they would voluntarily become subject to the
+Portuguese, their most bitter persecutors.
+
+[275] José Barreda, the Father Provincial of the missions, in a curious
+letter under date of August 2nd, 1753, tells the Marquis of Valdelirios
+that he fears not only that the 30,000 Indians resident in the seven
+towns may rebel, but that they may be joined by the Indians of the
+other reductions, and that it is possible they may all apostatize and
+return to the woods. Brabo, in the notes to his ‘Atlas de Cartas
+Geograficas de los Paises de la America Meridianal’ (Madrid, 1872),
+gives a synopsis of this letter, which formed part of his collection,
+and contained the greatest quantity of interesting papers on the
+Jesuits in Paraguay and Bolivia which has ever been brought together.
+In 1872, after publishing his ‘Atlas’, his ‘Coleccion de Documentos’,
+and his ‘Inventarios’, he presented his papers (more than 30,000 in
+number) to the Archivo Historico Nacional of Madrid. There they remain,
+and form a rich mine for dogged scholars who have not passed their
+youth on horseback with the lazo in their hands.
+
+[276] Archivo de Simancas, Legajo 7,378, folio 146.
+
+[277] _Ibid._: ‘Que toda la polvora que tengan los curas y misioneros
+se queme o se inutilize y pierda hechandola al rio, y que en los
+pueblos donde se fabrica, cese luego este labor.’
+
+[278] In another letter, also preserved at Simancas, and dated at
+Yapeyu, he complains bitterly of his own suffering on the journey: ‘Me
+moli tanto con el traqueo violento del carreton que no he podido volver
+sobre mi.’ The roads to the missions seem to have been as bad as those
+which produced the historical exclamation, ‘O dura tellus Hispaniæ!’ It
+is certainly the case that Ibañez, in his ‘Republica Jesuitica’
+(Madrid, 1768), gives a very different version of the doings of
+Altamirano; for he says that Rafael de Cordoba, Altamirano’s secretary,
+‘embarked in a schooner called _La Real_ a great quantity of guns and
+lead for balls, packing them all in boxes, which, he said, were full of
+objects of a pious nature. . . . This,’ says Ibañez, ‘was told me by
+the master of the schooner _José el Ingles_, a man worthy of credence.’
+This is pleasing to one’s national pride, but, still, one seems to want
+a little better authority even than that of ‘Bardolph, the Englishman’.
+
+[279] Dean Funes, book v., cap. iii., p. 54.
+
+[280] In a most curious letter (preserved at Simancas, Legajo 7,447),
+the mayor and council of the reduction of San Juan write to Altamirano
+upbraiding him with being their enemy, and tell him that ‘St. Michael
+sent by God showed their poor grandfathers (_sus pobres abuelos_) where
+to plant a cross, and afterwards to march due south from the cross and
+they would find a holy father of the Company.’ This, of course, turned
+out as the saint had foretold, and after a long day’s march they
+encountered the Jesuit and became Christians.
+
+[281] This account seems to have been lost, and a careful search has
+not disinterred it from the Maelstrom of Simancas, that prison-house of
+so many documents, without whose aid so much of Spanish history cannot
+be written.
+
+[282] His ‘Efemerides’, or Journal, printed and mutilated by Ibañez in
+his ‘Republica de Paraguay’, gives the best account of the brief ‘war’
+which has come down to us; it is supplemented by the ‘Declaracion de la
+Verdad’ of Father Cardiel, which deals with the misstatements of Ibañez
+and others against the Jesuits. In regard to his own share in the war,
+Padre Ennis says: ‘Atque in exercitas curatorem, spiritualem medicum
+secum ire postulat.’
+
+[283] ‘Se puso las botas’.
+
+[284] Dean Funes, ‘Ensayo de la Historia Civil del Paraguay’, Buenos
+Ayres, etc., book v., cap. iv., p. 58.
+
+[285] Luckily Ibañez (‘Republica Jesuitica de Paraguay’) has not
+corrected the many faults of spelling and Latinity into which Padre
+Ennis fell. Those, though left in from malice, as Ibañez was a bitter
+enemy of the Jesuits, serve to present the man in his habit as he
+wrote. However, Ibañez has so much mutilated the text of the journal
+that occasionally the sense is left obscure.
+
+[286] ‘Hoc itaque nuncio læti altero ac incensi . . . Sacramento
+expiationis et pane fortim roborati’ (Ennis, ‘Efemerides’).
+
+[287] Cardiel, in his ‘Declaracion de la Verdad’, p. 426, says: ‘Lo
+mismo es 28,000 mil Indios que igual numero de muchachos.’
+
+[288] ‘Nec tamen resipiscebat et Divinam Nemesim quamquam clare
+experiebatur pro causâ Societatis.’
+
+[289] ‘Declaracion de la Verdad’, p. 404.
+
+[290] In fact, they much resembled those ‘crakys of warre’ which, with
+the ‘tymmeris for helmys’, Barbour, in the ‘Bruce’, takes notice of as
+the two noteworthy events of a battle that he chronicles:
+
+ ‘Twa noweltyis that day thai saw,
+
+That forouth in Scotland had bene nane.
+
+Tymmeris for helmys war the tane,
+
+That thaim thoucht thane off gret bewté
+
+And alsua wondyr for to se.
+
+The tothyr, crakys war, off wer,
+
+That thai befor herd neuir er.’
+
+          _The Bruce_, Booke Fourteene, p. 392.
+
+[291] This was in an action in the year 1756.
+
+[292] ‘Miente de la cruz a la fecha’.
+
+[293] The Mamalucos, or Paulistas, were, of course, the bitterest
+enemies of everything Paraguayan, so that a King had as well been
+styled of ‘Iceland and of Paraguay’.
+
+[294] If this assumes to be Sâo Paulo de Piritinanga in Brazil, it is
+not unlikely one of the few books published there in the eighteenth
+century, if not the only one. Happy is the city of one book, especially
+when that work has nothing of a theological character in it, even
+though it lies from _la cruz á la fecha_.
+
+[295] ‘Account of the Abipones’, vol. i., p. 32.
+
+[296] The only man the Indians produced who showed any aptitude as a
+leader was a chief called Sepe Tyaragu. At his death in action in 1756
+Nicolas Ñeenguiru succeeded to his post.
+
+[297] _Milvago Chimango_.
+
+[298] _Polyhorus tharus_. In relation to the word ‘tharus’, which
+figures as a sort of scientific (or doggerel) cognomen to this bird,
+Mr. W. H. Hudson once pointed out to me that, like some other
+‘scientific facts’, it originated in a mistake. The Pampa Indian name
+of the bird is ‘traré’. Molina (Don Juan Ignacio), in his ‘History of
+Chile’, happened to spell the word ‘tharé’, instead of ‘traré’, and
+then proceeded to make a dog-Latin form of it. Thus the bird has
+received its present scientific name.
+
+[299] Cardiel, ‘Declaracion de la Verdad’, p. 430: ‘. . . llego alli
+despues de la fuga y desamparo de los pueblos . . . saco a los dos
+Padres que estaban muy afligidos por la soledad y alboroto.’
+
+[300] In a letter (Archivo de Simancas, Legajo 7,378, folio 128),
+Valdelirios, writing to the governor of Buenos Ayres, Don José de
+Caravajal y Lancastre, says: ‘Inagotables son los recursos de los
+Padres para que se dilate y no se ratifique el tratado. . . .’ But he
+gives no proof except that they had sent petitions to the King—surely a
+very constitutional thing for them to do.
+
+[301] The letter was written originally in Guaraní, and a certified
+translation of it exists at Simancas, Legajo 7,385, folio 13.
+
+[302] Altamirano.
+
+[303] Don Pedro Cevallos, Governor of Buenos Ayres, who was in Paraguay
+in 1755, sent there to fight the troops of King Nicolas, found, as he
+himself says, ‘no King, and no troops, but a few half-armed Indians.’
+Writing to the King, he says: ‘Los Jesuitas son utiles en el Paraguay.’
+
+[304] The figures in Chapter VII. serve to show that in Paraguay, at
+least, they were not exactly millionaires. In Mexico, Palafox, the
+saintly Bishop of Puebla, had set about all kinds of stories as to
+their riches, but Geronimo Terenichi, an ecclesiastic sent to Mexico to
+examine into the question of the Jesuits and their wealth, after a year
+of residence, expressly says ‘they were very poor, and laden with debt’
+(‘eran muy pobres y estaban cargados de deudas’): ‘Coleccion de los
+articulos de la Esperanza, sobre la Historia del Reinado de Carlos
+III.’, p. 435. Madrid, 1859.
+
+[305] They were expressly proclaimed to be ‘ocultas y reservadas’.
+Carlos III., in defence of his ‘occult’ and ‘reserved’ reasons, said,
+‘mis razones, solo Dios y yo debemos conocerlas’ (‘Reinado de Carlos
+III.’, vol. iii., p. 120. Ferrer del Rio, Madrid, 1856). No doubt
+Carlos III. satisfied his conscience with this dictum, but it is
+permissible to doubt whether the power alluded to in such a cousin-like
+manner by the King was equally satisfied.
+
+[306] This celebrated tumult, generally known in Spain as ‘el Motin de
+Aranjuez’, and sometimes as ‘el Motin de Esquilace’, occurred on Palm
+Sunday, 1766. The ostensible reason was an edict of the King (Charles
+III.) prohibiting the use of long cloaks and broad-brimmed hats, which
+had been for long popular in Spain. The tumult assumed such formidable
+dimensions that the Walloon Guards were unable to quell it, but two
+friars, Padre Osma and Padre Cueva, in some manner were able to stem
+the confusion. The King and the court were so much disturbed that they
+quitted Madrid and went to Aranjuez. There is no proof that the Jesuits
+had any hand at all in the affair.
+
+[307] Ferrer del Rio, in his history of the reign of Charles III.
+
+[308] Such, at least, several of his letters to the Pope, Clement XII.,
+would seem to indicate. It is not impossible that the strenuous
+opposition which the Jesuits gave to the Inquisition may have had
+something to do with their expulsion. Some of them went great lengths
+in their attacks. P. Antonio Vieyra, the celebrated Portuguese Jesuit,
+in his ‘Relaçaõ Exactissima, Instructiva, Curioza, Verdadeira,
+Noticioza do Procedimento das Inquiziçois de Portugal’ (Em Veneza,
+1750), is almost as severe as Protestant writers have been against the
+Inquisition. Particularly does he inveigh against the prison system of
+the Holy Office (pp. 3-5, chap. i.). In the last chapter (p. 154),
+Vieyra calls Saavedra, the founder of the Portuguese Inquisition, a
+tyrant, and in recounting his deeds calls him _tyranno, cruel,
+falsario, herege_, and _ladram_ (a thief), and finishes by asserting
+that the tribunal invented by such a man ‘had its roots in hell’, and
+that ‘its ministers could not go to heaven’.
+
+[309] His full name was Don Francisco de Paula Bucareli y Ursua.
+
+[310] Brabo (‘Coleccion de Documentos’, etc.) says of him, ‘speaking of
+the petty jealousies and intrigues which the decree of expulsion
+evoked: ‘En medio de tantas contrariedades, crimenes y miserias destaca
+serena la figura de Bucareli, no solo llevando a cabo con incansable
+celo su cometido, si no atendiendo a suplir en la organizacion
+religiosa, intelectual y civil los numerosos vacios que dejaba la falta
+del absorbente y decisivo influjo jesuitico.’
+
+[311] ‘Ensayo de la Historia Civil del Paraguay’, etc., vol. iii., cap.
+viii., p. 119.
+
+[312] Funes, ‘Ensayo de la Historia Civil’, etc., vol. iii., cap. viii.
+
+[313] ‘Tambien en algunos pueblos hay unas escopetas inglesas muy
+largas con sus horquillas si se quieren usar de ellas no son muy
+pesadas y tienen buen alcance’ (Funes, ‘Ensayo de la Historia Civil del
+Paraguay’, etc., vol. iii., cap. viii.).
+
+[314] There were in the year 1759 throughout the world 271 Jesuit
+missions, 1,542 religious houses, 61 cattle farms, 340 residences, 171
+seminaries, 1,542 churches, and 22,589 Jesuits, whereof 11,293 were
+priests. Of the above houses, missions, and churches, the greater
+portion were in America (Ferrer del Rio, ‘Historia del Reinado de
+Carlos III.’, Madrid, 1856).
+
+In the River Plate and Paraguay there were about 400 Jesuits, of whom
+300 were priests. The other hundred, according to Ibañez (‘Republica
+Jesuitica’), were ‘mostly poor devils who were in want of food, and
+came into the Order for a meal.’ Ibañez rarely spoke the truth, not
+even when it would have been expedient to do so; and certainly amongst
+these ‘poor devils’ could not have been included Asperger, the writer
+on Indian medicines, and other distinguished men who inhabited the
+Paraguayan missions as lay brothers.
+
+[315] Dean Funes, ‘Ensayo de la Historia Civil’, etc., vol. iii., book
+v., cap. ix.
+
+[316] The fine library was dispersed, and many priceless MSS. treating
+of the discovery and conquest, and of expeditions by the Jesuits
+amongst tribes of Indians now extinct, were lost. Nothing seems to have
+been preserved except matter which the dispersers thought might prove
+incriminating to the Jesuits. It is a well-known principle to judge and
+condemn a man, and then to search for evidence against him. The books
+were kept in a place known as La Granja de Santa Catalina, and a man of
+letters, Dr. Don Antonio Aldao, was charged to catalogue and remit them
+to the capital. Dean Funes says (book v., cap. ix., p. 156) that he
+complied with his instructions (‘verificóla felizmente y con arreglo a
+sus instrucciones’), but, anyhow, most of the books were lost. It is a
+common phrase amongst doctors, ‘The operation was entirely successful,
+but the patient unfortunately succumbed.’ Amongst the books was the
+celebrated ‘Monita Secreta’, used by Ibañez in his charges (after the
+expulsion) against the Jesuits.
+
+[317] Dean Funes (‘Ensayo de la Historia Civil’, vol. iii., cap. viii.)
+seems to have gauged the feelings of the Governor when he says: ‘Temblo
+de susto Bucareli considerando en riesgo una conquista, que debia
+aumentar su gloria y su fortuna.’ ‘Su fortuna’ is delicious, and shows
+your true conqueror’s melancholy.
+
+[318] The Tebicuari forms the northern boundary between the territory
+of Misiones and the rest of Paraguay. It is a large river, and in my
+time (1872-1875) was bridgeless, and had to be crossed in canoes,
+whilst the horses swam, or were towed behind the canoes with ropes.
+
+[319] Yapeyú was the largest of all the missions. The name signifies a
+chisel in Guaraní.
+
+[320] Bucareli, in a letter to El Conde de Aranda (Brabo, ‘Coleccion de
+Documentos relativos á la Expulsion de los Jesuitas’, Madrid, 1872),
+says in reference to the perils by which he imagined himself
+surrounded: ‘El misero diminuto estado de la tropa, por el atraso de
+sus pagas y la falta que encontré de caudales en estas cajas, era una
+urgencia que me atormentaba.’
+
+[321] This war, undertaken by a fool (Lopez) against enormous odds,
+served to show what a people even when in the wrong, and in a bad
+cause, can do when it believes itself to be fighting for national
+liberty. As a matter of fact, Paraguayan liberty was not threatened for
+an instant, and Lopez declared war against both Brazil and the
+Argentine Republic out of mere ambition to be a second Napoleon. His
+solitary qualifications for the character were that, like his
+prototype, he was fat and loved women. The war commenced in 1865 and
+finished in 1870, and left the country almost a desert. So lonely was
+it, that I have often in those days seen tigers calmly walk across a
+road in mid-day, and a shout or a pistol-shot but little quickened
+their movements.
+
+[322] _Capilla_ was the name given in Paraguay to some of the smaller
+villages which had a chapel, the chapel (_capilla_) being more
+important than the houses.
+
+[323] El V. P. José Pignatelli, in his ‘La Compañia de Jesus en su
+Extincion y Restablecimento’, says that the Paraguayan Jesuits were all
+sent to Faenza.
+
+[324] ‘Carta del Gobernador de Buenos Ayres (Bucareli) al Comte de
+Aranda’. Brabo, ‘Coleccion de Documentos Relativos a la Expulsion de
+los Jesuitos’, p. 8, Madrid, 1872: ‘Les hice vestir a la Española
+asistiendolos y tratandolos de modo que conozcan la mejora de su
+suerte. . . .’
+
+[325] Brabo, ‘Coleccion de Documentos’, etc., p. 101. The letter is
+headed ‘I. H. T., Ore Rey Nitu Don Carlos Tercero’.
+
+[326] Brabo, ‘Coleccion de Documentos’, etc., p. 185.
+
+[327] Ceremonies, no doubt, have their uses in enslaving mankind. A
+courtier once said to a Spanish King, ‘Your Majesty is but a ceremony
+yourself.’
+
+[328] Letter to Aranda: Brabo, ‘Coleccion de Documentos’, p. 196: ‘Y
+las mujeres en tal extremo, que es impossible demostralo sin faltar a
+la modestia.’
+
+[329] ‘Semejantes tiranias’.
+
+[330] P. 222: ‘Y teniendo presente que por lo que mira a este punto
+resulta de los informes que solo hablan estos Indios su idioma natural,
+pero que no es prohibicion de los PP. Jesuitos, sino por el amor que
+tienen a su nativo lenguage pues en cada uno de los pueblos han
+establecido esculas de leer y escriber en lengua española, y que por
+este motivo se encuentra un numero grande de Indios muy habiles en
+escribir (dos de ellos etan copiando hora esto que yo escribo y de
+mejor letra que la mia).’ Also pp. 223-225, etc.
+
+[331] Brabo, ‘Coleccion de Documentos’, etc., p. 200.
+
+[332] ‘Y sobre todo, fuera de la America y libre de Secretaria y
+Consejo de Indias.’ Brabo, ‘Coleccion de Documentos’, etc.: Letter of
+Bucareli to Aranda, p. 231.
+
+[333] Brabo, ‘Coleccion de Documentos’, etc., p. 280.
+
+[334] The alcaldes of Indian villages usually have a long cane with a
+silver head, like those formerly carried by footmen, as a badge of
+their office. In remote places I have seen them, with their canes in
+their hands, a battered tall hat upon their heads, a linen jacket and
+trousers, and barefooted, riding on an ox, and thought that they served
+to maintain the majesty of the law quite as well as if they had had
+stuff gowns, horsehair wigs, and had been seated on a sack of wool.
+
+[335] Vol. iii., book v., cap. viii., p. 130 (‘Ensayo de la Historia
+Civil del Paraguay’, etc.): ‘Los Caciques y corregidores que
+acompañaban a Bucareli, habian sido alhagados por todos los artificios
+de sugestion. Esto á la verdad, no era mas que coronar las victimas,
+que se destinaban al sacrificio.’
+
+[336] Chapter IX.
+
+[337] Brabo, p. 304.
+
+[338] Brabo, ‘Coleccion de Documentos’, p. 320: ‘Y porque estoy
+informado que muchos Indios de los que se habian ausentado con las
+tropas Portuguesas, y que han residido por gran tiempo en el Rio Pardo,
+Viamont, y otras partes se han restituido a sus pueblos, ciudaran . . .
+de que todos estos con sus families seran traslados a los mas
+interiores o distantes de aquellas fronteras por no ser conveniente se
+mantengan en ellas o sus inmediaciones, y asi en lo sucesivo lo
+ejecutaran . . . con los Indios que se restituyan, sin dejar alguno,
+para evitar todo motivo de communicacion que puede ser muy
+prejudicial.’
+
+[339] ‘No conviene dejarles una entera libertad, que seria por extremo
+fatal y prejudicial á sus intereses pues la astucia y sagacidad de los
+españoles triumfaria facilemente de su rudeza.’
+
+[340] Brabo, ‘Bucareli’s Instructions’, p. 327: ‘Que el commercio de
+los españoles ha de ser libre.’
+
+[341] The Paraguayan Jesuits were allowed to take away all their
+personal property, and it appears that they did so.
+
+[342] Cayetano Ibarguen had only two, P. Lorenzo Balda three, and so on
+(Brabo, ‘Coleccion de Documentos’, p. 388).
+
+[343] So late as 1818 Rengger, in his ‘Essai Historique sur la
+Révolution du Paraguay’, etc., talks of arriving in Buenos Ayres ‘après
+un court trajet de soixante jours.’ From thence to Corrientes he took
+seven weeks, but does not say if the passage was considered short or
+long.
+
+[344] Funes, ‘Ensayo Critico de la Historia Civil del Paraguay’, etc.;
+Don Feliz de Azara, ‘Descripcion y Historia del Paraguay’, etc.; and
+also ‘Memorias sobre el estado rural del Rio de la Plata en 1801’.
+
+[345] ‘Ensayo de la Historia Civil’, vol. i., book ii., p. 341.
+
+[346] Funes, ‘Ensayo de la Historia Civil’, etc., book v., cap. viii.,
+p. 133.
+
+[347] Brabo, ‘Inventarios’, Appendix, p. 669.
+
+[348] Demersay (‘Histoire du Paraguay’), writing in 1847, says of the
+mission of La Cruz he saw a few trees still standing in a miserable
+state.
+
+[349] Funes, ‘Ensayo de la Historia Civil’, etc., book vi., cap. viii.,
+p. 395.
+
+[350] Hudson, ‘Naturalist in La Plata’.
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 1479 ***
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+<body>
+<div>*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 1479 ***</div>
+
+<h1>A Vanished Arcadia</h1>
+
+<h3>Being Some Account of the Jesuits in Paraguay<br/>
+1607 to 1767</h3>
+
+<h2 class="no-break">By R. B. Cunninghame Graham</h2>
+
+<p class="center">
+Author of “Mogreb-El-Acksa”, etc.<br/>
+</p>
+
+<p class="center">
+With a <a href="#map">Map</a>
+</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p class="center">
+I DEDICATE<br/>
+THIS SHORT ACCOUNT OF
+</p>
+
+
+<h3>A VANISHED ARCADIA</h3>
+
+<p class="center">
+TO THE AUTHOR OF
+</p>
+
+<h4>‘SANTA TERESA, HER LIFE AND TIMES’,</h4>
+
+<p class="center">
+BEING CERTAIN THAT<br/>
+THE LIFE OF ALL SAINTS IS TO THEM AND US AN ARCADIA;<br/>
+UNKNOWN TO THEM AND TO US VANISHED WITH THEIR LIVES,<br/>
+YET STILL REMEMBERED, FITFULLY AS ARE THE JESUITS<br/>
+IN PARAGUAY, BY A FEW FAITHFUL,<br/>
+WHEN THE ANGELUS WAKES RECOLLECTION IN THE INDIANS’ HEARTS.<br/>
+BUT, THEN, THE ANGELUS (EVEN OF MEMORY)<br/>
+IS TO THE MOST PART OF MANKIND ONLY<br/>
+A JANGLING OF AN ANTIQUATED BELL.<br/>
+</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2>Preface</h2>
+
+<p>
+<i>Historicus nascitur, non fit.</i> I am painfully aware that neither my
+calling nor election in this matter are the least sure. Certain it is that in
+youth, when alone the historian or the horseman may be formed, I did little to
+fit myself for writing history. Wandering about the countries of which now I
+treat, I had almost as little object in my travels as a Gaucho of the outside
+‘camps’. I never took a note on any subject under heaven, nor kept a diary, by
+means of which, my youth departed and the countries I once knew so well
+transmogrified, I could, sitting beside the fire, read and enjoy the sadness of
+revisiting, in my mind’s eye, scenes that I now remember indistinctly as in a
+dream. I take it that he who keeps a journal of his doings, setting down day by
+day all that he does, with dates and names of places, their longitude and
+latitude duly recorded, makes for himself a meal of bitter-sweet; and that your
+truest dulcamara is to read with glasses the faded notes jotted down hurriedly
+in rain, in sun, in wind, in camps, by flooded rivers, and in the long and
+listless hours of heat—in fact, to see again your life, as it were, acted for
+you in some camera obscura, with the chief actor changed. But diaries, unless
+they be mere records of bare facts, must of necessity, as in their nature they
+are autobiographical, be false guides; so that, perhaps, I in my carelessness
+was not quite so unwise as I have often thought myself. Although I made no
+notes of anything, caring most chiefly for the condition of my horse, yet when
+I think on them, pampa and cordillera, virgin forest, the ‘passes’ of the
+rivers, approached by sandy paths, bordered by flowering and sweet-smelling
+trees, and most of all the deserted Jesuit Missions, half buried by the
+vigorous vegetation, and peopled but by a few white-clad Indians, rise up so
+clearly that, without the smallest faculty for dealing with that which I have
+undertaken, I am forced to write. Flowers, scents, the herds of horses, the
+ostriches, and the whole charm of that New World which those who saw it even a
+quarter of a century ago saw little altered from the remotest times, have
+remained clear and sharp, and will remain so with me to the end. So to the
+readers (if I chance to have them) of this short attempt to give some faint
+idea of the great Christian Commonwealth of the Jesuit Missions between the
+Paraná and Uruguay, I now address myself. He who attacks a subject quite fallen
+out of date, and still not old enough to give a man authority to speak upon it
+without the fear of contradiction, runs grave risk.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Gentle, indulgent reader, if so be that you exist in these the days of
+universal knowledge and self-sufficient criticism, I do not ask for your
+indulgence for the many errors which no doubt have slipped into this work.
+These, if you care to take the trouble, you can verify, and hold me up to
+shame. What I do crave is that you will approach the subject with an open mind.
+Your Jesuit is, as we know, the most tremendous wild-fowl that the world has
+known. ‘La guardia nera’ of the Pope, the order which has wrought so much
+destruction, the inventors of ‘Ciencia media’,<a href="#foot001">[1]</a> cradle
+from which has issued forth Molina, Suarez, and all those villains who, in the
+days in which the doctrine was unfashionable, decried mere faith, and took
+their stand on works—who in this land of preconceived opinion can spare it a
+good word? But, notwithstanding, even a Jansenist, if such be left, must yet
+admit the claim of Francis Xavier as a true, humble saint, and if the
+sour-faced sectary of Port Royale should refuse, all men of letters must
+perforce revere the writer of the hymn.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But into the whole question of the Jesuits I cannot enter, as it entails
+command of far more foot and half-foot words than I can muster up. Still, in
+America, and most of all in Paraguay, I hope to show the Order did much good,
+and worked amongst the Indians like apostles, receiving an apostle’s true
+reward of calumny, of stripes, of blows, and journeying hungry, athirst, on
+foot, in perils oft, from the great cataract of the Paraná to the recesses of
+the Tarumensian woods. Little enough I personally care for the political aspect
+of their commonwealth, or how it acted on the Spanish settlements; of whether
+or not it turned out profitable to the Court of Spain, or if the crimes and
+charges of ambition laid to the Jesuits’ account were false or true. My only
+interest in the matter is how the Jesuits’ rule acted upon the Indians
+themselves, and if it made them happy—more happy or less happy than those
+Indians who were directly ruled from Spain, or through the Spanish Governors of
+the viceroyalties. For theories of advancement, and as to whether certain
+arbitrary ideas of the rights of man, evolved in general by those who in their
+persons and their lives are the negation of all rights, I give a fico—yes, your
+fig of Spain—caring as little as did ancient Pistol for ‘palabras’, and holding
+that the best right that a man can have is to be happy after the way that
+pleases him the most. And that the Jesuits rendered the Indians happy is
+certain, though to those men who fudge a theory of mankind, thinking that
+everyone is forged upon their anvil, or run out of their own mould, after the
+fashion of a tallow dip (a theory which, indeed, the sameness of mankind
+renders at times not quite untenable), it seems absurd because the progress of
+the world has gone on other lines—lines which prolonged indefinitely would
+never meet those which the Jesuits drew. All that I know is I myself, in the
+deserted missions, five-and-twenty years ago often have met old men who spoke
+regretfully of Jesuit times, who cherished all the customs left by the company,
+and though they spoke at secondhand, repeating but the stories they had heard
+in youth, kept the illusion that the missions in the Jesuits’ time had been a
+paradise. Into the matter of the Jesuits’ motives I do not propose to enter,
+holding that the origin of motives is too deeply seated to be worth inquiry
+until one has more information about the human mind than even modern
+‘scientists’ seem able to impart. Yet it is certain the Jesuits in Paraguay had
+faith fit to remove all mountains, as the brief stories of their lives, so
+often ending with a rude field-cross by the corner of some forest, and the
+inscription ‘<i>hic occissus est</i>’ survive to show. Some men—such is the
+complexity of human nature—have undergone trials and persecutions for base
+motives, and it is open for anyone to say the Jesuits, as they were Jesuits,
+could do nothing good. Still, I believe that Father Ruiz Montoya—whose story I
+have told, how falteringly, and with how little justice to his greatness, none
+knows better than myself—was a good man—that is, a man without ulterior
+motives, and actuated but by his love to the poor Indians with whom he passed
+his life. To-day, when no one can see good in anything or anybody outside the
+somewhat beefy pale of the Anglo-Saxon race, I do not hope that such a mere
+dabbler in the great mystery of history as I am myself will for an instant
+change one preconceived opinion; for I am well aware that speeches based on
+facts are impotent in popular assemblies to change a single vote.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It is an article of Anglo-Saxon faith that all the Spanish colonies were
+mal-administered, and all the Spanish conquerors bloodthirsty butchers, whose
+sole delight was blood. This, too, from the members of a race who . . .; but
+‘In the multitude of the greyhounds is the undoing of the hare.’ Therefore, I
+ask those who imagine that all Spaniards at the conquest of America were
+ruffians, to consider the career of Alvar Nuñez, who also struts through his
+brief chapter in the pages of my most imperfect book. Still, I admit men of the
+stamp of Alvar Nuñez are most rare, and were still rarer in the sixteenth
+century; and to find many of the Ruiz Montoya brand, Diogenes would have needed
+a lantern fitted with electric light. In the great controversy which engaged
+the pens of many of the best writers of the world last century, after the
+Jesuits were expelled from Spain and her colonial possessions (then almost half
+the world), it will be found that amongst all the mud so freely flung about,
+the insults given and received, hardly anyone but a few ex-Jesuits had any harm
+to say of the doings of the Order during its long rule in Paraguay. None of the
+Jesuits were ever tried; no crimes were charged against them; even the reasons
+for their expulsion were never given to the world at large. Certain it is that
+but a few years after their final exit from the missions between the Uruguay
+and Paraná all was confusion. In twenty years most of the missions were
+deserted, and before thirty years had passed no vestige of their old prosperity
+remained.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The semi-communism which the Jesuits had introduced was swept away, and the
+keen light of free and vivifying competition (which beats so fiercely upon the
+bagman’s paradise of the economists) reigned in its stead. The revenues
+declined,<a href="#foot002">[2]</a> all was corruption, and, as the Governor,
+Don Juan José Vertiz, writes to the Viceroy,<a href="#foot003">[3]</a> the
+secular priests sent by the Government were brawlers, drunkards, and strikers,
+carrying arms beneath their cloaks; that robbery was rife; and that the Indians
+daily deserted and returned by hundreds to the woods.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+All the reports of riches amassed in Paraguay by the Jesuits, after the
+expulsion of their order proved to be untrue; nothing of any consequence was
+found in any of the towns, although the Jesuits had had no warning of their
+expulsion, and had no time for preparation or for concealment of their gold.
+Although they stood to the Indians almost in the light of gods, and had control
+of an armed force larger by far than any which the temporal power could have
+disposed of, they did not resist, but silently departed from the rich
+territories which their care and industry had formed.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Rightly or wrongly, but according to their lights, they strove to teach the
+Indian population all the best part of the European progress of the times in
+which they lived, shielding them sedulously from all contact with
+commercialism, and standing between them and the Spanish settlers, who would
+have treated them as slaves. These were their crimes. For their ambitions, who
+shall search the human heart, or say what their superiors in Europe may, or
+perhaps may not, have had in view? When all is said and done, and now their
+work is over, and all they worked for lost (as happens usually with the efforts
+of disinterested men), what crime so terrible can men commit as to stand up for
+near upon two centuries against that slavery which disgraced every American
+possession of the Spanish<a href="#foot004">[4]</a> crown? Nothing is bad
+enough for those who dare to speak the truth, and those who put their theories
+into practice are a disgrace to progressive and adequately taxed communities.
+Nearly two hundred years they strove, and now their territories, once so
+populous and so well cultivated, remain, if not a desert, yet delivered up to
+that fierce-growing, subtropical American plant life which seems as if it
+fights with man for the possession of the land in which it grows. For a brief
+period those Guaranís gathered together in the missions, ruled over by their
+priests, treated like grown-up children, yet with a kindness which attached
+them to their rulers, enjoyed a half-Arcadian, half-monastic life, reaching to
+just so much of what the world calls civilization as they could profit by and
+use with pleasure to themselves. A commonwealth where money was unknown to the
+majority of the citizens, a curious experiment by self-devoted men, a sort of
+dropping down a diving-bell in the flood of progress to keep alive a population
+which would otherwise soon have been suffocated in its muddy waves, was doomed
+to failure by the very nature of mankind. Foredoomed to failure, it has
+disappeared, leaving nothing of a like nature now upon the earth. The Indians,
+too, have vanished, gone to that limbo which no doubt is fitted for them.
+Gentle, indulgent reader, if you read this book, doubt not an instant that
+everything that happens happens for the best; doubt not, for in so doing you
+would doubt of all you see—our life, our progress, and your own infallibility,
+which at all hazards must be kept inviolate. Therefore in my imperfect sketch I
+have not dwelt entirely on the strict concatenation (after the Bradshaw
+fashion) of the hard facts of the history of the Jesuits. I have not set down
+too many dates, for the setting down of dates in much profusion is, after all,
+an <i>ad captandum</i> appeal to the suffrages of those soft-headed creatures
+who are styled serious men.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Wandering along the by-paths of the forests which fringe the mission towns, and
+set them, so to speak, in the hard tropical enamel of green foliage, on which
+time has no lien, and but the arts of all-destroying man are able to deface, I
+may have chanced upon some petty detail which may serve to pass an hour away.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A treatise of a forgotten subject by a labourer unskilled, and who, moreover,
+by his very task challenges competition with those who have written on the
+theme, with better knowledge, and perhaps less sympathy; a pother about some
+few discredited and unremembered priests; details about half-savages, who
+‘quoi! ne portaient pas des haults de chausses’; the recollections of long
+silent rides through forest paths, ablaze with flowers, and across which the
+tropic birds darted like atoms cut adrift from the apocalypse; a hotch-potch,
+salmagundi, olla podrida, or sea-pie of sweet and bitter, with perhaps the
+bitter ruling most, as is the way when we unpack our reminiscences—yes, gentle
+and indulgent reader, that’s the humour of it.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+          R. B. Cunninghame Graham.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Gartmore,<br/>  <i>March 30, 1900.</i>
+</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2>Contents</h2>
+
+<p class="noindent">
+<a href="#chap01">Chapter I</a><br/>
+Early history—State of the country—Indian races—Characteristics of the
+different tribes—Dobrizhoffer’s book—Various expeditions—Sebastian Cabot—Don
+Pedro de Mendoza—Alvar Nuñez—His expedition and its results—Other leaders and
+preachers—Founding of the first mission of the Society of Jesus<br/><br/>
+</p>
+
+<p class="noindent">
+<a href="#chap02">Chapter II</a><br/>
+Early days of the missions—New settlements founded—Relations of Jesuits with
+Indians and Spanish colonists—Destruction of missions by the Mamelucos—Father
+Maceta—Padre Antonio Ruiz de Montoya—His work and influence—Retreat of the
+Jesuits down the Paraná<br/><br/>
+</p>
+
+<p class="noindent">
+<a href="#chap03">Chapter III</a><br/>
+Spain and Portugal in South America—Enmity between Brazilians and
+Argentines—Expulsion of Jesuits from Paraguay—Struggles with the natives—Father
+Mendoza killed—Death of Father Montoya<br/><br/>
+</p>
+
+<p class="noindent">
+<a href="#chap04">Chapter IV</a><br/>
+Don Bernardino de Cardenas, Bishop of Paraguay—His labours as apostolic
+missionary—His ambitions and cunning—Pretensions to saintliness—His attempts to
+acquire supreme power—Quarrels between Cardenas and Don Gregorio, the temporal
+Governor<br/><br/>
+</p>
+
+<p class="noindent">
+<a href="#chap05">Chapter V</a><br/>
+Renewal of the feud between the Bishop and Don Gregorio—Wholesale
+excommunications in Asuncion—Cardenas in 1644 formulates his celebrated charges
+against the Jesuits—The Governor, after long negotiations and much display of
+force, ultimately succeeds in driving out the Bishop—For three years Cardenas
+is in desperate straits—In 1648 Don Gregorio is suddenly dismissed, Cardenas
+elects himself Governor, and for a short time becomes supreme in Asuncion—The
+Jesuits are forced to leave the town and to flee to Corrientes—A new Governor
+is appointed in Asuncion—He defeats Cardenas on the field of battle—The latter
+is deprived of his power, and dies soon after as Bishop of La Paz<br/><br/>
+</p>
+
+<p class="noindent">
+<a href="#chap06">Chapter VI</a><br/>
+Description of the mission territory and towns founded by the Jesuits—Their
+endeavours to attract the Indians—Religious feasts and processions—Agricultural
+and commercial organizations<br/><br/>
+</p>
+
+<p class="noindent">
+<a href="#chap07">Chapter VII</a><br/>
+Causes of the Jesuits’ unpopularity—Description of the lives and habits of the
+priests—Testimony in favour of the missions—Their opposition to slavery—Their
+system of administration<br/><br/>
+</p>
+
+<p class="noindent">
+<a href="#chap08">Chapter VIII</a><br/>
+Don José de Antequera—Appoints himself Governor of Asuncion—Unsettled state of
+affairs in the town—He is commanded to relinquish his illegal power—He refuses,
+and resorts to arms—After some success he is defeated and condemned to be
+executed—He is shot on his way to the scaffold—Renewed hatred against the
+Jesuits—Their labours among the Indians of the Chaco<br/><br/>
+</p>
+
+<p class="noindent">
+<a href="#chap09">Chapter IX</a><br/>
+The Spanish and Portuguese attempt to force new laws on the Indians—The Indians
+revolt against them—The hopeless struggle goes on for eight years—Ruin of the
+missions<br/><br/>
+</p>
+
+<p class="noindent">
+<a href="#chap10">Chapter X</a><br/>
+Position of the Jesuits in 1761—Decree for their expulsion sent from
+Spain—Bucareli sent to suppress the colleges and drive out the Jesuits—They
+submit without resistance—After two hundred years they are expelled from
+Paraguay—The country under the new rule—The system of government practically
+unchanged<br/><br/>
+</p>
+
+<p class="noindent">
+<a href="#chap11">Chapter XI</a><br/>
+Conclusion<br/><br/>
+</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<h1>A Vanished Arcadia</h1>
+
+<h3>Being Some Account of the Jesuits in Paraguay<br/>
+1607 to 1767</h3>
+
+<hr />
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a name="chap01"></a>Chapter I</h2>
+
+<p class="letter">
+Early history—State of the country—Indian races—Characteristics of the
+different tribes—Dobrizhoffer’s book—Various expeditions—Sebastian Cabot—Don
+Pedro de Mendoza—Alvar Nuñez—His expedition and its results—Other leaders and
+preachers—Founding of the first mission of the Society of Jesus
+</p>
+
+<p>
+With the exception of the French Revolution, perhaps no event caused so much
+general controversy at the end of the eighteenth century as the expulsion of
+the Jesuits from Spain and Portugal and their colonial possessions. As no
+definite charges were ever brought, at least in Spain, against the members of
+the Company of Jesus (King Charles III. having kept the reasons <i>ocultas y
+reservadas</i> and the proofs <i>privilegiados</i>), curiosity is to some
+extent not satisfied as to the real reason of their expulsion from the Spanish
+possessions in America.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It is almost impossible to understand nowadays the feelings which possessed the
+average man in regard to the Jesuits from the middle of the last century till a
+relatively short time ago. All the really great work done by the Society of
+Jesus seemed to have been forgotten, and every vulgar fable which it was
+possible to invent to their prejudice found ready acceptance upon every side.
+Nothing was too absurd to be believed. From the calumnies of the Jansenists to
+the follies of Eugène Sue the mass of accusation, invective, and innuendo kept
+on increasing in intensity. Indiscriminate abuse and unreasoning hatred, mixed
+with fear, seem to have possessed all minds. Even Pascal confesses (in a
+postscript to the ninth Provincial Letter) that ‘after having written my letter
+I read the works of Fathers Barry and Binet.’ If such a man as Pascal could be
+so grossly unfair as to write a criticism on works which he had not read, what
+can be expected from the non-judicial and uncritical public which takes all
+upon trust?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+From Japan to the interior of Bolivia there is scarcely a country in which the
+Jesuits have not laboured assiduously, and in which they have not shed their
+blood freely without hope of reward, yet it would require much time and a
+lengthy catalogue to enumerate the list of satirical and calumnious works which
+have appeared against them in almost every language in Europe. Of these,
+perhaps the most celebrated is the well-known ‘Monarquia de los Solipsos’,<a
+href="#foot005">[5]</a> by Padre Melchior Inshoffer, an ex-Jesuit, who
+describes the company in the worst possible terms. It is interesting chiefly on
+account of the portraits of well-known people of the time (1615 to 1648), as
+Pope Clement VIII., Francisco Suarez, Claudio Aquaviva, and others, veiled
+under easily distinguishable pseudonyms. The object of the writer, as the title
+indicates, is to show that the Jesuits endeavoured to turn all to their own
+profit. In this, if it was the case, they do not seem to have been greatly
+different from every other associated body of men, whether lay or clerical. The
+celebrated Spanish proverb, ‘Jesuita y se ahorca, cuenta le hace’, meaning,
+Even if a Jesuit is hung he gets some good out of it, may just as well be
+applied to members of other learned professions as to the Jesuits.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The world has rarely persecuted any body of men conspicuous by its poverty, or
+if it has done so has rarely persecuted them for long. The Inquisition of
+Spain, violent against the wealthy Jews and comfortable Moriscos, took little
+notice of the Gipsies; but, then, ‘Pobre como cuerpo de Gitano’ was and is a
+common saying in Spain.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+As in the case of the Templars, persecution only began against the Jesuits when
+it became worth while to persecute them. Ignatius Loyola, Francisco Xavier, and
+Diego Lainez, as long as they confined themselves to preaching and to teaching,
+were safe enough. Even the annals of theological strife, bloodthirsty and
+discreditable to humanity as they are, contain few examples of persecutors such
+as Calvin or Torquemada, to whom, ruthless as they were in their savage and
+narrow malignity and zeal for what they thought the truth, no suspicion of
+venal motives is attributed.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Of the Jesuits’ intrigues, adventures, rise and fall in Europe, much may be
+said in attack or in extenuation; but it is not the intention of the present
+work to deal with this aspect of the question. It was in Spanish America, and
+especially in Paraguay and Bolivia, where the policy of the Company in regard
+to savage nations was most fully developed, as it was only the Jesuits who ever
+succeeded in reclaiming any large number of the nomad or semi-nomad tribes of
+those countries.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Many excellent works in French, and the celebrated ‘Christianismo Felice nel
+Paraguay’ of the Abbate Muratori in Italian, certainly exist. But neither
+Father Charlevoix, the French historian of the missions, nor Muratori was ever
+in Paraguay, and both their books contain the faults and mistakes of men,
+however excellent and well intentioned, writing of countries of which they were
+personally ignorant. Both give a good account of the customs and regimen of the
+missions, but both seem to have believed too readily fabulous accounts of the
+flora and fauna of Paraguay.<a href="#foot006">[6]</a> The fact of having
+listened too readily to a fable about an unknown animal in no way detracts from
+the general veracity of an author of the beginning of the eighteenth century,
+for in all other respects except natural history Charlevoix keeps within the
+bounds of probability, though of course as a Jesuit he holds a brief for the
+doings of the Company in Paraguay. Muratori is more rarely led into
+extravagances, but is concerned in the main with the religious side of the
+Jesuits, as the title of his book indicates.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Many other French writers, as Raynal, Montesquieu, and Voltaire, have treated
+of Paraguay under Jesuit rule, but their writings are founded on hearsay
+evidence. A German, Father Dobrizhoffer, stands alone.<a
+href="#foot007">[7]</a> His delightful ‘History of the Abipones, an Equestrian
+People of Paraguay’, is perhaps the most charming book dealing with the
+subject. A simple and easy style, a keen habit of observation, long
+acquaintance with the country, a zeal for the conversion of the infidel, not
+only to Christianity, but to a more comfortable mode of life, to which he adds
+a faith sufficient to move the Cordillera of the Andes, but at the same time
+restricted by a common-sense and veracity not always observable in religious
+writers, render Dobrizhoffer a personal friend after the perusal of his
+writings.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+English is singularly barren in regard to the Jesuits in Paraguay. Father
+Falconer, an English Jesuit, has left a curious and interesting book (printed
+at Hereford in 1774), but he treats exclusively of what is now the province of
+Buenos Ayres, the Falkland Islands, and of Patagonia. As an Englishman and a
+Jesuit (a somewhat rare combination in the eighteenth century), and as one who
+doubtless knew many of the Paraguayan priests, his testimony would have been
+most important, especially as he was a man of great information, much
+education, an intrepid traveller, and, moreover, only entered the Company of
+Jesus at a comparatively advanced age.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It is in Spanish, or in Latin by Spanish authors, that the greater portion of
+the contemporary histories and accounts are to be found.<a
+href="#foot008">[8]</a> Literatures, like other things, have their times of
+fashion. At one time a knowledge of Spanish was as requisite as some tincture
+of French is at present, and almost as universal. Men from Germany, England,
+and Holland who met in a foreign country communicated in that language. In the
+early portion of the century Ticknor, Prescott, and Washington Irving rendered
+Spanish literature fashionable to some degree.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Later the historical researches of Sir William Stirling Maxwell drew some
+attention to it. To-day hardly any literature of Europe is so little studied in
+England. Still leaving apart the purely literary treasures of the language, it
+is in Spanish, and almost alone in Spanish, that the early history of America
+is to be found.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+After the struggle for independence which finished about 1825, some interest
+was excited in the Spanish-American countries, stimulated by the writings of
+Humboldt; but when it became apparent that on the whole those countries could
+never be occupied by Northern Europeans, interest in them died out except for
+purposes connected with the Stock Exchange. Yet there is a charm which attaches
+to them which attaches to no other countries in the world. It was there that
+one of the greatest dramas, and certainly the greatest adventure in which the
+human race has engaged, took place. What Africa has been for the last twenty
+years, Spanish America was three hundred years ago, the difference being that,
+whereas modern adventure in Africa goes on under full observation, and deals in
+the main with absolutely uncivilized peoples, the conquest of South America was
+invested with all the charm of novelty, and brought the conquerors into contact
+with at least two peoples almost as advanced in most of the arts of
+civilization as they were themselves.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+When first Sebastian Cabot and Solis ascended the Paraná, they found that the
+Guaranís of Paraguay had extended in no instance to the western shore of either
+of those rivers. The western banks were inhabited then, as now, by the
+wandering Indians of the still not entirely explored territory of the Gran
+Chaco. Chaco<a href="#foot009">[9]</a> is a Quichua Indian word meaning
+‘hunting’ or ‘hunting-ground’, and it is said that after the conquest of Peru
+the Indian tribes which had been recently subjugated by the Incas took refuge
+in this huge domain of forest and of swamp.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Be that as it may, the Chaco Indians of to-day, comprising the remnants of the
+Lulis, Tobas, Lenguas, Mocobiós, and others, are almost as savage as when first
+we hear of them in the pages of Alvar Nuñez and Hulderico Schmidel. These
+tribes the Jesuits on many occasions attempted to civilize, but almost entirely
+without success, as the long record of the martyrdom of Jesuit missionaries in
+the Chaco proves, as well as the gradual abandonment of their missions there,
+towards the second half of the eighteenth century.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Certain it is that at various places in the Chaco, in the quaint old maps the
+Jesuits have left us, one reads ‘Mission de Santa Cruz de los Vilelas’,
+‘Mission de la Concepcion de los Frontones’, and others; but much more
+frequently their maps are studded with crosses, and some such legend as ‘Hic
+occisi sunt PP. Antonius Salinus et Petrus Ortiz Zarate’.<a
+href="#foot010">[10]</a> It was only when the Jesuits encountered the more
+peaceful Guaranís that they met with real success.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+What was the nature of their success, how durable it was, what were the reasons
+which caused the expulsion of the order from America, and especially from
+Paraguay, and what has been the result upon the remainder of the Indians, it is
+my object to endeavour to explain.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A long residence in the river Plate, together with two visits to Paraguay, in
+one of which I saw almost all the remnants of the Paraguayan missions and a few
+of those situated in the province of Corrientes, and in the Brazilian province
+of Rio Grande do Sul, have given me some personal acquaintance with the
+subject.<a href="#foot011">[11]</a>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The actual condition of the rich district of Misiones (Paraguay) at the time I
+visited it, shortly after the conclusion of the great war between Paraguay and
+Brazil in 1870, does not enable me to speak with authority on the condition of
+communities, the guiding spirits of which were expelled as far back as the year
+1767. The actual buildings of the missions, the churches in a dismantled state,
+have indeed survived; in many instances the tall date-palms the Jesuits planted
+still wave over them. Generally the college was occupied by the Indian Alcalde,
+who came out to meet the visitor on a horse if he possessed one, with as much
+silver about the bridle and stirrups as he could afford, clothed in white, with
+a cloak of red baize, a large <i>jipi-japa</i> hat, and silver spurs buckled on
+his naked feet. If he had never left the mission, he talked with wonder and
+respect of the times of the Jesuits, and at the <i>oracion</i> knelt down to
+pray wherever the sound of the angelus might catch him. His children before
+bedtime knelt all in a row to ask his blessing. If he had been to Asuncion, he
+probably remarked that the people under those accursed priests were naught but
+animals and slaves, and launched into some disquisition he had heard in the
+solitary café which Asuncion then boasted. In the latter case, after much of
+the rights of man and the duties of hospitality, he generally presented you
+with a heavy bill for Indian corn and <i>pindo</i><a href="#foot012">[12]</a>
+which your horse had eaten. In the former, usually he bade you go with God,
+and, if you spoke of payment, said: ‘Well, send me a book of Hours when you get
+to Asuncion.’
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Of Indians, hardly any were left to judge of, for in the villages in which,
+according to the reports furnished to Bucareli, the Viceroy of Buenos Ayres at
+the time of the expulsion of the Jesuits, the population numbered in the thirty
+towns of the missions one hundred and twenty thousand,<a
+href="#foot013">[13]</a> a population of at most twenty thousand was to be
+found. On every side the powerful vegetation had covered up the fields. On
+ruined church and chapel, and on broken tower, the lianas climbed as if on
+trees, creeping up the belfries, and throwing great masses of scarlet and
+purple flowers out of the apertures where once were hung the bells. In the
+thick jungles a few half-wild cattle still were to be found. The vast
+<i>estancias</i>, where once the Jesuits branded two and three thousand calves
+a year, and from whence thousands of mules went forth to Chile and Bolivia,
+were all neglected. Horses were scarce and poor, crops few and indifferent, and
+the plantations made by the Jesuits of the tree (<i>Ilex Paraguayensis</i>)
+from which is made the <i>yerba maté</i>, were all destroyed.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In the vast forests, stretching to the Salto de Guayrá, a few scattered tribes,
+known as Caaguas, roamed through the thickets, or encamped upon the streams. In
+the thirty towns, once full of life and stir, in every one of which there was a
+church, finer, as an old Spanish writer says, than any in Buenos Ayres, there
+was naught but desolation and despair. The Indians either had returned into the
+woods, been killed in the ceaseless revolutionary wars, or had been absorbed
+into the Gaucho populations of Corrientes, Rio Grande, Entre Rios, and of Santa
+Fé.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It may be that all Indian races are destined to disappear if they come into
+contact with Europeans; certainly, experience would seem to confirm the
+supposition. The policy of the Jesuits, however, was based on isolation of
+their missions, and how this might have worked is matter at least for
+speculation. It was on account of the isolation which they practised that it
+was possible for the extravagant calumnies which were circulated as to their
+rule and riches to gain belief. It was on account of isolation that the first
+conflicts arose betwixt them and the authorities, both clerical and lay. That
+the Jesuits were more highly esteemed than the other religious orders in
+Spanish America in the seventeenth century, the saying current in those days,
+‘Los demas van á uña, los Jesuitas á una’—<i>i.e.</i>, The others get all they
+can, but the Jesuits have one aim (the conversion of the Indians)—seems to
+show.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It is not my purpose to deal with the probable reasons which induced their
+expulsion in Europe. Suffice it to say that, whatever crimes or misdemeanours
+they were guilty of, they were never called on to answer before any tribunals,
+and that in many instances they were treated, especially in Portugal, with
+great cruelty and injustice.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The burning, at the age of eighty, of the unfortunate Malagrida in Lisbon under
+the auspices of Pombal, for a book which it seems improbable he could have
+written in prison at so great an age, and which, moreover, was never brought
+into court, only supposed extracts from it being read, may serve as an example.
+In order clearly to understand the position of the Jesuits in America, and
+especially in Paraguay and Bolivia, it is necessary to glance briefly at the
+history of the first conquest of the river Plate.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The discovery of America opened up to Europe, and especially to Spain,
+opportunities for expansion of national territory and individual advancement
+which no epoch, either before or since, has equalled. From a cluster of small
+States, struggling for existence against a powerful enemy on their own soil, in
+a few years Spain became the greatest empire of the world. The result was that
+a spirit of adventure and a desire to grow rich speedily possessed all classes.
+In addition to this, every Spaniard in America during the first few years of
+the conquest seemed to consider himself, to some extent, not only as a
+conqueror, but also as a missionary.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Now, missionaries and conquerors are men, on the whole, more imbued with their
+own importance and sanctity, and less disposed to consider consequences, than
+almost any other classes of mankind. The conjunction of the two in one disposed
+the <i>conquistadores</i> of America to imagine that, no matter how cruel or
+outrageous their treatment of the Indians was, they atoned for all by the
+introduction of what they considered the blessing of the knowledge of the true
+faith. It will be seen at once that, if one can determine with accuracy which
+of the many ‘faiths’ preached about the world is actually the true faith, a man
+who is in possession of it is acting properly in endeavouring to diffuse it.
+The meanest soldier in the various armies which left Spain to conquer America
+seems to have had no doubt about the matter.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Bernal Diaz del Castillo, who, as he himself relates, came to America at the
+age of eighteen, and therefore could have had little previous opportunity of
+studying theology, and who, moreover, was unfitted to do so by the want of
+knowledge of Latin, to which he himself confesses, yet at the end of his
+history of the conquest of Mexico, one of the most interesting books ever
+written, has the following passage:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+‘But it is to be noted that, after God, it was we, the real conquerors, who
+discovered them [the Indians] and conquered them; and from the first we took
+away their idols, and taught them our holy doctrine, and to us is due the
+reward and credit of it all, before any other people, even though they be
+churchmen: for when the beginning is good, the middle and ending is good, which
+the curious [<i>i.e.</i>, attentive] reader may see in the Christian polity and
+justice which we showed them in New Spain.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+‘And I will leave the matter, and tell the other benefits which, after God, by
+our agency, came to the natives of New Spain.’<a href="#foot014">[14]</a>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+One would imagine, on reading the above extract, Bernal Diaz had never killed
+an Indian in his life, and that he had sacrificed his prospects in coming to
+Mexico solely to introduce ‘a Christian polity and justice’ amongst the
+inhabitants. Yet he was no hypocrite, but a stout sagacious soldier, even
+kindly, according to his lights, and with a love of animals uncommon in a
+Spaniard, for he has preserved the names and qualities of all the horses and
+mares which came over in the fleet from the Havana with Cortes.<a
+href="#foot015">[15]</a> The phrase, <i>despues de Dios</i> (after God) occurs
+repeatedly in the writings of almost all the <i>conquistadores</i> of America.
+Having, after God, conquered America, the first action of the conquerors was to
+set about making their fortunes. In those countries which produced gold and
+silver, as Mexico and Peru, they worked the mines by the labour of the Indians,
+the cruelties and hardships being so great that, in a letter of Philip II. to
+the Come de Chinchon, the Viceroy of Peru, dated Madrid, April 30, 1639,
+written fifty years after the discovery, he says: ‘These Indians flee, become
+ill, and die, and have begun to diminish greatly in number, and they will be
+finished soon unless an efficient remedy is provided shortly.’
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In Paraguay there were no mines, but there were other methods of extracting
+money from the Indians. At the first conquest Paraguay was not the little
+country bounded on the west by the Paraguay, on the south by the Paraná, on the
+north by the Aquidaban, and on the east by Sierra of Mbaracavu, as it is at
+present. On the contrary, it embraced almost all that immense territory known
+to-day as the Argentine Confederation, some of the Republic of Uruguay, and a
+great portion of Brazil, embracing much of the provinces of Misiones, Rio
+Grande do Sul, Paraná, and Matto Grosso, as well as Paraguay itself. How the
+little country, twelve hundred miles from the sea, came to give its name to
+such an enormous territory, and to have the seat of government at Asuncion,
+demands some explanation. Peru and Chile were discovered and occupied some time
+before the eastern side of South America. Their riches naturally drew great
+attention to them; but the voyage, first to Cartagena de Indias, and then
+across the isthmus, and the re-embarkation again on the Pacific, were both
+costly and arduous. It had been the ambition of all explorers to discover some
+river which would lead from the Atlantic to the mines of Peru and what is now
+Bolivia, then known as Alta Peru. Of course, this might have been achieved by
+ascending the Amazon, especially after the adventurous descent of it by
+Orellana, of which Fray Gaspar de Carbajal has left so curious a description;
+but, whether on account of the distance or for some other reason, it never
+seems to have been attempted.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In 1526 Sebastian Cabot left Spain with three small vessels and a caravel for
+the object of reaching the Moluccas or Spice Islands. It was his purpose to
+reach them through the Straits of Magellan. Being compelled by want of supplies
+to abandon his route, he entered a broad estuary, and ascended it under the
+impression that he had discovered another channel to the Pacific. He soon found
+his mistake, and began to explore the surrounding country. Fifteen years
+before, with the same object, Juan de Solis had entered the same estuary. On
+the island of Martin Garcia he was killed by a Chana Indian, and his expedition
+returned home. Hearing that there was much silver at the head-waters, he had
+called it the Rio de la Plata. If we take the head-waters of the river Plate to
+be situated in Bolivia, there certainly was much silver there; but Cabot was
+unaware that the head-waters were above two thousand miles from the estuary,
+and he was not destined to come near them. He did go as far as a point on the
+river Caracara, in what is now the province of Santa Fé, and there he built a
+fort which he named Espiritu Santo, the first Spanish settlement in that part
+of America. Whilst at Espiritu Santo, several exploring parties were sent to
+scour the country. One of them, under a soldier of the name of Cesar, never
+returned. Tradition, always eager to make up to history for its want of
+interest, asserted that after marching for years they reached a city. Perhaps
+it was the mystic Trapalanda of which the Gauchos used to discourse at night
+when seated round a fire of bones upon the pampa. Perhaps some other, for
+enchanted cities and Eldorados were plentiful in those days in America,
+alternating with occasional empires, as that of Puytita, near the Laguna de los
+Xarayes, Manoa, and the Ciudad de los Cesares, supposed to be situated near
+Arauco in the Chilian Andes. However, one of the party actually returned after
+years, and related his adventures to Ruy Diaz de Guzman,<a
+href="#foot016">[16]</a> the first historian of Paraguay. Thus it was that the
+stream of adventurers was ever seeking for a channel to the mines of Peru from
+the Atlantic coast. Cabot appears to have ascended the Paraná to the island of
+Apipé, and then, returning, entered the river Paraguay. Having ascended past
+what is now Asuncion, the capital of Paraguay, Cabot encountered Indians from
+the north who told him of the mines in Peru and in Bolivia, probably unaware
+that Cabot knew of them already. At this point, encouraged by what he heard, he
+gave the name of Rio de la Plata to what had previously been known either as La
+Mar Dulce or El Rio de Solis. Like most names which are wrongly given, it
+remained to testify to the want of knowledge of the giver. Four years after,
+Cabot returned to Spain, having failed to attract attention to his discoveries.
+In the face of the wealth which was pouring in from the Peruvian mines, another
+expedition started for the river Plate. Its General—for in Spain the title was
+used indifferently by land and sea—was Don Pedro de Mendoza, a gentleman of
+Guadix in Almeria, and a member of the household of Charles V.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Don Pedro had seen service in the Italian wars, and seems to have been a man of
+character and bravery, but wanting in the discretion and the necessary tact
+essential in the founder of a colony. In 1534 the expedition started,
+unfortunate almost from the first. In a ‘certain island’, as the historian of
+the expedition, Hulderico Schmidel, a German or Flemish soldier, calls Rio
+Janeiro, a dispute occurred between Don Pedro and his second in command, Juan
+de Osorio. At a court-martial held upon Osorio, Don Pedro appears to have let
+fall some remarks which Juan de Ayolas, the Alguazil Mayor (Chief Constable),
+seems to have taken up as an order for instant execution. This he performed
+upon the spot, plunging his dagger repeatedly into Osorio, or, as Hulderico
+Schmidel has it, ‘sewing him up with cuts’ (<i>cosiendole à puñaladas</i>).
+This murder or execution—for who shall tell when murder finishes and its legal
+counterpart begins?—rendered Don Pedro very unpopular with all the fleet; for,
+as Schmidel has it in his history,<a href="#foot017">[17]</a> ‘the soldiers
+loved Osorio.’ To be loved by the soldiers was the only chance a Spanish
+officer had in those times of holding his own. Both Schmidel and Bernal Diaz
+del Castillo, who had both been common soldiers, and who, curiously, both wrote
+histories, lose no occasion of vilifying officers who used the soldiers hardly.
+It is true that Bernal Diaz (who, unlike Schmidel, was a man of genius) does so
+with some discretion, and always apparently with reason. Schmidel, on the other
+hand, seems to have considered that any officer who interfered between the
+soldiers and the Indians was a tyrant, and hence his denunciation of Alvar
+Nuñez, under whom he served.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In 1535 the expedition entered the river Plate. Here Mendoza, with his usual
+want of judgment, pitched upon what is now the site of Buenos Ayres as the spot
+on which to found his colony. It would be difficult to select a more
+inconvenient place in which to found a town. The site of Buenos Ayres is almost
+level with the waters of the river Plate, which there are shallow—so shallow
+that large vessels could not approach nearer than ten to fifteen miles. Without
+a harbour, the anchorage was exposed to the full fury of the south-west gales,
+known as ‘pamperos’. However, if the site was bad the air was good; at least,
+it seems so, for a captain of the expedition exclaimed on landing, ‘Que buenos
+aires son estos!’ and hence the name. Here every sort of evil chance came on
+the newborn colony. The Pampa Indians, whom the historian Schmidel seems to
+have only known by their Guaraní name of Querandis, at first were friendly.
+After a little while they ceased to bring provisions, and the General sent out
+an expedition to compel them under his brother, Don Diego de Mendoza. It does
+not seem to have occurred to Don Pedro de Mendoza that, had the <i>cacique</i>
+of the Querandis landed in Spain, no one would have brought him provisions for
+a single day without receiving payment. However, Don Pedro<a
+href="#foot018">[18]</a> had come to America to introduce civilization and
+Christianity, and therefore, knowing, like Bernal Diaz and the other
+conquerors, his own moral worth, was justly indignant that after a day or two
+the Indians refused him more supplies. In the encounter which took place
+between the Spaniards and the Indians, Don Diego de Mendoza was slain, and with
+him several others. Here for the first time we hear of the bolas, or three
+stones united, like a Manxman’s legs, with strips of hide, with which, as
+Hulderico Schmidel tells us, the Indians caught the horses by the legs and
+threw them down. After this foretaste of European justice, the Indians besieged
+the newly-built town and brought it to great straits, so much so that, after
+three men had been hung for stealing a horse, in the morning it was discovered
+they had been cut down and eaten. In this desperate state Don Pedro despatched
+Juan de Ayolas to get supplies. He, having obtained some maize from the Timbu
+Indians, returned, leaving a hundred of his men in a little fort, called Corpus
+Christi, close to Espiritu Santo, the fort which Cabot had constructed. The
+friendliness of the Timbus induced Don Pedro to abandon Buenos Ayres and move
+to Corpus Christi. There he repaired with about five hundred men, all who
+remained of the two thousand six hundred and thirty with which he sailed from
+Cadiz. The horses he abandoned on the pampa; there they became the ancestors of
+the innumerable herds which at one time overspread the Argentine Republic from
+the Chaco to Patagonia, and whose descendants to this day stock the
+<i>estancias</i> of that country.<a href="#foot019">[19]</a>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+From Corpus Christi Juan de Ayolas was sent out to explore the river, and try
+to find the long-sought-for waterway to the Peruvian mines. He never reached
+Peru, and Corpus Christi never saw him return. Mendoza waited a year, and then
+returned to Spain, leaving his garrison with provisions for a year, the bread<a
+href="#foot020">[20]</a> ‘at the rate of (<i>á razon de</i>) a pound a day, and
+if they wanted more to get it for themselves.’ On the passage home he died
+insane. The pious were of opinion that it was a judgment on him for the murder
+of Don Juan Osorio. Before he embarked, Don Pedro had despatched a relative,
+Gonzalo de Mendoza, to Spain to bring provisions and recruits. Gonzalo, having
+obtained provisions in Brazil, returned to Corpus Christi; thence in company
+with Salazar de Espinosa he headed an expedition up the river in search of Juan
+de Ayolas, who had been appointed successor to Don Pedro. With them went
+Domingo Martinez de Irala, a man destined to play a great part in the conquest
+of Paraguay.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The expedition went up the Paraguay to a place near Fort Olimpo (21&deg; long.,
+58&deg; lat.) about a hundred leagues above Asuncion. Here they sent out
+exploring parties in all directions to seek Ayolas, but without success. Irala
+remained with one hundred men at Fort Olimpo. Gonzalo de Mendoza on his return,
+being attracted by the sight of a fine site for a town, landed, and on the
+fifteenth day of August, 1537, founded Asuncion. Here the Spaniards first met
+the Guaranís, who were destined in after-years to be the converts of the
+Jesuits, and be assembled by them in their famous missions.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+‘At the discovery of America,’ says Felix de Azara in his ‘Descripcion y
+Historia del Paraguay’, ‘the Guaranís were spread from the Guianas to the
+shores of the river Plate, and occupied all the islands of the Paraná extending
+up to latitude 20&deg; on the Paraguay, but without crossing either that river
+or the river Plate.’ They had also a few towns in the province of Chiquitos,
+and the nation of the Chiriguanás was an offshoot from them. In Brazil they
+were soon all either rendered slaves or so crossed with the African negro that
+the pure race has been almost entirely lost, though the language remains under
+the name of the Lingoa Geral, and many words from it have been introduced into
+Portuguese spoken by the Brazilians, as <i>capim</i>, grass; <i>caipira</i>,
+half-caste, etc. In fact, so great is the number of these words, idioms,
+phrases, and terms of speech derived from Guaraní, that Dr. Baptista de
+Almeida, in his preface to his grammar published at Rio Janeiro (1879),
+computes that there are more words derived from Guaraní than even from Arabic
+in the Portuguese spoken in Brazil.<a href="#foot021">[21]</a> The Guaranís in
+Brazil were known either as Tupis, from the word <i>tupy</i>,<a
+href="#foot022">[22]</a> savage, or Tupinambás, from <i>tupynambá</i>,
+literally, the savage or indigenous men.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Jean de Lery, the well-known Huguenot pastor and friend of Calvin, passed a
+year on the coast of Brazil about 1558, having accompanied the expedition of
+the famous Villegagnau. In his book (‘Histoire d’un Voyage faict en la Terre du
+Brezil’) he always refers to the Indians as Toupinaubaoults, and has preserved
+many curious details of them before they had had much contact with Europeans.
+He appears to have had a considerable acquaintance with the language, and has
+left some curious conversations <i>en langage sauvage et Français</i>, in which
+he gives some grammatical rules. The language of conversation is almost
+identical with that of Paraguay, though some words are used which are either
+peculiar to the Tupis or obsolete in Paraguay to-day. His account of their
+customs tallies with that of the various Spanish writers and explorers who have
+written on the subject. Tobacco, which seems to have been known under the name
+of ‘nicotiane’ to Lery, he finds in Brazil under the name of ‘petun’, the same
+name by which it is called in Paraguay at present. He believed that ‘petun’ and
+‘nicotiane’ were two different plants, but the only reason he adduces for his
+belief is that ‘nicotiane’ was brought in his time from Florida, which, as he
+observes, is more than a thousand leagues from ‘Nostre Terre du Brezil’. His
+experience of savages was the same as that of Azara, and almost all early
+travellers, for he says: ‘Nos Toupinambaoults reçoivent fort humainement les
+estrangers amis qui les vont visiter.’<a href="#foot023">[23]</a> Lery,
+however, seemed to think that, in spite of their pacific inclination, it was
+not prudent to put too much power in their hands, for he remarks: ‘Au reste
+parcequ’ils chargeyent, et remplisseyent leurs mousquets jusques au bout . . .
+nous leurs baillions moitié (<i>i.e.</i>, la poudre) de charbon broyé.’ This
+may have been a wise precaution, but he omits to state if the <i>charbon
+broyé</i> was <i>bailli</i> at the same price as good powder. According to
+Azara, who takes his facts partly from the contemporary writers—Schmidel, Alvar
+Nuñez, Ruy Diaz de Guzman, and Barco de la Centenera—the Guaranís were divided
+into numerous tribes, as Imbeguas, Caracaras, Tembues, Colistines, and many
+others. These tribes, though apparently of a common origin, never united, but
+each lived separately under its own chief. Their towns were generally either
+close to or in the middle of forests, or at the edge of rivers where there is
+wood. They all cultivated pumpkins, beans, maize, mani (ground nuts), sweet
+potatoes, and mandioca; but they lived largely by the chase, and ate much wild
+honey. Diaz in his ‘Argentina’ (lib. i., chap. i.) makes them cannibals. Azara
+believes this to have been untrue, as no traditions of cannibalism were current
+amongst the Guaranís in his time, <i>i.e.</i>, in 1789-1801. Liberal as Azara
+was, and careful observer of what he saw himself, I am disposed to believe the
+testimony of so many eye-witnesses of the customs of the primitive Guaranís,
+though none of them had the advantage enjoyed by Azara of living three hundred
+years after the conquest. It may be, of course, that the powers of observation
+were not so well developed in mankind in the beginning of the sixteenth as at
+the end of the eighteenth century, but this point I leave to those whose
+business it is to prove that the human mind is in a progressive state. However,
+Father Montoya, in his ‘Conquista Espiritual del Paraguay’, affirms most
+positively that they used to eat their prisoners taken in war.’<a
+href="#foot024">[24]</a>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Their general characteristics seem to have been much the same as those of other
+Indians of America. For instance, they kept their hair and teeth to an extreme
+old age, their sight was keen, they seldom looked you in the face whilst
+speaking, and their disposition was cold and reserved. The tone of their voices
+was low, so low that, as Azara says: ‘La voz nunca es gruesa ni sonora, y
+hablan siempre muy bajo, sin gritar aun para quejarse si los matan; de manera
+que, si camina uno diez pasos delante, no le llama el que le necesita, sino que
+va á alcanzarle.’ This I have myself observed when travelling with Indians,
+even on horseback.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+There was one characteristic of the Guaranís in which they differed greatly
+from most of the Indian tribes in their vicinity, as the Indians of the Chaco
+and the Pampas, for all historians alike agree that they were most unwarlike.
+It is from this characteristic that the Jesuits were able to make such a
+complete conquest of them, for, notwithstanding all their efforts, they never
+really succeeded in permanently establishing themselves amongst any of the
+tribes in the Chaco or upon the Pampas.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The name Guaraní is variously derived. Pedro de Angelis, in his ‘Coleccion de
+Obras y Documentos’, derives it from <i>gua</i>, paint, and <i>ni</i>, sign of
+the plural, making the signification of the word ‘painted ones’ or ‘painted
+men’. Demersay, in his ‘Histoire du Paraguay’,<a href="#foot025">[25]</a>
+thinks it probable that the word is an alteration of the word <i>guaranai</i>,
+<i>i.e.</i>, numerous. Barco de la Centenera<a href="#foot026">[26]</a>
+(‘Argentina’, book i., canto i.) says the word means ‘hornet’, and was applied
+on account of their savageness. Be that as it may, it is certain that the
+Guaranís did not at the time of the conquest, and do not now, apply the word to
+themselves, except when talking Spanish or to a foreigner. The word <i>abá</i>,
+Indian or man, is how they speak of their people, and to the language they
+apply the word <i>Abanêe</i>.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In the same way the word ‘Paraguay’ is variously derived from a corruption of
+the word ‘Payaguá’ (the name of an Indian tribe), and <i>y</i>, the Guaraní
+word for water, meaning river of the Payaguas. Others, again, derive it from a
+Guaraní word meaning ‘crown’, and <i>y</i>, water, and make it the crowned
+river, either from the palm-trees which crown its banks or the feather crowns
+which the Indians wore at the first conquest. Others, again, derive it from a
+bird called paraquá (<i>Ortolida paraqua</i>). Again, Angelis, in his work
+‘Serie de los Señores Gobernadores del Paraguay’ (lib. ii., p. 187), derives it
+from Paraguá, the name of a celebrated Indian chief at the time of the
+conquest. What is certain is that <i>y</i> is the Guaraní for water, and this
+is something in a derivation. <i>Y</i> is perhaps as hard to pronounce as the
+Gaelic <i>luogh</i>, a calf, the nasal <i>gh</i> in Arabic, or the Kaffir
+clicks, having both a guttural and a nasal aspiration.<a
+href="#foot027">[27]</a> It is rarely attempted with success by foreigners,
+even when long resident in the country. Though Paraguay was so completely the
+country of the Jesuits in after-times, they were not the first religious Order
+to go there. Almost in every instance the ecclesiastics who accompanied the
+first conquerors of America were Franciscans. The Jesuits are said to have sent
+two priests to Bahia in Brazil ten years after their Order was founded, but
+both in Brazil and Paraguay the Franciscans were before them in point of time.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+San Francisco Solano, the first ecclesiastic who rose to much note as a
+missionary, and who made his celebrated journey through the Chaco in 1588-89
+from Peru to Paraguay, was a Franciscan.<a href="#foot028">[28]</a> Thus, the
+Franciscans had the honour of having the first American saint in their ranks.
+It is noteworthy, though, that he was recalled from Paraguay by his superiors,
+who seem to have had no very exalted opinion of him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Charlevoix remarks (‘History of Paraguay’) ‘that it seems as if Providence, in
+granting him miraculous powers, had forgotten the other necessary steps to make
+them effective.’ That he really had these powers seems strange, but San
+Francisco Solano narrates of himself that, in passing through the Chaco, he
+learned the languages of several of the tribes, and ‘preached to them in their
+own tongues of the birth, death, and transfiguration of Christ, the mysteries
+of the Trinity, Transubstantiation, and Atonement; that he explained to them
+the symbols of the Church, the Papal succession from St. Peter downwards, and
+that he catechized the Indians by thousands, tens and hundreds of thousands,
+and that they came in tears and penitence to acknowledge their belief.’
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Of course, to-day it is difficult to controvert these statements, even if
+inclined to do so; but the languages spoken by the Chaco Indians are amongst
+the most difficult to learn of any spoken by the human race, so much so that
+Father Dobrizhoffer, in his ‘History of the Abipones’, says ‘that the sounds
+produced by the Indians of the Chaco resembled nothing human, so do they
+sneeze, and stutter, and cough.’ In such a language the Athanasian Creed itself
+would be puzzling to a neophyte.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He also says that several of the Jesuits who had laboured for years amongst the
+Indians could never master their dialects, and when they preached the Indians
+received their words with shouts of laughter. This the good priest attributed
+to the presence of a ‘mocking devil’ who possessed them. It may be that the
+mocking devil was but a sense of humour, the possession of which, even amongst
+good Christians, has been known to give offence.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But be this as it may, San Francisco de Solano remained two years at Asuncion,
+though whilst he lived there his powers of speech (according to the Jesuits)
+seem to have been diminished, and he held no communication with the Indians in
+their own languages. It may be that, like St. Paul, he preferred to speak, when
+not with Indians, five words with his understanding rather than ten thousand in
+an unknown tongue.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+At the time of the first conquest Paraguay was almost entirely peopled by the
+Guaraní race.<a href="#foot029">[29]</a> It does not appear that their number
+was ever very great, perhaps not exceeding a million in the whole country. From
+the writings of Montoya, Guevara, Lozano, and the other missionaries of the
+time, it is certain that they had attained to no very high degree of
+civilization, though they were certainly more advanced than their neighbours in
+the Gran Chaco. It is most probable that they had not a single stone-built
+town, or even a house, or that such a thing existed south of New Granada, to
+the eastward of the Andes, for we may take the description in Schmidel’s
+‘History of the Casa del Gran Moxo’<a href="#foot030">[30]</a> either as a
+mistake or as a story which he had heard from some Peruvian Indian of the
+palaces of the Incas. At any rate, no remains of stone-built houses, still less
+of palaces, are known to have been found in Brazil or Paraguay.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+To-day all the Guaranís who are still unconquered live in the impenetrable
+forests of the North of Paraguay or in the Brazilian province of Matto Grosso.
+Their limits to the south extend to near the ruined missions of Jesus and
+Trinidad. By preference, they seem to dwell about the sources of the Igatimí,
+an affluent of the Paraná, and in the chain of mountains known either as San
+Jose or Mbaracayú. The Paraguayans generally refer to them as Monteses
+(dwellers in the woods), and sometimes as Caaguás. They present almost the same
+characteristics as they did at the discovery of the country, and wander in the
+woods as the Jesuits describe them as doing three hundred years ago. Olive in
+colour, rather thickly set, of medium height, thin beards, and generally little
+hair upon the body, their type has remained unchanged. The difference in
+stature amongst the Guaranís is less noticeable than amongst Europeans. Their
+language is poorer than the Guaraní spoken by the Paraguayans, and the
+pronunciation both more nasal and guttural. Their numerals only extend to four,
+as was the case at the time of the discovery.<a href="#foot031">[31]</a>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Like their forefathers, they seldom unite in large numbers, and pay little
+honour or obedience to their chiefs, who differ in no respect, either in arms,
+dress, or position, from the ordinary tribesmen.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In Brazil they are confined to the southern portion of the province of San
+Paulo, and are called by the Brazilians Bugres—that is, slaves. A more
+unfitting name it would have been impossible to hit upon, as all efforts to
+civilize them have proved abortive, and to-day they still range the forests,
+attacking small parties of travellers, and burning isolated farm-houses. The
+Brazilians assert that they are cannibals, but little is known positively as to
+this. What has altered them so entirely from the original Guaranís of the time
+of the conquest, who were so easily subdued, it is hard to conjecture. One
+thing is certain: that the example given them by the Christian settlers has
+evidently not been such as to induce them to leave their wild life and enter
+into the bonds of civilization.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Diaz, in the ‘Argentina’, thinks the Caribs of the West Indies were Guaranís,
+and the Jesuits often refer to them under that name.<a href="#foot032">[32]</a>
+This point would be easily set at rest by examining if any Guaraní words remain
+in the dialect of the Caribs of the Mosquito coast. As to their relative
+numbers at the time of the foundation of the missions, it is most difficult to
+judge. At no one time does the population of the thirty towns seem to have
+exceeded one hundred and thirty thousand.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+D’Orbigny in his ‘L’Homme Américain’, estimates the Guaranís of Brazil at one
+hundred and fifty thousand.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Humboldt cites two hundred and sixty-nine thousand as the probable number of
+Indians of every kind in the Brazilian Empire.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The Viscount de Itabayana (a Brazilian writer) fixes the number at two hundred
+and fifty thousand to three hundred thousand.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Veloso de Oliveira puts it at eight hundred thousand; and later statisticians
+range between one million five hundred thousand and seven to eight hundred
+thousand.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The numbers given of Indians by the Spanish conquerors are almost always
+grossly overstated, from the wish they not unnaturally had to magnify the
+importance of their conquests and to enhance their exploits in the eyes of
+those for whom they wrote.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Struck by the tractable character of the Guaranís, Mendoza began to build a
+fort on August 15, 1537 (which is the day of the Assumption), and the name he
+gave to his fort was Asuncion, which afterwards became the capital of Paraguay.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Espinosa returned to Corpus Christi, and afterwards to Buenos Ayres, where a
+small force had still remained. This force, tired of the ceaseless battles with
+the Querandis, or Pampa Indians, embarked for Asuncion.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Irala, after waiting for many months at Fort Olimpo, returned to Asuncion,
+where he found Ruiz de Galan acting as Governor. A dispute at once arose
+between them, and Irala, after having been imprisoned, was allowed to return to
+Fort Olimpo. Here he found the Payaguá Indians in rebellion, and in the battle
+which ensued he is reported to have slain seven of them with his own hand.<a
+href="#foot033">[33]</a> He still maintained a fitful search for Juan de
+Ayolas, but without success.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Galan returned to Buenos Ayres, and, stopping at Corpus Christi, took occasion
+to fall upon the friendly and unsuspecting Timbú Indians and massacre a
+quantity of them. Why he did so is quite uncertain, for the Timbues had been in
+the habit of supplying the fort of Corpus Christi with provisions; it may be
+that the quality of the provisions was inferior, but neither Ruiz Diaz nor
+Schmidel informs us on the point. Galan, after his ‘victory’, re-embarked for
+Buenos Ayres, leaving Antonio de Mendoza in command with a hundred men.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+One day, when about the half of the force was hunting, the Indians fell upon it
+and cut it off to the last man; but for the opportune arrival of two vessels
+the fort would have been destroyed. However, many Spaniards were slain, and
+Antonio de Mendoza amongst them.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+After this battle, in which Santiago<a href="#foot034">[34]</a> is said to have
+appeared on the top of the principal tower of the fort dressed in white with a
+drawn sword in his hand, Galan and Espinosa returned to Asuncion, taking with
+them the remainder of the inhabitants of Buenos Ayres. At Asuncion they found
+that Irala had again returned without having discovered traces of Ayolas. Irala
+was elected Governor under a clause in the royal letters patent which provided
+for the case of Ayolas not returning. His first act was to order the complete
+evacuation of Buenos Ayres. An Italian vessel, which was going to Peru with
+colonists, having been driven into the river Plate, united with the remains of
+the colonists at Buenos Ayres and proceeded to Asuncion.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Curiously enough, the remnants of several expeditions thus joined to found the
+first permanent city in the territories of the river Plate; not at Buenos
+Ayres, but a thousand miles away in the interior of the country, where it
+seemed little probable that their attempt would prove successful.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+To preside over the heterogeneous elements of which Asuncion was composed,
+Domingo Martinez de Irala was chosen. He was a Biscayan, a member of that
+ancient race which neither Romans nor Moors were ever able to subdue. Nothing
+is known about his antecedents. Not improbably he was a son of one of the
+innumerable small gentlemen with whom the Basque provinces used to swarm.
+Almost every house in the little towns even to-day has its coat of arms over
+the door. Every inhabitant claimed to be a nobleman, and in the reign of
+Charles V. they furnished many soldiers of repute in the wars of Europe and
+America.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The system of Irala was to conciliate rather than subdue the natives. Isolated
+from help of every kind, the length of the voyage from Spain precluding all
+idea of speedy succour in a rebellion, it was the only course he could pursue.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+From the very first he encouraged the soldiers to marry women of the country,
+thus creating ties which bound them to the land.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Two Franciscan friars<a href="#foot035">[35]</a> set about at once to learn the
+language and preach to the people. They also seem to have endeavoured to reduce
+the Guaraní language to writing. So, from several circumstances, the early
+history of Paraguay was very different from that of every other Spanish
+possession in America. To all the others Spanish women seem to have gone in
+greater or in smaller numbers. To Paraguay, at the foundation of Asuncion, it
+seems that hardly any women went.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+So there a different state of society arose to that, for example, in Chile or
+in Mexico. In both those countries few Spaniards ever married native women.
+Those who did so were either members of the highest class—who sometimes, but
+rarely, married Indian women of position from motives of policy—or else the
+lowest class of Spaniards; in this case, after a generation, their children
+became practically Indians. In Paraguay it was quite the contrary, and the
+grandchildren of Indian mothers and Spanish fathers were almost reckoned
+Spaniards, and the next generation always so.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Washburne, in his ‘History of Paraguay’ (p. 32, cap. i., vol. i.), points out
+the contrast between the effects of the treatment meted out by Penn to the
+Indians in Pennsylvania and that by Irala in Paraguay. Where, he asks, are the
+Indian tribes with whom the celebrated Quaker treated? In Paraguay, on the
+other hand, at least in the time when Washburne was Minister from the United
+States to Lopez (from 1861 to 1868), the few remaining Paraguayans of the upper
+class were almost all descended from the intermarriages of the followers of
+Irala with the natives.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The tyranny of Lopez, and the effects of the disastrous war with Brazil and the
+Argentine Republic, have almost extirpated every Paraguayan (of the old stock)
+with the least pretensions to white descent.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Ruiz Diaz de Guzman, speaking of the mixed race in Paraguay and Buenos Ayres,
+says:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+‘They are generally good soldiers, of great spirit and valour, expert in the
+use of arms, especially in that of the musquet, so much so that, when they go
+on long journeys, they are accustomed to live on the game which they kill with
+it. It is common for them to kill birds on the wing, and he is accounted unfit
+for a soldier who cannot bring down a pigeon. They are such excellent horsemen
+that there is no one who is not able to tame and ride an unbroken colt.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+‘The women generally are virtuous, beautiful, and of a gentle disposition.’
+</p>
+
+<p>
+If the inhabitants of Paraguay and the river Plate of those days were good
+marksmen, it is more than can be said of the Gauchos of the Argentine provinces
+and the Paraguayans of twenty years ago. Without military training, so far from
+being able to bring down a pigeon on the wing, few could hit the trunk of a
+tree at fifty paces. The usual method of shooting used to be to cram as much
+ammunition into the gun as the hand would contain, and then, looking carefully
+away from the object aimed at, to close both eyes and pull the trigger.
+Accuracy of aim was not so much considered as loudness of report. As regards
+their powers of riding, they are still unchanged; and as to the virtue of their
+women, virtue is so largely a matter of convention that it is generally wisest
+to leave such matters uncommented on, as it is so easy not to understand the
+conventions of the people of whom one writes.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Whilst Irala was conciliating the Guaranís in Paraguay, Charles V. had not
+forgotten that the new settlement of Buenos Ayres had been abandoned. After
+much search, he selected Alvar Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca to be the new Governor;
+and, as Alvar Nuñez was perhaps the most remarkable of all the Spanish
+<i>conquistadores</i> of the New World, it may not be out of place to give some
+facts of his career, as his policy in regard to the Indians was almost that of
+the Jesuits in after-times.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+As he himself informs us in his Commentaries,<a href="#foot036">[36]</a> his
+‘father was that Pedro de Vera who won Canaria,’ and his mother ‘Doña Teresa
+Cabeza de Vaca, a noble lady of Jerez de la Frontera.’ After the Spanish
+fashion of the time, he used the names of both his parents.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In 1529 he sailed with the ill-fated expedition of Panfilo de Narvaez to
+Apalache in Florida, was shipwrecked, tried to regain the Spanish settlements
+in boats, and then cast by a storm absolutely naked, and with only three
+companions, upon an unknown land. Taken by the Indians, he was made a slave,
+then rose to be a pedlar, then a doctor, and finally a chief, held sacred for
+his mysterious powers. At last he made his way on foot into the territory of
+New Spain, not as a captive, but as the leader of several hundred Indians, who
+followed him and did his bidding as if he had been born their chief. Rambling
+about for months, but always followed by his Indians, he at length encountered
+a Spanish horse-soldier, and, accosting him, found he had almost forgotten
+Spanish during his ten years’ sojourn with the Indians. His first entreaty,
+when he found Spanish gradually returning to him, was to the Spaniards not to
+harass his Indian following. Then he besought the Indians themselves to cease
+their nomad life and cultivate the soil. In neither case was he successful, as
+the Spaniards, like all other Europeans, held Indians little removed from dogs.
+And for the Indians, the few remaining are as much attached to their old
+wandering life as in the days of the discovery of the New World. In all that
+Alvar Nuñez writes, he shows a grandeur of soul and spirit far different from
+the writings, not only of the conquerors of the New World, but of the
+conquerors of Africa of to-day. For him no bragging of his exploits.<a
+href="#foot037">[37]</a> All that he says he sets down modestly and with
+excuses (as every now and then, ‘Me pesa hablar de mis trabajos’), and as
+befits a gentleman. Lastly, he leaves the reader (when describing his captivity
+in Florida), by telling him quite quietly and without comment that God was
+pleased to save from all these perils himself, Alonso del Castillo Maldonado,
+Andres Dorantes, and that the fourth was a negro called Estevanico, a native of
+Azimur. But, not contented with his ten years’ captivity, after three years at
+home he entered into a certain <i>asiento</i><a href="#foot038">[38]</a> and
+<i>capitulacion</i><a href="#foot039">[39]</a> with the King to sail at his own
+charges with an expedition to succour Don Pedro de Mendoza, who was hard
+pressed by famine and the Indians at Buenos Ayres. He agreed to furnish eight
+thousand ducats, horses, arms, men, and provisions at his own expense, upon
+condition that he was made Governor and Adelantado of the Rio de la Plata, and
+General both of its armies and its fleets.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Upon November 2, 1537, he embarked at Cadiz with his fleet, consisting of a
+caravel and two full-rigged ships. All went well up to the Cape de Verdes. On
+nearing the equator, it occurred to the ‘Maestro del Agua’ to examine his stock
+of water, and, out of one hundred pipes which had been put aboard, he found but
+three remaining, and from these the thirty horses and four hundred men who were
+on board all had to drink. Seeing the greatness of the necessity, the
+Governor—for Alvar Nuñez almost always speaks of himself in the third
+person—gave orders that the fleet should make for land. ‘Three days,’ he says
+in his Commentaries, ‘we sailed in search of it’; and on the fourth, just
+before sunrise, occurred a very notable affair, and, as it is not altogether
+<i>fuera de proposito</i>, I set it down, and it is this—‘that, going towards
+the land, the ships had almost touched on some sharp rocks we had not seen.’
+Then, as now, I take it, vigilance was not a noticeable quality in Spanish
+sailors. Just as the vessels were almost on the rocks, ‘a cricket commenced to
+sing, which cricket a sick soldier had put into the ship at Cadiz, being
+anxious to hear its music, and for the two months which our navigation had
+endured no one had heard it, whereat the soldier was much enraged; and as on
+that morning it felt the land [<i>sintio la tierra</i>], it commenced to sing,
+and its music wakened all the people of the ship, who saw the cliffs, which
+were distant almost a crossbow-shot from where we were, so we cast out anchors
+and saved the ship, and it is certain that if the cricket had not sung all of
+us, four hundred soldiers and thirty horses, had been lost.’ Some of the crew
+accepted the occurrence as a miracle from God; but Nuñez himself is silent on
+that head, being a better observer of natural history than a theologian. But
+‘from there, and sailing more than a hundred leagues along the coast, the
+cricket every evening gave us his music, and thus with it we arrived at a
+little port beyond Cape Frio, where the Adelantado landed and unfurled his
+flag, and took possession for His Majesty.’ The expedition disembarked at Santa
+Catalina in Brazil. ‘There the Governor landed his men and twenty-six of the
+horses which had escaped the sea, all that remained of forty-six embarked in
+Spain.’ The <i>odium theologicum</i> gave the Governor some work at once. Two
+friars—Fray Bernardo de Armenta and Fray Alonso Lebron, Franciscans—had burnt
+the houses of some Indians, who had retaliated in the heathen fashion by
+slaughtering two Christians. The ‘people being scandalized’, the Governor sent
+for the friars, admonished them, and told them to restrain their zeal. This was
+the first false step he made, and set all friars and priests throughout America
+against him. Hearing at Santa Catalina that Buenos Ayres was almost abandoned,
+and that the inhabitants had founded the town of Asuncion del Paraguay, Alvar
+determined to march thither by land, and send his ship into the river Plate and
+up the Paraguay. The two Franciscan friars he told to remain and ‘indoctrinate’
+the Indians. This they refused to do, saying they wished to reside amongst the
+Spaniards in Asuncion. Had they been Jesuits, it is ten to one they had
+remained and spent their lives ‘indoctrinating’, for the Jesuits alone of all
+the religious Orders were ever ready to take every risk.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Upon his march the Governor, contrary to all good policy and precedent, ordered
+that nothing should be taken from the Indians without due payment being made.
+To insure this being done, he paid for all provisions himself, and served them
+out to the soldiery. This made him as unpopular with his soldiers as his
+dealings with the two Franciscans had made him amongst the friars. Surely he
+might have known that Pizarro, Cortes, Almagro, and the rest, were men who
+never paid for anything. Still, he persisted in his conduct to the end, and so
+brought ruin on himself. The Indians seemed to appreciate his method, for he
+says that ‘when the news was spread abroad of the good treatment the Governor
+gave to all, they came to meet the army decked with flowers and bringing
+provisions in great abundance.’ It was, he also says, ‘a thing to see how
+frightened the Indians were of the horses, and how they brought them food,
+chickens and honey to keep them quiet and in good humour, and they asked the
+Governor to tell the horses not to hurt them.’
+</p>
+
+<p>
+After passing the river Iguazú, he sent the two friars ahead to collect
+provisions, and ‘when the Governor arrived the Indians had no more to give.’<a
+href="#foot040">[40]</a>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+So having started from the coast upon November 2, 1541, he arrived at Asuncion
+on March 2, 1542, having accomplished a march of more than two thousand miles
+with but the loss of a single man and without the slaughter of a single Indian.
+Hardly had he arrived at Asuncion before he found himself embroiled on every
+side. The Indians were in full rebellion, the settlement of Buenos Ayres almost
+in ruins, and the officers appointed by the King to collect the royal dues all
+hostile to him to a man.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+After having consulted with the clergy to find if they thought it lawful to
+attack the Guaycurús who had assailed the newly-founded town, he received the
+opinion ‘that it was not only lawful, but expedient.’ Therefore he sent off an
+expedition against them, to which was joined a priest to require the Guaycurús
+to become Christians and to acknowledge the King of Spain. The propositions,
+not unnaturally, did not seem reasonable to the Indians, who most likely were
+unaware of the benefits which Christianity confers, and probably heard for the
+first time of the King of Spain. The Governor, who seems to have doubted of the
+humanity of the clergy, called another council, which confirmed the previous
+opinion. Strangely enough, this seems to have surprised him, for he probably
+did not reflect that the clergy would not have to fight themselves, and that
+the first blood ever spilt on earth was on account of a religious difference.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Just before the expedition started it was found that the two Franciscan friars
+who had come with him from Santa Catalina could not be found. It then appeared
+they had started back to the coast accompanied by a bevy of Indian damsels,
+thirty-five in all. They were followed and brought back, and then explained
+that they were on their way to Spain to complain against the Governor. The
+five-and-thirty dusky catechumens remained without an explanation, and the
+people were once more ‘scandalized’. The Governor then started out against the
+Guaycurús. Only those who know the Chaco, or western bank of the river
+Paraguay, can form the least idea of what such an expedition must have been.
+Even to-day in the Chaco the change since the beginning of the world can be but
+slight. As a steamer slips along the bank, nothing for miles and miles is seen
+but swamp, intersected with backwaters,<a href="#foot041">[41]</a> in which lie
+alligators, electric eels, and stinging rays. Far as the eye can reach are
+swamps, swamps, and more swamps, a sea of waving pampa-grass. After the swamps
+thickets of tacuaras (canes), forests of thorny trees, chañares, ñandubay,
+jacarandas, urundey, talas, and quebrachos, each one hard enough to split an
+axe, some, like the black canela, almost like iron; the inhabitants ferocious
+and intractable as when the Governor himself first saw them; the climate heavy
+and humid, the air dank with vinchucas<a href="#foot042">[42]</a> and
+mosquitoes and the little black infernal midget called the jejen; no roads, no
+paths, no landmarks, but here and there at intervals of many leagues a clearing
+in the forest where some straggling settlement exists, more rarely still the
+walls of a deserted Jesuit mission-house or church. Ostriches and deer,
+tigers,<a href="#foot043">[43]</a> capibaras and tapirs, and now and then a
+herd of cattle as wild as buffaloes, are seen. Sometimes an Indian with his
+lance sits motionless upon his horse to watch the vessel pass—a sentinel to
+guard the wilderness from encroachments from without. So Alvar Nuñez, as he
+tells us in his Commentaries, started with four hundred men and with one
+thousand friendly Indians, all well armed and painted, and with plates of metal
+on their heads to reflect the sun, and so strike terror to their enemies. To
+save the horses they were put on board,<a href="#foot044">[44]</a> whilst the
+Indians marched along the bank, keeping up with the ships. Horses at that time
+in Paraguay and in Peru often were worth one thousand crowns of gold, though
+Azara tells us that in the last century in Buenos Ayres you could often buy a
+good horse for two needles, so cheap had they become. Then, as at present, time
+was of no account in Paraguay, so almost every day they landed the horses to
+keep them in condition and to chase the ostriches and deer.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Just the kind of army that a thinking man would like to march with; not too
+much to eat, but, still, a pleasant feeling of marching to spread religion and
+to make one’s fortune, with but the solitary unpleasant feature to the
+soldier—the system of payment for provisions which the Governor prescribed. All
+was new and strange; the world was relatively young. Each night the Governor
+religiously wrote up his diary, now chronicling the death of some good horse,
+or of an Indian, or commenting upon the fruits, the fish, the animals, the
+trees, and ‘all the other things of God which differ from those in the
+Castiles.’ Occasionally a fight took place with Guasarapos or with Pagayuás,
+but nothing of much account (<i>de mucha monta</i>); always the tales of
+gold-mines to be met with further on. Eventually the expedition came to a point
+not far from where is now the town of Corumbá. There Alvar Nuñez founded a town
+to which he gave the name of Reyes, which has long fallen into decay. He also
+sent two captains to explore and search for gold, waiting two or three months
+for their return, and suffering from a quartan ague which confined him to his
+bed; then, having failed to find the talked-of gold-mines, he set his face
+again towards Asuncion. Just before starting he gave the final blow to his
+waning popularity. Some of his followers, having taken Indian girls, had hidden
+them on board the ships; this, when he knew it, Nuñez at once forbade, and,
+sending for the fathers of the girls, restored their children to them. ‘With
+this,’ he says, ‘the natives were much pleased, but the Spaniards rendered
+angry and desperate, and for this cause they hated me.’ Nothing more natural,
+and for the same cause the Spanish Paraguayans hated the Jesuits who carried
+out the policy which the wise Governor began.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+On April 8, 1543, the Governor returned to Asuncion, worn out and ill with
+ague. There he found all confusion. Domingo de Irala, a clever, ambitious
+Biscayan soldier who had been interim Governor before Nuñez had arrived, had
+worked upon the people, saying that Nuñez wished to take away their property.
+As their chief property was in Indians whom they had enslaved, this rendered
+Nuñez most unpopular, and the same kind of allegations were laid against him as
+were laid against the Jesuits when in their turn they denounced slavery in
+Paraguay. All the complaints were in the name of liberty, as generally is the
+case when tyranny or villainy of any sort is to be done.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+So Alvar Nuñez<a href="#foot045">[45]</a> tells us in his Commentaries that at
+the hour of the Ave Maria ten or twelve of the ‘factious’ entered his house
+where he lay ill in bed, all shouting ‘Liberty!’ and to prove they were all
+good patriots one Jaime Resquin put a bent crossbow to his side, and forced him
+to get out of bed, and took him off to prison amid a crowd all shouting
+‘Liberty!’ The friends of liberty (upon the other side) attempted a rescue, but
+the patriots<a href="#foot046">[46]</a> were too strong. So the unpatriotic
+Governor was thrown, heavily ironed, into a cell, out of which to make room
+they let a murderer who was awaiting death. ‘He’ (Alvar Nuñez grimly remarks)
+‘made haste to take my cloak, and then set off down the street at once, calling
+out “Liberty!”’ That everything should be in order, the patriots confiscated
+all the Governor’s goods and took his papers, publishing a proclamation that
+they did so because he was a tyrant. Unluckily, the Indians have not left us
+any commentaries, or it would be curious to learn what they thought as to the
+tyranny of Alvar Nuñez. Most probably they thought as the Indians of the Jesuit
+missions thought at the expulsion of the Jesuits from Paraguay, as is set forth
+in the curious memorial addressed in 1768 by the people of the Mission of San
+Luis to the Governor of Buenos Ayres, praying that the Jesuits might be
+suffered to remain instead of the friars, who had been sent to replace them
+against the people’s will.<a href="#foot047">[47]</a> Having got the Governor
+into prison, the patriots had to elect another chief, and the choice naturally
+‘fell’ upon Domingo de Irala, who, having been interim Governor, had never
+ceased intriguing from the first. He promptly put his friends in office, after
+the fashion of all Governors, whether they enter office to the cry of ‘Liberty’
+or not. The friends of Alvar Nuñez, in the usual Spanish fashion (long
+sanctified by use and wont), declared themselves in opposition—that is, they
+roamed about the land, proving by theft and murder that their love of liberty
+was just as strong as that of those in power. Things shortly came to such a
+pass that no one could leave his house by night. The marauding Guaycurús burnt
+all the suburbs, and threatened to attack the town. Nuñez himself was guarded
+day and night by four men armed with daggers in a close prison. As he says
+himself, his prison was not ‘fitting for his health,’ for day and night he had
+to keep a candle burning to see to read, and the grass grew underneath his bed,
+whilst for the sake of ‘health’ he had a pair of first-rate fetters on his
+feet. For his chief gaoler they procured one Hernando de Sosa, whom Nuñez had
+put in gaol for striking an Indian chief. A guard watched constantly at the
+prison gate, but, still, in spite of this he managed to communicate almost
+uninterruptedly with his friends outside. His method was certainly ingenious.
+His food was brought to him by an Indian girl, whom, so great was the fear of
+the patriots that he should write to the King, they made walk naked into the
+prison, carrying the dishes, and with her head shaved. Notwithstanding this,
+she managed to bring a piece of paper hidden between her toes. The party of
+Liberty, suspecting that Nuñez was communicating with his friends, procured an
+Indian youth to make love to the girl and learn the secret. This he failed to
+do, owing, perhaps, to his love-making being wanting in conviction on account
+of her shaved head. At last Irala and his friends determined to send the
+Governor a prisoner to Spain, taking care, of course, to despatch a messenger
+beforehand to distort the facts and prejudice the King. The friends of Nuñez,
+however, managed to secrete a box of papers, stating the true facts, on board
+the ship. At dead of night a band of harquebusiers dragged him from his bed
+(after a captivity of eleven months), as he says, ‘almost with the candle in
+his hand’—<i>i.e.</i>, in a dying state. As he left the prison, he fell upon
+his knees and thanked God for having let him once more feel the air of heaven,
+and then in a loud voice exclaimed: ‘I name as my successor Captain Juan de
+Salazar de Espinosa.’ At this one Garci Vargas rushed at him with a knife, and
+told him to recall his words or he would kill him instantly. This he was
+stopped from doing, and Nuñez was hurried to the ship and chained securely to a
+beam. On board the vessel, he says, they tried to poison him; but this seems
+doubtful, as there was nothing on earth to prevent their doing so had they been
+so inclined. Still, as a prudent man he took the precaution to provide some oil
+and a piece of unicorn (<i>pedazo de unicornio</i>), with which he tried the
+food. Unicorns he could not have seen in Paraguay, nor yet in Florida, and he
+does not explain how he became so luckily equipped.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+None the less, of all the discoverers of America he is the man of least
+imaginative power—that is, in matters appertaining to natural history—so one
+must conclude he had his piece of unicorn from Spain, where he most probably
+had bought it from some dealer in necessaries for travellers to the New World.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+After a stormy voyage he arrived in Spain to find his accusers just before him.
+With truly Eastern justice, both accusers and accused were put in gaol, a
+custom worthy of adoption in other lands. Nuñez was soon released on bail, and,
+his accusers having all died, in eight years’ time he was triumphantly
+acquitted of all the charges brought against him. To prove, however, that
+Justice is and always has been blind, the King never restored him to his
+government in Paraguay, and, as Nuñez says, forgot to repay him what he had
+expended in his service.<a href="#foot048">[48]</a> With Alvar Nuñez was lost
+the only chance of liberal treatment to the Indians, for from his time the
+governors, instead of being men of the world above the petty spite of party
+differences, were chosen either from officers who, having served in the
+frontier wars, quite naturally looked on the Indians as enemies, or were
+appointed by intriguing Ministers at Court. From the death of Alvar Nuñez to
+the inauguration of the missions by the Jesuits, no one arose to take the
+Indians’ side, and it may be that had his policy prevailed there would have
+been an Indian population left in the mission territory of Paraguay; for had
+the civil governors co-operated with the Jesuits, the dispersion of the
+Indians, which took place at the expulsion of the Jesuits, had not occurred.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Thus was Domingo Martinez de Irala left in sole command in Paraguay. He
+naturally had all to gain by not communicating with Spain. Had he done so, the
+part he played in reference to Alvar Nuñez must have been known. He had,
+however, certain good qualities, courage in abundance, Herculean strength and
+great endurance, and the power of making himself obeyed. But he had to justify
+himself to Spain for his position, and the surest way to do so was to discover
+gold-mines. So, naming Francisco de Mendoza his lieutenant, he started up the
+Paraguay, taking with him three hundred and fifty soldiers and two thousand
+Guaranís. After many hardships, he reached the frontiers of Peru, only to find
+the country already conquered from the Pacific side, and to be met by the
+messengers of the wise President, La Gasca, who told him to return, and named
+one Diego Centeno Governor of Paraguay instead of him. Centeno died before he
+could assume the governorship, so it seemed that fate determined that Irala was
+to continue in command.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+After a year and a half he returned to Paraguay, having found no gold or
+riches, but bringing many thousand Indians as slaves. It is important to
+remember that Irala, who was remarkable for his relatively kind treatment of
+the Indians, on this occasion led so many of them captive. On arriving at
+Asuncion he found a rebellion going on, as not infrequently occurred when a
+Spanish Governor left his domains. His lieutenant, Mendoza, had been killed by
+one Diego de Abreu. After quieting matters in Asuncion, he despatched Nuflo de
+Chaves (one of his captains) to found a town on the higher waters of the
+Paraguay.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Like many other captains of those days, the idea of Chaves was to make himself
+quite independent of authority; so, striking into the interior, he founded the
+town of Santa Cruz de la Sierra in Bolivia. After many adventures he was killed
+by an Indian, who struck him with a club whilst he was sitting eating without
+his helmet.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Irala died at the little village of Itá in 1557, and was buried in the
+cathedral at Asuncion, which he was building at the time. With him expired the
+generation of the conquering soldiers of fortune, who, schooled in the wars of
+Italy, brought to America some of the virtues and all the vices of the Old
+World. After him began the reign of the half-caste Spaniards who were the
+progenitors of the modern occupants of the Spanish-American republics. At
+Irala’s death the usual feuds, which have for the last three hundred years
+disgraced every part of Spanish America, began. Into them it is unnecessary to
+enter, for with Irala died almost the only Governor of Paraguay who showed the
+smallest capacity to make himself obeyed.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+True indeed that Arias de Saavedra, a native of Paraguay and
+Lieutenant-Governor under Ramirez de Velasco, the Governor of Tucuman,
+displayed some traces of ability and of intelligence. He it was who first
+appealed to Spain for missionaries to convert the Indians.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Whilst Alvar Nuñez and Irala, with Nuflo de Chaves and the other captains, had
+been conquering and building towns, the Jesuits had been preaching in the
+wilderness and gathering together the Indian tribes. Not ten years after the
+foundation of their Order,<a href="#foot049">[49]</a> or about 1550, they had
+landed at San Salvador de Bahia in Brazil.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In 1554, in the district of Guayrá, on the upper waters of the Paraná, and
+above the cataract, the towns of Ontiveros, Ciudad Real, and Villa Rica, had
+been founded by Don Ruy Diaz de Melgarejo.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In 1586 Fathers Alfonso Barcena and Angulo left the town of Santa Maria de las
+Charcas (Bolivia) at the request of Francisco Vitoria, Bishop of Santiago, who
+had appealed for missionaries to the Society of Jesus. They reached the
+province of Guayrá, and began their labours. Shortly afterwards they were
+joined by Fathers Estezan Grao, Juan Solano, and Thomas Fields; Solano and
+Fields had already visited some of the wandering tribes upon the Rio Vermejo in
+the Chaco.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In 1593 others arrived, as Juan Romero, Gaspar de Monroy, and Marcelino
+Lorenzana. Shortly after this they founded the college in Asuncion. Then
+Fathers Ortega and Vellarnao penetrated into the mountains of the Chiriguanás,
+and began to preach the Gospel to the Indians.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In 1602 Acquaviva, seeing the necessity of common action, called all the
+scattered Jesuits of Paraguay and the river Plate to a conference at Salta to
+deliberate as to their future policy.<a href="#foot050">[50]</a> In 1605 Father
+Diego Torres was named Provincial of the Jesuits of Paraguay and Chile, thus
+proving both the paucity of Jesuits in South America at the time, and the
+little idea the General in Rome had of the immensity of the countries he was
+dealing with.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Torres arrived in Lima with fifteen priests, and almost at the same time some
+others arrived at Buenos Ayres; both parties proceeded to Paraguay. Already the
+Jesuits found themselves a prey to calumny.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Both in Tucuman and Paraguay they were expected to lend themselves to the
+enslavement of the Indians. In Chile Father Valdivia was expelled from
+Santiago, and took refuge at Tucuman. There he found the condition of affairs
+so intolerable that he went to Madrid to solicit the protection of the King,
+Philip III., for his Indian subjects.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In 1608 Philip issued his royal letters patent to the Society of Jesus for the
+conversion of the Indians in the province of Guayrá.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The Bishop and the Governor, Arias de Saavedra (himself a Paraguayan by birth),
+offered no objection, and the scheme of colonization was agreed upon at once.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Thus the Jesuits obtained their first official status in America.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Fathers Simon Maceta and José Cataldino (both Italians) left Asuncion on
+October 10, 1609, and arrived in February, 1610, on the banks of the river
+Paranapané.<a href="#foot051">[51]</a>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+There they met the Indians amongst whom Fields and Ortega had begun to labour,
+and there they founded the Reduction<a href="#foot052">[52]</a> of Loreto, the
+first permanent establishment instituted by the Jesuits amongst the Guaranís.
+Thus, in the woods of Paraguay, upon a tributary of the Paraná but little known
+even to-day, did the Society of Jesus lay the first foundation of their famous
+missions. But little more than fifty years from the foundation of their Order,
+thus had they penetrated to what was then, and is perchance to-day, after their
+missions all are ruined, one of the remotest corners of the world.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+There they built up the system with which their name is linked for ever—the
+system which for two hundred years was able to hold together wandering Indian
+tribes, restless as Arabs, suspicious above every other race of men—and which
+to-day has disappeared, leaving nothing of a like nature in all the world.
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a name="chap02"></a>Chapter II</h2>
+
+<p class="letter">
+Early days of the missions—New settlements founded—Relations of Jesuits with
+Indians and Spanish colonists—Destruction of missions by the Mamelucos—Father
+Maceta—Padre Antonio Ruiz de Montoya—His work and influence—Retreat of the
+Jesuits down the Paraná
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It does not seem doubtful but that the work done by Fathers Ortega and Filds<a
+href="#foot053">[53]</a> had borne some fruit. Perhaps not quite after the
+fashion that the Jesuits believed; but when Maceta and Cataldino arrived at
+Guayrá and founded the Reduction of Loreto, their success at first was of a
+nature that almost justified the epithet ‘miraculous’, an epithet which indeed
+all men apply to any enterprise of theirs which meets success. Almost from the
+first inception of the missions, the Jesuits found themselves in the strange
+position of, though being hated by the Spanish settlers, yet recurred to as
+mediators when any of the wild tribes proved too powerful for the Spanish arms.
+Thus, far from cities, far from even such elementary civilization as Paraguay
+should show, almost upon the edge of the great cataract of the Paraná, the
+Jesuits founded their first reduction; to which the Indians flocked in such
+numbers that a second was soon necessary, to which they gave the name of San
+Ignacio, in memory of the founder of their rule.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+For the first few years all went well with the Jesuits. The Indians, happy to
+escape the persecutions of the Spaniards on the one hand, and the incursions of
+the Paulistas<a href="#foot054">[54]</a> on the other, flocked to the
+reductions, mission after mission was soon formed, and the wild Indians
+gathered up into townships and taught the arts of peace. But though the
+Guaranís at first entered into the Jesuit reductions as a refuge against their
+persecutors, the Portuguese and Spaniards, soon, as was only natural to men
+accustomed to a wild forest life, they found the Jesuit discipline too irksome,
+and often fled back to the woods. Then the poor priest, left without his flock,
+had to take up the trail of the flying neophytes, follow them to the recesses
+of the forests, and persuade them to come back.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+As a means to secure the confidence of the Indians, the Jesuits found
+themselves obliged to communicate as rarely as possible with the Spanish
+settlements. Thus, from the first the policy of isolation, which was one of the
+chief charges brought against the Order in later years, was of necessity
+begun.<a href="#foot055">[55]</a> Voltaire, no lover of religious Orders, says
+of the Jesuits:<a href="#foot056">[56]</a> ‘When in 1768 the missions of
+Paraguay left the hands of the Jesuits, they had arrived at perhaps the highest
+degree of civilization to which it is possible to conduct a young people, and
+certainly at a far superior state than that which existed in the rest of the
+new hemisphere. The laws were respected there, morals were pure, a happy
+brotherhood united every heart, all the useful arts were in a flourishing
+state, and even some of the more agreeable sciences; plenty was universal.’
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It is, however, to be remembered that Voltaire wrote as a philosopher, and not
+as an economist, and that his statement most probably would be traversed by
+those who see advancement rather in material improvement than in moral
+happiness, for without doubt, in Lima and in Mexico upon the whole, society
+must have made amongst the Spanish and Spanish-descended citizens greater
+advances than in the Jesuit reductions of Paraguay. In some respects their
+almost inaccessible situation close to the cataract of the Paraná was
+favourable to the early Jesuits, and in quick succession the villages of
+Loreto, San Francisco Xavier, San José, San Ignacio, San Pedro, and others of
+less importance, were founded, containing in all about forty thousand souls.<a
+href="#foot057">[57]</a>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+So in the Jesuit reductions of the province of Guayrá was first begun the
+system of treating the Indians kindly, and standing between them and the
+Spanish settlers, which made the Company of Jesus so hated afterwards in
+Paraguay. Little by little their influence grew, so that when, in 1614, Padre
+Antonio Ruiz de Montoya arrived, he found that there were already one hundred
+and nineteen Jesuits in Guayrá and in Paraguay. Of all the Jesuits who, during
+the long period of their labours, appeared in Paraguay, he was the most
+remarkable; one of the most learned men of the age in which he lived, he yet
+united in himself the qualities of a man of action to those of scholar and of
+missionary. Without his presence most likely not a tenth part of the Indians
+would have escaped after the destruction of the missions of Guayrá in 1630 and
+1631 at the hands of the half-civilized hordes known as Paulistas or Mamalucos,
+who from the city of San Paulo carried fire and sword amongst the Guaranís.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It is easy to understand that the Spanish colonists, who had looked on all the
+Indians as slaves, were rendered furious by the advent of the Jesuits, who
+treated them as men.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+To-day the European colonist in Africa labours less to enslave than to
+exterminate the natives; but if a body of clergy of any sect having the
+abnegation and disregard of consequences of the Jesuits of old should arise,
+fancy the fury that would be evoked if they insisted that it were as truly
+murder to slay a black man as it is to kill a man whose skin is white. Most
+fortunately, our clergy of to-day, especially those of the various churches
+militant in Uganda, think otherwise, and hold that Christ was the first
+inventor of the ‘colour-line’.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+At the first settlement of South America great semi-feudal fiefs called
+<i>encomiendas</i> were granted to the conquerors. One of the conditions of
+their tenure was that the <i>encomenderos</i> (the owners of the fiefs) ‘should
+see to the religious education of the Indians’. Much the same kind of thing as
+to enjoin kindness and Christian forbearance upon the directors of a modern
+Chartered Company. But, in addition to the <i>encomiendas</i>, two other
+systems were in vogue called <i>yanaconas</i> and <i>mitayos</i>, which were in
+fact designed to reduce the Indians to the condition of mere slaves.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Herrera<a href="#foot058">[58]</a> says that the ‘<i>yanaconas</i> were men
+destined from birth to perpetual slavery and captivity, and in their clothing,
+treatment, and the conditions of their toil, were differently treated from free
+men.’
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In Paraguay these <i>yanaconas</i> were known as ‘Indios Originarios’, and
+generally were descendants of Indians conquered in war; they, too, were in a
+condition of serfdom. They lived in the house of the <i>encomendero</i>, and
+could not be sold, and the <i>encomendero</i> was (in theory) obliged not only
+to feed and clothe them, but to instruct them in religious truths. In order to
+see that these conditions were duly carried out, visitors were sent each year
+to hear what mutually the <i>encomenderos</i> and the Indians had to say.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Herrera<a href="#foot059">[59]</a> describes the Indians under the
+<i>mitayo</i> system by the name of <i>mitayos tindarunas</i>, explaining that
+the word <i>tindaruna</i> signifies ‘forced labour’. The chiefs had to provide
+a certain number of them every year to work in mines and manufactories, and so
+well was the labour in the mines known to be fatal, that the Indians upon being
+drawn for service disposed of all their property, and not infrequently divorced
+their wives. The <i>mitayos</i> were at the beginning Indians who had not
+fought against the Spaniards, but had submitted to their rule. They were
+grouped in townships composed of portions of a tribe under a chief to whom the
+Spaniards gave the position of Alcalde. In the towns thus formed only the men
+between eighteen and fifty were liable to be drawn for service in the mines;
+originally their term of service was for only two months in the year, and for
+the remaining ten months they were in theory as free as were the Spanish
+settlers. By 1612 the abuses of their system had so diminished the number of
+the Indians that Don Francisco de Alfaro was named by the Spanish Government to
+report upon it, and to reform abuses where he found it possible. His report
+declared that the Guaranís and Guaycurús should not be made slaves of, and it
+abolished in their favour the forced labour which they had previously endured.
+The European settlers in Asuncion thought that this was owing to the influence
+of the Jesuits, and therefore they expelled them from the town. Recalled to
+Santiago, they founded there a college, and those who remained in Paraguay
+pushed on the mission-work. Brabo<a href="#foot060">[60]</a> points out that
+the first twenty reductions founded by the Company of Jesus were settled in the
+first twenty years from their first appearance in the land,<a
+href="#foot061">[61]</a> and that from the foundation of the Mission of St.
+George (the last established of the first twenty towns) to that of San Joaquim,
+in the wild forests of the Tarumá, they employed a hundred and twelve years. In
+the interval they chiefly occupied themselves in the consolidation of their
+first settlements, and in various unsuccessful attempts to institute similar
+reductions amongst the Indians of the Chaco across the Paraguay.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But whilst the Jesuits were settling their reductions in the province of Guayrá
+and those upon the Paraná and Uruguay, a nest of hawks looked at their
+neophytes as pigeons ready fattening for their use. Almost eight hundred miles
+away, at the city of San Paulo de Piritinanga, in Brazil, a strange society had
+come into existence by degrees. Peopled at first by Portuguese and Dutch
+adventurers and malefactors, it had become a nest of pirates and a home for all
+the desperadoes of Brazil and Paraguay. This engaging population, being in want
+of wives whereby to propagate their virtues, took to themselves Indians and
+negresses, and bred a race worse ten times than were themselves, as often
+happens both in the cases of Mulattos and Mestizos in America. Under the name
+of Mamelucos<a href="#foot062">[62]</a> (given to them no one knows why) they
+soon became the terror of the land. Equally at home on horseback, in canoes
+upon the rivers, or in schooners on the sea, excellent marksmen and courageous
+fighters, they subsisted chiefly by procuring Indians as slaves for the
+plantations in Brazil. In a short time they exhausted all the Indians near San
+Paulo, and were forced to search far in the depths of the unknown interior.
+Little by little, following the course of the great rivers in their canoes,
+they reached the Jesuit settlements upon the upper waters of the Paraná, where
+they burned the towns and the churches, made captives of the converts, and
+killed the priests. Montoya relates that a Jesuit, having clasped an Indian in
+his arms to save him, was deluged with his blood, a Mameluco having crept up
+behind him and plunged his lance into the Indian behind the Jesuit’s back. The
+Mameluco, on being, as Montoya says, ‘reprehended’ by the Jesuit, dogmatically
+remarked, ‘I shall be saved in spite of God, for to be saved a man has only to
+believe,’<a href="#foot063">[63]</a> a remark which showed him clearly an
+honest opponent of the Jesuits, as they insisted greatly on the doctrine of
+good works.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Ruiz Montoya and others tell us that the plan of action of the Paulistas was
+either to attack the Jesuit reductions on Sunday, when the sheep were gathered
+in the fold listening to Mass, surround the church, murder the priest, and
+carry off the neophytes as slaves; or else, disguised as Jesuits, enter a
+mission, gain the confidence of the Indians, and then communicate with their
+soldiers, who were waiting in the woods. But not content with this, it seems,
+so often did they practise singing Mass to pass as Jesuits, that on returning
+to San Paulo, in their orgies, their great diversion was to masquerade as
+priests. So that the rascals not only profited by their villainy, but extracted
+much amusement from their wicked deeds.<a href="#foot064">[64]</a> This, in
+Montoya’s opinion, was even more damnable than the actual crime. And so no
+doubt it was, and we in England, by having made our vice as dull as virtue is
+in other lands, have gone some way towards morality, for vice and virtue, both
+deprived of humour, become not so far separated as some virtuous dull folk may
+think.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Quite naturally, these redoubtable land and river pirates saw in the Jesuit
+reductions upon the Paranapané, and generally throughout the district of
+Guayrá, merely an opportunity of capturing more Indians than usual at a haul.
+In 1629 they first appeared before the Mission of San Antonio and destroyed it
+utterly, burning the church and houses, and driving off the Indians to sell as
+slaves. San Miguel and Jesus-Maria shortly suffered the same fate. In
+Concepcion Padre Salazar was regularly besieged, and he and all the people
+reduced to eating dogs, cats, rats, mice, and even snakes. At the last moment,
+when about to surrender, Father Cataldino, hastily arming some Indians with any
+rude weapons at his command, marched on the place and raised the siege. A
+worthy member of the Church militant this exploring, fighting, intrepid Italian
+priest, and one the Company of Jesus should honour, for to him, perhaps as much
+as to any of these first explorers of the Upper Paraná, is credit due.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But still the Mamelucos ran their course, destroying town after town, so that
+in the short space of a year (1630-31) they destroyed partially the reductions
+of San Francisco Xavier, San José, San Pedro, and La Concepcion; and the two
+first founded, San Ignacio and Loreto, were ruined utterly. The wretched
+Indians, to whom by law the Jesuits were forbidden to serve out firearms, stood
+no chance against the well-trained Paulistas, with their horses, guns, and
+bloodhounds, assisted as they were by troops of savage Indians who discharged
+poisoned arrows from blowpipes and from bows. Small wonder that, as Montoya,
+Charlevoix, Lahier,<a href="#foot065">[65]</a> and Filiberto Monero<a
+href="#foot066">[66]</a> all agree, despair took hold of them, so that in many
+instances they cursed the Jesuits and fled back to the woods. When one reflects
+that many of the Indian tribes looked upon baptism as a poison,<a
+href="#foot067">[67]</a> it is not strange that they should have associated
+effect with cause, and set down all their sufferings to the influence of the
+malignant rite to which the Jesuits had subjected them. The isolated Jesuits
+ran considerable risk from their own sheep, and Padre Mola, after the ruin of
+San Antonio, was suspected by them of being in league with the Paulistas, and
+had to flee for safety to another town; and as a touch of comedy is seldom
+wanting to make things bitterer to those in misfortune, a troop of savage
+Indians, having arrived to attack the Reduction of San Antonio, and finding it
+already burning, instantly thought poor Padre Mola had been the instigator,
+and, starting on his trail, almost surprised him before he reached a refuge
+from their patriotic rage.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Thus in the greater world reformers of all sorts have not infrequently in times
+of scarcity and danger been taken by their protégés for the authors of their
+trials and stoned, whilst the smug Government which caused the ruin, well
+bolstered up in the affection of its ‘taxables’, chuckled, serenely confident
+in the unending folly of mankind. Most certainly the Jesuits struggled to do
+their duty to their neophytes in what they thought they saw was right. On foot
+and unattended Fathers Maceta and Mansilla followed the fifteen thousand
+captives to Brazil, confessing those who fell upon the road before they died,
+and instant in supplication to the Paulistas for the prisoners’ release. Father
+Maceta especially behaved heroically, carrying the chains of those who could
+hardly drag themselves along, himself half dead with hunger and his constant
+toil. Especially he strove to effect the release of a captive chief called
+Guiravera, who had been one of his bitterest enemies, and strove so hard that a
+Paulista captain, either touched by his zeal or wearied with his pleading,
+released the chief, his wife and family, and six of the Indians of his tribe.
+The chief returned to become the Jesuits’ best friend, and the two priests on
+foot followed the captives’ train. What they endured on foot without
+provisions, tortured by insects, and in danger from wild beasts, as well as
+constant perils from the Paulistas, who now and then pricked them with lances
+or fired pistols over their heads to frighten them away, none but those who
+have journeyed in the forests of that forgotten corner of the world can
+estimate. I see them in their torn and sun-browned cassocks struggling through
+the <i>esteros</i><a href="#foot068">[68]</a> in water to the knees, falling
+and rising oft, after the fashion of the supposititious Christian on life’s
+way; pushing along through forest paths across which darted humming-birds, now
+coming on a dying man and kneeling by his side, now gathering the berries of
+the guavirami<a href="#foot069">[69]</a> to eat upon the road, and then again
+catching sight of a jaguar as it slunk beside the trail, and all the time
+convinced that all their efforts, like the efforts of most of those who strive,
+would be in vain. So stumbling through the woods, crossing the rivers on
+inflated ox-skins, baked by the sun upon the open plains, at length the Jesuits
+reached San Paulo, where they had a college, and without resting set at once to
+work. In season (and what in cases of the kind is ten times more important),
+out of season, they besought, pleaded, and preached, and finding as little
+grace from the Paulista chiefs as a transgressor against some fiery dogma would
+find from a sour-faced North British dogmatist, they started for Rio de Janeiro
+to see the Council-General of Brazil. There they were told that the right
+person to address was the Captain-General of the colony, who had his residence
+in Bahia, five or six hundred miles away. Not the least daunted, they set out,
+and found Don Diego Luis Oliveira more or less friendly, but as usual fearful
+of giving offence to those who had a vested interest in the trade. Then the two
+Jesuits, hearing that another invasion of the Paulistas was expected in Guayrá,
+started back on their long journey through the woods, over the plains, across
+the mountain ranges, and through the dank <i>esteros</i> which lay between them
+and their missions on the Paraná. The Captain-General seems to have been roused
+to a sense of the position by their words, for on his annual visitation at San
+Paulo he spoke in public to the colonists against their slave raids, when a
+shot fired from the meeting ended his speech.<a href="#foot070">[70]</a> The
+inhabitants then signified to him that, sooner than give up what seemed to them
+a justifiable and honest means of life, they would be debaptized. How they
+proposed to debaptize themselves is not related, but perhaps after the fashion
+of the Guaranís—by sand, hot water, and scraping with a shell; though why the
+tongue should be thus scarified seems doubtful, for no sect of Christians that
+is known exacts that people at that sacrament should put out their tongues, and
+even baptism does little or nothing to increase the power of scandal inherent
+both in those who have been and those who never were baptized.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+About this time (1630) the poor Jesuits were much tormented by the return to
+paganism of their Indians, and most especially by a hideous dwarf who set
+himself up as a god, and found a host of worshippers. Good Father Charlevoix
+thinks that <i>ce petit-monstre</i>,<a href="#foot071">[71]</a> despairing of
+being thought a man, had no resource but to give out he was a god, and remarks
+that, as even more hideous gods have been adored, it is not surprising that the
+Indians took him at his word. When stripped of the somewhat strange phraseology
+of the simple Jesuit, there is nothing really shocking in the incident. People
+in general, in making gods, endue them with their own least admirable
+attributes, and logically these poor Indians but followed out the general
+scheme.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But in the midst of heresies and dwarf-gods, with the Paulistas almost always
+in the field, a man arose who was to lead the Jesuits and their neophytes out
+of Guayrá and settle them securely below the cataract in the Misiones of
+Paraguay. Born probably late in the sixteenth century in Spain, Antonio Ruiz de
+Montoya was amongst the first of the Jesuit Fathers who came to Paraguay. In
+1612 we find him recently arrived from Spain;<a href="#foot072">[72]</a> sent
+up to the province of Guayrá to the assistance of Fathers Maceta and Cataldino.
+For thirty years,<a href="#foot073">[73]</a> as he himself informs us in his
+book, he remained in Paraguay, and in his own pathetic words he tells us how
+most of his life was spent. ‘I have lived,’ he says, ‘all through the period of
+thirty years in Paraguay, as in the desert searching for wild beasts—that is,
+for savage Indians—crossing wild countries, traversing mountain chains, in
+order to find Indians and bring them to the true sheepfold of the Holy Church
+and to the service of His Majesty.<a href="#foot074">[74]</a> With my
+companions I established thirteen reductions or townships in the wilds, and
+this I did with great anxiety, in hunger, nakedness, and frequent peril of my
+life. And all these years I passed far from my brother Spaniards have made me
+almost a rustic and ignorant of the polished language of the Court.’ Travelling
+as he did continually, few knew the country from Guayrá to Yapeyu<a
+href="#foot075">[75]</a> so well as he; he tells us that for ‘all travelling
+equipment’ he took a hammock, and a little mandioca flour, that he usually
+travelled on foot with either sandals or bare feet, and that for eight or nine
+years he never once tasted bread.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+About the year 1611-12 we find him charged with a mission to the Provincial at
+Asuncion to disabuse him of a report which had been carried there that the
+Jesuits of Guayrá were garnering in no fruit from all their labours in the
+wilds. The rumour had been so much repeated that the superiors in Asuncion were
+on the point of calling back the missionaries and giving up all hope. Montoya,
+accompanied by six Indians, set out upon the journey, which by land to-day is
+enough to appal the boldest traveller. Walking along, he found himself about
+the middle of his way alone, his Indians having loitered in the rear. Night
+caught him in the forests, and a storm came on. He passed the night at the foot
+of a large tree, hungry and wet, and, waking in the morning, found himself so
+crippled with arthritic pains as to be obliged to continue his journey on his
+hands and knees. Alone and helpless, he dragged himself to a place called
+Maracayu, and, failing to obtain a canoe, went on another league, and there lay
+down to die, his leg being swelled enormously with the rheumatic pains. Then,
+as he says himself, he prayed to San Ignacio, telling him that from a sentiment
+of obedience he had set out upon the journey through the waste. Nothing could
+have been better, for the saint (who must have seen him all the time),
+flattered, perhaps, that his own chief virtue had been the cause of so much
+pain, promptly healed him and restored his leg to its usual size, and Montoya
+went on his way rejoicing to Asuncion. The Provincial heard and was disabused,
+but was unable to send a single man to help, and poor Montoya set off again
+back to Guayrá alone, having gained nothing but his sufferings on the road.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Again, in 1614, we find him in Asuncion combating calumnies spread by the
+Spanish settlers against the Jesuits. In the same year (as he informs us<a
+href="#foot076">[76]</a>) he was witness in the Reduction of Loreto of a
+strange circumstance. ‘An Indian,’ he says, ‘of intelligence and pious conduct
+called me to administer the last Sacraments, and to confess him before he died,
+and this I did. As there seemed little hope of his recovery, and pressing
+business called me away, I quitted him after having given orders for his
+burial. He died in a short time—at least, all those who were with him had no
+doubt of this; on my return I found the man whom I had charged to stay beside
+the Indian till his death preparing for his funeral. Toward mid-day they came
+to tell me that the dead man had come to life, and wished to speak to me. I ran
+there, and found him with a cheerful face in the middle of a crowd of Indians.
+I asked him what had happened since I last saw him, and he answered me that the
+instant that I quitted him his soul had taken its departure from his body;
+then, at a point which he thought near to his hammock, a devil had appeared,
+who said to him, “You are my prey,” and that he answered it could not be, for
+he had confessed himself to the best of his ability, and had received the holy
+Viaticum before his death; that the devil had sustained that his confession had
+been incomplete, and that he had forgotten to confess that twice he had been
+drunk, to which he answered that it was an oversight, and he hoped that God
+would not remember it. Then, on the devil sustaining that he had committed a
+sacrilege, St. Peter had appeared, followed by angels, and driven off the
+fiend. I asked him how he had known St. Peter, and he replied by describing
+him, though he had never seen an image of the saint. “The saint,” he said,
+“covered me with his mantle, and I felt myself instantly carried through the
+air. First I perceived a lovely landscape, and further on a great city, from
+which a shining light appeared. Then the Apostle and the angels stopped, and
+the first said to me, ‘This is the city of the Lord; we live here with Him, but
+the time of your entry is not yet. It is written that your soul shall once more
+join your body, and in three days you must appear in church.’ Then all was
+dark, and in an instant I woke up alive and well.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+‘I,’ says Montoya, ‘understood by the last words of St. Peter that the man had
+to die in three days, and I asked what he thought himself. “I think,” said he,
+“that next Sunday they will carry my body to the church, and I am certain that
+I only returned to life in order to exhort my relatives and my friends to
+listen to your instructions.” . . . When Sunday came he made his general
+confession,<a href="#foot077">[77]</a> admitted the two sins the devil had
+reproached him with, exhorted all to live a Christian life, and a few moments
+afterwards quietly gave up the ghost.’
+</p>
+
+<p>
+This is the sole occasion on which Padre Ruiz Montoya even remotely touches the
+field of miracles, as he in general relies upon himself, his knowledge of the
+world, and on his patience, which must have been almost North British in its
+quality, if he acted up to his own favourite maxim of ‘by returning thanks for
+injuries is how wise men conduct their business.’<a href="#foot078">[78]</a>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In 1623 we find him praying Father Cataldino to let him accompany the
+expedition to Itiranbaru, a mountain wooded to the summit, in which lived
+several wild tribes. There he so worked upon the Indians as to establish them
+in a reduction under the title of St. Francis Xavier,<a
+href="#foot079">[79]</a> and left the mountain, which had been a haunt of
+savages, as Padre del Techo says in his curious work on Paraguay, ‘all at the
+service of the Lord.’
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In 1623, whilst preaching, he was suddenly assailed by hostile Indians, and
+seven of his Indians pierced with arrows at his feet. Undoubtedly, he must have
+been killed had not an Indian taken his hat and cloak, and run into the middle
+of the enemy to distract the fire. In the confusion both the heroic Indian and
+Montoya managed to escape, the latter getting into a canoe which, fortunately,
+was ready at the river-side. But in the midst of all his occupations he had
+time to study natural history in the spirit of the time, as the following
+description clearly shows: ‘Amongst the other rarities of the land is an
+amphibious animal. . . . It is like a sheep, with but the difference that its
+teeth and nails are like a tiger’s, which animal it equals in ferocity. The
+Indians never look on it without terror, and when it sallies from the marshes
+where it lives (which it does ordinarily in troops), they have no other chance
+of escape but to climb up a tree, and even then sometimes are not in safety,
+for this terrible creature sometimes uproots the tree, or sometimes stays on
+guard until the Indian falls into its jaws.’ Thus far Montoya; but Charlevoix
+informs us that, <i>en langue Guaranie</i>, it is known as the ‘ao’, and rather
+tamely adds, ‘When one of these animals is slain, the people make a jacket of
+its skin.’
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Again, Montoya tells us of the horse on which the venerable Padre Roque used to
+ride, which, when he died, refused all food, and wept perpetually, two streams
+of water running from its eyes. It never allowed an Indian to mount it after
+its master’s death, and finally expired, close to his grave, of grief. A
+kindly, scholarly, intrepid priest, well skilled in knowledge of the world, and
+not without some tincture of studies in science, as the above-related anecdotes
+reveal to us. No doubt the Indians loved him far and wide, and his superiors
+stood in some little awe of him, as those in office often do of their
+subordinates when they show that capacity for action which is a sure bar to
+advancement either in Church or State.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In 1627 Montoya was made head of the missions in Guayrá, which opened up to him
+the opportunity of showing what kind of man he was. In this year the Spaniards
+of Villa Rica, the nearest town in Paraguay to the reductions in Guayrá, sent
+out an expedition to chastize some Indians who had insulted a chief called
+Tayaoba, whom Montoya had baptized. This was the pretext for the expedition,
+but Montoya knew well that the real object was to hunt for slaves. He brought
+before the Governor the edict of the King of Spain forbidding any war to be
+made upon the Indians without sufficient cause. All was in vain, and the
+expedition left Villa Rica and plunged into the wilds. Montoya, sore against
+the Governor’s desire, went with the expedition, taking with him Padre Salazar
+and some well-armed Indians. It was lucky for the Spaniards that he was there,
+for on the second day a flight of arrows burst from a wood and wounded many of
+them. The captain of the expedition ordered a retreat, which, situated as they
+were, exposed on all sides to the fire of an enemy whom they could not see,
+must have proved fatal. Montoya counselled throwing up earthworks before some
+huts which stood upon the edge of the woods in which the Indians were; this
+done, he sent a messenger to Villa Rica for reinforcements. Even behind the
+earthworks the Spaniards were hard pressed; no one could show himself without
+being pierced by an arrow. The number of the Indians daily increased, till on
+the third day they numbered about four thousand, and seemed likely to advance
+upon the huts. The Spanish captain ordered a rally, and the neophytes wished to
+decamp, taking Montoya with them, and then gain the shelter of the woods. This
+he would not allow, and, charging with the soldiers, put the Indians to flight.
+The Spaniards, far from being grateful for their lives, seeing their hopes of
+making prisoners had vanished, wished to lay hands upon the Indians whom
+Montoya had brought, and who had fought beside them in the recent fray. Hearing
+that in the morning the Spanish soldiers would attack his neophytes, Montoya
+sent them off by night, and in the morning, when the Spanish captain found him
+and the other priest alone, he said, ‘Thinking you had no other use for the
+Indians, I advised them to return.’ The captain had the grace to say nothing
+but, ‘Then, you gave them good advice, my father.’ The two priests waited
+patiently till the soldiers had retired, and then sent for their Indians and
+quietly went home. Thus it appears that at necessity Padre Montoya was a true
+son of San Ignacio.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In 1628 Montoya seems to have met for the first time Padre Diaz Taño, who
+afterwards was his companion both in the retreat from Guayrá down the Paraná
+and in his mission to the King. No matter whether a man make his career with
+Indians in the wilds of Paraguay or amongst the so-called reasoning people in
+more sophisticated lands, if he once show himself superior to the ordinary run
+of men, there is something of an invidious character certain to be attributed
+to him by those who think that genius is the worst attribute that man can have.
+This, Montoya did not escape from amongst the Spaniards, but the Indians, at
+least, were less envious, being perhaps less educated, for they believed that
+the soul of one of their <i>caciques</i>,<a href="#foot080">[80]</a> known in
+his life as Quaratici, had entered into him. The rumour reached at last a chief
+called Guiravera, known to the Spaniards as the ‘Exterminator’ from his
+cruelty, who, hearing that the soul of his late rival had entered into Montoya,
+came to see him at the head of a large retinue of people of his tribe. Montoya
+and Maceta were at Villa Rica, and on the chief’s approach they happened to be
+seated in the plaza of the town. As he approached them, followed by his men,
+and with a threatening air, they remained seated, merely motioning him to take
+a seat upon a bench. This he did, after making one of his men cover the seat
+with a tiger-skin and stand behind on guard. What passed between them, most
+unluckily, Montoya has not set down. What he has told us only makes us wish for
+more, for it appears that after the usual salutations Guiravera refused to
+speak, and getting up walked about the town, silently looking at everything.
+But, as it ever happens, even Montoya was no exception to the general run of
+history-writers, who usually are occupied alone with facts which seem to them
+important at the time, forgetting that posterity (for whom they write) can
+judge of the result as well as they themselves, but thirst for details to
+complete the chain betwixt them and their predecessors. One thing is set down
+<i>in extenso</i>—not by Montoya, but by another Jesuit—that is, the sermon
+which Montoya preached to bring the chief into the fold. Considered as a sermon
+it does not seem out of the common way, and judged by its results was futile at
+the time, for the chief answered coldly that he would think the matter over,
+and then retired into the woods. But the seed thus sown in Villa Rica was to
+bear fruit, for in a year the chief, either tired of his ancestral gods or
+having pondered on the sermon, came into the fold and was baptized as Paul.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+An irruption<a href="#foot081">[81]</a> of the Mamelucos called Father Montoya
+from baptizing Indians and recovering their souls to the more prosaic, if as
+useful, task of saving their bodies, which he did at the immediate peril of his
+own. The Mamelucos had appeared (1628) before the Reduction of Encarnacion, and
+many of the Indians had already taken refuge in the woods. Those who remained
+were like a flock of sheep without a shepherd, and knew not what to do. Padre
+Montoya hastened to the spot, and called on every Christian to take up arms.
+Under the circumstances he undoubtedly was right; still, in reading history one
+is puzzled to observe how often and in how many different countries Christians
+have to resort to arms. But before proceeding to extremities, Montoya sent out
+Fathers Mendoza and Domenecchi with some of the principal inhabitants of the
+reduction to parley with the Mamelucos, who, under their celebrated leader
+Antonio Raposo, were encamped outside the place. Upon arriving within range of
+the Paulista camp they were greeted with a shower of balls and arrows, which
+killed several of the Indians and wounded Father Mendoza in the foot. But when,
+in spite of his wound, the Jesuit advanced towards the camp and insisted on
+speaking with the leader, the Mamelucos were so struck with his courage that
+they gave up to him several of the Indians whom they had taken prisoners upon
+the previous day. Next day Father Montoya, encouraged by the unhoped-for
+success of Father Mendoza, went out himself, and, facing the Paulistas,
+somewhat imprudently threatened them with the wrath of Heaven and the King if
+they did not retire. The wrath of Heaven is often somewhat capricious in its
+action, and the King of Spain, although as wrathful as he had been an Emperor,
+was too far away to inspire much terror in his subjects on the Paraná. So that
+the Paulista treated the wrath of both their Majesties as qualities which he
+could well neglect, and for sole answer ordered his men to march upon the town.
+But, whether owing to their hard hearts having been touched by the good
+Father’s eloquence, or the fact that the neophytes were under arms, when the
+Paulistas arrived close to the town they altered their intentions and filed off
+into the woods. Profiting by the respite from hostilities, Montoya, in
+conjunction with Padre Diaz Taño and a Father bearing the somewhat curious name
+of Padre Justo Vansurk Mansilla,<a href="#foot082">[82]</a> devoted all his
+attention for the time to the Mission of Santa Maria la Mayor, which was the
+most flourishing of all the missions of the time, and which to-day still shows
+the greatest remnants of the Jesuits’ work, both in regard to architecture and
+the remains of Indian population still settled on the old mission lands. But
+even there the Jesuits did not escape without their trials, for it appears<a
+href="#foot083">[83]</a> that a quantity of new proselytes arrived with women,
+whom the good Fathers stigmatized as ‘concubines’, and whom the ignorant
+Indians in the innocence of their hearts looked on as wives. The order being
+given to dismiss these concubines (or wives), a few submitted; but the rest,
+leaving the mission, started cultivating a tract of land in the vicinity.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Then the good Fathers, with Montoya at their head, hit on a stroke of genius.
+Taking the opportunity when the seceding Indians were away gathering their
+crops, they set fire to their houses and carried off the children and the
+women,<a href="#foot084">[84]</a> back to the mission. The recalcitrants
+appeared next day at Santa Maria la Mayor, and were received again into the
+bosom of the Church. Heresy, also, now and then made its appearance, for two
+rascals, having built two temples upon two hills, transported to them the
+skeletons of two magicians long since dead, and the fickle people left the
+churches empty, and went to worship at the magicians’ shrines. But in this
+season of sorrow and of care, and whilst the churches in the Mission of
+Encarnacion were left deserted, Montoya once again showed his determination,
+and put things right. Not being able to cope alone with the heathen, Father
+Diaz Taño went to Guayrá, and induced Montoya (still the superior of the
+reductions in that province) to give his aid. He came, and, having armed some
+of the faithful, at dead of night attacked the temples and razed them to the
+ground.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In 1631 Montoya and others came in the forests of Guayrá upon the wild Caaguas.
+These they strove hard to civilize, but, after labouring long, with all their
+eloquence were able to induce only eighteen to return with them to the
+Encarnacion. It was ‘with difficulty that they were able to give them a
+sufficient knowledge of the mysteries of our faith to be able to bestow the
+rite of baptism.’ It may be that the Caaguas, not having much to occupy their
+minds, approached the mysteries of our faith in more receptive attitudes than
+is attained by those whose minds are full. But, anyhow, Montoya, with true
+prudence, deferred their baptism till just before their death, for a few months
+of life outside the forests proved fatal to them all. Faith is a wondrous
+thing, and able to move most things, even common-sense. One wonders, though,
+why, when the Jesuits learned from experience that the poor Indians invariably
+died when exposed to the burning sun upon the plains, they continued in their
+fatal efforts to inflict baptism on the unoffending people of the woods. If it
+were necessary, it surely might have taken place in their own homes, and the
+patients then might have been left to chance, to see how the reception of the
+holy rite acted upon their lives.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In 1631 the Mamelucos broke into the province of Guayrá. All was confusion, and
+Montoya sent Father Diaz Taño to Asuncion to beg the Governor, Don Luis de
+Cespedes, to send them help. He answered that he could do nothing, and thus by
+leaving the whole territory of Guayrá without defence lost a rich province to
+the Crown of Spain. Though at the time (1631) Portugal and Spain were united,
+yet in the Indies their subjects were at war, and though in Europe Spain was
+the stronger of the two, in America the Portuguese conquered about that time
+rich provinces, which to-day form part of the quondam Empire of Brazil.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Upon the failure of Don Luis de Cespedes to render help, Padre Diaz Taño was
+despatched to Charcas<a href="#foot085">[85]</a> to lay the matter before the
+Audiencia Real (the High Court of the Indies). The frequent journeys and
+diplomatic negotiations in which the Jesuits of Paraguay were engaged rendered
+them far more apt to manage business than members of the other Orders in
+America. Whilst in Guayrá all was confusion, and the Paulistas swept through
+the land ruining everything, upon the Uruguay things prospered, and Padre
+Romero founded two new reductions (1631), known as San Carlos and Apostoles; he
+also laid the foundation of that territory in which the persecuted neophytes of
+Guayrá were soon to find a safe retreat. Father Diaz Taño by this time had
+returned from Charcas with a decree of the High Court, declaring the action of
+Don Luis de Cespedes in failing to protect Guayrá against the Mamelucos
+prejudicial to the interests of the King; but as neither he nor the High Court
+of Charcas possessed any power by means of which to stimulate the Governor to
+greater zeal, the decree was useless, and Taño and Ruiz Montoya found
+themselves summoned hastily to meet a new attack. But before they arrived the
+missions, both of San Francisco Xavier and of San José, had been destroyed. As
+there were still three reductions undestroyed, Montoya, as Provincial of
+Guayrá, called all the Jesuits of the province to deliberate as to their chance
+of making a defence. The debate ran high; some of the priests wished that the
+neophytes should fight to the end; others, more sensible, pointed out that the
+ill-armed and quite untrained militia of the missions could do nothing with
+their bows and arrows against the well-led and well-disciplined Paulistas all
+armed with guns.<a href="#foot086">[86]</a> Padre Truxillo gave it as his
+opinion that it would be more prudent to transport the Indians to a place of
+safety, and pointed out that near the cataract of Guayrá they would be able to
+cross the river and place it between themselves and the Paulistas in case of an
+attack. This advice seemed prudent to the rest, and Father Truxillo set out to
+make his preparation for the march. Few European travellers even to-day have
+visited the great cataract known as El Salto de Guayrá, or in Portuguese As
+sete Quedas. Bourgade la Dardye<a href="#foot087">[87]</a> has described it in
+his book on Paraguay. Situated as it is in the midst of almost impenetrable
+forests, it has not even now been properly placed upon the map. Bourgade la
+Dardye inclines to think he was the first to visit it since the expedition sent
+by the elder Lopez, President of Paraguay, under Lieutenant Patiño in 1861.
+Before that time it had been left unvisited since 1788, when the Boundary
+Commissioners sent to determine the dividing line between the Spanish and
+Portuguese possessions camped near it for a week. Felix de Azara writes about
+it in his ‘Historia del Paraguay’,<a href="#foot088">[88]</a> but he does
+little more than reproduce the account given by the Boundary Commissioners. He
+places it in 24&deg; 4&prime; 27&Prime; lat., and refers to it as ‘a tremendous
+precipice of water<a href="#foot089">[89]</a> worthy of Homer or of Virgil’s
+pen.’ He says the waters do not fall vertically as from a balcony or window
+(<i>como por un balcon ó ventana</i>), but by an inclined plane at an
+inclination of about fifty degrees. The river close to the top of the falls is
+about four thousand nine hundred Castilian yards in breadth, and suddenly
+narrows to about seventy yards, and rushes over the fall with such terrific
+violence as if it wished to ‘displace the centre of the earth, and cause thus
+the nutation which astronomers have observed in the earth’s axis.’ The dew or
+vapour which rises from the fall is seen in the shape of a column from many
+miles away, and on it hangs a perpetual rainbow, which trembles as the earth
+seems to tremble under one’s feet. ‘The noise,’ he says, ‘is heard full six
+leagues off, and in the neighbourhood neither bird nor beast is found.’ In
+Azara’s time the journey was not too pleasant, for he says: ‘He who wishes to
+see this fall must cross the desert for thirty leagues from the town of
+Curuguaty to the river Guatimi. There he must choose trees to construct canoes.
+In these he must embark all those who go with him, arms and provisions, and
+besides, where he embarks, leave an armed escort to secure his base of supplies
+from the wild Indians’ attack. In the canoes he then must navigate the Guatimi
+for thirty leagues until it joins the Paraná, and always with much care, for in
+the woods upon its banks are Indians who give no quarter.<a
+href="#foot090">[90]</a> . . . Then there remain three leagues to sail upon the
+Paraná, then one can reach the falls either in the canoes or struggling along
+the woods which fringe the river’s bank.’
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Azara was, perhaps, of all the travellers of the last century, the man who
+above all things shines in accuracy, and in point of fact his description of
+the cataract is the best we have up to the present time. Bourgade la Dardye
+tells us that not far above the cataract the Paraná expands into a lake almost
+five miles in breadth, and from the lake the river issues in two great arms,
+which have forced their way through the mountains known as the Sierra de
+Mbaracyu.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Dr. Bourgade la Dardye seems to think the circular eddies found in the whirls
+are the most curious features of the falls. He describes them thus: ‘They flow
+in falls varying from fifty to sixty feet in depth; these circular eddies,
+which are quite independent of one another, range along an arc of about two
+miles in its stretch. They are detached like giant caldrons yawning
+unexpectedly at one’s feet, in which the flood seethes with incredible fury;
+every one of these has opened for itself a narrow orifice in the rock, through
+which like a stone from a sling the water is hurled into the central whirlpool.
+The width of these outlets rarely exceeds fifteen yards, but their depth cannot
+be estimated. They all empty themselves into one immense central chamber about
+two hundred feet wide, rushing into it with astounding velocity. . . . A more
+imposing spectacle can scarcely be conceived, and I doubt whether abysses such
+as these exist elsewhere in the world.’ He places the falls in latitude 24&deg;
+2&prime; 59&Prime;, but corrects the longitude given by Azara as 56&deg;
+55&prime; west of Paris to 58&deg; 18&prime; 8&Prime;—that is, 53&deg;
+57&prime; 53&Prime; west from Greenwich, which certainly has some importance in
+fixing the breadth of the territory of Paraguay.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But neither Azara nor the French traveller, with their yards and feet, their
+longitude and latitude, and the rest, give an idea of the grandeur of the
+place. Buried in the primeval forests, forgotten by the world, known to the
+wandering Indians who give no quarter (any more to-day than in Azara’s time),
+the giant cataract is a lost wonder of the world. In the ruined missions on the
+Paraná, two hundred miles away, I have heard the Indians talk of it with awe.
+They told how through the woods tangled with undergrowth, matted together with
+lianas, they had hewed a path. Monkeys and parrots chattered at them, and a
+white miasmatic vapour hung over trees and lakes, burying the clearings in its
+wreaths, and lifting only at mid-day, to close again upon the woods at night.
+They talked of alligators, jaguars, the giant ant-eater, and the mysterious
+bird known to them as the ‘ipetatá’, which in its tail carries a burning fire.
+In the recesses of the thickets demons lurked, and wild Caaguas, who with a
+blowpipe and a poisoned arrow slew you and your horse, themselves unseen. Pools
+covered with Victoria regia; masses of red and yellow flowers upon the trees,
+the trees themselves gigantic, and the moss which floated from their branches
+long as a spear; the voyage in canoes, whirled like a cork upon the rapids;
+lastly the falls themselves, and how they, awestricken at the sight, fell
+prostrate and promised many candles to the Virgin and the saints on their
+return, they talked of into the watches of the night.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Somehow, I like those countries which, as the province of Guayrá and Paraguay,
+appear to have no future, and of which the charm is in the past. It pleases me
+to think that the sharp business men of times gone by, patting their stomachs
+(the prison of their brain), predicted great advancement, and were all
+deceived. For then it seems as if the prognostications of to-day’s schemes may
+also fail, and countries which they have doomed to progress still remain as is
+Guayrá, their towns deserted, with but the broken spire of some old church
+emerging from the verdure of the tropics, as the St. Paul’s Rocks rise sheer
+out of the sea. If there is charm in the unknown, there is at least as great a
+charm in the forgotten, and the Salto de Guayrá is one of the most forgotten
+corners of the earth. To this wild place Father Mendoza proposed to lead the
+Indians from the Reductions of San José and San Francisco Xavier, and then
+unite with them any of the fugitives he could assemble from those reductions
+which had been destroyed. But even the doglike patience of the Indians was at
+an end, and they preferred to die or be led captives rather than run the
+chances of escape in such a solitary place. In their despair, and placed
+between the Paulistas and the fear of emigration, the neophytes turned, as even
+more civilized people than themselves will turn, on their best friends, and
+held the Jesuits responsible for all their woes. Two Indian women, wives of
+<i>caciques</i>, having been taken by the Paulistas, the Indians broke into the
+church where a Jesuit (Padre Salazar) was officiating, and interrupted him
+during the Mass with the most bitter insults. One of the Indians menaced him
+with a lance, another with an arrow, whilst a third tried to snatch the chalice
+from his hands. He escaped, and ran, holding the chalice, out into the woods,
+followed by two little Indian boys. Wandering about, he fell in with the other
+Jesuits, all like himself outcasts, without a church, and almost deserted by
+the Indians. Padre Ruiz Montoya alone possessed a shadow of authority, and he
+advised the outcasts with the remnant of their flocks to retire into the woods,
+and sow a crop of maize for food, whilst he endeavoured to get help from
+Paraguay. Hardly was this done, when news was brought him which made him alter
+all his plans. Two messengers came to inform him that an army of Paulistas was
+marching on Villa Rica, and that a strong detachment of them was advancing from
+the south. Then Padre Montoya took a supreme resolve, and ordered the
+evacuation of the two principal reductions (San Ignacio and Loreto) which yet
+remained intact. They were the first which had been founded in Guayrá, and were
+as important as any of the Spanish towns in Paraguay. The churches, all the
+Jesuit writers, as Montoya, Charlevoix, Mastrilli, and Lozano, are agreed, were
+finer than any in the land. The Indians were, according to Montoya, far better
+Christians than the inhabitants of the Spanish settlements, and their faith and
+innocence were above all praise. They cultivated cotton and had large herds of
+cattle, so that the most bitter enemies of the Jesuits must allow that much had
+been accomplished in the short space of two-and-twenty years. In 1609 the
+Jesuits came to Guayrá, and found it absolutely untouched; and when in 1631
+they left it, it was upon the road to become one of the most flourishing
+American provinces of the Spanish throne. The other missionaries imagined that
+nothing would persuade the Indians to depart from their homes, where for so
+many years they had been happy; but after Montoya explained to them his plans,
+they all assented to them as with a single voice.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The plan by means of which the Jesuit Moses led his sheep out of the wilderness
+of Guayrá was most remarkable. The river Paraná forms a great artery between
+Brazil and Paraguay; upon each side of it a network of rivers disembogue. The
+Paranapané, on which most of the missions of Guayrá were situated, flows from
+the east, and falls into the Paraná, not much more than fifty miles above the
+cataract. After the last of the once-flourishing six Jesuit reductions had been
+evacuated at the orders of Montoya, he collected all the boats, rafts, and
+canoes, and after much persuasion got all the Indians persuaded to follow him
+to seek for safer habitations lower down the Paraná. The population of the six
+reductions has been estimated at about one hundred thousand souls; but of
+these, during the years of 1629 and 1630, thousands had been led captive to San
+Paulo, and thousands had dispersed into the woods. Still, assembled on the
+banks of the Paranapané, there was a multitude of Indians of every sex and age.
+Fortunately or unfortunately, no record by an eye-witness exists,<a
+href="#foot091">[91]</a> except that written by Montoya, and he is modest to a
+fault about all details, and absolutely silent as to the part he played
+himself. He tells us that at the starting-point were gathered two thousand five
+hundred families, and this in spite of the dispersions and the efforts made by
+the Spanish settlers in the town of Ciudad Real,<a href="#foot092">[92]</a> who
+feared, with cause, to be exposed to the full fury of the Paulistas without
+allies. It appears the Indians were in a state of spiritual exaltation, for
+some young men having remarked the Jesuits were packing up a Christ and an
+image of the Blessed Virgin, which in happier times had been miraculous, they
+declared that to affront exile, and even death, in such good company was a
+foretaste of heaven.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Montoya, in opposition to the modern style, tries to shift the burden of the
+praise on to the shoulders of the Provincial, Padre Francisco Lopez Truxillo,<a
+href="#foot093">[93]</a> but with indifferent success. This matter of bearing
+your own praise will require regulation in the future, when an advance of
+civilization has opened people’s eyes to the perception that praise is just as
+disagreeable to the sufferer as is blame. The sentinel whom they had placed to
+warn them of the enemy’s approach gave the alarm. Montoya sent at once to
+Ciudad Real for help, but the Spanish settlers were too hard pressed themselves
+to give assistance. Nothing remained but to make a portage of all their rafts,
+boats, and canoes, and then to re-embark and sail down the Paraná out of the
+reach of the Paulistas. Montoya passed in review his boats, and found he had
+seven hundred, and that twelve thousand people had embarked with him on leaving
+the Paranapané. When the Paulistas found the Jesuits had evacuated all their
+towns, they burnt the churches, on the principle, perhaps, that, the nests once
+pulled down, the rooks would not return. They turned the Jesuit cells into
+barracks for themselves, taking, as Montoya says with horror, ‘infamous women’
+into those chaste abodes, where never woman had passed through the doors. The
+Paulistas then entered into a rigorous examination<a href="#foot094">[94]</a>
+of the Jesuits’ private lives, hoping to find some scandal to bring against
+them. Especially they questioned the Indian women, giving them presents to
+discover everything they knew. All was in vain, the discipline of the Order, or
+the strict conscientiousness of the individual members of it, not having given
+scandal any hold.<a href="#foot095">[95]</a> The most difficult part of the
+great exodus was now to come. The rapids and the cataracts of the Paraná extend
+to nearly ninety miles, and the whole country is a maze of tangled forest
+interspersed with rocks. No paths exist, the place is desert, and over the dank
+mass of vegetation the moisture from the clouds of vapour thrown up by the
+falling water descends in never-ending rain.<a href="#foot096">[96]</a> In
+order to endeavour to save the trouble of reconstructing new rafts and canoes
+at the bottom of the cataract, Montoya launched three hundred empty boats
+(sending an Indian in advance) to see if any of them would arrive safely at the
+bottom of the falls. Not one escaped; and so the pilgrimage began, almost
+without provisions and without arms, in the middle of a country quite
+uncultivated, and where game was scarce.<a href="#foot097">[97]</a> To make
+things worse, intelligence was brought that, a few miles below the beginning of
+the falls, the Spaniards of Guayrá had built a wooden fort, surrounded with a
+strong stockade, hoping to intercept the retreating Indians, and make slaves of
+any who might fall into their hands. Montoya himself, dressed as an Indian,
+went out to observe the enemy, and on his return the whole immense assemblage
+silently plunged into the woods, leaving so little traces of its passage that
+the Spaniards in the fort were still expecting them when they were far beyond
+their reach.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Each Indian had to take his bundle on his back; even the children carried
+bundles in proportion to their strength. The missionaries carried what was held
+most sacred, as altar-plate and images of saints. In front a band of men armed
+with machétes (cane-knives) opened the way through the dense woods and pathless
+jungle of the bank; and as they marched along, Montoya says they sang hymns
+which the Jesuits had taught them, and at the sound of them fugitives who had
+been hiding in the woods came out and joined their march. Especially those from
+the out-station of Tayaoba joined them; their priest, Pedro de Espinosa, had
+met his death ‘with a good chance of his eternal welfare,’ as Montoya says.<a
+href="#foot098">[98]</a> But after the second day the hymns no longer sounded
+through the woods, nor did they play upon the harps and other instruments,
+whose strings being all broken and the wood unglued, ‘they left them on the
+rocks, being too sad to look at them.’ All through the weary journey Montoya
+seems never once to have despaired, and sets down in his book the adventures of
+each separate day, never forgetting to chronicle anything strange or pathetic
+as it occurred to him. On the fourth day he sent off Fathers Diego, Nicolas
+Hennerio, and Mansilla into the province of Itatines to found a mission there,
+acting upon orders which had just reached him from the Provincial of the Order
+shortly before he had started from Guayrá. They took with them ‘bells, images,
+and everything suitable for the foundation of a mission’; but the first two
+were martyred by the wild Indians, and the third just fled in time to save his
+life. It took the fugitive Indians eight weary days of marching to reach the
+lower end of the cataract, where once again the Paraná was navigable. On their
+arrival they hoped to find provisions and more boats; but none were there,
+their own stores were almost done, and the people too exhausted to march on.
+Fever broke out, and many of them died; and others, lost in the forests,
+without a guide, wandered about till death released them from their march. A
+weaker man than Padre Montoya might have despaired of ever issuing from the
+woods. However, he set the Indians to work to make canoes, and others<a
+href="#foot099">[99]</a> to cultivate patches of maize for food, working
+himself alternately with axe and hoe to give example to the neophytes. Others,
+again, cut down the enormous canes, which in that region grew to fifty feet in
+height, to make them into rafts.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+So, after a considerable time, all was in readiness for a new start, and
+luckily provisions from the reductions on the Paraná arrived. So they embarked
+again, and on the journey a raft in which a woman and two children were sitting
+upset, to Montoya’s agony, as he knew that ‘in that river there are fish that
+the people call culebras,<a href="#foot100">[100]</a> which have been seen to
+swallow men entire, and throw them out again with all their bones broken as if
+it had been done with stones.’ He says: ‘I confess I suffered infinitely, and,
+turning my eyes to heaven, I blamed my sins as having been the cause of so much
+misery, and said, “O Lord, is it possible that for this Thou hast brought these
+people out of their country, that my eyes should endure the spectacle of so
+much misery, and my heart break at so much suffering, and then to let them die
+devoured by savage fish!”’ As the good man was praying, the Indian woman’s head
+appeared above the water, and Montoya himself, aided by Indians, drew her and
+the children in safety to the land. But his trials were not at an end, for many
+of the hastily constructed rafts and canoes sank before his eyes, and the
+mortality of Indians was great. Eventually they found a temporary refuge in the
+Reduction of the Nativity upon the Acaray, and at Santa Maria la Mayor upon the
+Iguazú. Then famine raged, and the arrival of so many people increased the
+scarcity, so that six hundred of the new arrivals died in one reduction, and
+five hundred in the next. At last the scarcity became so great that the poor
+Indians had to roam about the forests to gather fruit, and many of them died in
+the recesses of the woods.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Seeing no hopes of saving the remainder, Montoya led them further on to the
+banks of a little river called the Jubaburrús,<a href="#foot101">[101]</a> and
+there he once again founded two reductions, which he named Loreto and San
+Ignacio, after the two the Mamelucos had destroyed. He bought ten thousand head
+of cattle out of the money the King allowed to the Jesuits of Guayrá, and from
+the sale of some few objects saved from the general destruction of the towns,
+and settled down his Indians, who in Guayrá had been all agriculturists, to a
+pastoral life. Thus did he bring successfully nearly twelve thousand people a
+distance of about five hundred miles through desert country, and down a river
+broken in all its course by rapids, landing them far from their enemies in a
+safe haven at the last. Most commonly the world forgets or never knows its
+greatest men, while its lard-headed fools, who in their lives perhaps have been
+the toys of fortune, sleep in their honoured graves, their memory living in the
+page of history, preserved like grapes in aspic by writers suet-headed as
+themselves. But though this Hegira was the most stirring episode of Montoya’s
+life, he yet had work to do, and in the province of diplomacy rendered as
+great, or even greater, services to the Indians, whom he loved better than
+himself, as in the memorable journey when he led them down the Paraná.
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a name="chap03"></a>Chapter III</h2>
+
+<p class="letter">
+Spain and Portugal in South America—Enmity between Brazilians and
+Argentines—Expulsion of Jesuits from Paraguay—Struggles with the natives—Father
+Mendoza killed—Death of Father Montoya
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In the province of Guayrá the Spaniards who had looked with disfavour on the
+Jesuits, and had enslaved the Indians when they were able, were in sore
+straits. The Mamelucos, finding no more Indians to enslave, fell on the two
+towns of Villa Rica and Ciudad Real, destroyed them utterly, and forced the
+inhabitants to flee for refuge into Paraguay. Thus Guayrá went the way of Matto
+Grosso and several other provinces of Spain, and became Portuguese. Strangely
+enough, most of these losses happened when Spain and Portugal were joined under
+one crown. At home the Spaniards and the Portuguese, however much they detested
+one another, were forced to keep the peace. In America they were always at war,
+which ended invariably to the detriment of Spain.<a href="#foot102">[102]</a>
+The strife begun by the Papal Bull of 1493, in which Pope Alexander VI. divided
+the territories discovered and to be discovered between Portugal and Spain,
+went on, till bit by bit Spain was stripped of the provinces of Matto Grosso,
+Rio Grande, and Guayrá, and found herself drawn into the numerous disputes
+about the Colonia del Sacramento, which cost so much blood to both contending
+Powers. Perhaps the most curious and interesting incident of the long struggle
+was the Three Years’ War, which began in 1750, after the marriage of Ferdinand
+VI. of Spain with Doña Barbara of Portugal. By the treaty entered into at this
+marriage, seven of the most flourishing of the missions situated on the left
+bank of the Uruguay were ceded to Portugal in exchange for La Colonia del
+Sacramento on the river Plate. The towns resisted change of sovereignty, as
+Portugal to them was typified by the Paulistas, their most inveterate enemies.
+The Marquis de Valdelirios in his curious despatches touches much upon this
+war, but perhaps the best account is to be found in the curious memoir of the
+Irish Jesuit Father, Tadeo Hennis,<a href="#foot103">[103]</a> who was the
+backbone of the resisting Guaranís.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The ancient enmity of the two nations has been continued in their descendants,
+the Brazilians and the Argentines and Uruguayans, and little by little Brazil
+is absorbing all the northern portion of the Republic of Uruguay. After the
+retreat under Montoya down the Paraná, the Jesuit missions, especially in
+Paraguay and what is now the province of Corrientes, for some time enjoyed a
+period of peace and of repose, and the strange policy of the Jesuits was
+developed, and township after township arose amongst the Guaranís (1630-31).
+But there was still no rest for Ruiz Montoya, who was of those who rest but in
+the grave. In 1632, at the instance of the Governor and magistrates of the
+township of Jerez, Montoya sent Fathers Jean Rançonier and Mansilla to the
+north of Paraguay to found a mission amongst the Itatines, a forest-dwelling
+tribe. Their territory was marshy and the climate bad, and woods of
+indiarubber-trees covered all the land. Fathers del Techo and Charlevoix both
+speak of the ‘rebounding balls’ with which they played, which, thrown upon the
+ground, start up again as if they were filled with air. This is, perhaps, one
+of the first times that indiarubber is mentioned, though in some places Jean de
+Léry<a href="#foot104">[104]</a> seems to indicate he was acquainted with its
+use.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The Jesuits found that to make progress was not easy with these Indians, who
+willingly enough listened to their preaching, but refused to alter their social
+habits, to which the Jesuits ascribe the fact that even then their numbers were
+diminishing. Like most of the Indians of America, they were polygamists, which
+custom in their race operates differently to polygamy amongst the negroes: for
+whereas they seem to increase and thrive, the Indians even at the conquest
+often tended to become extinct. When a headman amongst the Itatines died, a
+number of his followers jumped down precipices to accompany him upon his
+journey to a better world. This custom and polygamy gave much trouble to the
+Jesuits, but their most admirable patience and knowledge of mankind helped them
+to overcome them by degrees. All was about to flourish in the mission, when one
+Acosta, a Brazilian priest, appeared. Perhaps he was in league with the
+Paulistas, or perhaps was jealous of the Jesuits, for he tried hard to lead a
+number of the Indians to San Paulo to show them (as he said) how they should
+follow the true law of God.<a href="#foot105">[105]</a>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The Itatines, either suspecting that Acosta’s true law was false, or tired of
+his preaching, rose and killed him; but the effect was bad, and there grew up
+amongst those infidels a coldness even towards the Jesuits themselves. Had it
+not been for two miraculous events which happened opportunely, as such things
+should happen if they are to be turned to good account, much harm might have
+been done. A chief, having cursed a priest, was seized at once with a malignant
+ulcer in the throat, which shortly killed him. The Itatines did not apparently
+think anything of the influence of the unhealthy climate in which they lived,
+and set the occurrence down to the act of God.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But more was still to come. Another chief having so far forgotten himself as to
+jeer at a priest, a thunderbolt fell so close to him that he was knocked
+senseless, and lay as dead. These two events confirmed the Jesuits’ power, and
+things began to flourish in their four new missions. But the Great Power, so
+careful of the individual effort of His priests, seems to have been most
+unaccountably remiss of their success considered as a whole. In the same year
+(1632) the Mamelucos appeared and ruined all the four missions, so that the
+efforts of the Jesuits and the miracles were lost.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In 1633 the first skirmish took place between the Bishop of Paraguay and the
+Jesuits. This skirmish little by little grew into a war, kept up for more than
+a hundred years, and ended finally in the expulsion of the Jesuits from
+Paraguay. The Governor, Don Luis de Cespedes, having called upon the Indians of
+the Jesuit missions for personal service, a proceeding quite against both the
+King’s orders and the Papal Bulls, the Bishop thought the moment opportune to
+press for tithes. This, too, was equally forbidden both by a Bull and by an
+order of the Council of the Indies. Padre Romero went to Asuncion and displayed
+his Bulls and his orders of the Council, and the Governor withdrew his claims.
+The Bishop, after some opposition, withdrew likewise, and the Provincial of the
+Order arrived at Asuncion, bringing with him an order from the King signifying
+that the Indians of the reductions were to be left entirely to the Jesuits. So
+for the present the Jesuits scored a victory, though in the future it was to
+cost them dear. But the Governor of Paraguay having returned apparently to his
+design of exacting personal service from the Indians of the missions, the
+Provincial checkmated him with a royal order from Philip IV. The order was
+addressed to the Viceroy of Peru, the fourth Count of Chinchon. The missive,
+dated at Madrid in 1633, condemned in the strongest terms all personal service
+(that is, forced labour) amongst the Indians, not only of the Jesuit missions,
+but of Peru and Mexico. With a touching confidence in his own powers, and
+absolute right Divine, the well-meaning King added to his orders a paragraph
+commanding all to be done as he had ordered within six months. Strange to find
+Philip IV., whom Velasquez has immortalized and shown us as he sat upon his
+horse ineffable, so far away from the Museo del Prado, where alone he ever
+seems really to have lived. But foolish Governors and Bishops were not the
+Jesuits’ worst enemies in Paraguay. In 1634 the Provincial, Father Boroa, was
+shipwrecked in a voyage up the Uruguay, and only saved by the devotion of his
+neophytes.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Sometimes the cruel treatment of the natives by the Spanish settlers was
+avenged upon the Jesuits. This was the case with a band of Guapalaches, who,
+coming on Father Espinosa in a wood, attacked and massacred him and all his
+Indians, and, having cut his body into pieces, left it for the wild beasts to
+eat. Upon another occasion Father Mendoza fell into an ambuscade, from which he
+might have escaped had not his horse sunk in a miry stream. Long he defended
+himself with an Indian shield, but at length was stretched upon the ground and
+left for dead. During the night he revived, and dragged himself up to some
+rocks; but the Indians in the morning, following up his trail, came on him
+praying in a loud voice. They told him that he served a blind God, or at best a
+powerless God, as He did nothing to defend His servant; then, after torturing
+him cruelly, they despatched him, and, taking out his heart, said: ‘Let us see
+if his soul will take the road to heaven.’ These savages do not seem to have
+been genuinely interested in finding out what became of the soul after the
+dissolution of the body, for they sat down and made a hearty meal of two young
+Indians who accompanied the unlucky priest. But they had heard their victim say
+that when he baptized them it purified their souls, and the last words of
+Father Mendoza had been to recommend his soul to God. I often wonder if the
+Christians of to-day, their creed so firmly fixed by the martyrdoms of simple
+folk, who held their faith without perhaps much reasoning on it, know what they
+owe to men like Father Christopher Mendoza, slain by the Indians in the
+Paraguayan woods. Your ancient martyr, fallen out of fashion and forgotten by
+the Christians of to-day, should have his homage done to him, if only by the
+chance writer, who in his studies for some subject of no interest to the
+general world comes on his trail of blood; for martyrdom, no matter how
+obscure, forgotten by the people of the faith for which the martyr suffered, is
+a slur not only on the faithful, but on the faith itself. In 1636 occurred the
+second invasion of the Paulistas, which induced Father Montoya, accompanied by
+Father Diaz Taño, to go to Europe to seek protection for the Indians both from
+the King of Spain and from the Pope.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The Mamelucos burst into the province of Tapé,<a href="#foot106">[106]</a> and,
+as the mission of Jesus-Maria (one of the few left undestroyed at the former
+invasion) was most exposed, Father Romero asked permission of the Governor of
+the River Plate<a href="#foot107">[107]</a> to make some trenches to defend the
+place. The Governor consented, but the storm burst on the mission before the
+defences were in a fit state to defend. The mission priests Antonio Bernal and
+Juan Cardenas were in the front ranks encouraging the Indians, and both were
+badly wounded. Fathers Mola and Romero went about ministering to the wounded,
+but escaped themselves. At last, the Mamelucos having set fire to the church,
+capitulation became inevitable, and the chief part of the Indians were led away
+in chains. The same fate would have overtaken the mission of San Cristobal,
+where father Romero had retreated with some fugitives from Jesus-Maria, had not
+the people and their priest retreated hastily upon the mission of Santa Ana.
+But even there they were not long in safety, and had to undertake another
+perilous journey down the river Iguai. Here a party of passing Mamelucos fell
+into an ambuscade, and were hewn in pieces, presumably before the Lord. The
+Mamelucos pushed their advance so far that Father Montoya had given orders that
+all the missions of that province should be burned. The inhabitants, who
+trusted him quite blindly, were just about to begin to burn their houses, when
+an order from the Provincial stopped them from doing so till he himself
+appeared upon the scene. He arrived, and, gathering up the scattered Indians as
+far as he was able, left them for safety in some of the missions which had not
+been destroyed, and set off himself to ask for help from the Governor of
+Paraguay.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Finding no help either from him or from the Governor of the River Plate, he
+went to Corrientes, and was received almost with contumely. Then, desperate, he
+equipped an army of the mission Indians, and advanced to fight the Mamelucos;
+but they had retreated into Brazil, and were beyond his reach. Seeing that
+nothing was to be hoped from the Spanish Governors, he sent a box of papers in
+a ship going to Portugal, and laid his case before the Council of the Indies.
+Montoya and Charlevoix relate that the box was thrown into the sea near Lisbon
+by some enemy of the Jesuits, but providentially was washed up by the tide,
+and, being found miraculously, was taken to the King of Spain. Whether this
+happened as it is written, who shall say? But, in distress, when have good men
+(before the time of the encyclopædists) been without a miracle to sustain their
+cause? In the next year (1637) Father Montoya and Taño started upon their
+mission to Europe, and a new field was opened to Montoya in which to show his
+talents on the Indians’ behalf.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Whilst Father Montoya was in Spain, the Provincial appointed Father Alfaro to
+take his place. He fell on troublous times, for the Mamelucos were preparing to
+attack the three remaining missions in the province of Guayrá.<a
+href="#foot108">[108]</a> As they were not defensible, it was agreed to
+evacuate them, and to retreat into the provinces upon the Uruguay. When they
+were just about to start from Santa Teresa, where the inhabitants of the other
+missions had been collected, the Mamelucos appeared just before Christmas. The
+Indians were driven off as slaves, and the Mamelucos, with their usual sense of
+humour, attended Mass as penitents on Christmas Day, with candles in their
+hands, and listened to the sermon in an edifying way. The priest reproached
+them for their cruelty, and they, after listening devoutly, gave him the
+liberty of two choir boys, and quietly left the church.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+At length the Jesuits, rendered desperate by the perils to which the mission
+Indians were exposed, armed several bands of Indians and attacked the
+Mamelucos. But, as was to be expected, the half-armed Indians were always
+worsted by the well-armed and disciplined Paulista bands, and then the Jesuits
+took the supreme resolve to evacuate Guayrá entirely, and place the Indians in
+safety between the rivers Paraná and Uruguay.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Formed into three great companies, the Indians started on their second exodus.
+Although the difficulties were less than in the voyage down the Paraná, still,
+to march several thousand Indians just emerged from savagery, accompanied by
+their women and children, and charged with all their possessions, through a
+wild country, where they were exposed to the attack of a well-armed enemy upon
+the way, was not an easy task. Father Christobal Arenas formed them into three
+divisions, leading the first himself; but the Provincial seems to have done
+most of the organizing, for Charlevoix says that ‘to his courage, prudence, and
+inalterable kindness,’ the success was due.<a href="#foot109">[109]</a>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Courage and prudence and inalterable kindness are the three virtues which have
+most moved the world; perhaps the last has been most efficacious, and one would
+hope that in the future it would be the only one of the whole three required.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Twelve thousand Indians, not counting women and children, were thus led into a
+territory<a href="#foot110">[110]</a> between the rivers Uruguay and Paraná,
+rich, fertile, and, as the distance between the rivers is not above some
+five-and-twenty miles, defended in some measure, and easily rendered almost
+impregnable.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+No one can see the heart of man, and, even if God sees it, He never tells us
+what is there, so that we are obliged to judge of actions as we find them, and
+leave the search for motives to omniscients. On the face of it, the Jesuits,
+both those who led the Indians down the Paraná and those who headed them in
+this migration to the Mesopotamia between the Uruguay and Paraná, were not
+impelled by thought of gain; and if a Jesuit must of necessity have some dark
+scheme behind the smallest action of his life, these men concealed it so deep
+down within their souls that all the researches of their keenest enemies have
+not been able to throw light on it. But, even settled in their new homes, the
+Indians were defenceless against the Mamelucos, as it was a state maxim of the
+Spanish court that the Indians should never be allowed the use of guns. This
+was a wise enough precaution, without doubt, for the Indians of the
+Encomiendas, who lived amongst the Spaniards and owed them personal services;
+but arms for the Indians of the missions were a necessity of life. Therefore,
+before he started for Madrid, the Provincial impressed upon Montoya to approach
+the Council of the Indies and the King, and represent to them that it was
+impossible to guarantee the existence of the reductions against the Mamelucos
+unless the Indians were allowed to provide themselves with arms. So Father
+Montoya, though he was charged to press for various reforms, was most
+especially impressed upon this point. He was to tell the King that the Indians
+were not to be allowed to keep their arms themselves, but that they would be
+kept by the Jesuits, and served out to the Indians in case of an attack; then,
+that the arms would not cost a penny to the treasury, but be all paid out of
+the alms collected for the purpose by the Company; lastly, and this was a true
+stroke of Jesuit policy, that, to instruct the Indians how to shoot, they would
+bring from Chile certain Jesuits who in the world had served as soldiers. One
+sees them brought from the frontiers of Araucania, and from the outposts of the
+trans-Andean towns, half sacristan, half sergeant, instant in prayer, and yet
+with a look about them like a serious bull terrier—a fitting kind of priest for
+a frontier town, and such as could alone be found amongst the Jesuits.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+About this time (1639) the third invasion of the Mamelucos took place, and
+Father Alfaro, who had been left in charge of the missions on the Uruguay and
+Paraná, was shot by a Mameluco with a crossbow, and fell dead from his horse.
+The Governor of Paraguay, on hearing of it, marched with an army, and, having
+killed two or three hundred of the Mamelucos, took the rest prisoners, and
+carried them back to Asuncion. There, to the disgust of all the Jesuit
+historians, he menaced them with the wrath of Heaven and let them go. The
+feelings of a churchman, when his own privilege is thus usurped, may be
+compared to those of a strict game-preserver who sees his coverts poached. It
+is not so much the damage that is done as the personal insult and the
+humiliation which he suffers in his pride.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In this year, too, the Indians of the missions rendered their first armed
+service to the State which afterwards so often drew on them in its necessity
+and treated them so ill.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The Governor of Buenos Ayres, Don Pedro Estevan Davila, was setting out upon an
+expedition against a tribe of Indians who had taken refuge in the islands of
+the Lake Yberá. Eighty of the Indians were sent, and, being well led and armed,
+contributed considerably towards success. Next year a second contingent was
+required by the Governor of Tucuman, and duly sent to his assistance. History
+seems to repeat itself, and foolish soldiers and others never to gain
+experience; for the Governor (Padre del Techo in his ‘Historia Paraquaiæ’ tells
+us), having made war in Flanders, could never be dissuaded that the same system
+was not suitable for warfare in America. Accordingly, he set out in good order,
+but neglected to send out scouts, and consequently fell into the middle of the
+Calchaquis strongly entrenched within a marsh, attacked them with a rush, lost
+heavily, and had to retire to Tucuman. But all this time Father Montoya and
+Diaz Taño were striving in Rome and at Madrid with the Pope and with the King.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Urban VIII., at that time God’s vicegerent for the Christian portion of the
+world, received Diaz Taño kindly, listened to all he had to say with interest,
+promised him his help, and gave him a Papal letter menacing the Mamelucos with
+the wrath of God. From Rome Father Taño went to Madrid, and thence to Lisbon,
+whence he sailed armed with the protection of the Pope and accompanied by a
+fresh band of zealous priests. Arrived in Rio de Janeiro, he published the
+Papal letter, and fixed it on the doors of the Jesuit College and on those of
+their church. He seems on this occasion to have been wanting in the chief
+Jesuit virtue, prudence, or at the least he seems to have mistaken the
+character of the people amongst whom he was. Most of the colonists having
+relations with the Mamelucos were indignant, and a mob broke in the doors both
+of the college and of the church. The riot grew so serious that the Governor
+convoked a council, and cited Father Taño to appear. He came and spoke, and in
+the eyes of the chief people of the place made out his case; but the multitude,
+caring not much for reason (and nothing for philanthropy), became more furious,
+but was appeased at last by a petition being sent in protest to the Pope.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But if these things passed in Rio de Janeiro (which Del Techo refers to as
+<i>oppido sanctorum</i>), what was the fury of the people in San Paulo, the
+very centre of the Mamelucos, when the Vicar-General published the brief by
+order of Don Pedro Albornoz! The people rose immediately, and menaced the
+Vicar-General with instant death unless he instantly withdrew the brief. This
+he refused to do, although forced on his knees and with a naked sword held at
+his throat. His courage quieted them, and they drew up an appeal which they
+tried hard to make him sign, but he again refused. The mob, having demanded the
+brief, was told it was in the college of the Jesuits. Thither they went
+post-haste, and were met upon the steps by the Superior, dressed in canonicals
+and holding the holy wafer in his hand. He spoke, and most of them fell
+prostrate on the ground before the Body of our Lord. Others stood upright, and
+said that, whilst they adored the Holy Sacrament with their whole souls, they
+would not suffer that their slaves, who were their chiefest property, should be
+set free. An atheist (or some kind of Protestant) cried out to fire upon the
+priest, but he had no support. The Superior then gave them a copy of the brief,
+and they returned to the Vicar-General to ask for absolution for any censure of
+the Church they might have incurred; but he for the third time was obdurate,
+and let them welter in their sin.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The news of the revolution which liberated Portugal from Spain having just
+reached the town, the Jesuits had to retreat from it, leaving the inhabitants
+enraged against them and more determined than before to push their forays into
+Paraguay. But the time was past for their incursions, for Father Ruiz Montoya
+had prospered at Madrid, and secured even more than he had hoped for when he
+started on his quest. On arriving at Madrid, which he did after a prosperous
+journey of four months, he waited on the King (Philip IV.), and laid before him
+and commissaries chosen from the Indies and Castile the following points:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+1. That the law of 1611, which provided that no Indians, unless taken in a just
+war, should be reduced to slavery, should be put into effect.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+2. That the Pope should be approached to confirm the briefs of Paul III. and
+Clement VIII., which contained the same provisions.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+3. That those who did not conform to these instructions should be handed over
+to the Inquisition to be judged.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+4. That the Indians who had been enslaved by the Paulistas should be at once
+set free and the aggressors punished.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The King after deliberation granted every point, and, further, regulated the
+tribute which the Indians were to pay.<a href="#foot111">[111]</a> All this was
+easy to enact, but, like most other laws, not quite so easy to put into effect.
+Moreover, as the revolution which separated Portugal from Spain had just
+occurred, all Spanish thunder against the Mamelucos was of but small account.
+Montoya then pressed the demand for license to use firearms in self-defence
+against the Mamelucos. The King after deliberation granted this last point, and
+from that time the incursions of the Mamelucos ceased in Paraguay and generally
+throughout the mission territory. Then also there was set on foot that Jesuit
+militia which rendered such good service to the crown, but was the cause of so
+much murmuring, as it protected the mission Indians both from the Paulistas and
+from the inroads of the Spanish colonists.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Father Montoya never returned to Paraguay, where he had fought so long and done
+so much for the poor Indians. Apparently it was not written that he should see
+the results of all his efforts, for, having embarked at Seville for Peru, he
+was detained at Lima on business of the Order. From thence he went to Tucuman,
+and, having returned to Lima, died aged seventy. The Viceroy and the chief
+members of the Audiencia (with whom he had struggled all his life) accompanied
+his body to the grave, and it is said that several miracles showed forth the
+glory he enjoyed in heaven.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+That may be so, and if they happened (as they well may have done, for, after
+all, a miracle<a href="#foot112">[112]</a> really exists for those who credit
+it), if Heaven has honoured him, ’tis more than man has done: for even in
+Paraguay his name is not remembered, though it remains enshrined in the
+neglected pages of many a dusty Latin or a Spanish book.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But all the time that Fathers Montoya and Diaz Taño were in Europe a serious
+danger to the Jesuits was growing up. At the discovery of the New World, the
+Franciscans had been the first of all the Orders to go out. Some had
+accompanied Columbus, some were with Cortes in Mexico. Almagro and Pizarro’s
+hosts had their Franciscan chaplains. In his commentaries, Alvar Nuñez relates
+how he met some of the Order in Brazil. Lastly, the first of all the saints of
+the New World was a Franciscan.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In 1638 the Franciscans in the province of Jujuy<a href="#foot113">[113]</a>
+disputed with the Jesuits the right to certain missions, accusing them, as
+Padre del Techo says, ‘of putting their sickle into their ripening corn.’<a
+href="#foot114">[114]</a> What could be more annoying if it were true? As if a
+Wesleyan mission in the Paumotus Group should, after having shed its Bibles and
+its blankets like dry leaves, suddenly find an emissary from Babylon itself
+arrive and mark the sheep!
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But from Jujuy the dissensions spread to Paraguay, where the Franciscans had
+several missions extending from Yuti to Cazapá, thus being almost within touch
+of the Jesuit Gospellers in Santa Maria, upon the eastern bank of the
+Tebicuari, which bounds their territory. These jealousies might have gone
+smouldering on, and never burst out into fire, had not the appointment of a
+Franciscan to the see of Paraguay caused the flames to flare out fiercely.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Had a firebrand been wanted to stir up strife, none better could have been
+found than Don Bernardino de Cardenas, who was just then appointed to the
+bishopric of Paraguay.
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a name="chap04"></a>Chapter IV</h2>
+
+<p class="letter">
+Don Bernardino de Cardenas, Bishop of Paraguay—His labours as apostolic
+missionary—His ambitions and cunning—Pretensions to saintliness—His attempts to
+acquire supreme power—Quarrels between Cardenas and Don Gregorio, the temporal
+Governor
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Don Bernardino de Cardenas first saw the light in the town of La Plata,<a
+href="#foot115">[115]</a> capital of the province of Charcas in Bolivia, or, as
+it was then called, Alta Peru. The date of his birth is uncertain, but it would
+appear to have been in the early years of the seventeenth century. At an early
+age he entered the Franciscan Order.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+As the Franciscans had had the honour of having furnished to the calendar the
+first saint canonized in the New World, it seems to have been the dream of
+Cardenas from his earliest youth to emulate him. In this desire he seems to
+have acted in good faith, and all his life the dream of saintship haunted him.
+Charlevoix<a href="#foot116">[116]</a> says ‘he made a rather superficial study
+of theology, and then engaged in preaching, in which, with memory, assurance,
+and facility, he found it easy to succeed in a country where brilliant gifts
+are more esteemed than solid learning.’ Certainly a preacher without assurance,
+memory, and facility would scarcely have succeeded in any country; and in what
+country in the world is brilliancy not far esteemed above the deepest
+scholarship? Besides, ‘he was a man of visions (<i>homme à visions</i>) and
+revelations, which he took good care to publish.’ Visions are generally, in the
+case of saints, confined to the soul’s eye, and revelation to the inward ear;
+if, therefore, the recipient of them does not make them known, they run the
+risk of being lost. In a word, according to Charlevoix,<a
+href="#foot117">[117]</a> he was ‘one of the most complete and dangerous
+ecstatics that ever lived.’ ‘His first successes’ (whether as preacher or
+ecstatic are not specified) caused his superiors to name him guardian of their
+college of La Plata. They soon repented of their choice. No sooner was he named
+Superior than he sought to qualify himself for saintship by a sort of royal
+road. Saints are of several classes, and, in looking through the calendars, it
+strikes one how different seem to have been the methods by which they severally
+attained their goal.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Prince Juan Manuel, in the preface to his ‘Fifty Pleasant Stories of Patronio’,
+says that, ‘amongst the many strange things our Lord God made, He thought good
+to make one marvellous in special—that is, that, of the numberless men who are
+on earth, not one entirely resembles any other in his face.’ He might have said
+the same of saints and of their ways. One, like St. Francis of Assisi, treats
+his father (as it seems to me) but scurvily, and yet to every other created man
+and all the animals he is a brother. The saint of Avila founds convents,
+mingles with men of business, and has visions in the intervals of her
+journeying through Spain upon an ass. Again, another preaches to the Indians or
+the Japanese, gives up his substance, begs his bread from door to door, and
+leaves the devil’s advocate scarcely a quillet or a quiddity against him.
+Lastly, you find against the names of some merely the docket ‘virgin’ or
+‘martyr’, as their case or sex may serve.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Don Bernardino adopted none of these methods of procedure. Carrying a heavy
+cross, with ashes on his head and shoulders bared, followed by all his priests,
+he sallied out one day to discipline himself in public. This plan did not
+succeed with all the world, for his superiors ordered him to remain inside his
+convent gates. There he remained, and, as his Life informs us, profited by his
+retreat to study Holy Scriptures, and to such good effect that, the next time
+he preached, he charmed his hearers by his eloquence. Soon after this the
+Archbishop of La Plata held a provincial council, with the object of reforming
+the morals of the Indians in his diocese. Cardenas, being a fluent speaker, was
+chosen for the post of Apostolic Missionary. From this time dates the beginning
+of his fame.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In those days all the Indians of the Charcas, and generally of all Peru, were
+sunk in misery, but little removed from slaves, and their religion was a
+mixture of Christianity and paganism—just the kind of folk a fluent preacher of
+the style of Cardenas could work upon. All through the province he made his
+apostolic progress, preaching, converting, and confessing, everywhere preceded
+by his fame as seer of visions, miracle-worker, and recipient of celestial
+light. He took his way, dressed like a pilgrim, on foot, carrying a wooden
+cross, and followed by a multitude of Indians from town to town.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Religion in America (Catholic or Protestant) has always tended to revert to the
+original Eastern form, from which, no doubt, it sprung. The influence of the
+vast plains and forests, and the great distances to travel, have introduced the
+system of camp meetings amongst the Protestants, whereas the Catholics have
+often held a sort of ambulatory mission, the people of one village following
+the preacher to the next, and so on, in the same fashion as in Palestine the
+people seem to have followed John the Baptist.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Soon the news was spread about that the Indians who followed Cardenas had told
+him of rich mines, on the condition that he would not divulge the secret to the
+Spaniards. At that time the search for mines was carried almost to madness in
+Peru. Even to-day, in almost every mining town, a mysterious, poverty-stricken
+man sometimes approaches you with great precaution, and, drawing from his
+pocket an object wrapped in greasy paper, declares with oaths that it is
+<i>rosicler</i> (red silver ore), and that he knows where there are tons and
+tons of it. In Mexico the curious class of miners known as <i>gambusinos</i>
+rove through the valleys of the Sierra Madre armed with pick and pan, passing
+their lives in hunting mines, as pigs hunt truffles. If they come upon a mine,
+they never try to work it, but sell the secret for a trifling sum, and,
+drinking out the money, start on again to find the mines worked by the Aztecs,
+till an Apache bullet or arrow stops them, their El Dorado still ahead, or they
+are found beside their pick and shovel dead of thirst.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Neither in Mexico nor in Peru do things grow less in telling, and we may well
+suppose the stories of the mines the Indians told to Cardenas became colossal;
+for at last the Alcalde of Cochabamba wrote on the subject to the Count of
+Salvatierra, the Viceroy of Peru.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+As Charlevoix says, ‘it seemed as if it all worked to the advantage of the holy
+missionary, who, not content with saving souls, did not forget the interests of
+his native land.’ In the middle of his triumphs, being recalled to Lima, no one
+doubted that it was in order to confer with the Viceroy about the
+supposititious mines. Others, again, imagined that a mitre was destined for the
+successful evangelist, and therefore many, even quite poor people, pressed
+forward to offer funds to help him on his way. With quite apostolic assurance,
+he took all that was offered to him, being certain, as some think, that, the
+mines being real, he could some day repay with usury all he had borrowed, or,
+as others said, being indifferent about the matter, and trusting to repay in
+that better country where no usury exists and where no gold corrupts.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The Viceroy, being a man of little faith, sent to investigate the
+supposititious mines, but found them non-existent.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The superiors of Cardenas, as judicious as the higher officers of the
+Franciscan Order often proved themselves throughout America, informed him that
+he had given offence to many by his public scourgings and processions carrying
+a cross, and, most of all, that in his sermons propositions had escaped him of
+a nature likely to bring him under the censure of the Holy Office. A convent in
+Lima was assigned to him as a retreat and place of meditation on the virtues of
+submission and obedience.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+As we may well believe, no man who felt he had the stuff within himself to make
+a saint ever cared much for obedience or submission, except in others; so in
+his convent, instead of meditating on his faults, he passed his time in writing
+a memorial to the Council of the Indies, setting forth his views on the way in
+which to spread the gospel amongst the Indians. Nothing was better calculated
+to win him favour. Every Indian baptized was so much yearly gain to the Spanish
+Government.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Conversion and taxation always went hand-in-hand, and therefore Indians who,
+unbaptized, brought nothing to the treasury, having received the Gospel truths,
+were taxed so much a head to show them that from thenceforth they were
+Christians. Thus, we find that in the Paraguayan missions each Indian paid a
+dollar every year as a sort of poll-tax, and most of the disputes between the
+Viceroys of Paraguay and the Jesuits arose from the number of the Indians
+taxable. The Viceroys always alleged that the population of the missions never
+increased, on account of the Jesuits returning false numbers to avoid the tax.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Cardenas specially inculcated, in his memorial to the Council of the Indies,
+that it was not expedient to place the Indians under the regular clergy, a
+theory of which he himself was destined to become a great antagonist.
+Promotion, as we know, cometh neither from the east nor from the west; so it
+fell out that during his retreat, through the influence of his friend Don Juan
+de Solorzano, a celebrated lawyer, who had heard him preach when Governor of
+Guancavelico, he found himself named Bishop of Asuncion del Paraguay. This
+piece of luck opened the doors of his convent to him, and he repaired at once
+to Potosi to wait the arrival of the Papal Bull authorizing him to take
+possession of his bishopric. There he appeared in the habit of his Order, a
+little wooden cross upon his breast, and a green hat upon his head, a costume
+which, if not quite fitting to his new dignity, was at least suited to the
+Indian taste.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+His biographer informs us that, without a word to anyone, he began to preach
+and hear confessions. Being absolutely without resources, he was reduced to
+distribute indulgences and little objects of piety, and at the end of every
+sermon to send his green hat round the audience. His talent for preaching stood
+him in good stead, and after every sermon gifts were showered upon him, and a
+crowd accompanied him home.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The priest of Potosi being just dead, Don Bernardino took his place without
+permission, and set himself up in the double character of parish priest and
+Bishop to hold a visitation throughout the diocese.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Some people took this conduct as evidence of his saint-like humility in
+condescending, though a Bishop, to officiate as a mere priest. The Archbishop
+had a different opinion, but, as Don Bernardino had a great following, he
+thought it best to dissemble his resentment. Cardenas himself, by his
+imprudence, furnished the Archbishop with an excuse to get him out of the
+bishopric.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A rich Indian, whom Cardenas confessed upon his death-bed, left him ten
+thousand crowns. Not content with that, he influenced one Diego Vargas to
+change his will and leave him money. On this the Archbishop wrote to him,
+requesting that he would go and govern his own see. He had to go, but left the
+town, which he had entered without a farthing, with a long train of mules
+carrying his money, plate, and furniture. Why he did not instantly go to
+Asuncion is not quite clear, for in America it was the custom, owing to the
+great distance from Rome, that Bishops, on receipt of the royal order of
+appointment, got themselves chosen by the chapter of their diocese to govern
+provisionally. Instead of doing that, he went to Tucuman, and thence to Salta,
+where he arrived in 1641.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In Salta, his first visit was to the Jesuit college, where he laid his case
+before the Jesuit fathers, and showed them several letters, one from the
+Cardinal Antonio Barberini dated in 1638, and another from the King without a
+date, naming him Bishop of Asuncion. On the strength of these two letters he
+asked the Jesuits if he could get himself consecrated without the Papal Bulls.
+Charlevoix alleges that they dared not refuse to answer in the way he wished.
+Why this was so is not so easy to make out, as, even with his green hat and
+wooden cross, he could not at that time have been a formidable personage. Their
+written opinion he sent at once to the rector of the Jesuit college at Cordova,
+asking for his opinion and that of the doctors of the university. The answer
+reached him in Santiago del Estero, and was unfavourable. On reading the
+letter, Cardenas fell into a most unsaint-like fury, and tore it up without
+communicating it to anyone, not even to the Bishop of Tucuman, Don Melchior
+Maldonado. This was not strange, as he had counted on this Bishop to consecrate
+him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Notwithstanding what was at stake, he went on in the diocese of Tucuman just as
+he had done in that of Charcas, preaching, confessing, and celebrating Mass.
+Don Melchior Maldonado, a quiet man of no pretensions, wrote him a letter in
+which he said: ‘You came into my diocese like a St. Bernard; such is the
+reputation you have for holiness and preaching that my people pay me no
+respect, and only look on me as a man of common virtue and mediocre talents.
+Although I hope I am not jealous, still, I must remind you that you act as if
+you were St. Paul.’
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A Bishop of common virtue and of mediocre talents is, of course, a Bishop lost,
+and one can well conceive that poor Don Melchior Maldonado was placed in an
+unpleasant position during the stay of Cardenas in his diocese. Such were Don
+Bernardino’s powers of persuasion that at last the Bishop consecrated him. The
+ceremony was hardly over, when a letter arrived from the Rector of the
+University of Cordova advising Bishop Maldonado against the consecration.
+Unluckily for Paraguay, it was too late to undo the action, and Cardenas was
+now in a position to take possession of his see. Poor Melchior Maldonado,
+Bishop of Tucuman, had, as it happened, laid hands a little hastily upon the
+candidate. The Council of Trent pronounced upon the case, and found ‘that the
+consecration of the Bishop of Paraguay had been a valid one as touching the
+sacrament (ordination), and the impression of the character, but that it had
+been void as regards the power of discharging the functions attaching to the
+dignity, and that the Bishop and his consecrator had need of absolution, which
+the same holy congregation thinks ought to be accorded with the good pleasure
+of the Pope.’ As the same holy congregation had previously declared the taking
+possession of the diocese by Cardenas had been illegal, it is difficult for
+ordinary minds to grasp their real opinion of the case.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Finding that he had failed with the University of Cordova, Don Bernardino took
+his way to Santa Fé, from whence he wrote an insulting letter to the poor
+rector. The letter was conceived in such outrageous terms that the Bishop of
+Tucuman wrote in expostulation, saying he expected to see something
+extraordinary happen in Paraguay if he gave way to such excess of passion.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Don Bernardino’s usual luck attended him in Santa Fé. This town then formed
+part of the diocese of Buenos Ayres, though situated about four hundred miles
+from the metropolis. It happened that the see of Buenos Ayres was vacant, and
+the chapter of the cathedral invited Cardenas to visit that portion of the
+diocese through which he had to pass. Cardenas was, of course, delighted to
+show his talents for preaching, as he had done before in Charcas and in Potosi.
+When he arrived at Corrientes the enthusiasm for his holiness and talents was
+extraordinary. In Corrientes, Don Bernardino seems to have felt, for the first
+time, his calling and election really sure. At the time he landed (1642) the
+land was sunk in ignorance and superstition. Even to-day in Corrientes (the
+city of the seven currents), situated just at the junction of the rivers Paraná
+and Paraguay, close to the celebrated missions of the Jesuits, the inhabitants,
+living in a country almost tropical, are half Indians in type.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+What Corrientes looked like in Don Bernardino’s time is matter of conjecture.
+Perhaps it was not greatly different from some remote Spanish-American frontier
+towns some five-and-twenty years ago, save for the groups of Spanish soldiery,
+with their steel morions, trunk hose and heavy arquebuses lounging about, and
+in the matter of the scarcity of horses in the streets. No doubt the self-same
+listless air hung over everything, and in the place of the modern blue and
+white barred flags with a rising sun or cap of liberty stuck like a trade-mark
+in the corner, the blood and orange Spanish colours with the quarterings of
+castles and of lions flapped heavily against the flagstaff of the fort. The
+Indian women dressed all in white, their hair cut square across the forehead
+and hanging down their backs, sat with their baskets of fruit and flowers in
+the market-place. The town, as now, built chiefly of adobes, with a few wooden
+huts dotted about, was semi-oriental in design. On every church were cupolas
+after the eastern fashion, flat roofs on every house, and everything shone
+dazzling white against the dark, metallic-looking foliage of the trees. The
+streets, as now, were sandy water-courses, crossed here and there with
+traverses of rough-hewn stone to break the force of the water in the season of
+the rains.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+At night the fireflies glistened amongst the heavy leaves of the mamayes and
+the orange-trees, whilst from the Chaco rose the mysterious voices of the
+desert night, and from the outskirts of the town the wailing Indian Jarabis and
+Cielitos sung in a high falsetto key to the tinkling of a cracked guitar, but
+broken now and then by the sharp warning cry ‘Alerta centinela!’ of the
+soldiers on the walls. Could one have landed there, one would have felt much as
+a sailor feels, dropped on the beach of Eromango or on some yet
+unbemissionaried island of the Paumotus Group.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Embarking from Corrientes up the river Paraguay, the Bishop met two vessels
+sent from Asuncion to do him honour. When night approached he put in practice
+one of the manœuvres which in Peru had stood him in good stead. On every side a
+swarm of launches and canoes accompanied the ship to see the Bishop, whom
+already many believed a saint. He asked them all to retire a little from his
+ship. All did so but the guard of honour sent from Asuncion. Towards the middle
+of the night the sound of scourging wakened them. It was their Bishop trying to
+prepare himself for the duties that awaited him. Every succeeding night the
+same thing happened. During the day he celebrated Mass pontifically upon the
+deck. Voyages upon the river Paraguay before the days of steamers took a
+considerable time, especially as every night the custom was to anchor or to
+make fast the vessel to a tree. Soon the rumour reached Asuncion that a second
+St. Thomas was on his way to visit them. St. Thomas, as is said, once visited
+Paraguay, and a cave in the vicinity of a town called Paraguari, where he once
+lived, exists to-day to prove the passage of the saint.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Fate seemed determined that the Bishop should always meet the Jesuits, no
+matter where he went.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Becoming weary of the slow progress of the ships, he disembarked four leagues
+below Asuncion, at a farm belonging to the Company. He managed to dissemble his
+resentment so perfectly that no one knew he had a grudge against them. Arrived
+at the capital, he went at once to the church of San Blas, then to the
+Cathedral, where he celebrated Mass and preached, his mitre on his head. After
+service he dismissed the people to their homes to dine, saying, however, that
+he himself was nourished by an invisible food and by a beverage which men could
+not perceive. ‘My food’ (he said) ‘is but to do the work and will of Him who
+sent me.’ Therefore he remained in prayer and meditation until vespers, and
+that office finished, he retired to the palace accompanied by a shouting crowd.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In his position his conduct was most adroit, for, as his Bulls had not arrived,
+he must have known he had no legal status, and that, in default of that, he had
+to conquer public sympathy. The chapter never doubted that Don Bernardino would
+place himself entirely in their hands as his Bulls had not arrived. He,
+however, seems to have thought that the act of celebrating Mass pontifically in
+the Cathedral had put him in possession of his powers. So he named one
+Cristobal Sanchez as his Vicar-General. Two of the members of the chapter, Don
+Diego Ponce de Leon and Don Fernando Sanchez, remonstrated, but a considerable
+portion of the chapter sided with Cardenas. The stronger party left the
+Cathedral and celebrated Mass in the church belonging to the Jesuits, thus
+giving Cardenas a second cause of offence against the Company.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The Bishop, not being secure of his position, had recourse to every art<a
+href="#foot118">[118]</a> to catch the public eye: fasting and scourging,
+prayers before the altar, two Masses every day, barefoot processions—himself
+the central figure, carrying a cross—each had their turn. Along the deep red
+roads between the orange-gardens which lead from Asuncion towards the Recoleta
+and the Campo Grande, he used to take his way accompanied by Indians crowned
+with flowers, giving his benediction as he passed, to turn away (according to
+himself) the plague and to insure a fertile harvest. Not being content with the
+opportunities which life afforded, he instituted an evening service in a church
+in order to prepare for death.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Soon, as was to be expected in such a country, this service proved the occasion
+of much scandal, and, instead of showing people how to leave the world, became
+the means of introducing many into life in a clandestine way. The rector of the
+Jesuit college thought it his duty to inform the Bishop; but he, like all good
+men, thought nothing bad could spring from anything that he himself originated.
+No doubt he put it down to malice, as good people will when worldlings put the
+finger on the weak spot of a religious institution; but anyhow, regardless of
+the scandals, he continued his nocturnal rites.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The Governor of Paraguay at that time was one Gregorio de Hinostrosa, an
+officer born in Chile, an honest, pious, wooden-headed man, and much beloved by
+the inhabitants of Paraguay. On his arrival Don Bernardino tried to conciliate
+him. Unluckily, a friendship with the Bishop was impossible without a blind
+submission to his will. In the beginning all was flattery; when Don Gregorio
+attended Mass, the Bishop used to meet him at the church door. Not to be
+outdone, the Governor returned the Bishop’s politeness in a similar way, but
+went so far in his complaisance that Don Bernardino ceased to respect him. Soon
+there arose bickerings and jealousies, and at length they hated one another
+fervently.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Nor was the Bishop more successful with his clergy. Some of them laughed at his
+pretensions to be a saint, and called him an ambitious schemer. Again, amongst
+the laity, many did not quite understand his habit of celebrating two Masses
+every day. He answered that he never celebrated without releasing a soul from
+purgatory, and that there had been saints who celebrated nine Masses every day,
+and, moreover, that he was Pope in his own diocese. This cut the ground from
+under the feet of his detractors, for in a town of the calibre of Asuncion the
+people looked on a service in a church as a welcome means of getting through
+the day, and had he celebrated a dozen masses they would but have been more
+delighted with their new Bishop.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Under the pretext that there were not enough priests to serve the churches, he,
+by degrees, took several parishes into his own hands, and went from church to
+church to celebrate his Mass in each, whilst not forgetting to draw the various
+stipends for his work. But, not content with this, he began to ordain young men
+who knew no Latin, and even criminals, setting forth the view that ordination
+was a sort of second baptism, which purged all crimes—a most convenient theory,
+and one which is not half enough insisted on in these degenerate days.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The position of Asuncion gave him an opportunity of an almost unique kind to
+show his talents in another sphere. Across the river Paraguay, there about one
+mile broad, extends the country called the Chaco, a vast domain of swamp and
+forest, inhabited in those days, as at present, by tribes of wandering Indians.
+From the city walls, whilst listening to the church-bells, one can see the
+smoke of Indian encampments across the river only a mile away.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Of all the Indian tribes in the time of Cardenas, the most ferocious were the
+Guaycurús. The Jesuits had laboured almost in vain amongst them. Missions had
+been founded, and all gone well for months, and even years, when on a sudden,
+and without reason, the Guaycurús had burned the houses, killed the priests,
+and gone back to the wilds. From Santa Fé up to the province of Matto Grosso
+they kept the frontier in a turmoil, crossing the river and feeding like
+locusts on the settlements in Paraguay.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Not long before his arrival the Guaycurús had intimated their intention of
+holding a conference with Don Gregorio Hinostrosa. Don Bernardino thought the
+chance too good to lose, and at once declared that, as a Bishop, it was his
+place to carry on negotiations with the barbarians. Dressed in his robes and
+with an escort furnished by the Governor, he met the chiefs—who no doubt looked
+on him as a new kind of medicine-man—preached to them through an interpreter,
+curiously being without the gift of tongues, but notwithstanding that a
+reasonable number of them were baptized. On his return, he wrote to the King
+that by his efforts he had appeased the most ferocious Indians within his
+Majesty’s domains.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Within a week the Guaycurús surprised and burned a settlement a little higher
+up the stream. Not content with this Caligulesque apostolate to the Guaycurús,
+the Bishop longed for serious occupation, and caused it to be rumoured about
+the city that he did nothing except by the direct authority of the Holy Ghost,
+an allegation hard to confute, and if allowed, likely to lead to difficulties
+even in Paraguay.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Some years before the advent of Don Bernardino the Dominicans had built a
+convent in Asuncion. As they had no license to build, they were in the position
+of religious squatters on the domain of God. The citizens had applied to the
+Audiencia of Charcas, the supreme court on all such matters in South America,
+situated, with true Spanish unpracticality, in one of the most secluded
+districts of the continent. The Audiencia had refused the license, but had
+taken the matter <i>ad advisandum</i> for ten years. To take a matter into
+consideration for ten years, even in Spain or South America, where the law’s
+delay is generally more mortal than in any other country, was as good as giving
+a permission. So the Dominicans construed it, and no one dreamed of now
+molesting them.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+One day the Bishop, dressed in his robes, proceeded from his palace to the
+convent, informing the Governor that he wanted him to meet him there. Entering
+the convent church, he took the sacrament from off the altar and stripped the
+church of all its ornaments, setting a gang of workmen to demolish both the
+convent and the church. When the work was over, he went to a neighbouring
+church, and then and there, without confession, celebrated Mass, remarking to
+the faithful that there was no need for him to make confession, as he was
+satisfied of the condition of his conscience. Some murmured; but the greater
+portion of the people, always ready to take a saint at his own valuation, were
+delighted with his act. Doubts must have crossed his mind, as shortly
+afterwards he wrote to Don Melchior Maldonado, Bishop of Tucuman, for his
+opinion. That Bishop answered rather tartly that his zeal appeared to him to
+savour more of the zeal of Elias than of Jesus Christ, and that in a country
+where churches were so few it seemed imprudent to pull down rather than to
+build. ‘However,’ he added, ‘my light is not so brilliant as the light your
+lordship is illumined by.’
+</p>
+
+<p>
+When once a man is well convinced that all he does comes from the Holy Ghost,
+there is but little that he cannot do with satisfaction to himself.
+Self-murderers, according to the custom of those times, were not allowed
+admission into holy ground, as if the fact of having found their life
+unbearable debarred them from the right to be considered men. Such a man a few
+years previously had been buried at a cross-road. It now occurred to Cardenas
+to have a special revelation on the subject; and, curiously enough, this
+special revelation was on the side of common-sense. ‘This body,’ said the
+Bishop, ‘is that of a Christian, and I feel pretty sure his soul is now in
+bliss.’ He gave no reason for his opinion, as is the way of most religious
+folk, but, as he had special means of communication with heaven, most people
+were contented. Incontinently he had the corpse dug up and buried in the church
+of the Incarnation, himself performing all the funeral rites.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Although a miracle or two would have shocked nobody, still, in the matter of
+the suicide he had gone too far for the simple people of the place. They
+murmured, and for a moment the Bishop’s prestige was in jeopardy; but in the
+nick of time his Bulls arrived, brought by his nephew, Pedro de Cardenas, who,
+like himself, was a Franciscan friar. This saved him, and gave the people
+something new to think of, though at the same time he incurred a new anxiety.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In the Bulls there was a passage to the effect that, if at his consecration any
+irregularity had been incurred, he was liable to suspension from all his
+functions. This the Jesuit who translated the documents into Spanish for the
+purpose of publication drew his attention to. However, Cardenas was not a man
+to be intimidated by so small a matter, but read the translation to the people
+in the Cathedral, and intimated to them that the Pope had given him unlimited
+power in Paraguay, both in matters spiritual and temporal.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Though Don Gregorio, the Governor, was present at the ceremony, he made no
+protest at the assumption of temporal power by Cardenas. He had remarked it,
+though, and secretly determined to show him that his pretensions were
+unfounded. His nephew, Don Pedro de Cardenas, furnished the occasion. This
+young man had been despatched to Spain to get the Bulls. Upon the voyage he
+seems to have conducted himself with scant propriety. On his return, when
+passing Corrientes, he took on board a lady whom Charlevoix, quite in the
+spirit of the author of the Book of Proverbs, describes as ‘une jeune femme
+bien faite’. Having some qualms of conscience, he put on a secular dress, and
+on nearing Asuncion put his religious habit over it. In such a climate this
+double costume must have been inconvenient, and why he should have worn one
+dress above the other does not appear. His uncle, in his delight at the
+forthcoming of the Bulls, most probably paid little attention to his
+appearance. He lodged him in the palace, and assigned him a prebendary which
+was vacant. Where the ‘jeune femme bien faite’ was lodged is not set down, and
+the people of Asuncion no doubt looked leniently on such affairs, as does
+society to-day in England. After his usual fashion, the Bishop set all down to
+calumny.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+About this time the Governor had put in prison one Ambrosio Morales, a
+sub-official of the Inquisition, who had had a quarrel with an officer.
+Cardenas, being informed of this, could not lose so good a chance of exercising
+the power he arrogated in temporal affairs. Holding a monstrance in his hands,
+he went to the prison and asked for the prisoner, placing the monstrance on a
+table at the prison gate. The rector of the Jesuit college came and
+expostulated with him, saying that it was not fitting to expose the body of
+Jesus Christ in such a place, and that it was not decent that the Bishop
+himself should stay there. Considering his position, and the times in which he
+lived, it seems the rector was judicious in his expostulation. Cardenas replied
+that he would stay there till the prisoner was released. The rector, knowing
+him to be as obstinate as a male mule, went and begged the Governor to let
+Morales out. This he did at once, and then the Bishop, cross in hand, returned
+in triumph to the palace with the rescued Inquisitor following amongst his
+train. The people, whose lives were dull, snatched at the opportunity for some
+amusement, and said that it was good luck the Governor and Bishop were not
+always of one mind, for that their agreement had caused the demolition of a
+church and convent, and their quarrel the setting of a prisoner free.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+This little triumph emboldened the Bishop to go further. He admitted Morales
+into minor orders, gave him the tonsure, and thus, having placed him above the
+temporal power, enabled him to brave the Governor openly. The Bishop’s nephew,
+taking the Governor’s kindness for weakness, broke publicly into insulting
+terms about him. The Governor’s brother, Father Hinostrosa, pressed him to
+vindicate his dignity, but he refused, saying he wanted peace at any price.
+This policy the Bishop did not understand, for all concessions he set down as
+weakness, and they encouraged him to fresh exactions and more violence.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Dining with the Governor, the Bishop chanced to see upon the table a fine pair
+of silver candlesticks. To see and to desire with Cardenas was to ask, and so
+he intimated to the Governor his wish to have them. The Governor, thinking,
+perhaps, to wipe out the remembrance of the difficulty about Morales, sent them
+to the palace with his compliments. The Bishop took the present, and, turning
+to the man who brought them, said, ‘I should now be quite content if I only had
+the silver ewer and flagon which I noticed in your master’s house.’ The
+Governor, we may suppose, on hearing this made what the Spaniards call ‘la risa
+del conejo’; but sent the plate and a message, saying all his house contained
+was at the Bishop’s service. Don Bernardino, who, though he may have been a
+saint, as his friends proclaimed, was certainly far from a gentleman, sent for
+the flagon and the ewer, which he received at once, together with a friendly
+message from the Governor.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But even this free-will offering brought no quiet, for a new quarrel soon arose
+between the Bishop and the unlucky wielder of the temporal power. The Society
+of the Holy Sacrament enjoyed an <i>encomienda</i> at or near Asuncion. The
+Bishop, no doubt thinking he was most fitted to indoctrinate the Indians,
+endeavoured to persuade the Governor to get the Society of the Holy Sacrament
+to make their Indians over to himself. The Governor, who knew his
+fellow-countrymen, flatly refused, and upon this Don Bernardino fell into a
+fury, and reproached him with such bitterness that Don Gregorio, too,
+overstepped the bounds of prudence, and threw the conduct of his nephew with
+the ‘jeune femme bien faite’ into the Bishop’s teeth.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Hell has been said to have no fury equal to a woman scorned, but a Bishop
+thwarted makes a very tolerable show. Don Bernardino was one of those who think
+an insult to themselves carries with it a challenge to God, an outrage on
+religion, and generally conceive the honour of Heaven is attacked by any
+contradiction of themselves. To animadvert upon the actions of a Bishop’s
+nephew is as bad as heresy—far worse than simony—and the man who does it cannot
+but be a heretic at heart. So, at least, Don Bernardino thought; for, with
+candle, bell, and book, and what was requisite, he excommunicated the poor
+Governor, and declared him incompetent to bear the royal standard in a
+religious festival which was shortly to take place. Excommunication was at
+least as serious then as bankruptcy is now, though in Spanish America it did
+not carry with it such direful consequences as in European States.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Not wishing to use force, the Governor yielded the point, and did not trouble
+the procession. His moderate conduct gained him many partisans, and put many
+people against the Cardenas. The nephew, Pedro de Cardenas, thought it a good
+occasion to insult the Governor in public; so one day in the street he followed
+him, casting reflections on his mother and his female relatives. Don Gregorio,
+who was a man of tried courage, having served for years against the Indians of
+Arauco, the bravest race of all the Indians of America, controlled his temper,
+and, turning to the young Franciscan, said, ‘Go with God, my father; but do not
+try me any more.’ It was not to be expected that in those times and such a
+place a man like Don Gregorio de Hinostrosa, who had passed his life upon the
+frontiers, and who held supreme authority, would quietly submit to such a
+public insult; so one night he appeared at the Bishop’s palace, accompanied by
+soldiers, to arrest Don Pedro. Out came Cardenas, and excommunicated the
+Governor and all his soldiers on the spot, and Don Pedro pointed a pistol at
+his head. He, seeing himself obliged either to make a public scandal or retire,
+being for peace at any price, retired, and the triumphant Bishop published his
+edict of excommunication, which he extended with a fine of fifty crowns to
+every soldier who had been present at the scene. On reflection, thinking,
+perhaps, it was unwise to excommunicate so many soldiers, who might be needed
+to repel an Indian attack, he sent and told the Governor he was ready to
+absolve him upon easy terms. The Governor, who had made light of the first
+excommunication, was rather staggered when he found the second posted at the
+Cathedral door. And now a comedy ensued; for Don Gregorio went to the Bishop,
+and on his knees asked for forgiveness. He, taken unawares, also knelt down,
+and, when the Governor kissed his hand, wished to return the compliment, and
+would have done so had the rector of the Jesuit college not prevented him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+As Charlevoix says, ‘to see them on their knees, no one could have imagined
+which one it was who asked the other’s grace.’ The Bishop granted absolution to
+the Governor; but the soldiers’ action had been flat sacrilege at least, for
+every one of them was forced to pay the fine.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Two excommunications in a week were almost, one would think, enough to satisfy
+a Pope; but having nominated one Diego Hernandez, a Portuguese, to the post of
+Alguacil Mayor of the Inquisition, and given him the right to wear a sword in
+virtue of his office, the Governor, meeting the man in the street wearing a
+sword against his regulations, made him a prisoner. At once Don Bernardino
+launched another excommunication. But this time he had gone too far; the
+Governor laughed at his thunder, and condemned the prisoner to be hanged. At
+his wits’ end, the Bishop sent a servant to the man, and told him to fear
+nothing, for that, if he suffered death, he was a martyr, and that he himself
+would preach his funeral sermon. The Governor, who was perhaps a humorist,
+laughed at the message, which, he said, was not consoling, and then himself let
+Hernandez out of prison under heavy bail. The excommunication was then taken
+off, and peace once more reigned in Asuncion.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+As well as being not given to wine, it is essential that a Bishop shall know
+how to keep his own counsel—as Lorenzo Gracian expresses it,<a
+href="#foot119">[119]</a> ‘not to lie, but not for that to speak out always the
+whole truth.’ Everyone who knew the Bishop and his hasty temper was astonished
+at his behaviour to the Jesuits. No one imagined he had forgotten the attitude
+the rector of the University of Cordova had assumed towards his consecration,
+and still the Bishop seemed to show more favour to the Jesuits in Asuncion than
+to the members of the other religious communities. Perhaps he felt the want of
+partisans amongst the educated classes, for his quarrel with the Governor had
+lost him many friends. Certainly in Asuncion it was of great importance that
+the Jesuits should not declare against him openly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He praised them fulsomely both in the pulpit and in conversation, went in
+procession to their church, and treated them in public with marked
+consideration. As a contemporaneous Jesuit has left a record, they were not his
+dupes, but still endeavoured to live up to the praises he dispensed to them. He
+went so far as in a letter to the King, Philip IV., to say that the Jesuits
+only in all Paraguay were really fitted to have the care of Indians, and he
+advised the King to transfer the Indians who were under other religious bodies,
+as well as those under the secular clergy, to the care and guidance of that
+Order. No doubt in this the Bishop was right, even if not sincere. One of the
+qualifications the Jesuits had for the care of Indians was that the Indians did
+not look on them as Spaniards.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+As in the same way that in Matabeleland, perhaps, a German, Frenchman, or
+Italian is less hateful to the natives than an Englishman, so in Paraguay the
+Indians liked the Jesuits better than the other Orders, for there were many
+foreigners amongst their ranks. The Jesuits soon comprehended that the Bishop
+wished to make them odious to the public by overpraise. To set to work in such
+a manner almost requires an early training in a seminary, and that such tactics
+should have been put in force against such skilled diplomatists as were the
+Jesuits argues no ordinary capacity for diplomatic work in Cardenas. With him,
+however, the Spanish proverb, ‘Betwixt the word and deed the space is great’,
+had little application. The vicar of a place called Arecayá, close to Asuncion,
+had fallen into disgrace; the Bishop removed him from his parish, and asked the
+rector of the Jesuit college to send a priest to take his place. The answer he
+received was politic, and to the effect that there was no Jesuit who could be
+spared, and even if there was it ill-befitted any Jesuit to infringe upon the
+duties of the secular clergy; but that, if Cardenas intended to found a new
+reduction with all the privileges that the King had always given to that kind
+of establishment, the rector himself would ask permission from his Provincial
+to undertake the work. A splendid answer, and one which proved that the man who
+gave it was a man wasted in Paraguay, and that his place by rights was Rome or,
+at the least, some court.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Don Bernardino, who in matters such as these was quite as cunning as the
+rector, thanked him, and said he did not want a saint, but a priest to take the
+duty of another priest for a short time. The rector, seeing his diplomacy had
+failed, told Father Mansilla, who was at Itatines, to transfer himself to
+Arecayá, and, writing to the Bishop, told him that he had no doubt Mansilla
+would do all that was fitting in the case. The Bishop, who had gained his point
+and saw no further use for diplomacy, said: ‘Of that I am quite sure, and if he
+does not I shall excommunicate him, and lay the district of the Itatines under
+an interdict.’ Nothing appeared to give Don Bernardino such unmitigated
+pleasure as an excommunication; on the slightest protest he was ready, so that
+during his episcopate someone or other in Asuncion must have always been under
+the ban of Holy Mother Church. The rector felt instinctively that Don
+Bernardino had not done with him. This was the case, for soon another order
+came to send two Jesuits to undertake the guidance of a mission near Villa
+Rica. As at the time the Jesuits had no missions near Villa Rica, the order was
+most unpleasant to him. Firstly, the two who went—Fathers Gomez and
+Domenecchi—had to leave their missions and undertake a lengthy journey in the
+wilds. On reaching Villa Rica, they found not only that the inhabitants looked
+on them with great disfavour as interlopers, but that the Indians, whom they
+were sent to guide, were under the <i>encomienda</i> system, thus forcing them
+to wink at that which they disapproved. The resolution that they took did them
+great honour; it was to leave the town of Villa Rica and live out in the
+forests with the Indians.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The Jesuits of the college at Asuncion felt the situation keenly. People began
+to murmur at them for their invasion of the spiritual domains of others, and
+the rector, in despair, sent to the Bishop, and begged him not to praise them
+in his sermons. Nothing cost Cardenas so little as to promise, so he promised
+not to mention them again, and next time that he preached he spent an hour in
+telling of the wonders that the Jesuits had done in saving souls, not only
+amongst Catholics, but also amongst the infidels and Turks. The tactics of the
+Bishop were so marked that at last a rumour reached Don Melchior Maldonado, the
+Bishop of Tucuman, of whom Don Bernardino always stood in dread. His letter
+somehow became public, and as in it he spoke most warmly of the Jesuits, and
+praised the rector, the public turned again upon their side. Just at this time,
+however, the sleeping feud between the Bishop and the Governor broke out anew
+with so much fury that attention was directed from the Jesuits for the time
+being; but on them the situation still was hung, and both sides made advances
+to them for support.
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a name="chap05"></a>Chapter V</h2>
+
+<p class="letter">
+Renewal of the feud between the Bishop and Don Gregorio—Wholesale
+excommunications in Asuncion—Cardenas in 1644 formulates his celebrated charges
+against the Jesuits—The Governor, after long negotiations and much display of
+force, ultimately succeeds in driving out the Bishop—For three years Cardenas
+is in desperate straits—In 1648 Don Gregorio is suddenly dismissed, Cardenas
+elects himself Governor, and for a short time becomes supreme in Asuncion—The
+Jesuits are forced to leave the town and to flee to Corrientes—A new Governor
+is appointed in Asuncion—He defeats Cardenas on the field of battle—The latter
+is deprived of his power, and dies soon after as Bishop of La Paz
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The Governor, like a prudent soldier, was biding his time. The Bishop, not yet
+strong enough to walk alone, dared not break openly with the Jesuits. Don Pedro
+Cardenas still following up his evil courses, poor Don Gregorio Hinostrosa,
+accustomed all his life to deal with ‘officers and gentlemen’, thought fit to
+bring this under his uncle’s notice. The Bishop spoke to his nephew in a
+paternal fashion, enjoining certain penances upon him, and amongst others that
+he was to kiss the earth. Although Don Pedro Cardenas was not a man accustomed
+to lavish kisses on things inanimate, he complied, but, though complying, still
+pursued his vicious course.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Quite in the manner of King Charles (of pious memory), the Governor determined
+to arrest the recalcitrant with his own hand. Armed to the teeth, and with a
+band of musketeers accompanying him, he appeared before the convent of St.
+Francis, where Father Cardenas had taken refuge, and, dragging him from his
+bed, haled him incontinently to the river’s bank, and left him gagged and
+bound, a prey to flies and sun, for two whole days, dressed in his drawers and
+shirt. On the third day he was embarked in a canoe for Corrientes, with a small
+quantity of jerked beef for all provision, and a woman’s cloak wrapped round
+his shoulders to shield him from the cold. Not quite the guise in which a
+clergyman would care to appear before the eyes of his superiors, even in
+Paraguay. Naturally, the Bishop, having nothing else to do, got out his
+excommunication in his usual style, but no man marked him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Meantime Asuncion was in confusion, the Bishop and the Governor keeping no
+measure with the other man of sin. One tried to obtain possession of the
+other’s person to throw him into prison; the other strove to animate the
+preachers in the various churches to consign his rival’s soul to hell. In the
+deserted streets drums thundered, whilst in the air bells jangled, and the
+quiet, sleepy town was rent in twain by the dissensions of the opposing powers.
+The churches closed their doors, and the consolations of religion were
+withdrawn from those who wanted them.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+To add to the confusion, Don Pedro Cardenas escaped from Corrientes, and,
+having taken to himself a companion—one Francisco Sanchez de Carreras—raged
+through the city like a devil unchained. In his extremity, the poor Bishop went
+to the Jesuits for advice, informing them he could not stand the scandals that
+were taking place, and that he intended to leave the city after launching an
+interdict of excommunication upon all. Placed in the position of declaring
+openly either for Bishop or for Governor, the Jesuits refused an answer,
+knowing that anything they said would be brought up against them. All their
+advice to him was, ‘to trust in God, to persevere in his good efforts, to
+resign himself to divine will, which will, as the Bishop knew full well, worked
+sometimes in a mysterious fashion for the welfare of the soul.’ The Bishop
+answered this advice ‘<i>fort sèchement</i>’,<a href="#foot120">[120]</a>
+taking it for a reproach, and as a sort of thing not to be tolerated amongst
+professionals—as if one lawyer, having gone to another for his advice upon a
+private matter, had received for answer a lecture on conveyancing or a short
+treatise upon Roman Law.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Still, the occasion called for something to be done; so, calling an Indian
+servant, he stripped to the waist, and, to the horror and amazement of the
+public, appeared with naked feet and shoulders, dressed in a sack and armed
+with a heavy scourge. At the first blow he gave himself some canons of the
+Cathedral begged him to desist; but he, after prayer, replied that he intended,
+so to speak, to act as his own Pascal lamb, and wipe out the affront done to
+St. Francis in his unworthy blood.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A naked Bishop in a sack is almost sure to attract some observation even in
+Paraguay. Religious women not unfrequently have been attracted by such a
+spectacle, and so it proved on this occasion. Although the Jesuits and the
+saner portion of the population blamed the Bishop’s action, he made himself a
+host of partisans amongst the women of all classes, who followed him as they
+have often followed other thaumaturgists in times present and gone by.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+His friend Don Melchior Maldonado, hearing what had passed, wrote to reprove
+him for his inconsiderate zeal. In his epistle he observed that, though some of
+the Apostles had scourged themselves, it was not their habit to appear half
+naked before a crowd of women; that our Lord Himself had not of His own accord
+taken off His garments for the scourger; that saints who scourged themselves
+had, as a general rule, chosen a private place for their self-discipline. This
+was quite reasonable, but the advice was little to the taste of the recipient,
+who hated criticism when levelled at himself.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+If crosses make a saint, about this time Don Bernardino had his full share of
+them. News came from Itatines, where the two Jesuits had been marooned, that
+both of them were ill. Cardenas, who, we may remember, was <i>homme à
+visions</i>, called in the rector of the Jesuit college to inform him that the
+Company of Jesus had a new martyr in their ranks. Though martyrs (even to-day)
+enter the ranks of General Loyola’s army pretty frequently, it still seemed
+strange that the Bishop should know of this particular recruit before the
+rector. Pressed for an explanation, he replied that a pious person who was
+vouchsafed communication with the Lord in prayer had seen Father Domenecchi in
+heaven shining in glory and with a halo round his head.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Nothing could be more satisfactory. All the essentials of a well-attested
+miracle had been complied with. A man was dead, another man had seen the dead
+man in an ecstasy of prayer, and, to make all complete, refused to testify
+himself, sending the Bishop as a sort of pious phonograph. No true believer in
+such a case could doubt, and all went well till it appeared a man from
+Itatines, charged with a message to the Jesuit college, had passed the night
+before he gave his message at the Bishop’s house. In Holy Writ we read the
+wicked man shall have no rest; if this is so, it is as it should be, though
+generally the good seem just as troubled in their lives as the most erring of
+their brethren. He who would be a saint must be a-doing, year in, year out,
+just like a common workman, and Cardenas was no exception to the rule.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The pseudo-miracle not having been quite a success, he turned to other fields,
+and summoned all the inhabitants of Paraguay to attend at the Cathedral upon a
+certain day. The Governor, thinking there was a revolution likely to break out,
+fixed a review of all the troops for the same date. A Jesuit priest waited upon
+the Bishop to persuade him that the crowds which would assemble might break the
+peace. The Bishop reassured him, and sent him to the Governor to say that his
+intention was to preach to the people and explain to them the faith; further,
+that he intended on that day to raise his excommunication and be reconciled:
+only he asked him to allow the troops to attend and hear his sermon. The crowd
+was great; the Bishop mounted the pulpit, and, extending his forefinger in the
+attitude of malediction so dear to Bishops, straight began to preach. For a
+time all went well. The Governor, presumably, was waiting for the circulation
+of the hat—that awful mystery which makes all sects kin—when to his horror
+Cardenas began to enumerate all his offences: he was anathema, was
+excommunicated, a disbeliever, and had endeavoured to cast down that which the
+Lord Himself had set on high. The Bishop then informed the crowd that God was
+angry with the Governor, talked about Moses, and dwelt with unction on the fact
+that the great lawgiver had been swift to slay.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In a peroration which, no doubt, went home to all, he called upon his hearers,
+under penalty of a heavy fine and his displeasure, to seize the Governor,
+adding that if there was resistance ‘he should kill his brother, his friend, or
+his nearest relative.’<a href="#foot121">[121]</a> After these words he seized
+a banner from the hands of the astonished officer who stood nearest to him, and
+stood forth, like another Phineas, surrounded by his clergy, all of whom had
+arms beneath their cloaks.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A most dramatic scene, and probably almost successful, had but the Bishop only
+reckoned with two things: Firstly, he had forgotten that the Governor was an
+old Indian fighter, and ready for surprises; and, secondly, he had not taken
+into account the usual apathy of the common people when their leaders fight.
+Dumbly and quite unmoved the people stood, staring like armadillos at a snake,
+and made no sign. Then word was brought that the Governor had left the church
+and was assembling a force of arquebusiers.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Surrounded only by clergymen, Don Bernardino had to yield, and yielded like a
+Levite, with a subterfuge. He sent a priest to beg the magistrates to come to
+the Cathedral and reason with him. After a consultation this was done, and
+Cardenas consented to abate his fury and exhale his wrath. He said that Holy
+Writ itself gave leave to recur to force in self-defence (but did not quote the
+text), and that the Governor had meditated a like enterprise against himself;
+moreover, that, he being an excommunicated man, it became lawful for God’s
+vicegerent to lay hold on him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+After the scene was over, and the Bishop was escorted back to his palace by the
+magistrates, a second letter came from Tucuman making plain his conduct to him
+after the manner of a friend. The rector of the Jesuits also thought fit to
+remonstrate, and say that Cardenas had gone too far in attempting to assume the
+temporal power. This sufficed to further strain the relations between the
+Bishop and the Jesuits.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+As, even in Asuncion in 1643, it was unusual that the Governor should remain
+for ever under the ban of Holy Mother Church, arbiters were chosen to discuss
+the matter, and provide means whereby the Bishop could conveniently climb down.
+The arbiters absolved the Governor on the condition that he paid a fine of four
+thousand arrobas<a href="#foot122">[122]</a> of <i>yerba maté</i>, which in
+money amounted to eight thousand crowns. Quite naturally, the Bishop refused to
+abide by the decision, replaced his adversary under the ban, and recommenced to
+preach against him with considerable force.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The higgling of the market not having proved effectual in the adjustment of the
+sum to be paid by the Governor, a priest, one Juan Lozano, who had been
+condemned to imprisonment by his superiors for his loose life, and who had
+taken refuge with the Bishop, hit on a stroke of veritable genius. At a
+conference which took place between the Bishop and several notables of the
+place, including the rector of the Jesuits, Lozano gave it as his opinion that,
+if the Governor refused to pay, a general interdict should be proclaimed. The
+rector of the Jesuits retired indignantly, and ‘Père Lozano, retroussant sa
+robe le poursuivit en criant à pleine tête, et s’exprimant en des termes peu
+seans à sa profession.’<a href="#foot123">[123]</a> By this time Asuncion must
+have been like a madhouse, for no one seems to have been astonished, or even to
+have thought his conduct singular. The Bishop, always ready to take the worst
+advice, got ready for his task, and on Easter Eve embarked upon the river,
+leaving his Vicar-General under orders to proclaim the general ban. This was
+done, and the edict so contrived as to catch the luckless Governor in every
+church. The practical effect was to close all the churches, for to whatever
+church the Governor went the priest refused to celebrate the Mass. Several
+other persons were mentioned in the ban, which was posted up below a crucifix
+in the choir of the Cathedral. As Don Bernardino had omitted to state the
+particular offences for which they were condemned, the general confusion became
+intense, and no one attended Mass, so that the churches were deserted. After a
+little some of the churches opened in a clandestine manner, others remained
+closed, and the followers of the Bishop and the Governor alternately assembled
+in a rabble, and threw stones at all the churches, dispensing their favours
+quite impartially. The various religious Orders, not to be behindhand, also
+took sides, the Jesuits giving as their opinion that the Governor, not having a
+war upon his back, was really excommunicated; the Dominicans holding that the
+Bishop, in the general interest, ought to absolve him. He, armed with the
+opinion of the latter Order, marched to the dwelling of the Bishop’s
+Vicar-General, and, having nailed up both doors and windows, sent a trumpeter
+to tell him he should not leave his house till absolution had been granted.
+Still nothing came of it, and then the Governor did what he should have done at
+first: he sent a statement of the whole proceedings to the high court at
+Charcas. This high court (Audiencia) was situated right in the middle of what
+is now Bolivia, miles away from Lima, half a world from Paraguay, at least two
+thousand miles from Buenos Ayres, and separated from Chile by the whole
+Cordillera of the Andes. Even to-day the journey from Paraguay often exceeds a
+month.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The Bishop, not to be outdone, also prepared a statement, in which he accused
+his adversary of all the crimes that he could think of, and confirmed his
+statement with an oath. The chapter, thinking things were in an impossible
+condition, besought that the fine laid on the excommunicated folk should be
+raised or lessened, as it appeared to them there was not money in the town to
+satisfy it. Cardenas refused, and thus four months elapsed. Soon after this
+arrived one Father Truxillo, of the Order of St. Francis, who came from Tucuman
+as Vice-Provincial. Cardenas, thinking, as they were both Franciscans, that
+Truxillo must needs be favourable to his cause, made him his Vicar-General,
+with power to bind and to unloose—that is, to free the excommunicated folk from
+all their disabilities if, on examination, it seemed good to him. Truxillo, who
+was quite unbiassed as to matters in Asuncion, looked into everything, and
+declared the Governor and everybody ought to be absolved. He further gave it as
+his opinion that, the affair having gone to the high court at Charcas, he could
+do nothing but give an interim decree. Don Bernardino heard the news at Itati,
+an Indian village a few miles outside Asuncion. From thence he went to a
+somewhat larger village called Yaguaron, and shut himself up in a convent,
+after declaring everyone (except the superior clergy) under the severest
+censure of the Church if they should dare approach. Not a bad place for prayer
+and meditation is Yaguaron. A score or two of little houses, built of straw and
+wood and thatched with palm-leaves, straggle on the hillside above the shores
+of a great camalote-covered<a href="#foot124">[124]</a> lake. Parrots scream
+noisily amongst the trees, and red macaws hover like hawks over the little
+patches of maize and mandioca planted amongst the palms. Round every house is
+set a grove of orange-trees, mingled with lemons, sweet limes, and guayabas.
+Inside the houses all is so clean that you could eat from any floor with less
+repulsion than from the plates at a first-class hotel. A place where life slips
+on as listless and luxuriant as the growth of a banana, and where at evening
+time, when the women of the place go to fetch water in a long line with earthen
+jars balanced upon their heads, the golden age seems less improbable even than
+in Theocritus. To Yaguaron the higher clergy flocked to intercede for the good
+people of Asuncion, all except Father Truxillo, who, knowing something of his
+Bishop, did not go. That he was wise, events proved shortly. Two canons—Diego
+Ponce de Leon and Fernando Sanchez—he imprisoned in their rooms, calling them
+traitors to their Bishop and their Church. Deputations came from the capital to
+beg for their release, but all in vain. The Bishop answered them that he had
+set his mind to purge his diocese of traitors; and the two canons remained in
+prison. After a detention which lasted forty days, they escaped and fled to
+Corrientes, which must have looked upon Asuncion as a vast madhouse. Truxillo,
+who seems to have been a man not quite so absolutely devoid of sense as the
+other clergy, endeavoured to organize a religious <i>coup d’état</i>; but, most
+unfortunately, a letter he had written to some of the saner clergy fell into
+the Bishop’s hands. Excommunications now positively rained upon the land. The
+Governor, the Jesuits, the Dominicans, each had their turn; but, curiously
+enough, the poorer people still stood firm to Cardenas, thinking, no doubt, a
+man who treated all the richer sort so harshly must do something for the poor.
+Nothing, however, was further from the thoughts of Cardenas, who thought the
+whole world circled round himself. The Bishop’s nephew having returned to
+Corrientes and his former naughty life, Don Bernardino, casting about for
+another secretary, came on one Francisco Nieto, an apostate from the Order of
+St. Francis, and living openly with an Indian woman, by whom he had a son. Him
+the Bishop made his chaplain, then his confessor; and poor Nieto found himself
+obliged to send his Indian wife away in spite of all his protests and his wish
+to live obscurely as he had been living before his elevation to the post of
+secretary. A veritable beachcomber Father Francisco Nieto seems to have been,
+and the type of many a European in Paraguay, who asks no better than to forget
+the tedium of our modern life and pass his days in a little palm-thatched hut
+lost in a clearing of a wood or near some lake.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+So in Asuncion things went from bad to worse. Such trade as then existed was at
+a standstill, and bands of starving people swarmed in the streets, whilst the
+incursions of the savage Indians daily became more frequent. In fact, Asuncion
+was but a type of what the world would be under the domination of any of the
+sects without the counterpoise of any civil power. The Governor, seeing the
+misery on every side, determined, like an honest man, to pocket up his pride
+and reconcile himself with Cardenas at any price. So, setting forth with all
+his staff, he came to Yaguaron. There, like a penitent, he had to bear a
+reprimand before the assembled village and engage to pay a fine before the
+rancorous churchman would relieve him from the ban. The weakness of the
+Governor had the effect that might have been expected, and heavy fines were
+laid on all and sundry who had in any manner displeased the Bishop or leaned to
+the other side in the course of the dispute.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Right in the middle of the struggle between the clerical and lay authorities, a
+band of over three hundred Guaycurús appeared before the town. Unluckily, all
+the chief officers of the garrison were excommunicated, and thus incapable of
+doing anything to defend the place. Foolish as Cardenas most indubitably was,
+his folly did not carry him so far as to leave the capital of his diocese quite
+undefended. Still, he would not give way first, and only at the moment when the
+Indians seemed prepared to attack the town, at the entreaty of a ‘pious
+virgin’, he raised the excommunication on the Governor and his officers for
+fifteen days. The Governor, instead of, like a sensible man, seizing the Bishop
+and giving him to the <i>cacique</i> of the Guaycurús, led out his troops and
+drove the Indians off. That very night he found himself once more under the
+censure of the Church, and the conflict with his opponent more bitter than at
+first. The Viceroy of Peru, the Marquis of Mancera, indignant at the weakness
+of the Governor, wrote sharply to him, reprimanding him and telling him at once
+to assert himself and force the Bishop to confine himself to matters spiritual.
+On the Governor’s attempt to reassert himself, the answer was a general
+interdict laying the entire capital under the Church’s ban. On this, he marched
+to Yaguaron with all his troops, resolved to take the Bishop prisoner; but he,
+seeing the troops approach, went out at once, fell on the Governor’s neck, and
+straightway absolved him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+After the absolution came a banquet, which must have been a little constrained,
+one might imagine, and even less amusing than the regulation dinner-party of
+the London season, where one sits between two half-naked and perspiring women
+eating half-raw meat and drinking fiery wines with the thermometer at eighty in
+the shade. Thus disembarrassed from the Governor, Don Bernardino turned his
+attention to the Jesuits, and signified to them that he intended to take the
+education of the young out of their hands. This was a mortal affront to the
+Jesuits, as they have always understood that men, just as the other animals,
+can only learn whilst young. Hard upon this new step, Cardenas issued an edict
+forbidding them to preach or hear confessions. As for the Governor, the Bishop
+did not fear him, and the poorer people of Asuncion had always inclined to the
+Bishop’s party, either through terror of the Church’s ban or from their natural
+instinct that the Bishop was against the Government.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But Cardenas saw clearly that, to deal as he wished with the Jesuits, he must
+entirely gain the Governor’s confidence. This he tried to do by sending to him
+one Father Lopez, Provincial of the Dominicans. This Lopez was an able and
+apparently quite honest man, for he told the Governor that the wish of Cardenas
+was to expel the Jesuits from Paraguay, and from their missions, warning him at
+the same time not to allow himself to be made use of by the Bishop in his
+design. From that moment the two adversaries seemed to have changed characters,
+and Don Gregorio became as cautious as a churchman, whereas the Bishop seemed
+to lose all his diplomacy.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+To all the protestations of friendship which were addressed to him, the
+Governor answered so adroitly that the Bishop fell into the trap, and thought
+he had secured a partner to help him in the expulsion of the Jesuits. Finally,
+at Yaguaron, during a sermon, he formulated his celebrated charges against the
+Jesuits, which, set on foot by him in 1644, eventually caused the expulsion of
+the whole Order from America, and, though refuted a thousand times, still
+linger in the writing of all those who treat the question down to the present
+day. The charges were seven in number, and so ingeniously contrived that royal,
+national, and domestic indignation were all aroused by them. The first was that
+the Jesuits prevented the Indians from paying<a href="#foot125">[125]</a> their
+annual taxes to the crown. Secondly, that the Jesuits kept back the tithes from
+Bishops and Archbishops.<a href="#foot126">[126]</a> Thirdly, he said the
+Jesuits had rich mines in their possession, and that the product of these mines
+was all sent out of the country to the general fund at Rome. This the Jesuits
+disproved on several occasions, but, as often happens in such cases, proof was
+of no avail against the folly of mankind, to whom it seemed incredible that the
+Jesuits should bury themselves in deserts to preach to savages, unless there
+was some countervailing advantage to be gained. Even the fact that at the
+expulsion of the Company of Jesus from America no treasure at all was found at
+any of their colleges or missions did not dispel the conviction that they owned
+rich mines. The fourth charge was that the Jesuits were not particular about
+the secrets of the confessional, and that they used the information thus
+acquired for their own selfish ends. Further, that Father Ruiz de Montoya had
+acquired from the King, under a misapprehension, a royal edict,<a
+href="#foot127">[127]</a> giving the territory of the missions to the Jesuits,
+thus taking the fruits of their conquest from the Spanish colonists. Fifthly,
+that the Jesuits entered Paraguay possessed but of the clothes upon their
+backs, that they had made themselves into the sovereign rulers of a great
+territory, but that he was going to expel them, as the Venetians had expelled
+them from Venetia.<a href="#foot128">[128]</a> Sixthly, that even the
+Portuguese of San Paulo de Piritinanga had expelled them.<a
+href="#foot129">[129]</a> His last assertion was that he himself, together with
+the Bishop of Tucuman and others, had secret orders from the King to expel the
+Jesuits from their dioceses, but that the other Bishops lacked the courage
+which he (Cardenas) was then about to show. He wound up all by saying that,
+once the Jesuits were gone, the King would once again enjoy his rights, the
+Church be once again restored to freedom, and, lastly, that there would be
+plenty of Indians for the settlers to enslave. Quite possibly enough, the
+public, ever generous to a fault with other people’s goods, cared little for
+the rights of a King who lived ten thousand miles away; and as for the Church,
+it seems most probable they failed to see the peril that she ran. But when the
+Bishop spoke of enslaving the Indians, they saw the Jesuits must go, for from
+the conquest the Jesuits had stood between the settlers and their prey. All
+things considered, Don Bernardino made a remarkable discourse that Sunday
+morning in the palm-thatched village by the lake, for the echo of it still
+resounds in the religious world against the Jesuits.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Like other men after a notable pronouncement, it is most probable that Cardenas
+was unaware of the full import of his words. Perhaps he thought (as speakers
+will) that all the best portions of his sermon had been left unsaid. Be that as
+it may, he shortly turned his thoughts to other matters of more direct
+importance to himself. In judging of his life, it should not be forgotten that,
+by his sermon at Yaguaron, he placed himself upon the side of those who wanted
+to enslave the Indians. Perhaps he did not know this, and certainly his
+popularity amongst the Indians outside the missions was enormous. His next
+adventure was to try and eject the Jesuits from a farm they had, called San
+Isidro. The Governor having forbidden him to do so, he armed an army of his
+partisans to expel the Jesuits from their college in the capital.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Outside Asuncion the Lieutenant-Governor, Don Francisco Florez, met the
+Bishop’s secretary, Father Nieto, who informed him of the enterprise, exhorting
+him to enlist the sympathies of the Governor in so good a cause. Florez, a
+better diplomatist than his commanding officer, seemed to approve, and
+naturally deceived poor Father Nieto, who, like most hypocrites, became an easy
+prey to his own tactics when used against himself.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Florez informed the Governor at once, and he sent to the Jesuits, and put them
+on their guard. Next day he met the Bishop, and told him that his enterprise
+could not succeed, as the Jesuits were under arms. No doubt he learned these
+artifices in his campaigns against the Indians of Arauco, or it may have been
+that, like others who have had to strive with churchmen, he learned to beat
+them with their own controversial arms. The Bishop fell completely into the
+snare, and, thinking the Governor was a fast friend, confided all his plans to
+him for the expulsion of the Jesuits and the conquest of the mission territory.
+Just then Captain Don Pedro Diaz del Valle came from La Plata, and gave Don
+Bernardino a new decision of the High Court of Charcas, telling him to live in
+peace with all men, and govern his diocese with zeal. He certainly was zealous
+to an extraordinary degree, if not judicious. Therefore, the very mention of
+the word ‘zeal’ must have been peculiarly offensive to such a zealous man. The
+letter went on to say that all the fines he had exacted were illegal, and
+commanded him to give back the <i>yerba</i> which he had extorted from his
+involuntary penitents, and in the future live on better terms with all around
+him. To all of this he paid no notice, as was to be expected, but, to avoid
+returning the <i>yerba</i>, sent a letter to his officers to have it burned.
+This letter, which he denied, was subsequently produced against him in the High
+Court at Charcas.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Seeing the Governor was bent on frustrating or on deceiving him, he tried to
+get from Don Sebastian Leon, who held an office under the Governor, an edict of
+the Emperor Charles V., which he had heard was in the archives, and which
+provided that, in case a Governor should die or be deposed, the notables of the
+place had power to appoint an interim Governor to fill his place. If such a
+paper ever existed, it must have been a very early document given by Charles V.
+at the foundation of the colony, for nothing was more opposed to the traditions
+of Spanish policy throughout America. Don Sebastian Leon having informed the
+Governor, the latter saw that things were coming to a crisis, and that either
+he or the Bishop would have to leave the place. Not being sure of all his
+troops, and the Bishop having the populace upon his side, he sent to the Jesuit
+missions for six hundred Indians. Thus the supremacy of the royal government
+fell to be supported by men but just emerging from a semi-nomad life, who owed
+the tincture of civilization they possessed to the calumniated Jesuits.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+On many occasions armies of Indians from the Jesuit missions rendered important
+services to the crown of Spain: not only against the Portuguese, but against
+English corsairs, and in rebellions, as in the case of Cardenas; or as when, in
+the year 1680, Philip V. wrote to the Governor of Buenos Ayres to garrison the
+port with a contingent of Indians from the Jesuit reductions; in 1681, when the
+French attacked the port with a squadron of four-and-twenty ships; and at the
+first siege of the Colonia, in 1678, when three thousand Indians marched to the
+attack, accompanied by their Jesuit pastors, but under the command of Spanish
+officers.<a href="#foot130">[130]</a>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+An army from the Jesuit missions consisted almost entirely of cavalry. It
+marched much like a South American army of twenty years ago was wont to march.
+In front was driven the <i>caballada</i>, consisting of the spare horses; then
+came the vanguard, composed of the best mounted soldiers, under their
+<i>caciques</i>. Then followed the wives and women of the soldiers, driving the
+baggage-mules, and lastly some herdsmen drove a troop of cattle for the men to
+eat. When Jesuits accompanied the army, they did not enter into action, but
+were most intrepid in succouring the wounded under fire, as Funes, in his
+‘Historia Civil del Paraguay’, etc.,<a href="#foot131">[131]</a> relates when
+speaking of their conduct at the siege of the Colonia in 1703. For arms they
+carried lances, slings, <i>chuzos</i> (broad-pointed spears), lazos, and bolas,
+and had amongst them certain very long English guns with rests to fire from,
+not very heavy, and of a good range. Each day the accompanying Jesuits said
+Mass, and each town carried its particular banner before the troop. They
+generally camped, if possible, in the open plain, both to avoid surprises and
+for convenience in guarding the cattle and the <i>caballada</i>. In all the
+territories of South America no such quiet and well-behaved soldiery was to be
+found; for in Chile, Peru, Mexico, and Guatemala, the passage of an army was
+similar to the passing of a swarm of locusts in its effect.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Don Bernardino, on his side, was occupied in animating the populace against the
+Jesuits with all the fervour of an Apostle. Naturally, he first commenced by
+launching his usual sentence of excommunication against them, and having done
+so returned again to Yaguaron. This village, like other Paraguayan villages,
+many of which in times gone by have been the scenes of stirring episodes,
+retains to-day but little to distinguish it. Nature has proved too powerful in
+the long-run for men to fight against. On every side the woods seem ready to
+overwhelm the place. Grass grows between the wooden steps of the neglected
+church; seibos, lapachos, espinillos de olor, all bound together with lianas,
+encroach to the verges of the little clearings in which grows mandioca, looking
+like a field of sticks. All day the parrots scream, and toucans and picaflores
+dart about; at evening the monkeys howl in chorus; at night the jaguar prowls
+about, and giant bats fasten upon the incautious sleeper, or, fixing themselves
+upon a horse, leave him exhausted in the morning with the loss of blood.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+When Cardenas used the place as a sort of Avignon from which to safely utter
+his anathemas, it must have worn a different aspect. No doubt processions and
+ceremonies were continual, with carrying about the saints in public, a custom
+which the Paraguayans irreverently refer to as ‘sacando á luz los bultos’.<a
+href="#foot132">[132]</a> Messengers (<i>chasquis</i>), no doubt, came and went
+perpetually, as is the custom in countries such as Paraguay, where news is
+valuable and horseflesh cheap. Thereto flocked, to a moral certainty, all the
+broken soldiers who swarmed in countries like Peru and Paraguay, with Indian
+<i>caciques</i> looking out for work to do when white men quarrelled and
+throats were to be cut. Priests went and came, friars and missionaries; and
+Cardenas most certainly, who loved effect, gave all his emerald ring to kiss,
+and made those promises which leaders of revolt lavish on everyone in times of
+difficulty.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+When the Indian contingent arrived, the Governor marched upon Yaguaron,
+although the air was positively lurid with excommunications. The Bishop,
+rushing to the church, was intercepted by the Governor, who seized his arm and
+tried to stop him. Cardenas struggled with him, and declared him excommunicated
+for laying his hand upon the anointed of the Lord. But, most unfortunately,
+there was no Fitz-Urse at hand to rid the Governor of so turbulent a priest. A
+mulatto<a href="#foot133">[133]</a> woman rushed to the Bishop’s aid, together
+with some priests. This gave him time to gain the altar and seize the Host,
+which he exposed at once to the public gaze, and for the moment all present
+fell upon their knees. Turning to the Governor, he asked what he wanted with
+armed men in a church. The Governor replied he had come to banish him from
+Paraguay, by order of the Viceroy, for having infringed upon the temporal
+power. Cardenas, taken aback, replied he would obey, and, turning to the
+people, took them all for witnesses. The Governor, no doubt thinking he was
+dealing with an honest Araucan chief, retired. The Bishop immediately denounced
+the Governor in a furious sermon, after which he left the church, carrying the
+Host in full procession, accompanied by the choir singing the ‘Pange Lingua’,
+followed by a band of Indian women with their hair dishevelled, and carrying
+green branches in their hands. He then returned to the church, and from the
+pulpit denounced the Governor, who, standing at the door surrounded by a group
+of arquebusiers blowing their matches, answered him furiously.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The honours, so to speak, being thus equally divided, it remained for one side
+or the other to negotiate. Cardenas, knowing himself much abler in negotiations
+than his adversary, proposed a conference, in which he bore himself so
+skilfully that he made the Governor consent to dismiss his Indians, and allow
+him six days to make his preparations for the road. This settled, at dead of
+night he set out for the capital. Arrived there, he showed himself in public in
+his green hat, having upon his breast a little box of glass in which he bore
+the Host. A band of priests escorted him, all with arms concealed beneath their
+cloaks, in the true spirit of the Church militant. The bells were rung, and
+every effort strained to raise a tumult, but all in vain. He had to throw
+himself for refuge into the convent of the Franciscans.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+At once he set about to fortify the place to stand a siege. In several places
+he constructed embrasures for guns, and pierced the walls for musketry. But,
+thinking that his best defence lay in the folly of the people—as public men
+always have done, and do—he sent to the Cathedral for a statue of the Blessed
+Virgin, and another of San Blas, and placed them at the gate. Then, remembering
+that calumny was a most serviceable weapon, he put about the town a report that
+the Indians from the missions had pillaged Yaguaron, and that they even then
+were marching on the place. Again recurring to the edict of Charles V., which
+he pretended to have found, he issued a proclamation that, as the present
+Governor was excommunicated, and therefore could not govern, the office being
+vacant, he intended to nominate another in his stead. His subsequent behaviour
+shows most clearly that he wished to nominate himself.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Again both sides sent off a relation of their doings to the High Court of
+Charcas. Don Bernardino wrote in his that the Jesuits had offered the Governor
+thirty thousand crowns, and placed a thousand men at his command, if he would
+expel the Bishop from the country, under the belief that he (Don Bernardino)
+knew of their hidden mines in the mission territory. His witnesses were
+students and priests, and one of these proving recalcitrant, the Bishop had him
+heavily chained, and then suspended outside the convent of the Franciscans.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+This drastic treatment had the desired effect, as torture always has with
+reasonable men, and the poor witness signed, but afterwards protested, thus
+giving a good example in himself of the truth of the Spanish saying, ‘Protest
+and pay’.<a href="#foot134">[134]</a>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+By this time the patience and long-suffering of the Governor were quite
+exhausted. He therefore sent to the Bishop to say a ship was ready to take him
+down the river, and at the same time reminded him of his promise at Yaguaron to
+obey the order of the Viceroy of Peru. He sent the message by the royal notary,
+Gomez de Coyeso, who accordingly repaired to the convent of San Francisco. At
+the door a priest appeared, armed with a javelin, who three times tried to
+wound the notary, on which the Governor stationed a band of fifty soldiers at
+the convent gate, in spite of the presence of the statues of the Blessed Virgin
+and San Blas. Then, having published an edict that the Bishop was deposed, he
+proceeded to elect another in his stead.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+One of the canons, Don Cristobal Sanchez, who had governed the diocese during
+the interregnum before the advent of Don Bernardino, still lived in retirement
+near the town. The Governor approached him with the request that he would once
+more take the interim charge until the King should send another Bishop to
+replace Cardenas. Sanchez consented, on the understanding that the Governor
+would guarantee his personal safety. This being done, Sanchez was taken to the
+Jesuit college as the securest place.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+So it fell out that everything concurred to strengthen the hatred of the Bishop
+to the Jesuits. To the Jesuit college came the Governor and all the notables,
+and, having taken Sanchez in procession through the streets, they placed him on
+the Bishop’s throne in the Cathedral, and invested him with all the power that
+he had held before the coming of Don Bernardino Cardenas. The proclamation set
+forth by the Governor alluded to the informality of the consecration of Don
+Bernardino, and to his actions during his time of power.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+At last the Bishop saw that he must go. So, after launching a supreme anathema,
+and after having expressed his great unwillingness to tarry longer in a city
+where half the population had incurred the censure of the Church, and marked
+with a cross those churches where he permitted Mass to be celebrated, he went
+on board the ship. Before embarking, he drew a silver bell from underneath his
+cloak, and to the sound of it he solemnly proclaimed the town accursed. The
+bells of the Franciscan convent and the Bishop’s palace, according to his
+orders, all tolled loudly. This caused so much confusion that, in order to
+appease the tumult, the authorities ordered the bells of all the churches in
+the town to ring.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Entering the vessel, Don Bernardino sat himself upon the poop on a low stool,
+with all the clergy who were faithful to him grouped about the deck. With him
+he had the sacred wafer in a glass box, and not far off a group of sailors on
+the forecastle lounged about smoking and drinking <i>maté</i> whilst they
+played at cards. Someone reminded him it was not fitting that God’s Body should
+thus be seen so near to sailors, and therefore the Bishop, according to the
+custom of the Church in cases of accident or desecration, consumed the offended
+wafer, and peace descended on the ship.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Thus, in 1644, he took his first departure from the place where for the last
+two years he had brought certainly rather a sword than peace. His friends
+assured the public that, at the moment he stepped on board the ship, stars were
+seen to fall from heaven towards the church of St. Luke, and passed from thence
+to the episcopal palace and disappeared; that at the same time a slight shock
+of earthquake had been experienced; that stones had danced about, and several
+hills had trembled. The sun, quite naturally, had appeared blood-red; trouble
+and desolation had entered every heart, and animals had prophesied woe and
+destruction, predicting ruin and misfortune to the town till the good Bishop
+should return once more.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The events of the past two years in Paraguay had not been favourable to the
+conversion of the Indians. Not only in the missions, where the neophytes had
+seen themselves obliged to furnish troops against their Bishop, but in the
+territory of Paraguay itself, the Indians had not had a good example of how
+Christians carry out the duties of their faith. As a general rule, the Indian
+(unlike the negro) cares little for dogma, but places his belief entirely in
+good works. Perhaps on this account the Jesuits, also believers in good works,
+have had the most success amongst them. Be that as it may, the Jesuits, after
+the departure of the Bishop, found that many of their recent converts had
+fallen away and gone back to the woods.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Whilst Jesuits in Paraguay were seeking to convert the Indians, and whilst the
+Governor, no doubt, was thanking his stars for the absence of his rival, in
+Rome the question of the Bishop’s consecration filled all minds. From May 9,
+1645, to October 2 of the same year no less than four congregations of the
+Propaganda had been held about the case. The Pope himself was present at one of
+them. Nothing was arrived at till 1658, when finally the consecration was
+declared in order, but not until Don Bernardino was appointed to another see.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Just about this time (1644-45) a rumour was set on foot that the Jesuits had
+discovered mines near their reductions on the Paraná. These rumours were always
+set about when there was nothing else by means of which to attack the Jesuits.
+An Indian by the name of Buenaventura, who had been a servant in a convent in
+Buenos Ayres, on this occasion was the instrument used by their enemies. For a
+short time everyone believed him, and excitement was intense; but, most
+unluckily, Buenaventura happened at the zenith of his notoriety to run away
+with a married woman, and, being pursued, was brought to Buenos Ayres, and then
+in public incontinently whipped. In any other country Buenaventura after his
+public whipping would have been discredited, but a letter arrived from the
+Bishop of Paraguay, telling the Governor of Buenos Ayres that the mines really
+existed. At that time a new Governor, one Don Jacinto de Lara, had just
+arrived. Being new to America and its ways, he started out himself to try the
+question, and with fifty soldiers, taking Buenaventura as his guide, went to
+the missions. As might have been expected, on the journey Buenaventura
+disappeared, this time alone. ‘Cette fuite lui donna beaucoup à penser,’ says
+Charlevoix. But having gone so far, the Governor determined to try the question
+thoroughly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Father Diaz Taño, one of the best and hardest-working missionaries who ever
+entered Paraguay, besought the Governor to satisfy himself and search their
+territory for gold and silver, and requested him to call upon the Bishop for
+confirmation of the statements he had made. This he did, and then, accompanied
+by his soldiers, began his search. He gave out that the first man to find a
+mine should be at once promoted to be captain and have a large reward. After
+several days’ march, and having found no mines, letters were brought him from
+the Governor of Paraguay and from the Bishop. The first informed him that he
+had heard rumours of mines, but nothing certain. The second declined to specify
+the mines, which thus were destined to remain for ever, so to speak, <i>in
+partibus</i>. But he gave advice, and good advice is better than any mine,
+whether of silver or of gold. He told the Governor to start by turning out the
+Jesuits, and he would find the profits of their expulsion just as valuable as
+mines.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Whether this also made the Governor pensive I do not know, but, luckily, the
+Jesuits, who were concerned in exposing the imposture, had come on
+Buenaventura, and brought him ironed to the Governor. He, after having tried to
+make him confess his imposture without success, condemned him to be hung. The
+Jesuits, with their accustomed humanity (or ingenuity), begged for his life.
+This was accorded to them, and once again Buenaventura received a good sound
+whipping for his pains.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Thus ended the journey of Don Jacinto, without profit to himself, except so far
+as the experience gained. No doubt he saw and marked the Jesuit towns, the
+churches built of massive timber or of stone, and the contented air of Indians
+and priests, which always struck all travellers in those times. He saw the
+countless herds of cattle, the cultivated fields; enjoyed, no doubt for the
+first time since arriving in South America, the sense of perfect safety, at
+that time to be experienced alone in Misiones. But in despite of his exposure
+of the imposture, the rumour as to the existence of the mines never died out,
+and lingers even to-day, in spite of geological research in Paraguay.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Whilst this was going on in Misiones, in the remote and recently-converted
+district of the Itatines, in the north of Paraguay, the example set by the
+Bishop had borne its fruit. The Indians became unmanageable. One of the chiefs
+broke into open rebellion, and wounded a Jesuit father called Arenas at the
+very altar-steps. Soon the general corruption of manners became almost
+universal throughout the district. This, I fancy, must be taken to mean that
+the Indians reverted to polygamy, for the Jesuits always had trouble in this
+matter, being unable to persuade the Indians of the advantage of monogamy.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But most fortuitously, just as the general corruption gained all hearts, a
+tiger rushed into the town, and, after killing fourteen people and some horses,
+disappeared again into the woods.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The Jesuits, ever ready to take advantage of events like these, called on the
+Indians to see in the visitation of the tiger the wrath of Heaven, and to leave
+their wicked ways.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The Indians, always as willing to submit as to revolt, submitted, and the good
+fathers ‘prirent le parti de faire un coup d’autorité, qui leur réussit,’ as
+Charlevoix relates.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+They decoyed the chief, his nephew, and son, into another district, where they
+seized and shipped them off two hundred leagues to a remote reduction across
+the Uruguay. The Spaniards used to say of Ferdinand VII., when he had committed
+any great barbarity, ‘He is quite a King’ (‘Es mucho Rey’), and the Indians of
+the Itatines esteemed the Jesuits for their ‘coup d’autorité’ in the same
+manner as the Spaniards their King.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+His usual luck attended Cardenas in his exile in Corrientes. This town formed
+part of the diocese of Buenos Ayres, which happened to be vacant at the time.
+He therefore took upon himself to act just as he had acted in
+Paraguay—appointed officers of justice, held ordinations, and instituted a
+campaign against the Jesuits of the town.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Whilst he was thus occupied in his favourite pastime of usurping other people’s
+functions, two citations were sent him to appear before the High Court of
+Charcas. He disregarded them, and sent a statement of his case by the hands of
+his nephew to the Bishop of Tucuman. In the letter he set forth all his
+complaints against the Governor of Paraguay, calling him a violator of the
+Church, a heretic, and generally applying to him all those terms in which a
+thwarted churchman usually exhales his rage. Mixed up with this was a detailed
+accusation of the Jesuits, to whose account he laid all his misfortunes whilst
+in Paraguay. Lastly, he called upon the Bishop of Tucuman to summon a
+provincial council to condemn the monstrous heresies which he attributed to the
+Jesuits, reminding him that the Council of Trent had recommended the holding of
+frequent provincial councils, and stating his opinion that, unless a council
+were called at once, the Bishop would incur a mortal sin.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The answer Cardenas received from Tucuman was most ironically couched in the
+best style that his long-suffering friend was able to command. After addressing
+Cardenas as ‘your illustrious lordship’, he proceeded to demolish all his
+statements in such a manner as to argue that he had had much practice with
+refractory priests in his own diocese. He told him that the Jesuits were the
+only Order in Paraguay that really worked amongst the Indians. He reminded him
+that from that Order the ‘second Paul’, <i>i.e.</i>, St. Francis Xavier, had
+himself issued. He asked him whether, as a churchman, he thought the yearly sum
+of twelve thousand crowns given by the King out of the treasury of Buenos Ayres
+towards the Jesuits’ work was better saved, or that the thousands of Indians
+whom the Jesuits had converted should be lost to God. And as to heresy, he said
+he was no judge, leaving such matters to the Pope; but that no one accused the
+Jesuits of corruption in their morals, or of any of the greater crimes to which
+the great fragility of human nature renders us liable. He reminded him the
+Jesuits had made no accusation on their part, but always spoke of him with
+moderation and respect. And as to a provincial council, he said that it was
+impossible, for the following good cause: The Bishop of Misque<a
+href="#foot135">[135]</a> was too infirm to travel; the Bishop of La Paz was
+lately dead, and the see still vacant; the Bishop of Buenos Ayres only just
+arrived, and too much occupied to leave his diocese. Therefore, the only
+Bishops available were himself and Cardenas, and that they never would agree.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+‘Moreover,’ he remarked, ‘what is it that your illustrious lordship wishes me
+to do?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+‘To advise a Bishop?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+‘God has only given me the charge of my own sheep. Your lordship knows as well
+as I do how a Bishop should comport himself.’
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He finished with a quotation, saying that a Bishop’s state was not to lie ‘in
+splendore vestium, sed morum; non ad iram, sed ut omnimodum patientium.’
+</p>
+
+<p>
+What Cardenas replied is not set down in any history which has come under my
+observation, but what he must have thought is easy to divine.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The Governor of Paraguay, not content with having put his case before the
+Supreme Court of Charcas, sent also to the Council General of the Indies in
+Seville, detailing all the vagaries of the Bishop. The Jesuits also empowered
+an officer to represent them there.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+During these preparations, and whilst everyone was off his guard, the Guaycurús
+endeavoured to surprise the capital, and would have done so had not some
+regiments of Guaranís arrived in time from the mission territory. This should
+have been an object-lesson to those who always tried to show the Jesuits in the
+light of enemies to the authority of the King of Spain. Nothing, however,
+proved of the least avail, and though on several occasions the Spanish power in
+Paraguay was only saved by the exertions of the Jesuits and their Indians, the
+calumnies of Cardenas had taken too deep root to be dispelled.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Meanwhile, in Corrientes, Cardenas schemed night and day to return to Paraguay.
+In his own city of La Plata naturally he had some friends, and these did all
+they could to get him reinstated. In spite of all their efforts, an order came
+from Charcas for him to leave the city under pain of banishment.<a
+href="#foot136">[136]</a> Anyone but Cardenas would have been disconcerted; he,
+though, pretended, as in the order he was still styled Bishop of Paraguay, that
+before leaving for Charcas, to present himself before the court, he had to go
+to Asuncion to name a Vicar-General, and towards the end of 1646 he embarked
+upon the river for Paraguay.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The Governor was on the alert, and sent a vessel with orders to turn him back,
+which order was carried out in spite of his remonstrances, and he returned to
+Corrientes in a miserable state.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Then came another citation to appear at Charcas, and an intimation that he was
+appointed Bishop of Popayán. As Popayán (in New Granada) was at least three
+thousand miles from Asuncion, his joy at the appointment must have been
+extreme.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+His fortunes now seemed desperate; as he said himself in a letter to the King,
+‘at an advanced age he could not undertake so great a journey’; and on every
+side his enemies seemed to have got the upper hand.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In 1648 a change came over everything. Don Gregorio Hinestrosa was removed from
+Paraguay, and a new Governor, Don Diego Escobar de Osorio, appointed in his
+place. Immediately the news reached Cardenas he set out for Paraguay. Arriving
+at Asuncion, his friends all met him and took him in procession to the
+Cathedral. His first thought was to renew his persecution of the Jesuits. Most
+unfortunately for them, Don Juan de Palafox, Bishop of Puebla de los Angeles in
+Mexico, who had himself in Mexico had many quarrels with the Jesuits, wrote
+begging Cardenas and all the Bishops of South America to join against them.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+This Palafox was afterwards beatified, and even in his lifetime enjoyed the
+reputation of a saint, so that his letter greatly strengthened Cardenas.
+Notwithstanding this, Palafox in subsequent works of his during the time that
+he was Bishop of Osma (in Spain) said many things in praise of the work done by
+the Jesuits in Paraguay.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The new Governor, himself a member of the Supreme Court of Charcas, had never
+been before in Paraguay, and therefore resolved to treat the Bishop (as Don
+Gregorio had done) with every respect due to his station. The Bishop wanted
+nothing better, and saw at once he had another fool to deal with. Therefore he
+made no secret of his intention of not complying with the citation of the court
+at Charcas, and set himself at once to preach against the Jesuits, and stir up
+popular resentment against them. Unluckily, proof was wanting of the crimes he
+alleged they had committed, so he resorted to the device of getting a petition
+signed by all and sundry, asking for the expulsion of the Order from Paraguay.
+Like all petitions, it was largely signed by women and by children and by those
+who had never thought before about the matter, but liked the opportunity to
+write their names after the names of others, as sheep go through a gap or
+members give their votes (out of mere sympathy) in the high court of
+Parliament.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+This device having taken too much time, blank documents were passed about for
+all to write upon whatever they imagined to the disadvantage of the Jesuits. By
+an untoward chance, a bundle of these, sent to the agent of the Bishop in
+Spain, was taken on the voyage by an English corsair. The worthy pirate (no
+doubt a Protestant) was, if we can believe the Jesuits, extremely scandalized
+at the bad faith of those who used such means of wreaking their malevolence.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+So all seemed once again to smile upon Don Bernardino, who no doubt resumed his
+flagellations, his midnight services, and his saying of two Masses, and once
+again became the idol of the people of Asuncion.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But in the north, in the wild district of Caaguayu, hard by the mountains of
+Mbaracayá, close to the great <i>yerbales</i>,<a href="#foot137">[137]</a> the
+Jesuits had formed two towns amongst the Indians. These two towns were destined
+to be the outposts of the country against the incursions of the wild Indians
+from the Chaco.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The Bishop prevailed upon the Governor to let him turn out the Jesuits and
+replace them by priests of another Order. This being done, the Indians all
+deserted, leaving the district quite uninhabited.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The court at Charcas, hearing of this folly, sent an order to the Governor to
+send the Jesuits back. A year was passed in ceaseless searching of the woods
+and deserts for the Indians, but only half of the population could ever be
+persuaded to return, and Father Mansilla, the ex-missionary, died of the
+hardships that he underwent.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+From that date down to the time of Dr. Francia (<i>circa</i> 1812-35), the
+district remained a desert. Francia used it as a penal settlement, and to-day,
+save for a few wild, wandering Indians, known as Caaguas, and a sparse
+population of <i>yerba</i>-gatherers, it still remains almost unpopulated.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Meanwhile, the general indignation against the Jesuits seemed to infect all
+classes of the population. Certainly, the citizens of Asuncion had good and
+sufficient causes of complaint against the Jesuits. On several occasions the
+efforts of the Jesuits and their Indians alone had saved the capital from the
+wild Indians, and benefits are hard to bear, if only from their rarity.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Popular hatred, to the full as idiotic as is popular applause, fell chiefly
+upon Father Diaz Taño—he who had saved ten thousand Indians for the King of
+Spain in his celebrated retreat before the Mamelucos down the Paraná—and he was
+frequently insulted in the streets. Father Antonio Manquiano, a quiet and
+learned man, was almost murdered in open day by a furious fanatic, who fell
+upon him with the openly expressed intent ‘to eat his heart’.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+This was the moment Cardenas pitched on to declare the entire Order of the
+Jesuits excommunicated. As he had been a year away from the scene of his former
+exploits, people were not so used to excommunications, and therefore took them
+seriously.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+At this eventful juncture the Governor, Don Diego, died so suddenly that
+suspicions of his having been poisoned were aroused. Scarce was he dead than
+all the population assembled at the palace to elect an interim successor. This
+was a most important thing, as to communicate with Spain took, at the very
+shortest time, about eight months. By acclamation the choice fell on the
+Bishop, who thus found himself head of the spiritual and the temporal power at
+once.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The election was absolutely illegal, as the Spanish law provided that, if a
+Governor of Paraguay should chance to die, the nomination of an interim
+successor should rest first with the Viceroy of Peru, and failing him with the
+High Court of Charcas.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Cardenas based his election on the pretended edict of the Emperor Charles V.,
+but, if he had a copy of the edict, never produced it. As usual, ‘good men
+daring not, and wise men caring not’, but only fools and schemers taking part
+in the election, no serious opposition to his usurpation was encountered.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Cardenas never doubted for a moment that the function of a Governor was to
+govern, and he began at once to do so with a will.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Xarque, a Spanish writer, gives the following curious description of how he set
+about to get the people on his side to expel the Jesuits:<a
+href="#foot138">[138]</a>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Preaching one day in the Cathedral, after the consecration he turned towards
+the people, and, showing the holy wafer, said, ‘Do you believe, my brethren,
+that Jesus Christ is here?’ All, being true believers, answered as one man that
+such was their belief. In the same way as at a scientific lecture, when the
+lecturer holds up some substance, and says, ‘You all know well that calcium
+tungstate or barium hydrocyanide has this or the other property,’ the hearers
+nod assent like sheep, being afraid to contradict so glib a statement from so
+eminent a man.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Then said Cardenas, ‘Believe as firmly that I have an order from the King to
+expel the Jesuits.’ The people all believed, and Cardenas forgot to tell them
+that by the expulsion of the Jesuits twenty thousand Indians would pass into
+his power, whom he could then distribute amongst his friends as slaves, as he
+proposed to divide the Indians of the missions amongst the Paraguayan notables
+to win them to his side.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Being at the head of everything in Asuncion, Cardenas no longer hesitated, but
+ordered an officer, Don Juan de Vallejo Villasanti, with a troop of soldiers to
+march to the college of the Jesuits. This he did, and finding the gates all
+barred, he burst them open, and, entering the college, signified to the rector
+an order from the Governor (duly countersigned by the Bishop) to leave the city
+with all his priests, and to evacuate all the missions on the Paraná. The
+rector answered that the Jesuits had a permission from Philip II., renewed by
+his successors, to found a college, and Father Taño exhibited the documents.
+Villasanti, who had but little love for documents, snatched the parchments from
+his hand, and the soldiers forced the Jesuits in a body to the port like sheep.
+There they were tied and thrown into canoes almost without provisions, and sent
+off down the river to Corrientes, the certain haven of the party in Paraguay
+which has got the worst of an election or a revolution, and wishes to gain
+time.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Arrived in Corrientes, Don Manuel Cabral, a pious officer, received them in his
+house, and, curiously enough, the population welcomed the Jesuits with
+enthusiasm, and pressed them earnestly to build a college in the town.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Their college at Asuncion was treated like a town taken by storm: pulpit and
+font, confessionals and doors, all were torn down and burnt, and, with a view
+of justifying what was done, the Bishop’s partisans spread a report that, as
+the Jesuits were heretics, their temple was unclean.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The population, more artistic in its instincts than the Bishop, refused to
+allow the altar, which had been brought from Spain, to be destroyed. Besides
+the altar, there were also statues of San Ignacio and San Francisco Xavier.
+These the Bishop wished to turn into St. Peter and St. Paul. With this design
+he gave them to an Indian carpenter to work upon. The poor man did his best,
+but only managed to turn out two monstrous blocks, which looked like nothing
+human.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A statue of the Blessed Virgin which had the eyes turned up to heaven the
+Bishop wished to alter, and replace the head by another with the eyes turned
+down to earth, as being more befitting to the statue’s sex. The people, less
+mad or superstitious than the Bishop, refused to allow it, and the image, too,
+was placed in the Cathedral.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In 1649 the expulsion of an Order so powerful as were the Jesuits caused some
+commotion through the world at large. Miracles happened opportunely to
+strengthen waning faith. A fire placed round their church, though it destroyed,
+refused to blacken; and ropes fixed to the tower of the church, although
+attached to windlasses, refused to pull it down, so that the tower and church,
+though gutted, still remained almost intact, and, on the Jesuits’ return, were
+easily repaired, and served as a monument of victory.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Uneasy lies the head that wears a mitre, as poor Cardenas found out. His
+popularity suffered some decrease by the lack of treasure found in the Jesuits’
+college, for he had always dangled millions in prospective before the people’s
+eyes to engage them on his side, and, most unluckily, he had no millions to
+bestow. So, to make all things right, he sent Fray Diego Villalon<a
+href="#foot139">[139]</a> to Madrid to represent his interests.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The Jesuits upon their side were not inactive. By virtue of a brief of Gregory
+XIII. they had the privilege of appointing an official called a judge
+conservator in cases where their honour or their possessions were attacked.
+Therefore Father Alfonso de Ojeda was sent to Charcas to arrange about the
+case. At Charcas they found that Cardenas had been before them, and had
+instituted proceedings against their Order in the High Court. Father Pedro
+Nolasco, Superior of the Order of Mercy, was appointed judge conservator. He at
+once summoned the Bishop to appear before him, and arranged to try the case and
+hear the evidence.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Cardenas having refused to appear, sentence went by default against him. The
+High Court, being convinced that the pretended edict of the Emperor Charles V.
+did not exist, appointed Don Andres Garabito de Leon to be interim
+Captain-General of Paraguay, and gave him power, if necessary, to restore order
+by force of arms. The court then issued a decree summoning Cardenas to appear
+at once at Charcas and give his reasons why he had had himself made Governor
+and had expulsed the Jesuits from Paraguay. It then communicated with the
+Marquis of Mancera, Viceroy of Peru, who quite concurred in its decision as to
+Cardenas.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Apparently upon the principle which prevails amongst Mohammedans of always
+appointing, first an officer, and then a caliph to that officer to do the work,
+the High Court of Charcas also appointed a commander to proceed to Paraguay,
+pending the time that Don Andres should feel inclined to start himself. As the
+caliph’s name was Sebastian de Leon, it is not improbable that he was a
+relation of the first-appointed man.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Don Sebastian de Leon seems to have been in Paraguay already, for both
+Charlevoix and Xarque agree that he and his brothers, after the expulsion of
+the Jesuits by Cardenas, had retired to an estate some distance from Asuncion.
+At the estate the news of his appointment reached him, and must have placed him
+in a most difficult position as to what to do.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+On several occasions in the various rebellions which occurred in South America
+during the Spanish rule, men were appointed to quell rebellions, pacify
+countries, and restore order, and all without an army or any forces being
+placed at their command. This was the case with the celebrated La Gasca, who
+was sent from Spain to put down the rebellion of Gonzalo Pizarro, and succeeded
+in so doing, though he left Spain without a single soldier in his train. In
+this connection it is to be remembered that none of the rebellions in Spanish
+America from the days of Charles I. (<i>i.e.</i>, the Emperor Charles V.) to
+those of Charles III. were for the object of separation from the metropolis,
+but merely risings against Governors sent out from Spain. It seems that both in
+Peru and Paraguay the very name of the imperial power was able to draw hundreds
+of men to the standard of whatever officer held a commission from Madrid, such
+as that held by Garabito de Leon or by La Gasca on the Paraná.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+At first Don Sebastian did not show himself in Asuncion, but sent out
+messengers on every side to summon soldiers, requisition horses, and collect
+provisions. He also sent to Corrientes to tell the Jesuits he was ready to
+reinstate them in their possessions.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Don Bernardino meanwhile was preparing for the great adventure of his life. He
+seems to have believed most firmly that no power on earth had any right to
+remove him from the governorship of Paraguay. In a letter which he addressed to
+Don Juan Romero de la Cruz<a href="#foot140">[140]</a> he says he is on the
+point of distinguishing himself by heroic exploits and great victories; that he
+had on his side justice and force (a most uncommon combination); that the
+entire capital was favourable to him; and that he was resolved neither to
+readmit the Jesuits nor to recognise Don Sebastian de Leon as Governor.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Asuncion was once again convulsed, and all was preparation for the holy war.
+The Bishop had given out that angels were to help him, and this so reassured
+his soldiers that they provided themselves with cords to bind the Indians in
+the army of Don Sebastian Leon, thinking they would fall an easy prey to them.
+This matter of the cords explains, perhaps, why the population of Asuncion was
+almost unanimous in favour of the Bishop.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In the army of Don Sebastian, as well as the militia of the province, marched
+three thousand Indians from the Jesuit reductions on the Paraná. The Spaniards
+of the capital were all determined not to kill any of them, but keep them alive
+for slaves, and hence the cords with which they armed themselves.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The sacred generalissimo led out his army from Asuncion in person, celebrating
+Mass himself, and then heading his troops like many another Spanish
+ecclesiastic has done before and after him, and continued doing even to the
+latest Carlist war.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The armies met not far from Luqué, in a little plain known as the Campo Grande.
+An open plain with sandy soil, which gave the horses a good footing, with
+several little stagnant pools in the centre where the wounded men could drink
+and wash their wounds, with a most convenient forest on all sides for the
+deserters and the cowards to hide in, made a good battlefield. The village of
+Luqué, grouped round its church, and with a little plaza in the middle in which
+sat Paraguayan women selling mandioca, chipa,<a href="#foot141">[141]</a> and
+rapadura,<a href="#foot142">[142]</a> with sacks of maize and of mani,<a
+href="#foot143">[143]</a> stood on the summit of a little hill. Upon the plain
+the earth is red, and looks as if a battle had been fought upon it and much
+blood spilt. In all directions run little paths, worn deep by the feet of mules
+and horses, and in which the rider has to lift his feet as if he were going
+through a stream. To Asuncion there leads one of the deep-sunk roads planted
+with orange and paraiso<a href="#foot144">[144]</a> trees, constructed thus (as
+Barco de la Centenera tells us in his ‘Argentina’) so as to be defensible
+against the Indians after the country was first conquered by the Spaniards.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+On the Bishop’s side hardly a soldier but thought himself an emissary of God,
+or doubted of the victory for a moment in his heart. Angels themselves had
+promised victory to their leader, who, to make all things safe, had issued a
+proclamation punishing surrender with the pain of death; so they stood quietly
+in array of battle waiting to be attacked.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Upon his side, Don Sebastian Leon, seeing the attitude of the enemy,
+immediately ordered an advance, and charged himself, with all his cavalry, upon
+the Bishop’s men. They, with the firmness that fanatics so often show, stood
+firmly in their ranks, thinking themselves invulnerable. Their valour proved
+but momentary, for at the second charge they broke their ranks and fled. Flight
+turned to rout, and Don Sebastian having commanded that they should not be
+pursued, they still fled on, no man pursuing them.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The Governor then entered the capital without resistance. On the plaza he
+stopped, and having gathered up the wounded without respect of party, he sent
+them to the hospital. Then, having seen to the safety of the town, he rode to
+the Cathedral to give thanks to God for having preserved him from the dangers
+of the fight. Dressed in his robes and seated on his throne was Cardenas. Don
+Sebastian entered the church, dismounted, and kissed his hand respectfully,
+like a true Spaniard, and asked him ceremoniously to deign to give him the
+baton of the civil power. Cardenas answered not a word, but handed him the
+baton, and then retired, accompanied by all his priests.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The victory did not terminate the work of Don Sebastian. After a reasonable
+interval, and before witnesses, he cited the Bishop to appear before the court
+of Charcas. The Bishop promised to obey, thinking he had another Don Gregorio
+Hinostrosa to deal with, but quite determined never to comply, acting according
+to the custom of Governors in South America, who, when an order reached them
+from Madrid, either absurd or quite impossible to execute, solemnly answered,
+‘I obey, but I do not comply,’<a href="#foot145">[145]</a> saving by the phrase
+the honour of their sovereigns and themselves. Upon their side the Jesuits
+pressed the judge conservator, Father Nolasco, to issue his sentence, and free
+them from the charges under which they lay. This he did, and gave as his
+opinion they were quite innocent of all that Cardenas had laid to their
+account.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+As in a palace,<a href="#foot146">[146]</a> things go slow in Spain, and it was
+not till 1654 that a royal decision confirmed the judgment of Nolasco, and
+freed the Jesuits from all the charges raised against them.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Order restored, Cardenas deprived of his usurped authority, and the Jesuits
+reinstated, the temporary commission of Sebastian Leon was at an end. Therefore
+he retired again to plant his mandioca under his own guayaba-tree. Yet feeling
+ran so high that he was hardly safe from the vengeance of the partisans of
+Cardenas, so that he found himself once more obliged to summon the militia of
+the province, and lead them to a perfunctory campaign against the Payaguás.
+These Indians the earlier historians of the conquest, Barco de la Centenera and
+Rui Diaz de Guzman, describe as river-pirates, almost living in canoes, and
+dashing out on any passing Spanish vessel that they thought weak enough. The
+Jesuits Montoya and Dobrizhoffer tell us that they went naked, painted in many
+colours, with a hawk’s or parrot’s wing passed through the cartilage of their
+left ear, and that they were, of all the Indians of Paraguay, the most
+indomitable. A few, when I knew Paraguay some twenty years ago, hung round
+Asuncion, squalid and miserable, passing their time in fishing in canoes, and
+as attached to their own mode of life as when the first discoverers called them
+‘sweet-water pirates’ and the ‘most pestilent of all the Indians on the river
+Paraguay.’ The Payaguás chastised, Don Sebastian, upon one pretext or another,
+did not disband his troops, keeping them always by him, and thus making the
+position of the Bishop quite untenable, till by degrees his followers fell away
+and left him almost deserted and his party all dissolved. Seeing the game was
+up, the Bishop, after having named one Don Adrian Cornejo as his suffragan,
+took his departure (1650) for Charcas to appear before the court. For eight
+tumultuous years he had kept his bishopric in a perpetual turmoil, having been
+the evil genius of the land.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+What sort of man he really was is hard to-day to judge, for Xarque, Villalon,
+Charlevoix, and Dean Funes,<a href="#foot147">[147]</a> who chronicle his
+doings, were all, on one side or the other, partisans. The Jesuits condemn him
+as a spoliator, the Franciscans hold him up as one who fought throughout his
+life for the honour of the founder of their rule. Tracts, books, and pamphlets
+for and against him have been written in numbers, and in the history of the
+times in Paraguay his name bulks large. One thing is certain—that the Indians
+loved and revered him, and followed him up to the end. Even in Charcas, where
+he lived for years upon a pension of two thousand crowns allowed him by the
+King whilst his case dragged its weary course to Rome, Madrid, back to Peru,
+and then to Rome again, the Indians, when he appeared in public, greeted him
+with flowers. He may have been a saint: so many men are saints, and the world
+knows them not. He may have been a schemer; but he made nothing by his schemes
+except the barren honour of his consecration to the see of Paraguay. A preacher
+certainly he was, able and willing to draw crowds, after the fashion of all
+those who have the gift of words.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Headstrong and obstinate, through a long life he hated vigorously, thinking all
+those who differed from him were accursed of God. A strenuous member of the
+Church militant on earth, he was at least a personality, and those who read the
+history of his time must reckon with, and take sides for or against, him after
+the fashion of the men with whom he passed his life, who to a man revered him
+as a saint, or looked upon him as a devil sent to plague mankind.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Arrived in Charcas, he soon fell on evil times, although at first he made some
+partisans. Still looking back to Paraguay, he passed his time in drawing out
+petitions to the King; then, one by one, all his friends fell from him, except
+some faithful Indians, who considered him a saint. His dreams of saintship were
+not fulfilled, for his name never figured in the calendar. Years did not tame
+nor yet did hope ever completely leave him; for in old books I find him always
+protesting, ever complaining, and still striving, till, in 1665, Philip IV. in
+pity made him Bishop of Santa Cruz. A sentence from the registers of the
+Consistory at Rome informs us that, as Bishop of La Paz, in his own province of
+the Charcas, he left off troubling, and rested from his agitated life.
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a name="chap06"></a>Chapter VI</h2>
+
+<p class="letter">
+Description of the mission territory and towns founded by the Jesuits—Their
+endeavours to attract the Indians—Religious feasts and processions—Agricultural
+and commercial organizations
+</p>
+
+<p>
+With the death of Cardenas the most dangerous enemy the Jesuits ever had in
+Paraguay had disappeared. They worsted him, and drove him from his see; but the
+movement set on foot by him and the calumnies he levelled at their Order still
+remained and flourished, and in the end prevailed against them and drove them
+from the land. A calumny is hard to kill; mankind in general cherish it; they
+never let it die, and, if it languishes, resuscitate it under another form;
+they hold to it in evil and in good repute, so that, once fairly rooted, it
+goes on growing like a forest-tree throughout the centuries. Therefore, the
+charges against the Jesuits in Paraguay, which Cardenas first started, are with
+us still, and warp our judgment as to the doings of the Order in the missions
+of the Paraná and Uruguay even until to-day.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But neither calumny nor the raids of the Paulistas, nor yet the jealousy of the
+Spanish settlers in Paraguay, deterred the Jesuits from the prosecution of
+their task. The missions gradually extended, till they ranged from Santa Maria
+la Mayor, in Paraguay, to San Miguel, in what is now Brazil; and from Jesus,
+upon the Paraná, to Yapeyu, upon the Uruguay. Most of the country, with the
+exception of the missions of Jesus and Trinidad, upon the Paraná, which to-day,
+at least, are only clearings in the primeval forest, is composed of open
+rolling plains, with wood upon the banks of all the streams. Covered as it was
+and is with fine, short grass, it formed excellent cattle-breeding country, and
+hence the great industry of the Indians was to look after stock. The country
+being so favourable for cattle, they multiplied immoderately, so that in the
+various establishments (<i>estancias</i>), according to the inventories
+published by Brabo, their numbers were immense.<a href="#foot148">[148]</a>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+These open rolling plains, called by the natives <i>campos quebrantados</i>,
+are generally studded thickly with stunted palms called yatais,<a
+href="#foot149">[149]</a> but not so thickly as to spoil the grass which covers
+them in spring and early summer, and even in winter they remain good feeding
+ground. Thick clumps of hard-wood trees<a href="#foot150">[150]</a> break up
+the prairie here and there into peninsulas and islands, and in the hollows and
+rocky valleys bushy palmetto rises above a horse’s knees. In general the soil
+is of a rich bright red, which, gleaming through the trees, gives a peculiarly
+warm colour to the land. All the French Jesuit writers refer to it as ‘la terre
+rouge des missions’. The Jesuits used it and another earth of a yellow shade
+for painting their churches and their houses in the mission territory. Its
+composition is rather sandy, though after rain it makes thick mud, and renders
+travelling most laborious. The flowers and shrubs of the territory are quite as
+interesting and still more varied than are the trees. Many of the Jesuits were
+botanists, and the works of Fathers Montenegro,<a href="#foot151">[151]</a>
+Sigismund Asperger and Lozano are most curious, and give descriptions and lists
+of many of the plants unclassified even to-day. The celebrated Bonpland, so
+long detained by Dr. Francia in Paraguay, unfortunately never published
+anything; but modern writers<a href="#foot152">[152]</a> have done much, though
+still the flora of the whole country is but most imperfectly known, and much
+remains to do before it is all classified. The <i>Croton succirubrus</i> (from
+which a resin known as ‘sangre-de-drago’ is extracted), the sumaha (bombax—the
+fruit of which yields a fine vegetable silk), the erythroxylon or coca of
+Paraguay, the incienso or incense-tree of the Jesuits, are some of the most
+remarkable of the myriad shrubs. But if the shrubs are myriad, the flowers are
+past the power of man to count. Lianas, with their yellow and red and purple
+clusters of blossoms, like enormous bunches of grapes, hang from the
+forest-trees. In the open glades upon the ñandubays,<a
+href="#foot153">[153]</a> the algarrobos, and the espinillos, hang various
+Orchidaceæ,<a href="#foot154">[154]</a> called by the natives ‘flores del
+aire’, covering the trees with their aerial roots, their hanging blossoms, and
+their foliage of tender green. The Labiatæ, Compositæ, Daturæ, Umbelliferæ,
+Convolvulaceæ, and many other species, cover the ground in spring or run up
+trees and bushes after the fashion of our honeysuckle and the traveller’s joy.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The lakes and backwaters of rivers are covered with myriads of water-lilies
+(all lumped together by the natives as ‘camalote’), whilst in the woodland
+pools the Victoria Regis carpets the water with its giant leaves. In every wood
+the orange and the lemon with the sweet lime have become wild, and form great
+thickets. Each farm and <i>rancho</i> has its orange-grove, beneath the shade
+of which I have so often camped, that the scent of orange-blossom always brings
+back to me the dense primeval woods, the silent plains, the quiet Indians, and
+the unnavigated waterways, in which the alligators basked. Except the Sierra de
+Mbaracayu,<a href="#foot155">[155]</a> on the north-east, throughout the
+mission territory there are no mountains of considerable height; and through
+the middle of the country run the rivers Paraná and Uruguay, the latter forming
+the boundary on the south-east. The rolling plains and woods alternate with
+great marshes called <i>esteros</i>, which in some districts, as of that of
+Ñeembucu, cover large tracts of land, forming in winter an almost impenetrable
+morass, and in the spring and early summer excellent feeding-ground for sheep.
+Throughout the territory the climate is healthy, except towards the woody
+northern hills. With this rich territory and the false reports of mines, which
+even unsuccessful exploration could not dispel, it is but natural that the
+Jesuits were hated far and wide. It must have been annoying to a society
+composed, as were the greater portion of the Spanish settlements in Paraguay,
+of adventurers, who treated the Indians as brute beasts,<a
+href="#foot156">[156]</a> to see a preserve of Indians separated from their
+territory by no great barrier of Nature, and still beyond their power.<a
+href="#foot157">[157]</a> Bonpland, in speaking of the country, says: ‘The
+whole of the land exceeds description; at every step one meets with things
+useful and new in natural history.’ Such also was the opinion of the French
+travellers Demersay and D’Orbigny; of Colonel du Graty, whose interesting work
+(‘La République du Paraguay’, Brussels, 1862) is one of the best on the
+country; the recent French explorer Bourgade la Dardye, and of all those who
+have ever visited the missions of Paraguay.<a href="#foot158">[158]</a>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In this rich territory the Jesuits, when, after infinite trouble, they had
+united a sufficient<a href="#foot159">[159]</a> quantity of Indians, formed
+them into townships, almost all of which were built upon one plan. In Paraguay
+itself only some three or four remain; but they remain so well preserved that,
+by the help of contemporary accounts, it is easy to reconstruct almost exactly
+what the missions must have been like during the Jesuits’ rule.<a
+href="#foot160">[160]</a>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Built round a square, the church and store-houses filled one end, and the
+dwellings of the Indians, formed of sun-dried bricks or wattled canes in three
+long pent-houses, completed the three sides. In general, the houses were of
+enormous length, after the fashion of a St. Simonian phalanstery, or of a
+‘miners’ row’ in Lanarkshire. Each family had its own apartments, which were
+but separated from the apartments of the next by a lath-and-plaster wall,
+called in Spanish <i>tabique</i>; but one veranda and one roof served for a
+hundred or more families. The space in the middle of the square was carpeted
+with the finest grass, kept short by being pastured close by sheep. The
+churches, sometimes built of stone, and sometimes of the hard woods with which
+the country abounds, were beyond all description splendid, taking into
+consideration the remoteness of the Jesuit towns from the outside world.
+Frequently—as, for instance, in the mission of Los Apostoles—the churches had
+three aisles, and were adorned with lofty towers, rich altars,<a
+href="#foot161">[161]</a> super-altars, and statuary, brought at great expense
+from Italy and Spain. Though the churches were often built of stone, it was not
+usual for the houses of the Indians to be so built; but in situations where
+stone was plentiful, as at the mission of San Borja, the houses of the Jesuits
+were of masonry, with verandas held up by columns, and with staircases with
+balustrades of sculptured stone.<a href="#foot162">[162]</a> The ordinary
+ground-plan of the priest’s house was that of the Spanish Moorish dwelling, so
+like in all its details to a Roman house at Pompeii or at Herculaneum. Built
+round a square courtyard, with a fountain in the middle, the Jesuits’ house
+formed but a portion of a sort of inner town, which was surrounded by a wall,
+in which a gate, closed by a porter’s lodge, communicated with the outside
+world. Within the wall was situated the church (although it had an entrance to
+the plaza), the rooms of the inferior priest, a garden, a guest-chamber,
+stables, and a store-house, in which were kept the arms belonging to the town,
+the corn, flour, and wool, and the provisions necessary for life in a remote
+and often dangerous place. In every case the houses were of one story; the
+furniture was modest, and in general home-made; in every room hung images and
+pious pictures, the latter often painted by the Indians themselves. In the
+smaller missions two Jesuits managed all the Indians.<a
+href="#foot163">[163]</a>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The greatest difficulty which the Jesuits had to face was the natural indolence
+of their neophytes. Quite unaccustomed as they were to regular work of any
+kind, the ordinary European system, as practised in the Spanish settlements,
+promptly reduced them to despair, and often killed them off in hundreds.
+Therefore the Jesuits instituted the semi-communal system of agriculture and of
+public works with which their name will be associated for ever in America.<a
+href="#foot164">[164]</a>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The celebrated Dr. Francia, dictator of Paraguay, used to refer to the Jesuits
+as ‘cunning rogues’,<a href="#foot165">[165]</a> and, as he certainly himself
+was versed in every phase of cunningness, perhaps his estimate—to some extent,
+at least—was just. A rogue in politics is but a man who disagrees with you;
+but, still, it wanted no little knowledge of mankind to present a daily task to
+men, unversed in any kind of labour, as of the nature of a pleasure in itself.
+The difficulty was enormous, as the Indians seemed never to have come under the
+primeval curse, but passed their lives in wandering about, occasionally
+cultivating just sufficient for their needs. Whether a missionary, Jesuit, or
+Jansenist, Protestant, Catholic, or Mohammedan, does well in forcing his own
+mode of life and faith on those who live a happier, freer life than any his
+instructor can hold out to them is a moot point. Only the future can resolve
+the question, and judge of what we do to-day—no doubt with good intentions, but
+with the ignorance born of our self-conceit. Much of the misery of the world
+has been brought about with good intentions; but of the Jesuits, at least, it
+can be said that what they did in Paraguay did not spread death and extinction
+to the tribes with whom they dealt.<a href="#foot166">[166]</a> So to the task
+of agriculture the Jesuits marshalled their neophytes to the sound of music,
+and in procession to the fields, with a saint borne high aloft, the community
+each day at sunrise took its way. Along the paths, at stated intervals, were
+shrines of saints, and before each of them they prayed, and between each shrine
+sang hymns.<a href="#foot167">[167]</a> As the procession advanced, it became
+gradually smaller as groups of Indians dropped off to work the various fields,
+and finally the priest and acolyte with the musicians returned alone.<a
+href="#foot168">[168]</a> At mid-day, before eating, they all united and sang
+hymns, and then, after their meal and siesta, returned to work till sundown,
+when the procession again re-formed, and the labourers, singing, returned to
+their abodes. A pleasing and Arcadian style of tillage, and different from the
+system of the ‘swinked’ labourer in more northern climes. But even then the
+hymnal day was not concluded; for after a brief rest they all repaired to
+church to sing the ‘rosary’, and then to sup and bed. On rainy days they worked
+at other industries in the same half-Arcadian, half-communistic manner, only
+they sang their hymns in church instead of in the fields. The system was so
+different to that under which the Indians endured their lives in the
+<i>encomiendas</i> and the <i>mitas</i> of the Spanish settlements, that the
+fact alone is sufficient to account for much of the contemporary hatred which
+the Jesuits incurred.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Imagine a semi-communistic settlement set close to the borders of Rhodesia, in
+which thousands of Kaffirs passed a life analogous to that passed by the
+Indians of the missions—cared for and fed by the community, looked after in
+every smallest particular of their lives—and what a flood of calumny would be
+let loose upon the unfortunate devisers of the scheme! Firstly, to withdraw
+thousands of ‘natives’ from the labour market would be a crime against all
+progress, and then to treat them kindly would be heresy, and to seclude them
+from the contamination of the scum of Europe in the settlements would be termed
+unnatural; for we know that native races derive most benefit from free
+competition with the least fitted of our population to instruct. But besides
+agriculture the enormous cattle-farms<a href="#foot169">[169]</a> of the
+mission territory gave occupation to many of the neophytes. The life on
+cattle-farms gave less scope for supervision, and we may suppose that the
+herders and the cattlemen were more like Gauchos; but Gauchos under religious
+discipline, half-centaurs in the field, sitting a plunging half-wild colt as if
+they were part of him, and when on foot at home submissive to the Jesuits,
+constant in church, but not so fierce and bloodthirsty as their descendants
+soon became after the withdrawal of the mission rule.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+As well as agriculture and <i>estancia</i> life, the Jesuits had introduced
+amongst the Indians most of the arts and trades of Europe. By the inventories
+taken by Bucareli, Viceroy of Buenos Ayres, at the expulsion of the Order, we
+find that they wove cotton largely; sometimes they made as much as eight
+thousand five hundred yards of cloth in a single town in the space of two or
+three months.<a href="#foot170">[170]</a> And, in addition to weaving, they had
+tanneries, carpenters’ shops, tailors, hat-makers, coopers, cordage-makers,
+boat-builders, cartwrights, joiners, and almost every industry useful and
+necessary to life. They also made arms and powder, musical instruments, and had
+silversmiths, musicians, painters, turners, and printers to work their
+printing-presses: for many books were printed at the missions,<a
+href="#foot171">[171]</a> and they produced manuscripts as finely executed as
+those made by the monks in European monasteries.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+All the <i>estancias</i>, the agricultural lands and workshops were, so to
+speak, the property of the community; that is to say, the community worked them
+in common, was fed and maintained by their productions, the whole under the
+direction of the two Jesuits who lived in every town. A portion called
+<i>tupinambal</i> in Guaraní was set aside especially for the maintenance of
+orphans and of widows. The cattle and the horses, with the exception of ‘los
+caballos del santo’, destined for show at feasts, were also used in common. The
+surplus of the capital was reserved to purchase necessary commodities from
+Buenos Ayres and from Spain.<a href="#foot172">[172]</a> Each family received
+from the common stock sufficient for its maintenance during good conduct, for
+the Jesuits held in its entirety the Pauline dictum that if a man will not
+work, then neither shall he eat. But as they held it, so they practised it
+themselves, for their lives were most laborious—teaching and preaching, and
+acting as overseers to the Indians in their labours continually, from the first
+moment of their arrival at the missions till their death. Thus, if the mayor of
+the township complained of any man for remissness at his work, he received no
+rations till he had improved.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+To inculcate habits of providence amongst the Indians, always inclined to
+consume whatever was given to them and go fasting afterwards, they issued the
+provisions but once a week, and when they killed their oxen forced the Indians
+to ‘jerk’<a href="#foot173">[173]</a> a certain quantity of beef to last
+throughout the week. Vegetables each family was obliged to plant both in their
+gardens and in the common fields; and all that were not actually consumed were
+dealt out to the workers in the common workshops or preserved for sale.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Certain of the Indians owned their own cows and horses, and had gardens in
+which they worked; but all the product was obliged to be disposed of to the
+Jesuits for the common good, and in exchange for them they gave knives,
+scissors, cloth, and looking-glasses, and other articles made in the outside
+world. Clothes were served out to every Indian, and consisted for the men of
+trousers, coarse <i>ponchos</i>, straw hats or caps, and shirts; but neither
+men nor women ever wore shoes, and the sole costume of the latter was the
+Guaraní <i>tipoi</i>,<a href="#foot174">[174]</a> a long and sleeveless shift
+cut rather high, and with coarse embroidery round the shoulders, and made of a
+rough cotton cloth. For ornaments they had glass beads and rosaries of brass or
+silver, with silver rings, and necklaces of glass or horn, from which hung
+crucifixes. Thus food and clothing cost the Jesuits<a href="#foot175">[175]</a>
+(or the community) but little, and a rude plenty was the order of the land. The
+greatest luxury of the Indians was <i>maté</i>, and to produce it they worked
+in the <i>yerbales</i> in the same way in which they worked their fields—in
+bands and with processions, to the sound of hymns and headed by a priest.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+This, then, was the system by means of which the Jesuits succeeded, without
+employing force of any kind, which in their case would have been quite
+impossible, lost as they were amongst the crowd of Indians, in making the
+Guaranís endure the yoke of toil. The semi-communal character of their rule
+accounts for the hostility of Liberals who, like Azara, saw in competition the
+best road to progress, but who, like him, in their consuming thirst for
+progress lost sight of happiness.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In addition to the means described, the Jesuits had recourse to frequent
+religious feasts, for which the calendar gave them full scope, so that the life
+in a Jesuit mission was much diversified and rendered pleasant to the Indians,
+who have a rooted love of show. Each mission had, of course, its patron
+saint,<a href="#foot176">[176]</a> and on his day nobody worked, whilst all was
+joyfulness and simple mirth. At break of day a discharge of rockets and of
+firearms and peals upon the bells announced the joyful morn. Then the whole
+population flocked to church to listen to an early mass. Those who could find
+no room inside the church stood in long lines outside the door, which remained
+open during the ceremony. Mass over, each one ran to prepare himself for his
+part in the function, the Jesuits having taken care, by multiplying offices and
+employments, to leave no man without a direct share in all the others did.<a
+href="#foot177">[177]</a> The humblest and the highest had their part, and the
+heaviest burden, no doubt, fell upon the two Jesuits,<a
+href="#foot178">[178]</a> who were answerable for all. The foremost duty was to
+get the procession ready for the march, and saddle ‘los caballos del santo’<a
+href="#foot179">[179]</a> to serve as escort, mounted by Indians in rich
+dresses, kept specially for feasts.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The inventory of the town of Los Apostoles<a href="#foot180">[180]</a> enables
+us to reconstruct, with some attempt at accuracy, how the procession was formed
+and how it took its way. All the militia of the town were in attendance,
+mounted on their best horses, and armed with lances (<i>chuzos</i>), lazo,
+bolas, and a few with guns. The officers of the Indians rode at their head,
+dressed out in gorgeous clothes, and troops of dancers, at stated intervals,
+performed a sort of Pyrrhic dance between the squadrons of the cavalry.<a
+href="#foot181">[181]</a> In the front of all rode on a white horse the Alferez
+Real,<a href="#foot182">[182]</a> dressed in a doublet of blue velvet richly
+laced with gold, a waistcoat of brocade, and with short velvet breeches
+gartered with silver lace; upon his feet shoes decked with silver buckles, and
+the whole scheme completed by a gold-laced hat. In his right hand he held the
+royal standard fastened to a long cane which ended in a silver knob. A sword
+was by his side, which, as he only could have worn it on such occasions, and as
+the ‘horses of the saint’ were not unlikely as ticklish as most horses of the
+prairies of Entre Rios and Corrientes are wont to be, must have embarrassed him
+considerably. Behind him came the Corregidor, arrayed in yellow satin, with a
+silk waistcoat and gold buttons, breeches of yellow velvet, and a hat equal in
+magnificence to that worn by his bold compeer. The two Alcaldes, less violently
+dressed, wore straw-coloured silk suits, with satin waistcoats of the same
+colour, and hats turned up with gold. Other officials, as the Commissario,
+Maestre de Campo, and the Sargento Mayor, were quite as gaily dressed in
+scarlet coats, with crimson damask waistcoats trimmed with silver lace,<a
+href="#foot183">[183]</a> red breeches, and black hats adorned with heavy lace.
+In the bright Paraguayan sunshine, with the primeval forest for a background,
+or in some mission in the midst of a vast plain beside the Paraná, they must
+have looked as gorgeous as a flight of parrots from the neighbouring woods, and
+have made a Turneresque effect, ambling along, a blaze of colours, quite as
+self-satisfied in their finery as if ‘the rainbow had been entail settled on
+them and their heirs male.’ Quite probably their broad, flat noses, and their
+long, lank hair, their faces fixed immovably, as if they were carved in
+ñandubay, contrasted strangely with their finery. But there were none to
+judge—no one to make remarks; most likely all was conscience and tender heart,
+and not their bitterest enemy has laid the charge of humour to the Jesuits’
+account.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+As in the inventories of the thirty towns I find no mention either of stockings
+or of shoes for Indians, with the exception of the low shoes and buckles worn
+by the Alferez Real, it seems the gorgeous costumes ended at the knee, and that
+these popinjays rode barefoot, with, perhaps, large iron Gaucho spurs fastened
+by strips of mare-hide round their ankles, and hanging down below their naked
+feet. But, not content with the procession of the elders in parrot guise, there
+was a parody of parodies in the <i>cabildo infantil</i>, the band composed of
+children, who, with the self-same titles as their elders, and in the self-same
+clothes adjusted to their size, rode close upon their heels. Lastly, as
+Charlevoix tells us, came ‘des lions et des tigres, mais bien enchainés afin
+qu’ils ne troublerent point la fête,’ and so the whole procession took its way
+towards the church.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The church, all hung with velvet and brocade, was all ablaze with lights, and
+fumes of incense (no doubt necessary) almost obscured the nave. Upon the right
+and left hand of the choir (which, as is usual in Spain, was in the middle of
+the church) the younger Indians were seated all in rows, the boys and girls
+being separated, as was the custom in all the missions of the Jesuits, who, no
+doubt, were convinced of the advisability of the saying that ‘entre santa y
+santo, pared de cal y canto.’<a href="#foot184">[184]</a> The Indians who had
+some office, and who wore the clothes<a href="#foot185">[185]</a> I have
+described, were seated or knelt in rows, and at the outside stood the people of
+the town dressed in white cotton, their simple clothes, no doubt, forming an
+effective background to their more parti-coloured brethren kneeling in the
+front. Throughout the church the men and women were separated, and if a rumour
+of an incursion of Paulistas was in the air, the Indians carried arms even in
+the sacred buildings and at the solemn feasts. Mass was celebrated with a full
+band, the oboe, fagot, lute, harp, cornet, clarinet, violin, viola, and all
+other kinds of music, figuring in the inventories of the thirty towns. Indeed,
+in two of the inventories<a href="#foot186">[186]</a> an opera called
+‘Santiago’ is mentioned, which had special costumes and properties to put it on
+the stage. Mass over, the procession was reconstituted outside the church, and
+after parading once more through the town broke up, and the Indians devoted the
+night to feasting, and not infrequently danced till break of day.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Such were the outward arts with which the Jesuits sought to attach the simple
+people, to whom they stood in the position not only of pastors and masters both
+in one, but also as protectors from the Paulistas on one side, and on the other
+from the Spaniards of the settlements, who, with their <i>encomiendas</i> and
+their European system of free competition between man and man, were perhaps
+unknowingly the direst enemies of the whole Indian race. There is, as it would
+seem, implanted in the minds of almost all primitive peoples, such as the
+Guaranís, a solidarity, a clinging kinship, which if once broken down by
+competition, unrestrained after our modern fashion, inevitably leads to their
+decay. Hence the keen hatred to the Chinese in California and in Australia.
+Naturally, those whom we hate, and in a measure fear, we also vilify, and this
+has given rise to all those accusations of Oriental vice (as if the vice of any
+Oriental, however much depraved, was comparable to that of citizens of Paris or
+of London), of barbarism, and the like, so freely levelled against the
+unfortunate Chinese.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In Paraguay nothing is more remarkable in a market in the country than the way
+in which the people will not undersell each other, even refusing to part with
+goods a fraction lower than the price which they consider fair.<a
+href="#foot187">[187]</a> It may be that the Jesuits would have done better to
+endeavour to equip their neophytes more fully, so as to take their place in the
+battle of the world. It may be that the simple, happy lives they led were too
+opposed to the general scheme of outside human life to find acceptance or a
+place in our cosmogony. But one thing I am sure of—that the innocent delight of
+the poor Indian Alferez Real, mounted upon his horse, dressed in his motley,
+barefooted, and overshadowed by his gold-laced hat, was as entire as if he had
+eaten of all the fruits of all the trees of knowledge of his time, and so
+perhaps the Jesuits were wise.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Strangely enough—but, then, how strangely all extremes meet in humanity!—the
+Jesuits alone (at least, in Paraguay) seem to have apprehended, as the Arabs
+certainly have done from immemorial time, that the first duty of a man is to
+enjoy his life. Art, science, literature, ambition—all the frivolities with
+which men occupy themselves—have their due place; but life is first, and in
+some strange, mysterious way the Jesuits felt it, though, no doubt, they would
+have been the first to deny it with a thousand oaths. But in a Jesuit mission
+all was not feasting or processioning, for with such neighbours as the
+Mamelucos they had to keep themselves prepared.<a href="#foot188">[188]</a> As
+for their better government in home affairs each mission had its police, with
+officers<a href="#foot189">[189]</a> chosen by the Jesuits amongst the Indians,
+so for exterior defence they had militia, and in it the <i>caciques</i><a
+href="#foot190">[190]</a> of the different tribes held principal command. Most
+likely over them, or at their elbows, were set priests who before entering the
+Company of Jesus had been soldiers: for there were many such amongst the
+Jesuits. As their own founder once had been a soldier, so the Company was
+popular amongst those soldiers who from some cause or other had changed their
+swords to crucifixes, and taken service in the ranks of Christ.<a
+href="#foot191">[191]</a> As it was most important, both for defence and
+policy, to keep the <i>caciques</i> content, they were distinguished by better
+treatment than the others in many different ways. Their food was more abundant,
+and a guard of Indians was on perpetual duty round the houses where they lived;
+these they employed as servants and as messengers to summon distant companies
+of Indians to the field. Their method of organization must have been like that
+of the Boers or of the Arabs; for every Indian belonged to a company, which now
+and then was brought together for evolutions in the field or for a period of
+training, after the fashion of our militia or the German Landwehr. Perhaps this
+system of an armed militia, always ready for the field, was what, above all
+other reasons, enabled their detractors to represent the Jesuits as feared and
+unpopular. Why, it was asked, does this community of priests maintain an army
+in its territories? No one remembered that if such were not the case the
+missions could not have existed for a year without a force to defend their
+borders from the Paulistas. Everyone forgot that Fathers Montoya and Del Taño
+had obtained special permission from the King for the Indians of the missions
+to bear arms; and, as no human being is grateful for anything but contumelious
+treatment, the Spanish settlers conveniently forgot how many times a Jesuit
+army had saved their territories. The body of three thousand Guaranís sent at
+the expense of the Company to assist the Spaniards against the Portuguese at
+the attack upon the Colonia del Sacramento<a href="#foot192">[192]</a> on the
+river Plate, in 1678, was quite forgotten, together with the innumerable
+contingents sent by the Jesuits at the demand of Spanish governors against the
+Chaco Indians, the Payaguás, and even against the distant Calchaquis, in what
+is now the province of Jujuy. Even when an English pirate, called in the
+Spanish histories Roque Barloque (explained by some to be plain Richard
+Barlow), appeared off Buenos Ayres, the undaunted neophytes shrank not a moment
+from going to the assistance of their co-religionists against the ‘Lutheran
+dog’.<a href="#foot193">[193]</a> Lastly, all Spanish governors and writers,
+both contemporaneous and at the end of the eighteenth century, seem to forget
+that if the Jesuits had an army of neophytes within their territory the fact
+was known and approved of at the court of Spain.<a href="#foot194">[194]</a>
+But it appears that Calvin had many coadjutors in his policy of ‘Jesuitas aut
+necandi aut calumniis opponendi sunt.’<a href="#foot195">[195]</a> When a
+Jesuit army took the field, driving before it sufficient cattle to subsist
+upon, and with its <i>caballada</i> of spare horses upon its flank, it must
+have resembled many a Gaucho army I have seen in Entre Rios five-and-twenty
+years ago. The only difference seems to have been that the Gauchos of yesterday
+did not use bows and arrows, although they might have done so with as much
+benefit to themselves, and no more danger to their enemies, than was occasioned
+by the rusty, ill-conditioned guns they used to bear. The Indians were armed
+with bows, and in their expeditions each Indian carried one hundred and fifty
+arrows tipped with iron. Others had firearms, but all bore bolas on their
+saddles, and carried lazos and long lances,<a href="#foot196">[196]</a> which,
+like the Pampa Indians, they used in mounting their horses, placing one hand
+upon the mane, and vaulting into the saddles with the other leaning on the
+lance. The infantry were armed with lances and a few guns; they also carried
+bolas, but they trusted most to slings, for which they carried bags of hide,
+with a provision of smooth round stones, and used them dexterously. On several
+occasions their rude militia gave proofs of stubborn valour, and, as they
+fought under the Jesuits’ eyes, no doubt acquitted themselves as men would who
+looked upon their priests almost in the light of gods. But agriculture and
+cattle-breeding were not all the resources of the missions; for the Jesuits
+engaged in commerce largely, both with the outer world and by the intricate and
+curious barter system which they had set on foot for the mutual convenience of
+the different mission towns. In many of the inventories printed by Brabo, one
+comes across the entry ‘Deudas’, showing a sort of account current between the
+towns for various articles. Thus, they exchanged cattle for cotton, sugar for
+rice, wheat for pig-iron or tools from Europe; as no account of interest ever
+appears in any inventory as between town and town, it seems the Jesuits
+anticipated Socialism—at least, so far as that they bought and sold for use,
+and not for gain. Although between the towns of their own territory all was
+arranged for mutual convenience, yet in their dealings with the outside world
+the Jesuits adhered to what are known as ‘business principles’. These
+principles, if I mistake not, have been deified by politicians with their ‘Buy
+in the cheapest, sell in the dearest’ tag, and therefore even the sternest
+Protestant or Jansenist (if such there still exist) can have no stone to throw
+at the Company of Jesus for its participation in that system which has made the
+whole world glad.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Cotton and linen cloth, tobacco, hides, woods of the various hard-wood forests
+of the country, and, above all, <i>yerba-maté</i>, were their chief articles of
+export to the outside world. Their nearest market was in Buenos Ayres, and to
+that port they sent their <i>yerba</i> in boats made at their own yards, of
+which they had several, but notably at Yapeyú upon the Uruguay. The money that
+was made was sent to the Superior of the missions, who had the disposition of
+the way in which it was dispensed, either for use at home or to be sent to
+Europe for necessary goods. As well as <i>yerba-maté</i>, they sent great
+quantities of hides. The inventories of the towns taken at the expulsion state
+that the number of green hides<a href="#foot197">[197]</a> exported annually
+was fifty thousand, together with six thousand cured; in addition they sold
+from three to four arrobas<a href="#foot198">[198]</a> of horse-hair, and wood
+to the value of twenty-five to thirty thousand dollars every year. The total
+export of their <i>yerba</i> ranged between eighty and one hundred thousand
+arrobas, which at the lowest price could not have been sold at a profit under
+seven dollars an arroba,<a href="#foot199">[199]</a> so that the income<a
+href="#foot200">[200]</a> of the thirty towns must have been relatively
+large.<a href="#foot201">[201]</a> Two or three hundred barrels of honey<a
+href="#foot202">[202]</a> and some three or four thousand arrobas of tobacco
+made up the sum total of their exports, though, had they needed money, it might
+have been increased in such a country, and with so many willing labourers,
+almost indefinitely.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Thus it will be seen that the missions were organized both agriculturally and
+commercially so as to be almost self-supporting, and that of the mere
+necessaries of life they had sufficient for exportation, no small achievement
+when we consider how averse from labour were the Indians with whom they had to
+deal. But that nothing should be wanting that a civilized community could
+possibly desire, they had their prisons, with good store of chains, fetters,
+whips, and all the other instruments with which the moral code is generally
+enforced. The most usual punishment was whipping;<a href="#foot203">[203]</a>
+and the crimes most frequent were drunkenness, neglect of work, and bigamy,
+which latter lapse from virtue the Jesuits chastised severely, not thinking,
+being celibates themselves, that not unlikely it was apt to turn into its own
+punishment without the aid of stripes.
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a name="chap07"></a>Chapter VII</h2>
+
+<p class="letter">
+Causes of the Jesuits’ unpopularity—Description of the lives and habits of the
+priests—Testimony in favour of the missions—Their opposition to slavery—Their
+system of administration
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Much has been written of the interior government of the missions by the
+Jesuits, but chiefly by strong partisans, for and against, on either side,
+whose only object was to make out a case to fit the prejudices of those for
+whom they wrote. Upon the Jesuit side the Abbé Muratori<a
+href="#foot204">[204]</a> describes a paradise. A very Carlo Dolce amongst
+writers, with him all in the missions is so cloying sweet that one’s soul
+sickens, and one longs in his ‘Happy Christianity’ to find a drop of gall. But
+for five hundred pages nothing is amiss; the men of Belial persecute the Jesuit
+saints, who always (after the fashion of their Order and mankind) turn both
+cheeks to the smiter, and, if their purse is taken, hasten to give up their
+cloaks. The Indians are all love and gratitude. No need in the Abbé’s pages for
+the twelve pair of fetters, which Brabo most unkindly has set down amongst his
+inventories. Never a single <i>lapsus</i> from the moral rule the Jesuits
+imposed—no drunkenness, and bigamy so seldom met with that it would seem that
+Joseph Andrews had been a swaggerer judged by the standard of these moral
+Guaranís. Then comes Ibañez,<a href="#foot205">[205]</a> the ex-Jesuit, on the
+other side. In a twinkling of an eye the scene is changed. For, quite in
+Hogarth’s vein, he paints the missions as a perpetual march to Finchley, and
+tells us that the Indians were savages, and quite unchanged in all their
+primitive propensities under the Jesuit rule. And for the Jesuits themselves he
+has a few home-truths administered with vinegar, after the fashion of the
+renegade the whole world over, who sees nothing good in the society that has
+turned him out. He roundly says the Jesuits were loafers, accuses them of
+keeping the Indians ignorant for their own purposes, and paints them quite as
+black as the Abbé Muratori painted them rose colour, and with as little art. So
+that, as usually happens in the writings of all polemists, no matter upon which
+side they may write, but little information, and that distorted to an
+incredible degree, is all that they afford.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In general, curious as it may appear, the bitterest opponents of the Jesuits
+were Catholics, and Protestants have often written as apologists. Buffon,
+Raynal, and Montesquieu, with Voltaire, Robertson, and Southey, have written
+favourably of the internal government of the missions and the effect which it
+produced. No other names of equal authority can be quoted on the other side;
+but yet the fact remains that the Jesuits in Paraguay were exposed to constant
+calumny from the first day they went there till the last member of the Order
+left the land.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It is my object first to try to show what the conditions of their government
+really were, and then to try and clear up what was the cause of unpopularity,
+and why so many and such persistent calumnies were laid to their account.
+Stretching right up and down the banks of both the Paraná and Uruguay, the
+missions extended from Nuestra Senora de Fé<a href="#foot206">[206]</a> (or
+Santa Maria), in Paraguay, to San Miguel, in what is now the Brazilian province
+of Rio Grande do Sul; and from the mission of Corpus, on the east bank of the
+Paraná, to Yapeyú, upon the Uruguay. The official capital was placed at
+Candelaria, on the east bank of the Paraná. In that town the Superior of the
+missions had his official residence, and from thence he ruled the whole
+territory, having not only the ecclesiastical but the temporal power, the
+latter, from the position in which he was placed, so many hundred miles from
+any Spanish Governor, having by degrees gradually come into his hands. The
+little town of La Candelaria was, when I knew it, in a most neglected state.
+The buildings of the Jesuits, with the exception of the church, were all in
+ruins. The streets were sandy and deserted, the foot-walk separated from them
+by a line of hard-wood posts, which, as tradition said, were left there by the
+Jesuits; but the hard woods of Paraguay are almost as imperishable as iron.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A <i>balsa</i>—that is, a flying bridge worked by a cable—plied fitfully across
+the Paraná to Ytapua, also a little ex-Jesuit town upon the other side. Each
+shop had a sign outside, as was the case in England a hundred years ago.
+Indians supplied the place with vegetables, floating down in canoes piled up
+with fruit, with flowers, with sweet potatoes, and returning home empty, or for
+their cargo three or four tin pails, a looking-glass, or other of the marvels
+which Europe sends as a sample of her manufactures to little frontier towns.
+All was as quiet, or perhaps much quieter than in the time when the Superior of
+the Jesuits was in residence, and if it had been necessary, during the hot
+hours of noon, Godivas by the dozen might have ridden down the streets, had
+they been able to find horses quiet enough to ride, certain that no one in the
+town would lose his after-breakfast nap to look at them.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In every mission two chosen Jesuits lived. The elder, selected for his
+experience of the country and knowledge of the tongue from amongst those who
+had been rectors of colleges or provincials of the Order, was vested with the
+civil power, and was responsible direct to the Superior. The second, generally
+styled companion (el Compañero), acted as his lieutenant, and had full charge
+of all things spiritual; so that they were a check on one another, and their
+duties did not clash.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In difficulties the Superior transmitted orders, like a general in the field,
+by mounted messengers, who frequently rode over a hundred miles a day, relays
+of horses always being kept ready for emergencies every three leagues upon the
+road.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+From La Candelaria roads branched off to every portion of the territory, most
+of them fit for carts, and all superior to those tracks which were the only
+thoroughfares but twenty years ago. Roads ran to Corrientes, to Asuncion,
+others from Yapeyú to the Salto Grande, on the Paraná. Upon the Upper Uruguay
+were about eighty posts, all guarded, and with horses ready to equip the
+messengers. But there were also roads in the district of the Upper Paraná,
+which I myself remember as a wilderness, uncrossed, uncrossable, where tigers
+roamed about and Indians shot at the rare traveller with poisoned arrows out of
+a blow-pipe, whilst they remained unseen in the recesses of the woods. In the
+districts of the Upper Uruguay and Paraná, besides the roads and relays of
+post-horses, they had a fleet both of canoes and boats in which they carried
+<i>yerba</i><a href="#foot207">[207]</a> and the other products of the land.
+Thus, with their fleet of boats and of canoes, their highroads branching out on
+every side, and their relays of post-horses at intervals, most probably no
+State of America at the time had such interior means of communication with the
+seat of government. The Incas and the Aztecs certainly had posts who carried
+messages and brought up fish from the coast with great rapidity; but all the
+Spanish colonies contemporaneous with the Jesuits’ settlements in Paraguay had
+fallen into a state of lethargy and of interior decay. The roads the Incas used
+in Peru were falling fast into disuse, and it took several weeks to send a
+letter from Buenos Ayres to the Pacific coast.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The system of interior government in the missions was in appearance
+democratic—that is to say, there were officials, as mayors<a
+href="#foot208">[208]</a> and councillors; but most of them were named by the
+Jesuits, and all of them, even although elected, owed their election entirely
+to their priests. This sort of thought-suggested representation was the most
+fitting for the Indians at the time,<a href="#foot209">[209]</a> and those who
+look into the workings of a County Council of to-day cannot but think at times
+that the majority of the councillors would have been better chosen had the
+electorate had the benefit of some controlling hand, though from what quarter
+it is difficult to see. The problem which most writers on the Jesuits have
+quite misunderstood, is how two Jesuits were able to keep a mission of several
+thousand Indians in order, and to rule supreme without armed forces, or any
+means of making their power felt or of enforcing obedience to their decrees.
+Undoubtedly, the dangerous position in which the Indians stood, exposed on one
+side to the Paulistas, and on the other to the Spanish settlers, both of whom
+wished to take them as their slaves, placed power in the Jesuits’ hands: for
+the Indians clearly perceived that the Jesuits alone stood between them and
+instant slavery. Most controversialists who have opposed the Jesuits assert
+that the Indians of the missions were, in reality, half slaves. Nothing is
+further from the truth, if one consults the contemporary records, and remembers
+the small number of the Jesuits. The work the Indians did was inconsiderable,
+and under such conditions as to deprive it of much of the toilsomeness which is
+incident to any kind of work. The very essence of a slave’s estate is being
+obliged to work without remuneration for another man. Nothing was farther from
+the Indians than such a state of things. Their work was done for the community,
+and though the Jesuits, without doubt, had the full disposition of all the
+money earned in commerce,<a href="#foot210">[210]</a> and of the distribution
+of the goods, neither the money nor the goods were used for
+self-aggrandisement, but were laid out for the benefit of the community at
+large. The total population of the thirty towns is variously estimated from one
+hundred and forty to one hundred and eighty thousand,<a
+href="#foot211">[211]</a> and, curiously enough, it remained almost at the same
+figure during the whole period of the Jesuit rule. This fact has been adduced
+against the Jesuits, and it has been said that they could not have been good
+rulers, or the population must have increased; but those who say so forget that
+the Indians of Paraguay were never in great numbers, and that most writers on
+the wild tribes, as Dobrizhoffer<a href="#foot212">[212]</a> and Azara, remark
+their tendency never to increase.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+All this relatively large population of Indians was ruled, as has been seen, by
+a quite inconsiderable number of priests, who, not disposing of any European
+force, and being almost always on bad terms with the Spanish settlers in
+Paraguay on account of the firm stand they made against the enslaving of the
+Indians, had no means of coercion at their command. Hence the Indians must have
+been contented with their rule, for if they had not been so the Jesuits
+possessed no power to stop them from returning to their savage life. Azara,<a
+href="#foot213">[213]</a> although in the main an opponent of the Jesuits, in
+the same way that a ‘good Liberal’ of to-day would oppose anything of a
+Socialistic tendency, yet has this most significant passage in their favour.
+After enumerating the amount of taxes paid by the missions to the Crown, he
+says ‘en faisant le bilan tout se trouvait égal, et s’il y avait quelque
+excédant, il était en faveur des Jésuites ou des peoplades.’<a
+href="#foot214">[214]</a> Seldom enough does such a result take place when the
+balance is struck to-day in any country between the rulers and their
+‘taxables’. Following their system of perfect isolation from the world to its
+logical sequence, the Jesuits surrounded all the territories of their different
+towns with walls and ditches, and at the gates planted a guard to prevent
+egress or ingress between the missions and the outer world.<a
+href="#foot215">[215]</a> Much capital has been made out of this, as it is
+attempted to be shown that the Indians were thereby treated as prisoners in
+their own territories. Nothing, however, has been said of the fact that, if the
+ditches, palisades, and guard-houses kept in the Indians, they also had the
+effect of keeping the Spaniards out. When men who looked upon the Indians as
+without reason, and captured them for slaves when it was possible, began to
+talk of liberty, it looks as if the ‘sacred name of liberty’ was used but as a
+stalking-horse—as greasy Testaments are used to swear upon in police-courts,
+when the witness, with his tongue in his cheek, raises his eyes to heaven, and
+then with fervency imprints a kiss upon his thumb.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It will be seen that the communism of the missions was of a limited character,
+and, though the land was cultivated by the labour of the community, that the
+products were administered by the Jesuits alone. Though it has been stated by
+many polemical writers, such as Ibañez and Azara, and more recently by
+Washburne, who was American Minister in Paraguay during the war with Brazil and
+the Argentine Republic (1866-70), that the Jesuits had amassed great wealth in
+Paraguay, no proof has ever been advanced for such a charge. Certainly Cardenas
+made the same statement, but it was never in his power to bring any
+confirmation of what he said. This power alone was in the hands of Bucareli
+(1767), the Viceroy of Buenos Ayres, under whose auspices the expulsion of the
+Jesuits was carried out. By several extracts from Brabo’s inventories, and by
+the statement of the receivers sent by Bucareli, I hope to show that there was
+no great wealth at any time in the mission territory, and that the income was
+expended in the territory itself. It may be that the expenditure on churches
+was excessive, and also that the money laid out on religious ceremonies was not
+productive; but the Jesuits, strange as it may appear, did not conduct the
+missions after the fashion of a business concern, but rather as the rulers of
+some Utopia—those foolish beings who think happiness is preferable to wealth.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Nothing can give a better idea of the way of life of a Jesuit priest and of his
+daily labours than the curious letter of Nicolas Ñeenguiru, originally written
+in Guaraní, but of which a translation is extant in the National Spanish
+Archives in Simancas:<a href="#foot216">[216]</a>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+‘The manner of living of the father is to shut all the doors, and remain alone
+with his servant and his cook (who are Indians of a considerable age), and
+these only wait on him; but by day only, and at twelve o’clock, they go out,
+and an old man has care of the porter’s lodge, and it is he who shuts the gate
+when the father is asleep, or when he goes out to see his cultivated ground,
+and even then they go alone, except it be with an old Indian, who guides them
+and attends to the (father’s) horse; and after that he goes to Mass, and in the
+evening to the Rosary of the Blessed Virgin, calling us together by the sound
+of the bell, and before that he calls the boys and girls with a small bell, and
+after that the good father begins to teach them doctrine and how to cross
+themselves. In the same way, on every feast day, he preaches to us the Word of
+God, in the same way the Holy Sacrament of Penitence and of the Communion; in
+these things does the good Father employ himself, and every night the porter’s
+lodge is closed, and the key taken to the Father’s room, which is only opened
+in the morning in order that the sacristan and the cooks may enter. . . .
+</p>
+
+<p>
+‘The Fathers every morning say Mass for us, and after Mass they go to their
+rooms, and then they take some hot water and <i>yerba</i> (<i>maté</i>), and
+nothing more; after that he comes to the door of his apartment, and then all
+those who heard Mass come to kiss his hand, and after that he goes out to see
+if the Indians are diligent at their tasks, and afterwards they go to their
+room to read the divine service for the day in his book, and to pray that God
+may prosper him in all his affairs. At eleven o’clock they go to eat a little,
+not to eat much, for he only has five dishes, and only drinks wine once, not
+filling a little glass; and spirits they never drink, and there is no wine in
+our town, except that which is brought from Candelaria, according to that which
+the Superior sends, and they bring it from somewhere near Buenos Aires. . . .
+After he has finished eating, to rest a little he goes into the church;
+afterwards—yes, he retires to rest a little, and whilst he is resting those who
+work in the father’s house go out, and those who do any kind of indoor work,
+and also the sacristan and the cook: all these go out, and as long as the bell
+does not ring the doors are shut, and only an old man guards the gate, and when
+they ring the bell again he opens the doors so that those who work indoors may
+go inside, and the father takes his breviary and goes nowhere. In the evening
+they ring the bell so that the children may come home, and the father comes in
+to teach them Christian doctrine.’
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Perhaps the foregoing simple description, written by an Indian in Guaraní, and
+translated by someone who has preserved in Spanish all the curious inversions
+of the Guaraní, presents as good a picture of the daily life of a mission
+priest in Paraguay as any that has ever been given to the public by writers
+much more ambitious than myself or Ñeenguiru. Nicolas Ñeenguiru, the writer of
+the letter, afterwards figured in the war against the Portuguese, and several
+of his letters are preserved in the archives of Simancas, though none so
+interesting and simple as that I have transcribed.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Dobrizhoffer, in his history of the Abipones, says of him that he was a simple
+Indian, whom often he had seen put in the stocks for petty faults; at any rate,
+he seems to have been one of those Indians whom the Jesuits had at least
+favourably impressed by the system they employed. After the manner in which he
+wrote, hundreds of Indians must have thought, or else the missions, placed as
+they were, surrounded on all sides by enemies, could not have endured a single
+day. What was it, then, which raised the Jesuits up so many and so powerful
+enemies in Paraguay, when in the districts of the Moxos<a
+href="#foot217">[217]</a> and the Chiquitos where their power was to the full
+as great, amongst the Indians, they never had a quarrel with the Spaniards till
+the day they were expelled? Many and various causes contributed to all they
+underwent, but most undoubtedly two reasons must have brought about their fall.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Since the time of Cardenas, the report that the Jesuits had rich mines, which
+they worked on the sly, had been persistently on the increase. Although
+disproved a thousand times, it still remained; even to-day, in spite of
+‘science’ and its wonderful discoveries, there are many in Paraguay who cherish
+dreams of discovering Jesuit mines. Humanity loves to deceive itself, although
+there are plenty ready to deceive it; and if men can both forge for themselves
+fables and at the same time damage their neighbours in so doing, their pleasure
+is intense. I take it that many really believed the stories of the mines, being
+unable to credit that anyone would live far from the world, surrounded but by
+Indians, for any other reason than to be rich. But let a country have rich
+minerals, even if they exist but in imagination, and it becomes a crime against
+humanity to shut it up. So that it would appear one of the reasons which
+induced hatred against the Jesuits was the idea that they had enormous mineral
+wealth, which either they did not work or else worked in secret for the benefit
+of their society.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The other reason was the question of slavery. Once get it well into your head
+that you and yours are ‘reasoning men’<a href="#foot218">[218]</a> (<i>gente de
+razon</i>), and that all coloured people are irrational, and slavery follows as
+a natural sequence; for ‘reasoning men’ have wit to make a gun, and on the gun
+all reason takes it stand. From the first instant of their arrival in America,
+the Jesuits had maintained a firm front against the enslavement of the Indians.
+They may have had their faults in Europe, and in the larger centres of
+population in America; but where they came in contact with the Indians, theirs
+was the sole voice raised upon their side.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In 1593 Padre Juan Romero, sent from Peru as Superior to Paraguay, on his
+arrival gave up an estate (with Indians in <i>encomienda</i>) which his
+predecessors had enjoyed, alleging that he did not wish to give the example of
+making profit out of the unpaid labour of the Indians,<a
+href="#foot219">[219]</a> and that without their work the estate was valueless.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+On many occasions, notably in the time of Cardenas, the Jesuits openly
+withstood all slavery, and amongst the concessions that Ruiz Montoya obtained
+from the King of Spain was one declaring all the Indians to be free.<a
+href="#foot220">[220]</a> If more examples of the hatred that their attitude on
+slavery called forth were wanting, it is to be remembered that in 1640, when
+Montoya and Taño returned from Spain, and affixed the edict of the Pope on the
+church doors in Piritinanga, threatening with excommunication all
+slave-holders, a cry of robbery went forth, and the Jesuits were banished from
+the town. But in this matter of slavery there is no saying what view any one
+given man will take upon it when he finds himself in such a country as America
+was during the time the Jesuits were in Paraguay. Don Felix de Azara, a liberal
+and a philosopher, a man of science, and who has left us perhaps the best
+description both of Paraguay and of the River Plate, written in the eighteenth
+century, yet was a partisan of slavery.<a href="#foot221">[221]</a> In a most
+curious passage for a Liberal philosopher, he says:<a href="#foot222">[222]</a>
+‘The Court ordered Don Francisco, Judge of the High Court of Charcas, to go to
+Peru in the character of visitor. The first measure which he took, in 1612, was
+to order that in future no one should go to the Indians’ houses with the
+pretext of reducing them (<i>i.e.</i>, to civilization), and that no
+<i>encomiendas</i> (fiefs) should be given of the kind we have explained—that
+is to say, with personal service (of the Indians). I cannot understand on what
+he could have founded a measure so politically absurd; but as that judge
+favoured the <i>ideas of the Jesuits</i>, it is suspected that they dictated
+his conduct.’
+</p>
+
+<p>
+What stronger testimony (coming from such a man) could possibly be found, both
+that the Jesuits were opposed to the enslaving of the Indians and that their
+opposition rendered them unpopular? In the same way, no doubt, some modern,
+unwise philosopher, writing in Brussels, would uphold the slavery and massacres
+in Belgian Africa as evidences of a wise policy, because the end condones the
+means, and in the future, when progress has had time to fructify, there will be
+workhouses dotted all up and down the Congo, and every ‘native’ will be forced
+to supply himself, at but a trifle above the cost in Belgium, with a
+sufficiency of comfortable and thoroughly well-seasoned wooden shoes.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+So it appears that the aforesaid were the two chief reasons which made the
+Jesuits unpopular with the Spanish settlers in Paraguay. But in addition it
+should be remembered that there were in that country members of almost all the
+other religious Orders, and that, as nearly every one of them had quarrelled
+with the Jesuits in Europe, or at the best were jealous of their power, the
+enmities begun in Europe were transmitted to the New World, and constantly
+fanned by reports of the quarrels which went on between the various Orders all
+through Europe, and especially in Rome.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But if it were the case that the Jesuits excited feelings of hatred in their
+neighbours, yet they certainly had the gift of attaching to themselves the
+Indians’ hearts. No institution, condemned with contumely and thrust out of a
+country where it had worked for long, its supposed crimes kept secret, and its
+members all condemned unheard, could have preserved its popularity amongst the
+descendants of the men with whom it worked, after more than one hundred years
+have passed, had this not been the case.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I care not in the least for theories, for this or that dogma of politicians or
+theologists, but take my stand on what I heard myself during my visits to the
+now ruined Jesuit missions in Paraguay. Horsemen say horses can go in any
+shape, and, wonderful as it may seem, men can be happy under conditions which
+no writer on political economy would recognise as fit for human beings. Not
+once but many times have aged Indians told me of what their fathers used to say
+about the Jesuits, and they themselves always spoke of them with respect and
+kindness, and endeavoured to keep up to the best of their ability all the
+traditions of the Church ceremonies and hours of prayer which the Jesuits had
+instilled.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+That the interior system of their government was perfect, or such as would be
+suitable for men called ‘civilized’ to-day, is not the case. That it was not
+only suitable, but perhaps the best that under all the circumstances could have
+been devised for Indian tribes two hundred years ago, and then but just emerged
+from semi-nomadism, is, I think, clear, when one remembers in what a state of
+misery and despair the Indians of the <i>encomiendas</i><a
+href="#foot223">[223]</a> and the <i>mitas</i> passed their lives. That
+semi-communism, with a controlling hand in administrative affairs, produced
+many superior men, or such as rise to the top in modern times, I do not think;
+but, then, who are the men, and by the exercise of what kind of virtues do they
+rise in the societies of modern times? The Jesuits’ aim was to make the great
+bulk of the Indians under their control contented, and that they gained their
+end the complaints against them by the surrounding population of slave-holders
+and hunters after slaves go far to prove.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Leaving upon one side their system of administration, and discounting their
+unalterable perseverance, there were two things on which the Jesuits appealed
+to the Indians; and those two things, by the very nature of their knowledge of
+mankind, they knew appealed as much to Indians as to any other race of men.
+Firstly (and in this writers opposed to them, as Brabo<a
+href="#foot224">[224]</a> and Azara,<a href="#foot225">[225]</a> both agree),
+they instilled into the Indians that the land on which they lived, with
+missions, churches, herds, flocks, and the rest, was their own property. And in
+the second place they told them they were free, and that they had the King of
+Spain’s own edict in confirmation of their freedom, so that they never could be
+slaves. Neither of these two propositions commends itself to many writers on
+the Jesuits in Paraguay, but for all that it seems to me that in themselves
+they were sufficient to account for the firm hold the Jesuits had on their
+neophytes.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The freedom which the Indians enjoyed under the Jesuit rule might not have
+seemed excessive to modern minds and those attuned to the mild rule of the
+Europeans of to-day in Africa. Such as it was, it seemed sufficient to the
+Guaranís, and even, in a limited degree, placed them above the Indians of the
+Spanish settlements, who for the most part passed their lives in slavery.
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a name="chap08"></a>Chapter VIII</h2>
+
+<p class="letter">
+Don José de Antequera—Appoints himself Governor of Asuncion—Unsettled state of
+affairs in the town—He is commanded to relinquish his illegal power—He refuses,
+and resorts to arms—After some success he is defeated and condemned to be
+executed—He is shot on his way to the scaffold—Renewed hatred against the
+Jesuits—Their labours among the Indians of the Chaco
+</p>
+
+<p>
+From the departure of Cardenas in 1650, to about 1720, was the halcyon period
+of the Jesuit missions in Paraguay. During that time things went on in the
+missions after the fashion I have attempted to describe. The people passed
+their time in their semi-communistic labour, sweetened by constant prayer;
+their pastors may or may not have done all that was possible to instruct them
+in the science of the time; but, still, the Indian population did not decrease,
+as it was observed to do from year to year in other countries of America and in
+the Spanish settlements in Paraguay.<a href="#foot226">[226]</a> During this
+period the Jesuits had made repeated efforts, but without much real success, to
+establish missions amongst the wild equestrian tribes in the Gran Chaco upon
+the western bank of the river Paraguay. Nothing, apparently, pointed to the
+events which, beginning in the year 1721, finally led to their expulsion, or,
+at least, furnished additional reasons to King Charles III. to include the
+Jesuits in Paraguay in the general expulsion of their order from the dominions
+of the Spanish crown.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In that year (1721) Don José de Antequera was appointed to succeed the Governor
+of Paraguay, Don Diego de los Reyes Balmaceda, when his term of office had
+expired. The situation was, as often happened in the Spanish colonies,
+complicated by an inquiry into the conduct of the Governor (Balmaceda), in
+progress at the High Court of Charcas, which court, as in the case of Cardenas,
+acted most cautiously, both on account of its position, so far from Paraguay,
+and on account of the inordinate procrastination of everything connected with
+the Spanish law. If Balmaceda were condemned, then Antequera would step into
+his shoes at once. If, on the other hand, he were acquitted, Antequera would
+have to wait until the legal time of office had run its course. So far all was
+in order, but the High Court, either in doubt of its own wisdom or of its power
+to pronounce judgment definitely, had issued a decree suspending Balmaceda from
+his functions, but without either condemning or acquitting him. This, too, they
+did after having taken more than three years to sift the evidence and summon
+witnesses, who either had to cross the country on a mule at the imminent risk
+of death by famine or by Indians, or, having descended the river Plate to
+Buenos Ayres (which journey often took a month), wait for a ship to take them
+round Cape Horn to Lima, and from thence travel to Charcas on muleback,
+following one of the Incas’ roads.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Don José de Antequera y Castro was born at Lima, and being, as Father
+Charlevoix<a href="#foot227">[227]</a> says, an able, eloquent, but vain and
+most ambitious man, endowed with plenty of imagination, some talent, and but
+little ballast, was not content to wait till time should place him in his
+governorship. So, hearing that a judge inquisitor was to be sent to Paraguay to
+inquire into the case, and having graduated himself and held the position of
+procurator fiscal in the Charcas, he solicited the post, and by some error was
+appointed.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+No sooner was the appointment signed than straight he posted off to Paraguay.
+As he had studied in the college of the Jesuits at La Plata, his first visit
+was to the reductions of the Jesuits. The missionaries received him well, and
+sent a troop of Indians to escort him to the boundary of their territories,
+never suspecting what Antequera was about to do. Having heard that the
+Governor, Balmaceda, was at a distant port upon the Paraná, Antequera hastened
+to Asuncion. Arrived there, the same madness of authority seems to have come on
+him which came fifty or sixty years before his time on Cardenas. Finding no
+special seat reserved for him in the Cathedral, he publicly reproved the dean,
+to the great scandal of the worshippers. This seems not to have lost him the
+respect of the citizens of Asuncion, who were accustomed to all kinds of
+vagaries, both of their rulers and their spiritual guides. No sort of violence
+to laws and customs seems ever to affect a people unless the violence is done
+to benefit them, when instantly they rise against the breaker of the law,
+however heavily it may bear upon themselves.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But the devoted citizens of Asuncion were so accustomed to perpetual turmoil
+that, as Dean Funes<a href="#foot228">[228]</a> says, ‘they only stopped when
+it was absolutely necessary for them to breathe.’ Even the overpraised citizens
+of Athens at the time of Pericles, who must have been in all their ways so like
+the Athenians of to-day, were not more instant in the Agora or diligent in
+writing patriots’ names on oyster-shells than the noisy mob of half-breed
+patriots who in the sandy streets of Asuncion were ever agitating, always
+assembling, and doing everything within their power to show the world the
+perfect picture of a democratic State. Strange that such turbulent and
+patriotic people should have been ancestors of those whom I, after the
+termination of the war with Buenos Ayres and Brazil in 1870, knew as lethargic
+and downtrodden, as if the great dictator, Dr. Francia, whom the country
+people, speaking in bated breath, called ‘El Difunto’, had still oppressed the
+land. Into the turbulent hotbed of Asuncion fell Antequera, one of those
+Creoles of Peru who, born with talent and well educated, seemed, either from
+the circumstances of their birth or the surroundings amongst which they passed
+their youth, to differ as entirely from the Spaniards as if they had been
+Indians and not Creoles of white blood. Like Cardenas, Antequera was endowed
+with eloquence; but, unlike Cardenas, he set no store on eloquence upon its own
+account, but only used it for his own advancement in the world. Finding the
+Governor absent from Asuncion and lying under a decree suspending him from all
+his functions, it seems at once to have occurred to Antequera to seize his
+place. On this account, having ingratiated himself with some of those opposed
+to Balmaceda, he raised an army, and sent to seize him; but the Governor,
+having notice of the plot, escaped to Corrientes, and Antequera instantly
+assumed his post. This was too much for the Viceroy of Peru, who, though he had
+befriended Antequera in the past, had some respect for law. Immediately he
+issued a decree replacing Balmaceda in the governorship, and ordering Antequera
+to give him back the power he had usurped. This Antequera had no thought of
+doing, and he embarked on a career of violence which induced some to believe he
+intended to proclaim himself an independent king. Whether this was or was not
+the case, a state of things arose in Paraguay more pandemonic even than in the
+good old times of Cardenas. The Jesuits, not having seen their way to sustain
+the cause of their ex-pupil, were expelled once more (1725), and as before took
+ship for Corrientes amongst the tears of the people, their historians say,<a
+href="#foot229">[229]</a> and as Ibañez and those who have written against them
+affirm as strongly, amongst universal joy. Certain it is that in Asuncion they
+played a different part from that played by them in the mission territory, and
+no doubt mixed, as did the other Orders of religion, in the intrigues which
+never seemed to cease in the restless capital of Paraguay.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Not being content with the expulsion of the Jesuits, Antequera defeated several
+generals sent against him by the Viceroy of Peru, and by a <i>coup de main</i>
+took prisoner the ex-Governor Balmaceda, having surprised him in his house in
+Corrientes, and carried him back to Asuncion under a close guard. The usual
+reign of terror then began, and everything fell into confusion, till at last
+the King (Philip V.) in 1726 commanded that the Jesuits should be reinstated in
+their college in Asuncion, and that the missions should be taken from the
+jurisdiction of the Governors of Paraguay and placed under the control of the
+Governor of the River Plate, as had been previously done in the case of the
+other Jesuit missions beyond the Uruguay. But Spain was far away, and on one
+pretext or another so much delay occurred that it was not till March 18, 1728,
+that the Jesuits were reinstated in the college in Asuncion, which they were
+now fated to hold but for a little space. At last the Viceroy of Peru, the
+Marquess of Castel Fuerte, sent Don Bruno de Zavala with a sufficient army and
+six thousand Indians from the missions against the usurper Antequera, who fled
+for refuge to the Franciscan convent in Cordoba, where he remained, till,
+finding his position quite untenable, he fled to Charcas, where he was
+arrested, and sent to Lima to await his trial. Four years he waited in perfect
+liberty, going and coming about the town as it best pleased him, whilst the
+High Court heard evidence, wrote to Madrid, received instructions from the
+King, and generally displayed the incapacity which in all ages has been the
+chief distinctive features of every court of law.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In 1731 an order came from Madrid to execute him, and without loss of time he
+was placed on a horse draped all in black, and, preceded by a herald and
+guarded by a troop of guards, taken out to the public square to be beheaded.
+But the good people of the capital, who, in the fashion of the world, would not
+most probably have stirred a step to save a saint, were mightily concerned to
+see a rogue receive his due deserts. The streets were filled with thousands
+crying out ‘Pardon!’ stones flew, and the affair looked so threatening that the
+Viceroy had to get on horseback and ride amongst the crowd to calm the tumult.
+The people met him with a shower of stones, and he, fearing the prisoner would
+escape, called on his guards to fire upon him. Four balls pierced Antequera,
+who fell dying from his horse into the arms of two accompanying priests. Thus
+the most turbulent of all the Governors of Paraguay ceased troubling, and the
+executioner, after having cut off his head, exhibited it to the people from the
+scaffold, with the usual moral aphorism as to the traitor’s fate.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The triumph of the Jesuits in Asuncion was but momentary, following the general
+rule of triumphs, which take their way along the street with trumpets and with
+drums amid the acclamations of the crowd, and then, the pageant over, the chief
+actors fall back again into the struggles and the commonplace of ordinary life.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Between the years 1728 and 1730 the people of Asuncion had been more eager in
+pursuit of liberty<a href="#foot230">[230]</a> than was their usual wont. The
+citizens were divided into camps, and daily fought amongst the sandy streets
+and shady orange-bordered lanes which radiate from almost every quarter of the
+town. The rival bands of madmen were styled respectively the ‘Communeros’ and
+the ‘Contrabandos’, and to the first Antequera throughout his residence in Lima
+gave all the assistance in his power. Neither of the two seems to have had the
+most elementary idea of real patriotism, or any wish for anything beyond the
+momentary triumph of the miserable party to which each belonged. One doctrine
+they held in common—a hatred of the Jesuits, and of the influence they
+exercised against the enslaving of the Indians, which was the aim of
+‘Contrabandos’ and of ‘Communeros’ alike. One of the rival chieftains of the
+factions having fled for refuge to the missions, the people of Asuncion
+assembled troops to take him from his sanctuary by force. Arrived upon the
+frontier of the Jesuit territory, they found themselves opposed by an army of
+the Indians, who looked so formidable that the troops retired to Asuncion, and
+the leaders, foiled in the field, and not having force to attack the Jesuits in
+their own territory, set vigorously to inflame the minds of the people against
+them.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+They worked with such success that when, in 1732, the news of Antequera’s death
+reached Paraguay, the people, inflamed with the idea that he was sacrificed to
+the hatred of the Jesuits, rose and expelled them once again. The constant
+expulsions of the Jesuits from Asuncion, the turmoils in the State, and the
+fact that every now and then the Indians had to take arms to defend their
+territory, acted most mischievously on the reductions, both in Paraguay and in
+those between the Paraná and Uruguay. Whole tribes of Indians, recently
+converted, went back to the woods; land was left quite untilled, and on the
+outskirts of the mission territory the warlike tribes of Indians, still
+unsubdued, raided the cattle, killed the neophytes, and carried off their wives
+as slaves. But still, in spite of all, the Indians clung to their priests—as
+they said, from affection for the religious care they had bestowed, but quite
+as possibly from the instinctive knowledge that, between the raiding Portuguese
+and the maddening patriots in Asuncion, their only safeguard against slavery
+lay in the Jesuits. Most fortunately for Paraguay at the time (1734), Don Bruno
+de Zavala, perhaps the most energetic of the Spaniards in the King’s service in
+America, was Viceroy in the River Plate. Having received orders to quiet the
+dissensions in Asuncion, in spite of being nearly seventy years of age, and
+having lost an arm in the Italian wars, he marched at once, taking but forty
+soldiers in his train, as, war being imminent with Portugal, it was not safe to
+deplete the slender forces in the River Plate. Arrived in Paraguay, he entered
+the Jesuit missions at the Reduction of San Ignacio Guazu,<a
+href="#foot231">[231]</a> and, having appealed to the provincial of the Order
+for his aid, speedily found himself at the head of a large army of the Indians.
+After some skirmishes he was in a position to enter Asuncion and force the
+people to receive him as their Governor. By one of those revulsions so frequent
+in a crowd of reasonable men, the people begged him to invite the Jesuits to
+return. They did so (1735), and were received in state, the Governor, the
+Bishop, and the chief clergy and officials of the place attending Mass in the
+Cathedral with lighted candles in their hands. His duty over, Don Bruno de
+Zavala set off for Chile, where he had been appointed Governor, and on his
+journey, at the town of Santa Fe, died suddenly, exhausted with the battles,
+marchings and countermarchings, rebellions, Indian incursions, the turbulence
+of the people in the towns, and the other cares which formed the daily duties
+of a Spanish officer in South America at the middle of the eighteenth
+century.<a href="#foot232">[232]</a> The next ten years were on the whole
+peaceful and profitable for the Indians of the missions and for the Jesuits.
+The Indians followed quietly their Arcadian lives, except when now and then a
+contingent of them was required to assist in any of the wars, which at that
+time were ceaseless throughout the eastern part of South America. The Jesuits
+pushed out their spiritual frontiers, advancing on the north amongst the
+Tobatines of the woods, and on the west endeavouring to spread their colonies
+amongst the Chiriguanas and other of the Chaco tribes.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+From the conquest of Peru, when those Indians who had been but recently brought
+under the empire of the Incas retreated into the Chaco, it had been the refuge
+of the fiercest and most indomitable tribes. The Spanish colonists, the ardour
+of the first conquest spent, had settled down mainly to agricultural pursuits.
+Few had efficient firearms, and on the whole, though turbulent amongst
+themselves, they had become unwarlike.<a href="#foot233">[233]</a> The very
+name of the wild Indians (Los Indios Bravos) spread terror up and down the
+frontiers. This terror, which I remember still prevalent both in Mexico and on
+the pampas of the Argentine Republic, not more than five-and-twenty years ago,
+was keener upon the confines of the Chaco than anywhere in South America,
+except, perhaps, in Chile, upon the frontiers of Araucania.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The Tobas, Mataguayos, Lules, Aguilotas, Abipones, and the rest, together with
+the warlike nations of the Vilelas and the Guaycurús, had from the first
+rejected Christianity. Attempts had several times been made to establish
+settlements amongst them, but the ferocity of all the tribes, their nomad
+habits—for many of them passed their lives on horseback—and the peculiar nature
+of their country, a vast domain of swamp, pierced by great rivers quite unknown
+to the Spanish settlers, had hitherto combined to render every effort vain.
+But, notwithstanding this, the Jesuits laboured incessantly, and not without
+success, amongst the wildest of the Chaco tribes. The gentle and eccentric
+Father Martin Dobrizhoffer passed many years amongst the Abipones, of whom he
+wrote his charming book. He enumerates many tribes, of whom he says<a
+href="#foot234">[234]</a> ‘these are for the most converted by us, and settled
+in towns.’
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Nothing, perhaps, displays the Jesuits at their best, more than their efforts
+in the Chaco. The enormous territory was sparsely peopled by about seventy
+tribes,<a href="#foot235">[235]</a> whereof there were fifteen or sixteen of
+considerable size. Hardly two tribes spoke dialects by which they could
+communicate with one another, and almost every one of them lived in a state of
+warfare, not only with the Spaniards, but with the neighbouring tribes. The
+inventories preserved by Brabo<a href="#foot236">[236]</a> show us the town of
+Paisanes in the Chaco, with its rough wooden houses, and the Jesuits’
+habitation in the middle of the place, stockaded, and without doors, and with
+but narrow openings in the wall, through which the missionaries crept. The
+inside of the house contained five or six rough rooms, almost unfurnished, but
+for a few religious books and a plentiful supply of guns.<a
+href="#foot237">[237]</a> Their beds were of unvarnished wood, with curtains of
+rough cotton spun by the Indians. Sometimes they had a sofa of leather slung
+between four stakes, a rack for medicine bottles, and for the wine for Mass.
+Lastly, one priest, in the settlement amongst the Toquitistines, had among his
+books copies of Cervantes and Quevedo; one hopes he read them half smiling,
+half with a tear in his eye, for your true humour is akin to tears. Perhaps,
+reading ‘Don Quixote’ or ‘El Gran Tacaño’, the poor priest forgot his troubles,
+and, wandering with Sancho in La Manchan oak-woods or through Castilian
+uplands, thought he was in Spain.<a href="#foot238">[238]</a>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Throughout the territory of the Gran Chaco there were but seven reductions
+established by the Jesuits. These were San José de Bilelas, with its little
+town Petacas; San Juan Bautista de los Iristines, with its townlet of the same
+name; San Esteban de los Lules, with the town of Miraflores; Nuestra Señora del
+Buen Consejo de los Omarapas, capital Ortega; Nuestra Señora de Pilar de los
+Paisanes, with Macapillo as its centre; Nuestra Señora del Rosario de los
+Tobas, with its chief place called San Lucas; and, lastly, the establishment
+amongst the Abipones, known as La Concepcion. In all these missions the Jesuits
+lived in constant peril of their lives. In reading their old chronicles one
+finds the records of their obscure and half-forgotten martyrdoms, their
+sufferings, and the brief record of their deaths by an arrow or a club. In 1711
+Father Cavallero, with all his following, was slain by the savage Pinzocas. In
+1717 Father Romero, having, as a Jesuit writer says, ‘nothing but moral force
+behind him,’<a href="#foot239">[239]</a> was slain with twelve companions of
+the Guaranís of Paraguay. In 1718 Fathers Arco and Blende, Sylva and Maceo,
+received their dusted-over martyrs’ crowns.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Right up the western bank of the river Paraguay, in the old maps, the crosses
+mark the sites where Jesuits were slain. That they all died to further crafty
+schemes, or for some hidden purpose of a Machiavelian nature, even a Dominican
+will scarcely urge. That they did good—more or less good than Protestant
+fanatics of the same kidney might have achieved—it were invidious to inquire.
+That which is certain is that they were single-hearted men, faithful unto the
+end to what they thought was right, faithful even to the shedding of their own
+blood, which is, one may believe, the way in which the scriptural injunction
+should be rightly read.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In the dim future, when some shadow of common-sense dawns on the world, and
+when men recognise that it is better to let others follow their destiny as it
+best pleases them, without the officious interference of their fellows, it may
+be that they will say all missionaries of whatsoever sect or congregation
+should have stayed at home, and not gone gadding to the desert places of the
+earth seeking to remedy the errors of their God by their exertions; but whilst
+the ideal still remains of sacrifice (which may, for all I know, be useless in
+itself, or even harmful), they must perforce allow the Jesuits in Paraguay high
+rank, or else be stultified.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But in the Chaco the Jesuits found conditions most different from those
+prevailing in their missions between the Uruguay and Paraná. Instead of open
+plains, vast swamps; instead of docile semi-Arcadians like the Guaranís, who
+almost worshipped them, fierce nomad horsemen, broken into a hundred little
+tribes, always at war, and caring little for religion of any sort or kind.
+Again, there seems in the Chaco to have been no means of amassing any kind of
+wealth, as all the territory was quite uncultivated and in a virgin state; but,
+still, the settlements had existed long enough for cattle to increase.<a
+href="#foot240">[240]</a> Lastly, the incursions of the barbarous tribes were a
+constant menace both to the Jesuits and their neophytes. Yet in their
+indefatigable way the Jesuits made considerable progress amongst the Chaco
+tribes, as both the curious ‘History of the Abipones’ by Father Dobrizhoffer
+and the inventories preserved by Brabo prove.<a href="#foot241">[241]</a>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Besides their seven establishments in the Gran Chaco, they had three
+establishments in the north of Paraguay in the great woods which fringe the
+central mountain range of the country, known as the Cordillera de M’baracayu.
+These missions, called San Joaquin del Taruma, San Estanislao, and Belen, were
+quite apart from all the other missions of the Guaranís, far distant from the
+Chaco, and removed by an enormous distance from those of the Order in the Moxos
+and amongst the Chiquitos, forming, as it were, an oasis in the recesses of the
+Tarumensian woods. These three reductions, founded respectively in 1747,<a
+href="#foot242">[242]</a> 1747, and 1760, were, as their dates indicate, the
+swansong of the Jesuits in Paraguay. Founded as they were far from the Spanish
+settlements, they were quite removed from the intrigues and interferences of
+the Spanish settlers, which were the curse of the other missions on the Paraná.
+The Tobatines Indians<a href="#foot243">[243]</a> were of a different class to
+the Guaranís, though possibly of the same stock originally. Not having come in
+contact until recent years with the Spaniards, and having had two fierce and
+prolonged wars with the nearest settlements, they had remained more in their
+primitive condition than any of the Indians with whom the Jesuits had come in
+contact in Paraguay. During the short period of Jesuit rule amongst them
+(1746-1767) things seem to have gone on in a half-Arcadian way. In San Joaquin,
+Dobrizhoffer, as he says himself, devoted eight years of unregretted labour to
+the Indians. Most certainly he was one of the Jesuits who understood the
+Indians best, and his descriptions of them and their life are among the most
+delightful which have been preserved. He tells of the romantic but fruitless
+search during eighteen months throughout the forests of the Taruma by Fathers
+Yegros, Escandon, Villagarcia, and Rodriguez, for the Itatines who had left the
+reduction of Nuestra Señora de Santa Fe, and had hidden in the woods.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Then, commenting upon the strangeness of all affairs sublunary, he relates that
+accident at length effected what labour could not do. In 1746 Father Sebastian
+de Yegros, after a search of forty days, came on the Indians—as it were,
+directed by Providence, or, as we now say, accident. He built a town for them,
+and, as Dobrizhoffer says, ‘assembled them in Christian polity.’ To the
+new-founded village cattle of every kind were sent, with clothes—useful, of
+course, to those who had never worn them—axes, and furniture, and lastly a few
+music masters,<a href="#foot244">[244]</a> without whose help those who build
+cities spend their toil in vain.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+To the new town (in which the simple-hearted priest remained eight years), in
+1753, came Don Carlos Morphi, an Irishman, and Governor of Paraguay; and,
+having stayed five days with Dobrizhoffer, departed, marvelling at the accuracy
+with which the new-made Christians (<i>Cristianos nuevos</i>) managed their
+double-basses, their flageolets, their violins, and, in general, all their
+instruments, whether of music or of war.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Modestly, but with prolixity, as befits a virtuous, God-fearing man, the simple
+Jesuit relates a special instance of the way in which he was enabled to work
+both for his own glory and for the profit of the Lord. Not far from San
+Estanislao was situate the forest of M’baevera, in which grew quantities of
+trees from which the <i>yerba-maté</i> (Paraguayan tea) was made. To reach it
+was a work of pain and trouble, for through the woods a track called a
+<i>picada</i> had to be cut; the rivers were deep, bridgeless, and had to have
+branches strewed along the track to give a footing to the struggling mules.<a
+href="#foot245">[245]</a>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+An expedition having been sent under a certain Spaniard called Villalba to
+collect <i>yerba</i>, came suddenly upon a deserted Indian hut. As they had
+started quite unarmed, except with knives and axes to cut down the boughs, a
+panic seized them, and, instead of collecting any leaves,<a
+href="#foot246">[246]</a> they hurried back to San Estanislao. No sooner did
+Dobrizhoffer hear the news than he set out to find the Indians, with a few
+neophytes, upon his own account. Having travelled the ‘mournful solitudes’ for
+eighteen days, they came upon no sign of Indians, and returned footsore and
+hungry, ‘the improvement of our patience being our sole recompense.’
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He himself walked all the way, and ‘often barefoot’, suffering ‘what neither I
+can describe nor yet my reader credit.’ The missionary calling has undergone
+considerable change since 1750. Hardships which the greater faith or stronger
+constitutions of the missionaries of the last century rendered endurable are
+now largely fallen out of fashion, and your missionary seldom walks barefoot,
+even in a wood, because to do so would give offence, and bring discredit on the
+society for which he works.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Though unsuccessful in his search that year, Dobrizhoffer, not daunted by his
+barefoot marching, set out again upon the Gospel trail next spring. After
+another journey of some twenty days, during the whole course of which it rained
+incessantly, he came on a community of seemingly quite happy sylvans, whom he
+proceeded to convert. In the first hut he met with there were eight doors, and
+in it dwelt some sixty Indians—a palm-built, grass-thatched phalanstery, with
+hammocks slung from the rude beams, in which ‘these heathen’ used to sleep.
+Each separate family had its own fire, on the hearth of which stood mugs and
+gourds and pots of rudely-fashioned earthenware. Naked and not ashamed ‘these
+savages’, and the men wore upon their heads high crowns of parrot feathers. For
+arms they carried bows and arrows, and the first man Dobrizhoffer saw was
+holding a dead pheasant in one hand, and in the other a short bow. In the woods
+around the phalanstery was an ‘amazing’ quantity of maize, of fruits of divers
+sorts, and of tobacco. From the hives which the wild bees make in hollow trees,
+they collected honey in large quantities, which served them (at least so
+Dobrizhoffer says) for meat and drink alike.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Their name for the god they worshipped was Tupá, but ‘of that God and his
+commandments they care to know but little.’ This sounds ambiguous, and would
+appear at first sight as if the confidence betwixt the creators and their God
+had been but slight. Perhaps the ambiguity may be set down to the translator<a
+href="#foot247">[247]</a> who turned the Latin in which the memoirs first were
+formed into the vulgar tongue.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A thing remarkable enough when one considers how prone mankind is to act
+differently was that, although the Itatines knew an evil spirit under the name
+of Aná, yet they paid little adoration to him, apparently content to know as
+little of him and his laws as they did of their God.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Those hapless, harmless folk, as innocent of God and devil, right and wrong,
+and all the other things which by all rights they should have known, as they
+are said to be implanted in the mind of man, no matter what his state, seem to
+have lived quite happily in their involuntary sin.<a href="#foot248">[248]</a>
+But Dobrizhoffer, in his simple faith and zeal for what he thought was right,
+wept bitter tears when he thought upon their unregenerate state.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A sycophantic Guaraní from the reductions then took up his parable, and said:
+‘God save ye, brothers; we are come to visit you as friends. This father-priest
+is God’s own minister, and comes to visit you, and pray for your estate.’ An
+aged Indian interrupted him, saying he did not want a father-priest, and that
+St. Thomas in the past had prayed sufficiently, as fruits of every sort
+abounded in the land. The Indian, in his unsophisticated way, seems to have
+thought the presence of a priest acted but as manure on the ground where he
+abode; but the Jesuit, almost as simple-minded as himself, took it in
+kindliness, and journeyed with the Indian to a large village about three days
+away. Arrived there, all the inhabitants of the place sat in a circle round the
+missionary. They appeared (he says) in so much modesty and silence ‘that I
+seemed to behold statues, and not live Indians.’ To awaken their attention he
+played upon the viol d’amore, and, having thus captured their ears, began to
+preach to them. The good priest probably believed all that he said, for, after
+dwelling on the perils of the road, he said: ‘My friends, my errand is to make
+you happy.’ It did not seem to him that their free life in woods, in which
+abounded maize, fruits, and tobacco, with game of every kind, could possibly
+have induced content. Content, as Christians know, comes but with faith, and a
+true knowledge of the dogma is above liberty. Kindly, but muddle-headedly, he
+deplored their lot, their want of clothes, their want of interest in their God,
+their lack of knowledge of that God’s commands. Then, coming to the point, he
+spoke of hell, and told the astonished Indians that it was quite impossible for
+them to avoid its flames, unless, taught by a priest, they came to know God’s
+law. He then briefly (as he says) explained the mysteries of our faith. They
+listened rapt, except that ‘the boys laughed a little’ when he spoke of hell.<a
+href="#foot249">[249]</a> Nothing more painful than to see a child laughing
+unconscious of its peril in the traffic of a crowded street, and we may well
+believe that the kind-hearted Dobrizhoffer shuddered at the laughter of these
+children when he reflected that had he taken the wrong path, crossing the
+marshes or in the woods, the laughers had been damned. Much more he said to
+them after exhausting hell, and, to ‘add weight’ to his oration, presented each
+of them with scissors, knives, glass beads, axes, small looking-glasses, and
+fishing-hooks, for he knew well that sermons which end in ‘give me’ have but a
+small effect.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He says himself quite frankly, ‘I seemed to have borne down all before me
+because I had mingled my oration with a copious largess.’<a
+href="#foot250">[250]</a> Glass beads and looking-glasses have from the time
+when the first Christian missionary preached to the Indians been potent factors
+in conversion, and still to-day do yeoman service in the great work of bringing
+souls to God.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Seated around the fire ‘smoking tobacco through a reed’, and pondering
+perchance over the mysteries of the new expounded faith, the <i>cacique</i> of
+the Itatines took up his parable.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+‘I have’ (said he) ‘conceived an affection for the father-priest, and hope to
+enjoy his company throughout my life. My daughter is the prettiest girl in the
+whole world, and I am now resolved to give her to the father-priest, that he
+may always stay with me, and with my family, here in the woods.’
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The Indians from the missions broke into laughter, after the fashion of all
+those who, knowing but a little, think that they are wise. The <i>cacique</i>,
+who knew nothing, was astounded that any man, no matter what his calling, could
+live without a wife, and asked the Jesuit if the strange thing was true. His
+doubts being satisfied, they fell discoursing on the nature of the Deity, a
+subject not easy of exhaustion, and difficult to treat of through the medium of
+an interpreter. ‘We know’ (the <i>cacique</i> said) ‘that there is someone who
+dwells in heaven.’ This vagueness put the missionary upon his mettle, and he
+set out at once to expatiate upon the attributes of God. They seemed to please
+the <i>cacique</i>, who inquired, ‘What is it that displeases, then, the
+dweller in the skies?’
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Lies, calumnies, adulteries, thefts, all were enumerated, and received the
+Indian’s assent; but the injunction not to kill provoked a bystander to ask if
+it was not permitted to a man to slay those who attacked his life. He added, ‘I
+have endeavoured so to do since the first day I carried arms.’
+</p>
+
+<p>
+‘Fanatical casuist’ is a stout argument in the mouth of a man nurtured upon
+Suarez and Molina, but no doubt it did good service, and Dobrizhoffer uses it
+when speaking of the chief. But Dobrizhoffer did better work than mere
+theological disputation, for he prevailed upon eighteen of the Indians to
+accompany him to the settlement of San Joaquin; and after having ‘for some
+months tried the constancy’ of a youth called Arapotiyu, he admitted him to the
+sacrament of baptism, and ‘not long afterwards united him in marriage according
+to the Christian rites.’ It is evident that baptism should precede marriage;
+but it is an open question as to the duration of the interval between the two
+ceremonies, and we may be permitted to wonder whether, after all, both might
+not be advantageously dispensed at the same time. In the case of Arapotiyu the
+system worked satisfactorily, for he ‘surpassed in every kind of virtue, and
+might have been taken for an old disciple of Christianity.’ Even ‘old
+Christians’ occasionally, despite their more laborious induction into the rites
+and customs of their faith, have fallen from grace, perhaps from the undue
+prolongation of the term between the ceremonies.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In the case of another youth (one Gato) things did not go so smoothly, for
+though he, too, by his conduct obtained both baptism and Christian wedlock,
+Dobrizhoffer adds without comment, ‘not many months after he died of a slow
+disease.’<a href="#foot251">[251]</a> The slow disease was not improbably the
+nostalgia of the woods, from which the efforts of the good missionary had so
+successfully withdrawn him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The labours of the Jesuits in the three isolated missions in the north of
+Paraguay<a href="#foot252">[252]</a> seem to have been as successful as those
+in the Chaco were unfortunate. In dealing with the wild equestrian tribes of
+the Gran Chaco, the system of the Jesuits was not so likely to achieve success
+as amongst the peaceful Guaranís. That of the Spanish settlers was entirely
+ineffectual, and has remained so down to the present day, when still the
+shattered remnants of the Lules, Lenguas, Mocobios, and the rest, roam on their
+horses or in their canoes about the Chaco and its rivers, having received no
+other benefits from contact with the European races but gunpowder and gin.
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a name="chap09"></a>Chapter IX</h2>
+
+<p class="letter">
+The Spanish and Portuguese attempt to force new laws on the Indians—The Indians
+revolt against them—The hopeless struggle goes on for eight years—Ruin of the
+missions
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The missions in the Chaco and the Taruma, all founded between 1700 and 1760,
+the last (Belen) but seven years before the expulsion of the Jesuits from
+America, go far towards disproving the allegations of some writers,<a
+href="#foot253">[253]</a> that the apostolic energy of the first foundations
+had decayed, and that the Jesuits were merely living on the good name of the
+first founders in the beginning of the past century. But let the zeal of any
+class of men be what it may, if they oppose themselves to slavery and at the
+same time are reported to have lands in which is gold, and resolutely exclude
+adventurers from them, their doom is sealed. Both crimes were set down to the
+Jesuits. Writing in 1784, or twenty years after the expulsion of his order,
+Dobrizhoffer refers to the Indians of the reductions as ‘being in subjection<a
+href="#foot254">[254]</a> only to the Catholic King and the royal Governors,
+not in dreaded slavery amongst private Spaniards as the other Indians;’ and
+Montoya, Lozano, and Del Techo, writing in earlier times, all confirm the
+statement, which is also doubly confirmed by the various royal edicts on the
+subject.<a href="#foot255">[255]</a> The reports of gold-mines, too, had never
+ceased, although they had been repeatedly disproved, and those, together with
+the stand for freedom for the Indians, led to the events which finally brought
+about the expulsion of the Order from the territories where they had worked so
+long.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In 1740, Gomez de Andrade, Governor for the King of Portugal in Rio de Janeiro,
+being one of those who was convinced that the reason why the Jesuits guarded
+their territories so religiously was that they had mines, bethought him of a
+plan. His plan, like most of those conceived on the fantastic reasons which are
+called ‘of State’, took no account of sentiment, and therefore, as mankind are
+and will ever be a thousand times more influenced by sentiment than by hard
+reasoning, was from the first bound of itself to fail.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The colony of Sacramento upon the river Plate had for a hundred years been the
+source of conflict between the Spaniards and the Portuguese.<a
+href="#foot256">[256]</a> Situated as it was almost in front of Buenos Ayres,
+it served as a depot for smugglers; and, moreover, being fortified, menaced the
+navigation both of the Paraná and Paraguay. Slavers from England, Holland, and
+the German ports crowded the harbour. Arms of all kinds were stored there, and
+were distributed to all adventurers who meditated assaults against the crown of
+Spain. Twice or three times it had been taken and restored, the Indians of the
+missions always rendering most efficient help. At the time of which I write
+(1740) it had passed again by treaty under the dominion of the Portuguese, but
+still remained a standing menace to the Spaniards. Gomez Andrade advised the
+court of Lisbon to exchange it against the seven reductions<a
+href="#foot257">[257]</a> of the Uruguay, and thus at once to secure a country
+rich in gold and to adjust the frontier at the river Uruguay. Nothing appears
+so simple to a statesman as to exchange one piece of territory for another. A
+parchment signed after some international negotiations, and the whole thing is
+done. If, though, as happened in this case, one of the territories contains a
+population such as that which inhabited the seven towns upon the Uruguay, and
+which has conquered the country in which it lives from virgin forest, and
+defended it against all comers, it sometimes happens that the unreasonable
+inhabitants, by clinging to their homes, defeat the statesmen’s plans. Yet
+statesmen, once embarked in any plan, do not stick at such trifles as the
+affection of a people for its home, but quietly pursue their path, knowing that
+that which is conceived by ministers of State must in the end be beneficial to
+mankind. Without this patriotic abnegation of their feelings, no statesmen
+would be worthy of the name. Indifference to the feelings of others is perhaps
+the greatest proof a public man can give of his attachment to the State. After
+negotiations, lasting many years, in 1750 a treaty was signed between Portugal
+and Spain agreeing that the former should give up the Colonia del Sacramento to
+the Spaniards in exchange for the seven Jesuit towns upon the Uruguay, and that
+both nations should furnish a commission to fix the frontiers of the two
+nations on the Uruguay.<a href="#foot258">[258]</a> On February 15, 1750, the
+Spanish court sent to the Jesuits of the seven towns to prepare their Indians
+to leave their homes and march into the forests, and there found new towns.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+At that date François Retz was General of the Jesuits, and on him devolved the
+duty of communicating the orders of the courts of Spain and Portugal to the
+Jesuits in the missions of the Uruguay. Father Bernard Neyderdorffer was the
+man on whom the Provincial of Paraguay (Father Barreda) imposed the task of
+communicating to the Indians the wishes of the two courts. Though he had lived
+already thirty-five years in the missions, and knew the Indians well, and was
+respected by them as a father, he seems at first to have shrunk from such a
+task. When the news was brought to the towns upon the Uruguay, none of the
+Indians at first would credit it. The <i>caciques</i> (chiefs) of the seven
+towns declared that they would rather die than leave their native place.
+Nothing was heard but lamentations and expressions of hatred of the Portuguese,
+mingled with denunciations of the Jesuits themselves, who the poor Indians not
+unnaturally believed were in league with Spain to sell them to the Portuguese.
+But in a little the clamours turned to action, and, not content with refusing
+to obey the edict of the two courts, the Indians broke into revolt. Two most
+important narratives of this revolt exist, one by Father Cardiel and one by
+Father Ennis, both of whom were witnesses of the events. After considerable
+negotiations, which lasted till 1753,<a href="#foot259">[259]</a> the united
+troops of Portugal and Spain advanced into the mission territory to arrange the
+occupation of the ceded towns. The commissioners of the two nations were, for
+Spain, the Marques de Valdelirios, and for Portugal General Gomez Freyre de
+Andrade, and both of them appear to have come to America already prejudiced
+against the Jesuits. On March 24, 1753, Andrade wrote to Valdelirios, almost
+before he could have heard anything definite about the mission territory, to
+which they both were strangers, telling him that opposition was to be expected,
+and that the Jesuits were urging the Indians to revolt.<a
+href="#foot260">[260]</a> The opposition that the two commissioners so
+confidently hoped to find,<a href="#foot261">[261]</a> and which contemporary
+writers have set forth in its true colours as but the revolt of ignorant
+Indians rendered desperate by being arbitrarily dispossessed of lands which
+they themselves had settled and held for almost a hundred years, was fraught
+with serious consequences, not only to the Jesuits in Paraguay, but to the
+Order throughout the world at large. For years their enemies had said the
+Jesuits were endeavouring to set up in the missions a State quite independent
+of the Spanish crown. By their own conduct the Jesuits to some extent had given
+colour to the report, for by excluding (in the interest of the Indians) all
+Spaniards from the mission territories, it looked as if they were at work at
+something which they wished to keep a secret, as no one at that time deemed it
+a serious plea to enter into any line of conduct for the good of Indians, whom
+in general the Spanish settlers looked upon as beasts. That it was the best
+policy they could have possibly pursued under the circumstances is proved
+abundantly by the code of instructions laid down by Don Francisco Bucareli, the
+Viceroy of Buenos Ayres, under whose auspices the expulsion of the Jesuits in
+1760 was carried out. In that code occurs the following article:<a
+href="#foot262">[262]</a> ‘You will not allow any strangers, of whatever
+estate, quality, or condition they may be, to reside in the town (that is, of
+the missions), even if they be artisans,<a href="#foot263">[263]</a> and much
+less that they deal or take contracts in them either for themselves or for
+others, and you shall take especial care that the Laws of the Indies be
+executed, and specially those which are contained in Article 27 of Book IX.;<a
+href="#foot264">[264]</a> and also if any Portuguese deserters or other persons
+of whatever conditions should come to the towns, you will instantly conduct
+them to this city, taking every precaution to prevent their escape.’
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Still, though their policy was pursued, it did not stop the opponents of the
+Jesuits from denouncing that very policy, both at the cession of the seven
+towns and at the expulsion of the Order from America. The commissioners, after
+innumerable delays, having found themselves in 1753 at Santa Tecla, a village
+near the Uruguay, it becomes necessary to cast a glance at what the Jesuits
+themselves were doing, and how they tried to do their duty as they saw it both
+to their Sovereign, their Order, and the Indians over whom they ruled. It seems
+as if, whilst the superiors of the Order recognised at once the futility of
+striving against Portugal and Spain, some of the inferior members secretly set
+on the Indians to armed resistance to the impolitic decree. The council of the
+province (Paraguay)<a href="#foot265">[265]</a> assembled at the Jesuit college
+in Cordoba, composed of Fathers Masala, Horos, Caballero, Lopez, and Lozano,
+sent a memorial<a href="#foot266">[266]</a> both to the Viceroy of Peru and to
+the High Court of Charcas. In the memorial they first set forth their loyalty,
+and then exposed the deceit to which the ministers of Spain and Portugal had
+been subjected by their advisers in America. They pointed out most justly that
+the treaty was damaging to both the countries concerned,<a
+href="#foot267">[267]</a> and that in regard to the Indians of the seven towns
+peculiarly unjust. Both at Charcas and at Lima their memorial (though diffuse)
+was favourably received, and a copy remitted to the King and Council at Madrid.
+Ibañez, in his ‘Republica Jesuitica’, qualifies the action of the Jesuits in
+this matter as a ‘great crime’. Dean Funes only sees duplicity of language, but
+seems to excuse it in the circumstances in which the Jesuits were placed.
+Certainly, after efforts extending over almost two hundred years, it was hard
+on them to see seven of their most flourishing missions arbitrarily broken up,
+the Indians driven from their homes, and their territory occupied by those very
+Portuguese who for a hundred years had been their persecutors. There was much
+to say in extenuation, even for ‘duplicity of language’, when one remembers
+that the Jesuits alone (no matter how mistaken their views of treatment may
+seem to modern eyes) stood out against the assumption that the Indians were a
+mere flock of sheep, who might be driven from their homes on any pretext, or at
+the exigencies of ministers at courts who lived ten thousand miles away, and
+were completely ignorant of the local circumstances. Whether the memorial
+influenced the court of Spain is hard to say; but it is certain that when, in
+1752, the Marques de Valdelirios arrived in Buenos Ayres, with him came as a
+commissioner to fix the boundary between the two nations of the Uruguay Father
+Luis de Altamirano, accompanied by his secretary, Rafael de Cordoba, both
+members of the Order, and that the Marquis took up his lodging in the college
+of the Jesuits. There papers and memorials rained on him: one came from the
+Bishop of Tucuman, and one from Don Jaime de San Just, the Governor of
+Paraguay, with many others from people of inferior note, all in the interest of
+the Company. It appears as if Valdelirios thought that these memorials were
+inspired, for his first action was to publish to the priests of the seven towns
+the wishes of his government as to evacuation by the Indians of the territory.
+This he did through the prefect of the missions, who seems to have acted in
+good faith in his endeavours to carry out the wishes of the Spanish court. Just
+at that moment Barreda, the Provincial of Paraguay, arrived in Buenos Ayres,
+and Valdelirios asked him his opinion as to the measures best calculated to
+insure the treaty being quietly carried out. Barreda, though all his interests
+were against the execution of the treaty, seems to have acted in good faith. He
+gave the sensible advice that, as the treaty had been made entirely without
+taking into consideration the difficulties of carrying it out, it could not be
+held a crime to ask the King for some delay.<a href="#foot268">[268]</a> He
+advised consulting three ex-Governors of Paraguay, who happened to be in Buenos
+Ayres,<a href="#foot269">[269]</a> and, lastly, that all hurry, or anything
+likely to excite the Indians, should be avoided; for it was possible that they,
+relying on their numbers and local knowledge, might be able to give much
+trouble even to the joint forces of both crowns. He laid before Valdelirios the
+condition of the reductions, telling him that they were fertile and well
+cultivated,<a href="#foot270">[270]</a> and that this of itself would incline
+the Indians against migrating from their lands. Lastly, he said it was the
+opinion of the most experienced of the priests that the Indians would yield
+neither to arguments nor reason, for the hatred of the Portuguese had put them
+quite beside themselves with fury at the idea of giving up their lands.
+Valdelirios must have found himself not in too comfortable a state. Lodged as
+he was in the college of the Jesuits, he must have felt that most of the advice
+which was so freely tendered him was biassed, and to relieve his mind he called
+a council, at which the Provincial Barreda, Juan Escadon, his secretary,
+Altamirano, and Rafael de Cordoba appeared. The council recommended prudence,
+and, as the majority were Jesuits, pushed their prudence even beyond Lowland
+Scotch or north of Ireland limits, for they proposed to institute a commission
+which, after three years’ investigation, should report at Buenos Ayres on what
+it had found out. Commissions, royal or otherwise, have always been a
+trump-card in the hands of governments, since peddling democracy, with show of
+noses and the like, came in and put an end to those good old methods which are
+as dear to-day to rulers’ hearts as they have ever been since the beginning of
+the world, and will be whilst election, battle, fitness, talents, wealth,
+unfitness, or any other cause, gives power into the hands of anyone to rule.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Valdelirios, who was not a fool, saw their design, and instantly despatched
+Altamirano (1752) to Castillos to meet Freire de Andrade and the Portuguese,
+and set about drawing the new frontier line at once. Altamirano, though a
+Jesuit, appears (at first at any rate) to have been anxious that the treaty
+should be carried out. In 1752 (September 22) he wrote<a
+href="#foot271">[271]</a> from the reduction of San Borja to P. Mathias
+Stroner,<a href="#foot272">[272]</a> ordering all the Jesuits to assist in
+carrying out the evacuation of the seven towns. By his advice Freire de Andrade
+and Valdelirios met at Castillos, and, after having laid off some twenty
+leagues of boundary line, returned respectively to the Colonia and to Buenos
+Ayres.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But in the missions things were in a state bordering on revolution. When the
+letter from the prefect of the missions reached San Miguel, the Indians
+assembled outside the church,<a href="#foot273">[273]</a> and having learned
+the situation of the lands to which they were to move, their fury knew no
+bounds. They all refused to stir, saying they had inherited their lands from
+their forefathers and by the grace of God.<a href="#foot274">[274]</a> Their
+example was at once followed by three more of the towns, and virtually a state
+of absolute defiance to the orders of the Spanish crown ensued.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Just at this moment Altamirano, the commissary, arrived, and found the state of
+things most serious.<a href="#foot275">[275]</a> The commissary Altamirano set
+to work at once to place before the Jesuits of the seven towns the danger they
+exposed themselves to if they refused to help him to carry out the orders of
+the crown. Almost immediately on his arrival he wrote<a
+href="#foot276">[276]</a> to Don José de Caruajal y Lancastre to send more
+troops, and to the various priests<a href="#foot277">[277]</a> to destroy their
+powder, and cease to manufacture any more.<a href="#foot278">[278]</a> It is
+most likely that, if Altamirano had no secret understanding with his brother
+Jesuits, his letters must have considerably amazed them, and certainly they
+gave offence to the Indians, who declared he could not be a Jesuit at all. Six
+hundred Indians, under a chief called Sepe Tyaragu, marched upon Santo Thomé,
+where Altamirano had taken up his residence, with the avowed purpose of
+discussing whether he was a Jesuit or not, and, if the latter supposition
+proved correct, of throwing him into the river Uruguay;<a
+href="#foot279">[279]</a> but Altamirano did not wait their coming, and
+returned precipitately to Buenos Ayres. The commission which had set out to
+mark the limits between the countries,<a href="#foot280">[280]</a> buried in
+the woods, or marching along the river, was absolutely unaware of what was
+going on amongst the Indians till they arrived in Santa Tecla on February 26,
+1753. The first notice that they had of it was when they found themselves
+surrounded by a strong force of Indians. One of the commissaries, Don Juan de
+Echevarria, is known to have left a curious account of the proceedings, from
+which Dean Funes, Ibañez, and most of the writers on the subject must have
+copied.<a href="#foot281">[281]</a>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Historians, like lawyers in conveyancing, catch errors one from another, and
+transmit them as truths or titles to posterity. Certain it is that Echevarria
+sent for the nearest Jesuit priest to mediate, and he luckily, or unluckily,
+proved to be that Father Thadeus Ennis, who played so prominent a part in the
+futile rising which the enemies of the Jesuits have chosen to dignify with the
+high-sounding title of the ‘Jesuit War’.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+If Father Ennis really thought the Indians could hold head to both the
+Spaniards and the Portuguese, or if he thought that the rising would draw
+attention to the injustice of the treaty, is difficult to say. Whether, indeed,
+he headed it himself, or if he merely accompanied the Indians as their
+spiritual guide, giving them now and then the benefit of his advice on matters
+temporal, after the fashion of the ambitious churchman of all time,<a
+href="#foot282">[282]</a> is now unknown. Whatever his opinions were upon this
+matter, Father Ennis showed himself almost from the first irreconcilable. He
+refused to meet the commissioners, and in his place sent a <i>cacique</i>
+(chief) of the Indians, one Sepe Tyaragu, an official of the reduction of San
+Miguel. This chief, seeing the escort of the commission was but small, ‘put on
+his boots’,<a href="#foot283">[283]</a> and took high ground, daring to talk
+about the rights of man, of the love of country, and said that liberty
+consisted in being allowed to enjoy his property in peace, sentiments which,
+though admirable enough in a white man’s mouth, for men of colour are but fit
+for copy-books.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The <i>cacique</i> firmly refused to vacate his lands, and said the King of
+Spain, as he lived far away, could not have understood the bearing of affairs
+in Paraguay. Such arguments as these, together with the perhaps offensive tone
+of the <i>cacique</i>, had such effect on the commissioners that, after having
+threatened him with vengeance, which at the time they had no power to carry
+out, they both withdrew out of the territory.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+As Funes<a href="#foot284">[284]</a> well observes, the Spaniards had
+established themselves in these parts (the River Plate and Paraguay) to obtain
+a limitless submission from the Indians. Any resistance drove them to fury, and
+excited them to take revenge. As all the Indians’ crime was their unwillingness
+to quit the lands on which they had been born, it seemed a little hard to
+slaughter them, even before their petition to the King had been refused. Most
+probably all had been prepared before, for Valdelirios at once issued an order,
+which he had the power to do under a sealed letter from the King, to the
+Governor of Buenos Ayres, Andonaegui, to prepare for war. Active hostilities
+broke out in 1754, and Father Ennis has preserved a day-by-day account, written
+in priestly Latin,<a href="#foot285">[285]</a> of what took place. After some
+skirmishes, which at the first were favourable to the Indians, who took great
+courage from them,<a href="#foot286">[286]</a> the first encounter of a serious
+nature occurred on February 24, 1754. Quite naturally, the victory was on the
+side of the best-armed battalions, and the Indians lost many of their best men,
+and their largest piece of ordnance.<a href="#foot287">[287]</a>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+With varying success the war dragged on for several years, after the style of
+the Gaucho warfare in the River Plate which was common twenty years ago, or
+that in Venezuela which obtains to-day. Alternately each party carried off the
+other’s horses, drove each other’s cattle, or, if they caught a straggler, tied
+his hands and cut his throat or lanced him, the party who had lost the man
+protesting he was ‘massacred’—a term in use even to-day when the party to which
+one’s self belongs sustains reverse. For the first two years—for wars in South
+America till twenty years ago were to the full as interminable as that of
+Troy—Father Thadeus Ennis kept his journal, faithfully chronicling all that he
+saw. Occasionally in a perfunctory way he says his mission with the revolted
+Indians was as a priest and physician to the souls and bodies of his flock; but
+now and then he sets down the capture of a convoy of some thirty carts, or the
+cutting off some messenger carrying despatches from the Generals. In this he
+sees the hand of God (put forth to help his Jesuits<a
+href="#foot288">[288]</a>), although he now and then complains the Indians were
+remiss in following up any success they had. After the first encounter, the
+Indians seem to have employed the immemorial guerilla tactics which so often
+waste all the strength of an army which has conquered in the field. Father
+Cardiel<a href="#foot289">[289]</a> describes the Indian army, quoting from the
+writing of a Spanish officer who served against them, as quite contemptible.
+Their cannon were but hollow reeds, bound round with hide, which could only be
+fired two or three times, and carried balls a pound in weight.<a
+href="#foot290">[290]</a> Some lances and bows and arrows which they had
+appeared to him more formidable. Most of them carried banners with the painted
+figure of a saint, under whose ægis they deemed themselves secure from
+cannon-balls. Their trenches were but shallow ditches, with a few deeper holes
+to shelter in, but which, as Cardiel observes, served many of them for graves,
+as they were open to artillery, having been constructed without ‘an ounce of
+military art’. The officer adds that no sooner had the Indians heard the cannon
+than they fled, leaving almost nine hundred on the field and losing one-sixth
+prisoners.<a href="#foot291">[291]</a> Finally, the officer remarks with
+disgust that the official chronicler of the affair ‘lies from first to last’<a
+href="#foot292">[292]</a> when he declares that the Indians could make any
+resistance against disciplined troops. With varying fortune the campaign
+dragged on, until in 1756 the diary of Father Ennis, bad Latinity and all,
+comes to an abrupt conclusion at the taking of San Lorenzo, where the
+stout-hearted priest was taken prisoner. His papers fell into unfriendly hands,
+and were made use of by Ibañez, with the context duly distorted in various
+passages, and served as one of the most formidable indictments against the
+Jesuits in the expulsion under Charles III.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Although Thadeus Ennis and other Jesuits accompanied the troops, and no doubt
+aided much by their advice, the Indians had as a general one Nicolas Ñeenguiru,
+styled in the Gazettes of the time the King of Paraguay. About this man all
+kinds of monstrous legends soon sprang up. One little lying book, entitled
+‘Histoire de Nicolas I., Roy du Paraguai et Empereur des Mamalus’,<a
+href="#foot293">[293]</a> which bears upon its title-page ‘Saint Paul’,<a
+href="#foot294">[294]</a> 1756, especially excels. In that brief work of but
+one hundred and seventeen pages, printed on yellowish paper, and with one of
+the finest little vignettes of a basket of fruit and flowers upon its
+title-page that one could wish to see, a sort of parody of a Spanish picaresque
+novel in duodecimo is set forth with circumstance.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Nicolas Roubioni is duly born in 1710, in a small ‘bourgade de l’Andalousie’
+bearing the name of Taratos. The name carries conviction from the start, and
+pronounced à la française, with the accent equal upon all the syllables, is
+quite as Spanish as the most exigent of comic operas could possibly desire. His
+father, ‘ancien militaire’, left him alone to educate himself as he best liked.
+Arrived at eighteen years of age he runs away to Seville, and after several
+adventures in the style of those of Rinconete and Cortadillo, seen through
+French spectacles, enters the service of a lady bearing the well-known Spanish
+name of Donna Maria della Cupidità. Under the unnecessary alias of Medelino,
+and in the capacity of cook, he becomes the lady’s lover as in duty bound.
+‘Chassé’ from Seville by a jealous brother of his love, he flies for refuge to
+a ‘bourgade’ (name not chronicled) some seven leagues away. He then becomes a
+muleteer, and at Medina Sidonia kills a man, and, forced to flee, repairs to
+Malaga, where he lives peacefully ten years. Finding life dull there, he
+journeys to Aragon and joins the Jesuits, and from henceforth his future is
+assured. After an interval he reappears at Huesca, and at once falls in love
+with ‘une belle espagnole’, Donna Victoria Fortini, whom he courts under the
+guise of a gentleman of Seville, returning every night to the convent of the
+Jesuits to change his clothes. So great becomes his effrontery that under the
+style and title of ‘Comte de la Emmandés’, he publicly marries ‘sa belle’, the
+Jesuits either consenting, or too astounded at the fact to intervene. Things
+getting hot in Huesca, he embarks for Buenos Ayres as a missionary, leaving
+poor Donna de la Victoria ‘dans une inquiétude mortelle’, as she might well
+have been. Arrived in Buenos Ayres just at the moment of the cession of the
+seven Jesuit towns, he sees his opportunity, learns Guaraní in the brief space
+of six or seven weeks, and joins the Indians. They naturally, having been
+trained to look on every foreigner outside the Order of the Jesuits as an
+enemy, receive him as their King. Under the title of the ‘Son of the Sun and
+Star of Liberty’ he rules them, looked on as a God. The brief mendacious
+chronicle leaves him on the throne, just after having joined the empire of the
+Mamalucos to that of Paraguay, and promising to give the world more of his
+history when it comes to hand.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+By stories such as those contained in the mendacious little book imprinted at
+St. Paul, the easy-minded public—then, as now, always more easily impressed
+with lies than with the truth—was biassed against the Jesuits in Paraguay.
+Father Dobrizhoffer,<a href="#foot295">[295]</a> who knew ‘King’ Nicolas from
+his youth up, has left a very different version of his history, in which no
+Donna della Cupidità or de la Victoria even remotely flourishes. Nicolas
+Ñeenguiru was born in the township of La Concepcion, of which in after-life he
+rose to be the mayor. He married an Indian woman, not ‘une belle Andalouse’,
+and Dobrizhoffer says a friend of his, one Father Zierheim, had him whipped
+publicly for petty theft when a young man. At the time (1753) when, in company
+with another Indian, one José, mayor of San Miguel, he headed the Indian
+revolt, he was a man of middle age, tall, taciturn and grave, and not
+ill-looking, though marked across the cheek with a disfiguring scar. At no time
+was he even a lay brother of the Jesuit Order, as by their rules in Paraguay no
+Indians were ever taken either as lay brothers or as priests. So little was the
+man feared by the authorities that, once the Indians’ resistance was over,
+Nicolas went to the Spanish camp, was quietly heard, dismissed, and then
+continued in his office as the mayor of his native place. The legend sprang
+from a mistake in Guaraní, to which perhaps a little malice gave its artful
+charm. In Guaraní the word ‘Rubicha’ signifies a chief, whereas ‘Nfurabicha’
+means king. The two, pronounced by one but ill acquainted with the language
+sound identical. Nothing was more likely than that the Indians should call
+their general their chief; had they thought really of settling upon a king, it
+is certain that they would have chosen one of the family of some well-known
+chief, and not an Indian merely appointed mayor by the Jesuits. But be that as
+it may, General Ñeenguiru, though he has left some interesting letters, which
+are preserved in the archives of Simancas, showed no capacity for
+generalship.<a href="#foot296">[296]</a> Throughout the course of the campaign
+he endeavoured to replace his want of skill by tricks and by intrigues, but of
+so futile a nature that they were frustrated and rendered useless at once. His
+first endeavour was to gain time, when he found himself with seventeen hundred
+men opposed to Andonaegui, Governor of Buenos Ayres, who had an army well
+equipped with guns, of about two thousand men. Ñeenguiru wrote to Andonaegui,
+telling him that the Indians were ready to submit, and then, whilst waiting for
+an answer, set about fortifying the position which he held. Warned by a spy,
+Andonaegui attacked at once, and drove the Indians from their trenches like a
+flock of sheep, taking their wooden cannon, lances, and banners, and killing
+thirteen hundred of them.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A glorious victory, and, as Father Ennis says, ‘to be expected, and which, had
+it chanced otherwise, must have covered the Spaniards and the Portuguese with
+shame.’ In fact, a victory of the same kind as those which since that time have
+been most usual when well-armed European troops have faced half-naked,
+ill-armed savages, but which, of course, reflect no credit on the victor, or,
+at best, just as much credit as a butcher rightfully receives when he defeats a
+calf.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But even after the victory over the Indians of Nicolas Ñeenguiru the troubles
+of the allies were not quite at an end. The usual dissensions between allies
+who mutually detest each other soon broke out, and Gomez Freire, the General of
+the Portuguese, only prevented a collision with the Spaniards by considerable
+tact. After a short campaign of a few months, the allies entered the rebellious
+towns and took possession of them all, with the exception of San Lorenzo, which
+continued to hold out. A month or two served to reduce it, too, and the whole
+territory of the seven towns submitted to the power of the joint forces of
+Portugal and Spain. The struggle over, Ñeenguiru was quietly again reinstated
+mayor of Concepcion, the bruised wooden cannon duly set up as monuments, the
+dead left on the plains and the <i>esteros</i> for the chimangos<a
+href="#foot297">[297]</a> and the caranchos<a href="#foot298">[298]</a> to
+gorge upon, and, law’s due majesty once more vindicated, the conquerors set
+about, in 1757, to trace the limits between the territories of the two
+Christian Kings.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Most of the seven towns were half deserted, the Indians having fled for refuge
+to the woods,<a href="#foot299">[299]</a> and the commission set to work upon
+its labours in a desert which it itself had made. Out of the fourteen thousand
+Indians who had inhabited the seven flourishing towns upon the Uruguay but few
+remained; yet still the work of pacification and working at the boundary went
+on slowly, for from 1753 to 1759 nothing of consequence was done. In 1760
+Ferdinand VI. died, and his son Charles III. succeeded him, and still the
+boundary commission worked on hopelessly in Paraguay. The Jesuits, who had
+worked unceasingly during the last eight years to annul the treaty handing the
+seven missions over to the Portuguese, at length, in 1761, obtained from
+Charles III. a treaty annulling all that had been done, and providing that the
+seven towns should remain part of the dominions of the Spanish crown.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+They triumphed; but their triumph added another step towards their ruin, for
+the jealousy which they evoked by their persistent fight raised up much
+animosity towards themselves in Spain. How great a share they had in the
+resistance of the Indians cannot be known with certainty. Papers preserved in
+the archives of Simancas charge them with stirring up the Indians to resist;<a
+href="#foot300">[300]</a> but they are chiefly from Valdelirios and others,
+who, naturally finding resistance, put it down at once to the Jesuits, whom
+then, as now, it was the fashion to abuse. The Indians themselves seem to have
+been perplexed, no doubt encouraged by their priests on one hand, and on the
+other seeing the commissary Altamirano, himself a Jesuit, calling upon them to
+submit. In a pathetic letter written to the Governor of Buenos Ayres, and dated
+‘en la estancia de San Luis, Feb. 28 de 1756’, Primo Ibarrenda, of San Miguel,
+says:<a href="#foot301">[301]</a> ‘This our writing I send to you that you may
+tell us finally what is to be our lot, and that you take a resolution what it
+is that you shall do. You see how that last year the father commissary<a
+href="#foot302">[302]</a> came to this our land to bother us to leave it: to
+leave our towns and all our territories, saying it was the will of our lord the
+King: besides this you yourself sent us a rigorous letter telling us to burn
+our towns, destroy the fields, even pull down our church, which is so beautiful
+(<i>tan lindo</i>), and saying also that you would kill us. You also say, and
+therefore we ask you if it is the truth, for if it is, we will all die before
+the Holy Sacrament; but spare the church, for it is God’s, and even the
+infidels would not do it any harm.’ They go on to say they have always been
+obedient subjects of the King, and that it is impossible that his wish could be
+to injure them—in fact, the letter of innocent men, half civilized, and
+thinking justice, mercy, and right-doing were to be found with Governors and
+Kings. Had many of the Jesuits chosen to take the field, their knowledge of the
+country and the vast influence that they had upon the Indians would have made
+the campaign perilous enough even for the united military power of Portugal and
+Spain. As it was, the miserable war dragged on for eight long years, and for
+result ruined seven missions where before the Indians lived happily. Then, when
+the fields were desolate, the villages deserted, and the Indian population half
+dispersed, statesmen in Spain and Portugal saw fit to change their minds, to
+annul the treaty, and to pass a diplomatic sponge over the ruin and the misery
+they had caused.
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a name="chap10"></a>Chapter X</h2>
+
+<p class="letter">
+Position of the Jesuits in 1761—Decree for their expulsion sent from
+Spain—Bucareli sent to suppress the colleges and drive out the Jesuits—They
+submit without resistance—After two hundred years they are expelled from
+Paraguay—The country under the new rule—The system of government practically
+unchanged
+</p>
+
+<p>
+‘No storm is so insidious’ (said St. Ignatius) ‘as a perfect calm, and no enemy
+so dangerous as the absence of all enemies.’
+</p>
+
+<p>
+This dangerous state of calm without an apparent enemy in sight was the
+position of the Jesuits in Paraguay in 1761. By desperate efforts and intrigues
+in Spain they had kept their thirty missions from being mutilated; their
+influence amongst the Indians had never been more absolute. The governors of
+Buenos Ayres and of Paraguay had tried a fall with them, and the honours of the
+struggle were with the Jesuits. They had succeeded in getting put into force
+the clauses of the ‘Laws of the Indies’, which kept Spaniards out of the Indian
+settlements. Even those sent against them had been forced to testify to their
+utility<a href="#foot303">[303]</a> in Paraguay. But throughout Spain and her
+enormous empire in America and in the East perpetual hostility between the
+Jesuits and the regular clergy had been going on for years. In every portion of
+America the Jesuits were unpopular, the excuse alleged being their wealth and
+power;<a href="#foot304">[304]</a> but the real reason was their attitude on
+slavery. After repeated grumblings of distant thunder, at length the storm
+broke, and the decree for the expulsion of the Jesuits in Spain and her
+dominions was signed, and the order sent to Bucareli, Governor of Buenos Ayres,
+in June of 1767, to put it into force in Paraguay. The reasons which induced
+King Charles III. to expel the Jesuits, mysterious as they were, and locked up
+a dead secret in the royal breast,<a href="#foot305">[305]</a> may or may not
+have been sufficient in Spain, but could in no respect have held good for
+Paraguay, where there existed little scope for court intrigue, and where the
+Jesuits were far removed from their fellow Spanish subjects, and occupied
+entirely with their mission work. Many and various have been the explanations
+which historians have set forth for this decree. Certain it is in Spain this
+Order had attained to considerable power, and that in Rome the abler of their
+Generals occasionally kept the Popes in mental servitude.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Some have accounted for the act of Charles III. as being but revenge for the
+tumult of Aranjuez under the ministry of Esquilace,<a href="#foot306">[306]</a>
+arguing that the Jesuits were in fact the authors of it, and that it was but
+the precursor of a plot to dethrone the King and place his brother Don Luis
+upon the throne, as being not so liberal in his ideas. Others, again, have
+stated<a href="#foot307">[307]</a> that the Jesuits set about a calumny that
+Charles III. was not the Queen’s son by her husband, but by a lover whom they
+said she had. The only reason which seems feasible is that the King was worked
+on by the fear that the Order had risen to too much power, and that if he did
+not at once take steps the monarchy would be rendered but a mere appendage of
+the General of the Jesuits.<a href="#foot308">[308]</a>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Whether it is sound policy of any government to expel a race, or sect, or order
+from its domains, no matter what the immediate exigencies of the times seem to
+require, is a moot point. The expulsions of the Jews, Moriscos, and Huguenots,
+and the dissolution of the monasteries in the times of that true Protestant
+Henry VIII. of ever pious memory, do not exactly seem to have had the effect
+upon the countries where they took place that was at first expected by their
+instigators. Expelled by Charles III., the Jesuits to-day in Spain have
+re-acquired much of their influence. So that it seems that persecution, to be
+effectual, must not stop on this side of extermination, and this our Lord
+Protector Cromwell understood full well.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The Viceroy Bucareli<a href="#foot309">[309]</a> to whom the task of the
+expulsion of the Order in the viceroyalty of Buenos Ayres and of Paraguay was
+entrusted, was no ordinary man.<a href="#foot310">[310]</a> Appointed Viceroy
+of Buenos Ayres after a distinguished career of public service, he found
+himself, almost without warning, and without any adequate forces at his
+command, obliged to execute by far the most important and far-reaching task
+that had ever fallen to the lot of any Spanish Governor in America to carry
+out. But as his services had not been chiefly in America, he held the idea
+which at the time was generally received in Europe, that the Jesuits possessed
+great wealth, had bodies of trained troops, and so would resist all efforts at
+expulsion to the death.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Full of these visions, says Dean Funes,<a href="#foot311">[311]</a> he
+considered the order, which was transmitted to him from Spain, as involving
+serious military risk, and evidently seems to have looked on every Jesuit
+village as a strong place of arms. July 22, 1767, was the day he chose, keeping
+his design a secret, and preparing to strike in Corrientes, Cordoba, Monte
+Video, and Santa Fe, on the same day, or rather night, for the terror of the
+Jesuits was so great that he designed to expel them all by night.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+On July 2 two ships arrived in Buenos Ayres bringing the news that the decree
+had been put in force in Spain on April 2 with success. As all the crew of both
+the ships knew what had happened in Spain, concealment of his plan became no
+longer possible. Thus, had the Jesuits possessed either the wish or the means
+to make an armed resistance, they had ample time to stand on their defence.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Nothing was further from their minds, though they had complete dominion over a
+territory as large as France, and which contained a population of over one
+hundred and fifty thousand souls.<a href="#foot312">[312]</a> For arms, they
+had as chief defence some ‘very long English guns, with rests if they wished to
+use them, which were not very heavy, and had a tolerable range.’<a
+href="#foot313">[313]</a> These were the preparations that the Jesuits (who,
+not in Paraguay alone, but throughout all the American dominions of the Spanish
+crown, ruled over territories stretching from California to Cape Horn)<a
+href="#foot314">[314]</a> had made, and they were found alone in the missions
+of Paraguay, where, by a special permission of the Kings of Spain, arms were
+allowed for defence against the Portuguese.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Bucareli, who seems to have been a timid but honest and upright man, made his
+first experiment upon the Jesuits of Buenos Ayres, Cordoba, and Santa Fe. The
+colleges in all these places were suppressed on the same night, and without the
+least resistance from their occupants. He who suppresses a religious Order,
+takes a town or country, or, in fact, puts into operation any of the forces of
+the law or military power, always expects, no matter how exalted be his motives
+at the start, to recoup himself from the treasure of the conquered. <i>Væ
+victis</i>, together with the vestments of the church, the plainsong, and the
+saints, came as a pagan heritage to the new faith, and has been held as canon
+law since Constantine looked at the sky and thought he saw a cross.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Great must have been the disgust of the Governor to find the spoil so paltry,
+and not to have the satisfaction even of saying that the Jesuits had hidden all
+their gold, as, his own measures having been taken secretly, they had no
+knowledge of what was in the wind. In the college of Cordoba, esteemed to be a
+mine of wealth, was found only nine thousand dollars,<a
+href="#foot315">[315]</a> which sum Ferando Fabro, the commissioner sent by
+Bucareli to take over the effects of the Jesuits at Cordoba, duly chronicles in
+his report.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But if the college of Cordoba<a href="#foot316">[316]</a> proved a miserable
+prey, there still remained the Jesuit missions on the Uruguay and Paraná, with
+all the riches of their fertile territory, and the enormous wealth which every
+Spaniard firmly believed the Jesuits had acquired. None of the Jesuits, either
+in Buenos Ayres, Cordoba, Santa Fe, Corrientes, or Monte Video having made the
+least resistance, but having opened wide their doors to the soldiers, who in
+all the towns on the same day at two o’clock in the morning came to signify
+their expulsion to them, it was only natural to think that the same conduct
+would be observed in Paraguay. But Governors and Governments never seem in the
+least accessible to common-sense. Almost a year had passed before he plucked up
+courage for his dangerous task.<a href="#foot317">[317]</a> He set about it
+with more preparation than either Cortez or Pizarro made for the conquest of
+Mexico or of Peru. Having embarked for Spain in the frigate <i>La Esmeralda</i>
+one hundred and fifty Jesuits from the towns of Cordoba, Buenos Ayres, Monte
+Video, and Santa Fe, he prepared to march upon the missions, when a suspicion
+of resistance caused him to take precautions which the result proved quite
+ridiculous. He sent two hundred of the best of the militia of Asuncion to
+occupy the fords upon the Tebicuari,<a href="#foot318">[318]</a> and a body of
+equal strength to occupy the port of San Miguel. All these measures being taken
+for his safety, the conqueror embarked upon May 24, taking with him three
+companies of grenadiers and sixty dragoons. He disembarked at the town of Salto
+on the Uruguay, and from thence despatched Captain Don Juan Francisco de la
+Riva Herrera to occupy the towns upon the Paraná. Don Francisco de Zabala was
+sent to seize six of the towns upon the Uruguay. Bucareli himself, with several
+hundred men, marched upon Yapeyu,<a href="#foot319">[319]</a> the southernmost
+of all the mission towns. The Jesuits, however, gave no trouble to any of the
+troops, and even stopped the Governor from gathering any laurels, however
+withered, with which to crown his arms.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+As he advanced from town to town, the priests, on his arrival at each place,
+although living in the midst of Indians, some of whom were armed, and many of
+whom had served the King of Spain in various wars, and all of whom looked on
+the Jesuits almost as gods, came out and peacefully gave up the keys of all
+their houses, and submitted quietly to be made prisoners and be carried off in
+chains from the territories which they and their order had civilized and ruled
+over almost two hundred years. Seventy-eight Jesuits and their provincials were
+sent prisoners to Buenos Ayres, and their places all filled up with other
+priests taken from different Orders, and none of whom had any experience in
+mission-work. As Dean Funes tartly writes, the miracle that Bucareli wished,
+but scarcely dared to hope for, had taken place. The Jesuits, in Paraguay, at
+least, by their conduct in their last public act, most amply vindicated their
+loyalty to the Spanish crown. Nothing would have been easier, depleted as the
+viceroyalty was at the time of troops,<a href="#foot320">[320]</a> than to have
+defied the forces which Bucareli had at his disposal, and to have set up a
+Jesuit State, which would have taxed the utmost resources of the Spanish crown
+to overcome. No doubt the very facility with which Bucareli carried out his
+plans confirmed him in his own mind of their expediency, for men in general are
+prone to think that right which they accomplish with success. However, be that
+as it may, he returned in triumph to Buenos Ayres on September 16, having
+expended in his expedition less than four months. So in a quarter of a year the
+Jesuits, after more than two hundred years of rule, were all expelled from
+Paraguay.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+They made no fight, nor offered any resistance, letting themselves be taken as
+a butcher takes a sheep, and that surrounded as they were by a population of
+upwards of one hundred and fifty thousand souls, cut off by countless leagues
+from the outside world, defended on three sides by virgin forests and by
+marshes hardly passable to European troops. One word from the Provincial would
+have set the missions in a blaze. A word would have brought clouds of
+horsemen—badly armed, ’tis true, but knowing every foot of marsh and forest,
+all the deep-beaten tracks which wind in the red earth across the lonely
+plains, the passes of the rivers, springs, natural fastnesses, and having the
+varied knowledge of a country which of old made Border horsemen and
+Northumbrian prickers formidable upon the Scottish marches—into the field.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The dogged Paraguayan Indians, ancestors of the infantry which, under Lopez,<a
+href="#foot321">[321]</a> died so bravely under the fire of the Brazilian guns,
+would, in their red cloaks and scanty linen clothes, have marched from
+<i>capilla</i><a href="#foot322">[322]</a> and from mission against the enemies
+of the ‘father-priests’. Seventy-eight Jesuits were marched off to Buenos
+Ayres, and then shipped off to Europe<a href="#foot323">[323]</a> to join their
+fellows, who had been brought together by the ministers of the most liberal
+King who ever filled the Spanish throne from every quarter of the world. Having
+expelled the Jesuits, Bucareli was bound by the exigencies of his position to
+calumniate them. Perhaps, as an official, hidebound in his belief in the
+inalterable right of Governments to commit injustices, he believed all that he
+wrote. For the welfare of humanity, one could hope he knew all that he wrote
+was false. What hope is there left for mankind as long as addle-headed, honest
+men see naught but justice in whatever order they receive? Better a thousand
+times a rogue who knows he is a rogue than a good, well-intentioned, blundering
+man quite unaware he is a fool.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But, still, he had to justify himself either upon his own account or for the
+benefit of that posterity to conciliate which so many public men have paltered
+with the truth. So his first care was to extract a letter from thirty Indians
+whom he chose to dignify with the title of the mayors of the thirty towns,
+first having, as he says himself in a letter to the Conde de Aranda, the
+minister of Charles III., dressed them in the Spanish fashion, and treated them
+in such a way that they might know how much their lot had been improved.<a
+href="#foot324">[324]</a> The letter, written originally in Guaraní,<a
+href="#foot325">[325]</a> bears upon every line of it the dictation of the
+Governor. After a fine paragraph of salutations, it goes on to give the King
+many and repeated thanks (‘muchas y repetidas gracias’) for having sent his
+Excellency Captain-General Don Francisco Bucareli, ‘who has fulfilled, for the
+love of God and for the love of your Majesty, all the just orders which your
+Majesty laid to his charge, aiding our poverty, and clothing us like
+gentlemen.’ Most people, even the heathen, like those who help their poverty
+and clothe them in the garb of gentlemen. It had not occurred to the poor
+Indians that the fine clothes might turn out liveries. The mayors all sign
+their Indian names, which seems to give the lie to the accusation that the
+Jesuits kept them ignorant. The letter, dated Buenos Ayres, March 10, 1768,
+seems to show that the Indians, be they who they might have been, were not free
+agents at the time they wrote. The Indians’ letter duly despatched, the
+Governor indited a report, in which he fairly and with circumstance reiterates
+all the old charges against the Jesuits in Paraguay which the inventive brain
+of Cardenas had first conceived; but to them he adds several little touches of
+his own, which show he had some observation and an imaginative mind.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Amongst his numerous letters to Aranda and to the King, one dated Buenos Ayres,
+October 14, 1768,<a href="#foot326">[326]</a> contains the fullest account of
+his proceedings in the missions and of his views (or of what he thought to be
+his views) about the work in which he was engaged. Time was of small account in
+1768 either in Paraguay or in Madrid, so Bucareli relates with some prolixity
+all that he did, with comments, movements of troops, regrettable occurrences—as
+when his soldiers let themselves be surprised and lost their horses—and now and
+then scraps of morality and theology, which shows quite plainly that the art of
+writing maundering despatches is not so new as optimists may have supposed.
+Quite in the manner of a modern special correspondent, he sets down all that he
+suffered from the weather; that it rained incessantly, and, marvellous to tell,
+that after rain the rivers rose, and gave him difficulty to cross. The roads
+were bad, provisions scarce and dear, and now and then wild Indians ‘massacred’
+an outpost of his men, whilst his brave fellows, when God willed it,
+occasionally ‘chastised’ the infidel, and by the grace of Heaven slew no small
+number of them. Still, in the monstrous farrago of words, extending to some
+sixteen pages of close print, he lets us see he was a man of some capacity, but
+leaves it doubtful whether he really thought he was engaged upon a noble work,
+or if he wrote ironically, or if his only object was to satisfy his conscience
+and his King. But making much of little difficulties is but to be expected from
+a leader of an expedition or from a General in the field. Without it, how could
+they justify their existence, or prove to the world at large that they were
+needed, or but more important than a mere ceremony?<a href="#foot327">[327]</a>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+When the land troubles were got over, and Bucareli, having arrived at Yapeyu,
+embarked upon the river, the very winds proved contrary, so that it took him
+many days to arrive at Candelaria, which port he reached upon August 27, 1768.
+But before quitting Yapeyu the Governor made a solemn feast, riding himself
+before his grenadiers, whose caps, he says, caused much amazement, the Indians
+never having seen such headgear in their lives. The difficulties of his journey
+over, the Jesuits dispossessed and sent down-stream to be remitted home,
+Bucareli in his letter next deals with questions of religion, about which he
+shows himself as well informed as all the Spanish conquerors seem to have been
+in the New World. If for the dogma of the faith he was a bar of iron, for ‘cold
+morality’, as Scottish preachers of the perfervid type used to refer to it, he
+was most keen. The Indians’ clothes, especially the graceful <i>tupoi</i> worn
+by the women, shocked him exceedingly. It was impossible to touch upon it
+without an outrage upon modesty.<a href="#foot328">[328]</a> Masculine virtue
+is a most precarious thing, but little, if at all, more stable than its female
+counterpart; therefore perhaps the Governor was right not to expose his
+soldiers to temptation, so he did well, as he informs us, in serving out
+clothes which obscured their charms, or perhaps hid them quite from view. ‘Such
+tyrannies,’<a href="#foot329">[329]</a> says the modest Governor, ‘occasioned
+many offences against God, and frequent illnesses and epidemics.’ The sentence
+is a little doubtful in its meaning, for if a scantiness of women’s dress
+occasioned illnesses and epidemics amongst the population of a town, Belgravia
+and Mayfair should surely be the most unhealthy spots on earth; though even
+there, I verily believe, no more offences against God occur than amongst the
+Moors, whose women show only their eyes to the shrinking gaze of easily
+offended men.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+As in duty bound, Bucareli kept for the end of his despatch a rehash of all the
+old charges made against the Jesuits. They kept the Indians in slavery, would
+never let them learn Spanish, and were themselves inordinately rich. The first
+two accusations Father José Cardiel, in his ‘Declaracion de la Verdad’,
+abundantly disproves.<a href="#foot330">[330]</a> The last the Governor
+disproves himself; for had he found much treasure he most assuredly would have
+made haste to send it to the King. What he did find, a reference later to
+Brabo’s inventories will show, and the same source discloses all the wealth the
+richest Order in the world, according to their enemies, took with them in their
+involuntary journey back to Spain. All being finished in the missions and the
+Jesuits expelled, Bucareli found himself obliged to institute some system for
+the government of the Indian population, which he had deprived both of its
+spiritual and of its temporal guides.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The Jesuits’ government having been so bad, according to his own despatch, the
+Indians having been kept in such a miserable state, their education having been
+so neglected, and, above all, their women having been dressed in such light
+attire that Bucareli could not with modesty even describe their dress, it might
+have seemed but natural that he should have evolved some system of government
+differing in all respects from that he had destroyed. So far from that, in his
+instructions to his interim successor, dated at Candelaria,<a
+href="#foot331">[331]</a> August 23, 1768, he practically followed slavishly
+all the policy which the Jesuits had pursued. He ordered Captains Riva Herrera
+and Bruno de Zavala, to whom the arrangements were committed, to see that the
+Indians were instructed ‘in the true knowledge of our holy faith’, a work which
+the Jesuits, whatever might be their faults, had not neglected to insure. After
+some platitudes as to the vivifying effects of free and open trade, and an
+injunction to his captains to take care the Indian girls were decorously and
+virtuously dressed, he launched into a sermon about honest work, which, as he
+said, would make the Indians rich, happy, and virtuous, and alone could ever
+make a kingdom prosper; in fact, he used almost precisely similar language to
+that to-day used by a European Governor in Africa when about to make a people
+slaves. On the whole, however, his instructions were wise and liberal, and had
+they been carried out in the same spirit, and with fidelity, the Indians might
+have long continued in the same half-Arcadian, half-Christian state in which
+the Jesuits left them, and to which it seems they could attain, but not go
+farther without exposure to that vivifying commerce without which nations
+cannot prosper, but with which the greater portion of their citizens must
+remain ever slaves.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The instructions given, he left the missions never to return, leaving behind
+him the reputation of an honest man, having made, as it would appear, no money
+during his sojourn in their territories. On October 20, 1768, he wrote from
+Buenos Ayres to Aranda, telling him that his work was done, and asking him as a
+particular favour to implore the King to give him some employment ‘out of
+America, and particularly not under either the secretaryship or the Council of
+the Indies.’<a href="#foot332">[332]</a> Thus it appears that either the work
+in which he had been engaged was uncongenial to him, or he mistrusted the
+future and the Indians when the Jesuits’ sheltering hands had been withdrawn,
+and thought the King might blame him for what was sure to come. One passage in
+his letter of instructions shows that the antique, but still current, fashion
+of going to any length to obtain a country in which are situated even
+supposititious gold-mines had its influence even with such an honest man as
+Bucareli was. He specially enjoins upon the officials left in charge ‘to find
+out from what quarter the Indians of those towns extract those pieces of the
+precious metals which they sometimes bring to their priests.’ So that the fable
+of the false mines started by Cardenas, although a thousand times disproved,
+still lingered in the minds of those who could not understand what motive
+except that of growing rich could cause the Jesuits to bury themselves in the
+recesses of the Paraguayan woods. The release from things American and under
+the jurisdiction of the Council of the Indies did not come to Bucareli for
+almost two more years, during which time he struggled manfully with the affairs
+of the Jesuit missions, repelled the Chaco Indians on one side, and on the
+other implored for troops to defend the island of Chiloe against the heretic
+English, who at that time appear to have been meditating the advancement of
+their empire in the extremest south. One curious letter was reserved for
+Bucareli to indite before he quitted Buenos Ayres for the last time. On January
+15, 1770, he sent a long declaration signed by the celebrated Nicolas Ñeenguirú
+and other Indians, giving an account of the part played by him in the abortive
+resistance which he made against the cession of the seven towns. This is the
+last time that Nicolas, the ‘King’ of Paraguay and ‘Emperor of the Mamelucos’,
+appears in any document as far as I can find. His name at one time was well
+known in Paraguay, the River Plate and Spain, and served to father many lies
+upon; and at the last, the Jesuits gone, he seems to have turned against them,
+and said all that was required by Bucareli to get up his case. It appears from
+Bucareli’s letter that the family of the Ñeenguirú had been well known in the
+missions from the time of Cardenas. In 1770<a href="#foot333">[333]</a> we find
+him shorn of his kingly and imperial dignities, the mayor of Concepcion in
+Paraguay, tall, taciturn, with long, lank hair, and much respected by his
+brother Indians, who held his stirrup for him when he got upon his horse. To
+find him in the humour to give tongue about the Jesuits was a trump-card in
+Bucareli’s hand, for if it could be proved that in 1750 they had resisted the
+forces of the crown of Spain, the public, always anxious to believe a lie,
+would naturally applaud the action of the King in their expulsion from his
+territories. Nicolas, who seems to have been but a poor creature at the best,
+testified that everything which he had done as General of the Indians was by
+the order of Fathers Limp and Ennis, and that he was a poor Indian who did but
+that which he was told. He finished up his testimony with thanks to the good
+King for having taken him out of the power of the Jesuits, and kept him in his
+post of mayor at Concepcion. In fact, all was the same to him as long as he was
+left with his alcalde’s staff.<a href="#foot334">[334]</a>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Upon August 14, 1778, Bucareli sailed for Spain, leaving Don Juan José Vertiz
+as his successor in the viceroyalty of the provinces of the River Plate. The
+missions were all placed under the care of friars of the begging Orders,
+chiefly Franciscans, and the system of the Jesuit government was left
+unchanged. In 1771, writing from San Lorenzo (el Escorial) in Spain, Bucareli,
+who seemed fated never to escape from the affairs of Paraguay, sends a long
+constitution for the thirty towns which follows all the Jesuits’ rules of
+government to the last tittle of their policy. Brabo has preserved the
+document, which runs to forty-seven pages of close print in its entirety. A
+carefully thought-out and well-conceived digest of a constitution it most
+certainly is, and yet it follows to the most minute particular the policy the
+Jesuits laid down.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Dean Funes<a href="#foot335">[335]</a> seemed to see that the flattering of
+Nicolas Ñeenguiru and the other Indian chiefs was an entire affair of artifice,
+and that it was but a mere crowning of the victims who were destined to be
+sacrificed. It may be that the constitution made by Bucareli at the Escorial
+was similarly but a blind to keep the Indians quiet till the Government had
+time to exploit them at its ease. Still, Bucareli in all his actions seems to
+have been an honest man; one of those honest, narrow-minded men who have sown
+more misery in the world than all the rogues and scoundrels since the flood. Be
+all that as it may, his constitution in a thousand ways recalled the Jesuits’
+polity in their days of rule. In a former chapter<a href="#foot336">[336]</a> I
+have pointed out a curious instance in which this constitution traverses
+entirely statements made by the Jesuits’ enemies that their exclusive policy
+was for their own ends, and not, as they alleged, for the protection of the
+Indians. But there are other instances quite as remarkable which show that the
+Jesuits not only had grasped perfectly what the best course of treatment was
+for their subjects, but that the official mind of Bucareli, trained as he was,
+so to speak, in the strictest sect of Pharisees, and prejudiced against the
+Jesuits in every way, yet discerned clearly as an honest man that the plan they
+had laid down was the most suitable for future rulers to pursue.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+At the time of forming his constitution he had been gone but scarce a year from
+Buenos Ayres, and yet he writes<a href="#foot337">[337]</a> complaining
+bitterly of what was happening in the missions of Paraguay. He points out that
+all his trouble will have been in vain ‘if the Governor and his lieutenants are
+not stimulated to address themselves to the service of God and of the King,
+with that zeal which everyone should impart to his duty.’ Then, after a puff
+preliminary of the beauty of freedom, human and Divine, he sets forth how the
+Indians are in future to be ruled. First, as in duty bound, he points out that
+anything savouring of communism is against the laws of Heaven and of man; that
+the Indians in their semi-communism were really slaves, the industrious working
+for the idle, and so forth; that their clothes were scanty; that they were not
+allowed to freely mix with Spaniards, and were kept a race apart. Then like a
+prudent statesman having made his apologia ‘pro existentia sua’, and blown off
+much virtuous steam, he comes to business, and business, as we know, is the
+great soberer of theorists, no matter on what side they theorize.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+After the article to which I have referred in Chapter IX. comes this most
+curious paragraph, taken in connection with the inalienable right which,
+according to himself, the Indians had of free communication with the outer
+world:<a href="#foot338">[338]</a> ‘And because I am informed that many Indians
+who have been absent in the army of the Portuguese, and have resided for
+lengthened periods in Rio Pardo, Viamont and other parts, have returned to
+their towns, you will take care that all these with their families shall be
+removed to those (towns) either in the interior or distant from those
+frontiers, as it is not convenient that they should remain on them (the
+frontiers) or close to them; and thus you will proceed successively with the
+Indians who return, without leaving one, in order to avoid any chance of
+communication, which might be most prejudicial.’ Surely a satire on his own
+abuse of the Jesuits for keeping the Indians mewed up from intercourse with the
+outside world. It may be that he had perceived the Indians were not fit to hold
+their own; indeed, it is certain he had done so, for on p. 326 he writes, ‘It
+is not convenient to leave them (the Indians) entire liberty,<a
+href="#foot339">[339]</a> for it would be in the extreme fatal and prejudicial
+to their interests, because the astuteness and sagacity of the Spaniards would
+triumph easily over their rusticity.’ ‘Sagacity’ is an ingenious euphuism, and
+might well be used with good effect in the like circumstances, when occasion
+serves, to-day. But as no single article of any document set forth by any
+Government can be straightforward and single in its purpose, and as all laws
+are made with an eye upon some party presently in power, after the paragraph
+just quoted, on the next page occurs the following sentence under the head of
+‘Commerce with the Spaniards is to be free’.<a href="#foot340">[340]</a> ‘It is
+laid down that between the Indians and the Spaniards commerce should be free,
+in order that mutual dealings should unite them in friendship.’ Therefore to
+the ordinary mind it is impossible to make out what really was intended, and
+whether commerce was to be free or not. Those little differences apart, the
+constitution ran entirely upon Jesuit lines. That semi-communism which was so
+prejudicial during the Jesuits’ rule was formally re-organized in chapter iv.
+of the constitution (p. 343) the instant that their power was placed in other
+hands. Even the prohibition to the Spaniards to enter the Jesuit towns, and
+reside there, was formally kept up in chapter iii., with the sole alteration
+that for three months of the year they might reside amongst the Indians on
+certain well-defined conditions most prolixly set forth. So that it will be
+seen that, if the Jesuits did ill, as usual, any ill they did was carefully
+perpetuated by their successors, and, quite as naturally, all that they strove
+to do in favour of the Indians was most carefully undone.
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a name="chap11"></a>Chapter XI</h2>
+
+<p class="letter">
+Conclusion
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It is the fashion of some to say that history, of whatever nature, can but be
+written dispassionately at a period sufficiently removed from the events of
+which it treats to have allowed the heat of passion to evaporate. This is as
+false as almost every other dictum which men take on trust, forgetting that to
+have passed into the proverbial stage a saying must have been foolish at the
+start, in order that it should have got itself commended by the majority of
+mankind.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The heat of passion never evaporates in regard to events which at the epoch of
+their acting caused great controversies. From writings of contemporaries the
+coolest-headed take a bias, in the same way that men unconsciously pass on the
+microbes of disease to their best friends. Only from inventories and rolls of
+court, State Papers and the like is it possible to get unbiassed matter, and
+even then figures, those chief deceivers of mankind, can be well cooked for or
+against, according to the bias of the man who draws them up. Still, when they
+are drawn up by enemies, they often quite unwittingly show out the truth. In a
+letter dated October 30, 1768, Bucareli sends a list to Aranda of the effects
+of many of the Jesuits taken from Paraguay and sent by him to Spain. The list
+itself speaks volumes in defence of the Jesuits in Paraguay. Whatever may have
+been their faults, the Governor himself (or even Charles III.) could not have
+charged upon the captured priests that they had got together a large stock of
+property during their mission life.<a href="#foot341">[341]</a> The first upon
+the list, P. Pedro Zabaleta, took ten shirts, two pillow-cases, two sheets,
+three pocket-handkerchiefs, two pairs of shoes, two pairs of socks, and a pound
+and a half of snuff. The others were in general less well set up with shirts,<a
+href="#foot342">[342]</a> some few had cloaks, and one (P. Sigismundo Griera) a
+nightcap; but all of them had their snuff, the only relic of their luxurious
+mission life. Manuel Vergara, their Provincial, testifies in a paper sent with
+the list that most of the clothes were taken from the common stock, and all the
+snuff. What sort of treatment they endured upon their passage in the two
+frigates <i>San Fernando</i> and <i>San Nicolas</i> is quite unknown, but
+certainly their luggage could not have been in the way; and for their snuff, no
+doubt they husbanded it with care during the long two months, which in those
+days was thought a record run.<a href="#foot343">[343]</a> In the missions
+which they had so long tended with such care, giving their muddle-headed love
+to the Indians in their Machiavelian way, all was confusion in the space of six
+short months. Dean Funes and Don Feliz de Azara<a href="#foot344">[344]</a> are
+the only two contemporary writers who treat of the expulsion of the Jesuits
+from Paraguay outside the official world. The Dean, a man of the old school,
+was kindly and humane, well educated, and, having been brought up in Tucuman
+amongst an Indian population, looked on the Indians in a kindly way as
+fellow-creatures, though differing in essential points from races which had
+been for centuries exposed to civilization and its effects. His description of
+the Indians has for veracity and observation not often been surpassed. ‘Those
+natives<a href="#foot345">[345]</a> (he says) are of a pale colour, well made,
+and well set up. Their talent and capacity are capable of much advancement.
+Though they lack invention in themselves, yet are they excellent in imitation.
+Idleness seems natural to them, although it may be more the effect of habit
+than of temperament; their inclination towards acquiring knowledge is decided,
+and novelty has its full effect upon their minds. Ambitious of command, they
+acquit themselves with honour in the positions to which they may attain.
+Eloquence is held amongst them in the first place, and avarice in no respect
+degrades their minds. An injurious word offends them more than punishments,
+which they solicit rather than undergo the former outrage. Incontinency in
+their women they look upon but with indifference, and even husbands are little
+sensible to acts of infidelity. Conjugal love has but slight influence upon the
+treatment which they give their wives. Fathers of families care for their sons
+but little. The serenity of mind of all these Indians in the midst of the
+greatest troubles is without equal in the world; never a sigh with them takes
+off the bitterness of suffering.’
+</p>
+
+<p>
+No one who knows the Indians but must confess that Dean Funes had made a study
+of their character deeper than is his own. Azara, on the other hand, was a man
+of science; his books upon the birds and quadrupeds of Paraguay still hold the
+field, and are esteemed for curious and minute observation and accuracy as to
+scientific facts. The man himself was an extremely able writer, a captain in
+the Spanish navy, and well educated. For twenty years he served in Paraguay and
+in the River Plate, with credit to himself and profit to the country which he
+served. Educated as he was in the school of the Encyclopædists, amongst the
+strictest of the pharisees of Liberalism, to him the very name of Jesuit was
+anathema. After the fashion of his kind, he seemed unable to distinguish
+between the scheming Jesuits at European courts and the simple and hard-working
+missionaries in Paraguay. All were anathema, and therefore all their system was
+repugnant to him; and though a kindly man, as is set forth abundantly in all
+his works, he never paused to think that there could be a difference between
+his ideal free Liberal citizen, voting and exercising all his right of
+citizenship in a free commonwealth, after the fashion of a dormouse freely
+exercising his natural functions in the receiver of an air-pump, and a simple
+Indian of the Paraguayan woods.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Freedom to him, as it has been to many theorists, was an abstract thing,
+possessing which a man, even though starving, must in its mere possession find
+true happiness. He never paused to inquire, as even Bucareli did, if the
+mission Indians could hold their own under free competition with the ‘sagacity’
+of the surrounding Spanish settlers. Therefore he is the authority whom
+Liberals always quote against the system of the Jesuits. When he inveighs
+against their semi-communism, the modern Liberal claps his hands, and sees a
+kindred Daniel come to judgment, as he would do to-day if in Damaraland the
+Germans set up a Socialistic settlement amongst the negro tribes, and some
+Liberal economist denounced it with an oath. Azara quite forgets that, as Dean
+Funes says, the ‘sentiment of property was very weak amongst the Indians,’ and
+that their minds were ‘not degraded by the vice of avarice.’ Still, Azara was
+an honest man—a keen observer and impartial, as far as his upbringing and the
+tenets he had imbibed in youth permitted him to be. Upon the question of the
+Jesuits he was entirely prejudiced, although few have stood up more stoutly to
+condemn the faulty system which the Spaniards pursued towards the Indians in
+both Americas. But on account of his political proclivities Azara is quite
+silent as to the state into which the missions fell after the Jesuits had been
+expelled. No doubt he thought that, once their faulty system was removed, the
+Indians would soon become what he judged civilized, and hold their own with
+those around them, though of another race and blood.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Funes, upon the contrary, fully exposes all the rapacity and incompetence of
+the new shepherds left by Bucareli to guard the Jesuits’ sheep.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+‘Ignorant<a href="#foot346">[346]</a> of Guaraní, and without patience to
+acquire it, confusion reigned in the missions as in a tower of Babel,’ and he
+goes on to say ‘an imperious tone of order was substituted for the paternal
+manner (of the Jesuits), and as a deaf man who cannot hear has to be taught by
+blows, that was the teaching they (the Indians) had to bear.’ Shortly, he says,
+‘a wall of hatred and contempt began to rise between the Indians and their
+masters; and the priests, who by the virtue of their office ought to have been
+the ministers of peace, being without influence to command . . . and not
+entirely irreproachable in their ministry . . . added themselves to the discord
+and dissension which arose.’
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Bucareli, as soon as he knew what was going on, advised that all the priests
+appointed by himself should be replaced by others. This accordingly was done,
+but it was even then too late: the missions went from bad to worse; of the vast
+quantities of cattle few were left; the priests followed the example of their
+prototypes Hofni and Phineas, went about armed, took Indian mistresses, and
+neglected all religious duties, treating the Indians after the fashion of the
+Spaniards in the settlements. Thus the Arcadian life, which had subsisted more
+than two hundred years, in the brief space of two short years was lost.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The vast estancias, in which at the expulsion more than a million head of
+cattle pastured,<a href="#foot347">[347]</a> were but bare plains, in which the
+cattle that were left had all run wild or perished from neglect. Wild beasts
+roamed round the outskirts of the half-deserted towns. A dense low scrub of
+yatais and of palmettos invaded all the pasture-lands, and in the erstwhile
+cultivated fields rank weeds sprang up, and choked the crops which in the
+Jesuits’ times had made the mission territories the most productive of the
+American possessions of the Spanish crown. The churches were unserved, and in
+the evening air no more the hymns resounded, nor did the long white-robed
+processions headed by a cross pass to the fields to peaceful labour, marshalled
+by their priests. The fruit-trees round the missions were either all cut down
+for firewood or had degenerated, and the plantations of the Ilex
+Paraguayensis,<a href="#foot348">[348]</a> from which they made their
+<i>yerba</i>, which had been brought from the up-country forests with vast
+pains, were in decay, and quite uncultivated.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The Indian population had almost disappeared within the space of
+eight-and-twenty years.<a href="#foot349">[349]</a> The Guaranís collected from
+the woods with so much effort to the missionary, then guided down the Paraná by
+the most noble and self-sacrificing of their priests, Ruiz Montoya, and after
+that redeemed with blood from the fierce Mameluco bands, had shrunk away before
+the baneful breath of unaccustomed contact with the civilizing whites.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The simple ceremonious, if perhaps futile, mission-life had withered up at the
+first touch of vivifying competition—that competition which has made the whole
+world gray, reducing everything and everyone to the most base and commonest
+denominator.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The self-created goddess Progress was justified by works, and all the land left
+barren, waiting the time when factories shall pollute its sky, and render
+miserable the European emigrants, who, flying from their slavery at home, shall
+have found it waiting for them in their new paradise beyond the seas.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The world, it would appear, is a vast class-room, and its Creator but a
+professor of political economy, apparently unable to carry out his theories
+with effect. Therefore, to us, the Western Europeans, he has turned for help,
+and upon us devolved the task of extirpating all those peoples upon whom he
+tried his ’prentice hand. On us he laid injunctions to increase at home, and to
+the happier portions of the world to carry death under the guise of life
+unsuitable to those into whose lands we spread.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Let those made cruel by the want of sympathy with men that the mere poring over
+books so often superinduces in the mind protest when judging of the Jesuits in
+Paraguay against the outrage done to their theories by the scheme the Jesuits
+pursued.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It has been nobly said<a href="#foot350">[350]</a> ‘that the extinction of the
+smallest animal is a far greater loss than if the works of all the Greeks had
+perished.’ How much the greater loss that of a type of man such as the Indians,
+whom the semi-communistic Jesuit government successfully preserved, sheltering
+them from the death-dealing breath of our cold northern life and its full, fell
+effects!
+</p>
+
+<p>
+There are those, no doubt, who think that a tree brought from the tropics
+should be planted out at home, to take its chance of life in the keen winter of
+the north, in holy competition with the ash and oak; and if it dies, there are
+still pines enough, with stores of dogwood, thickets of elder, and a wilderness
+of junipers. They may be right; but, after all, that which has felt the tropic
+sun is for the tropics, and to grow under the tantalizing sunshine of the
+north, which lights but does not warm, it must have glass, and shelter from the
+cold.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But of aforethought to deliberately transplant our fogs and chilling
+atmosphere, and so to nip and kill plants which crave only the sun to live,
+that is a crime against humanity; a crime posterity with execration will one
+day taunt us with, and hold us up to execration, as we to-day in our hypocrisy
+piously curse the memories of Pizarro and Cortés.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In the eternal warfare between those who think that progress—which to them
+means tramways and electric light—is preferable to a quiet life of futile
+happiness of mind there is scant truce, so that my readers have to take their
+choice whether to side with Funes or Azara in judging of the Jesuits’ rule in
+Paraguay. There is no middle course between the old and new; no halting-place;
+no chink in which imagination can drive in its nail to stop the wheels of time;
+therefore, no doubt, the Jesuit commonwealth was doomed to disappear. But for
+myself, I am glad that five-and-twenty years ago I saw the Indians who still
+lingered about the ruined mission towns, mumbling their maiméd rites when the
+Angelus at eventide awoke the echoes of the encroaching woods, whilst
+screeching crowds of parrots and macaws hovered around the date-palms which in
+the plaza reared their slender heads, silent memorials of the departed Jesuits’
+rule.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Indians and Jesuits are gone from Paraguay, the Indians to that Trapalanda
+which is their appointed place; and for the Jesuits, they are forgotten, except
+by those who dive into old chronicles, or who write books, proposing something
+and concluding nothing, or by travellers, who, wandering in the Tarumensian
+woods, come on a clump of orange-trees run wild amongst the urundéys.
+</p>
+
+<p class="center">
+FINIS NON CORONAT OPUS
+</p>
+
+<div class="fig" style="width:100%;">
+<a name="map"></a>
+<a href="images/map.jpg">
+<img src="images/map.jpg" width="800" height="466" alt="Illustration:" /></a>
+</div>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2>Notes</h2>
+
+<p>
+About the author:<br/>
+<br/>
+           Robert Bontine Cunninghame Graham (1852-1936)
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Born in London. Lived in Argentina, mostly ranching, from 1869 to 1883, when he
+returned to Scotland. Member of the British House of Commons for North West
+Lanark (1886-1892). Strong socialist tendencies. Was elected first president of
+the Scottish Labour Party in 1888, first president of the National Party of
+Scotland in 1928, and first Honorary President of the Scottish National Party
+in 1934. Died in Argentina. He was the model for a number of fictional
+characters in books by his friend, Joseph Conrad, and also by G. B. Shaw.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Notes to the etext:<br/>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Corrections made:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Chapter I:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+(p. 6) (footnote)<br/>
+[‘Commentarios Reales’ (en Madrid CI}. I}CCXXIII., en la oficina]<br/>
+</p>
+
+<p class="letter">
+where “}” marks a character that is the mirror image of “C”, which was formerly
+used in Roman Numerals as follows: “CI}” = “M” [1,000]; “I}” = “D” [500]; and
+subsequent “}”s multiply by ten, as “I}}}” = 50,000.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+changed to:<br/>
+[‘Commentarios Reales’ (en Madrid 1723, en la oficina]<br/>
+</p>
+
+<p class="letter">
+Let us all take this moment to give thanks for Hindu-Arabic numerals, Amen.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+(p. 19)<br/>
+[‘Descripcion y Historia del Paraguay, ‘the Guaranís were spread]<br/>
+changed to:<br/>
+[‘Descripcion y Historia del Paraguay’, ‘the Guaranís were spread]<br/>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+(p. 24) (footnote)<br/>
+[del Sr Provisor Alonso Joseph Gomez de Lara.]<br/>
+changed to:<br/>
+[del Sr. Provisor Alonso Joseph Gomez de Lara.]<br/>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+(p. 34)<br/>
+[and his mother Doña Teresa Cabeza de Vaca,]<br/>
+changed to:<br/>
+[and his mother ‘Doña Teresa Cabeza de Vaca,]<br/>
+</p>
+
+<p class="letter">
+as the best guess as to where the quoted section begins, which is later marked
+with a closing quote.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Chapter II:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+(p. 52) (footnote)<br/>
+[de la Compagnie de Jésus, vol. iii., cap v., p. 322]<br/>
+changed to:<br/>
+[de la Compagnie de Jésus’, vol. iii., cap v., p. 322]<br/>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+(p. 74)<br/>
+[militia of the missions could no nothing with their bows and arrows]<br/>
+changed to:<br/>
+[militia of the missions could do nothing with their bows and arrows]<br/>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Chapter V:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+(p. 129)<br/>
+[to divine will, which, will, as the Bishop]<br/>
+changed to:<br/>
+[to divine will, which will, as the Bishop]<br/>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+(p. 131) (footnote)<br/>
+[[121] Exod. xxxii. 27.]<br/>
+updated to:<br/>
+[[121] Exod. 32:27.]<br/>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+(p. 138)<br/>
+[sending to him one Father Lopez, Provincial of the Dominicians.]<br/>
+changed to:<br/>
+[sending to him one Father Lopez, Provincial of the Dominicans.]<br/>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Chapter VI:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+(p. 181) (footnote)<br/>
+[‘Declaracion de la Verdad, p. 295:]<br/>
+changed to:<br/>
+[‘Declaracion de la Verdad’, p. 295:]<br/>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+(p. 184) (footnote)<br/>
+[la Historia del Paraguay’, etc., cap. i., vol. ii.]<br/>
+changed to:<br/>
+[la Historia del Paraguay’, etc., cap. i., vol. ii.).]<br/>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Chapter IX:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+(p. 237)<br/>
+[After negotiations, lasting many years, in 1758 a treaty was signed]<br/>
+changed to:<br/>
+[After negotiations, lasting many years, in 1750 a treaty was signed]<br/>
+</p>
+
+<p class="letter">
+15 January 1750, to be exact.<br/>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Chapter X:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+(pp. 263-264) (footnote)<br/>
+[Ibañez rarely spoke he truth, not even when it would]<br/>
+changed to:<br/>
+[Ibañez rarely spoke the truth, not even when it would]<br/>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+(p. 268) (footnote)<br/>
+[The war commenced in 1868 and finished in 1870,]<br/>
+changed to:<br/>
+[The war commenced in 1865 and finished in 1870,]<br/>
+</p>
+
+<p class="letter">
+(the dates generally given for this war, though the opening stages arguably
+occurred late in 1864.)
+</p>
+
+<p>
+(p. 275)<br/>
+[signed by the celebrated Nicolas Ñeengiurú and other Indians,]<br/>
+changed to:<br/>
+[signed by the celebrated Nicolas Ñeenguirú and other Indians,]<br/>
+   and:<br/>
+[the family of the Ñeengiurú had been well known]<br/>
+ changed to:<br/>
+[the family of the Ñeenguirú had been well known]<br/>
+</p>
+
+<p class="letter">
+(as it appears elsewhere in the text)
+</p>
+
+<p>
+(p. 276)<br/>
+[the flattering of Nicolas Ñeengiuru]<br/>
+ changed to:<br/>
+[the flattering of Nicolas Ñeenguiru]<br/>
+</p>
+
+<p class="letter">
+This wrong spelling is given throughout Chapter X, but Chapter X only.
+Elsewhere, the accents are occasionally missing from a name that seems to be
+the same.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The original Index has been omitted as unnecessary in a searchable text.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+This etext was transcribed from the edition published in London in 1901.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The excellent film, “The Mission” (1986), was based on events apparently
+related to the ‘Jesuit War’ referred to in Chapter IX.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+HTML 4.0, the current standard at the time this file was created, does not
+recognize the breve accent for the letter i, but following the standard for (a
+breve), I have gone ahead and coded i breve, as there are only two instances,
+and it may yet become a standard.
+</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2>Footnotes:</h2>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot001"></a>
+<b>[1]</b> The doctrine of the ‘Ciencia Media’ occurs in the celebrated
+‘Concordia gratiæ et liberi arbitrii’, by Luis de Molina (1588). The concilium
+de Auxiliis was held to determine whether or not <i>concordia</i> was possible
+between freewill and grace. As the Jesuits stuck by Molina and his doctrines in
+despite of councils and of popes, the common saying arose in Spain: ‘Pasteles
+en la pasteleria y ciencia media en la Compañia.’
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot002"></a>
+<b>[2]</b> Dean Funes, ‘Ensayo de la Historia Civil del Paraguay’, etc., Buenos
+Aires, 1816.
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot003"></a>
+<b>[3]</b> <i>Idem.</i> The letter is dated 1771 and the Jesuits were expelled
+in 1767. As the writer of the letter was on the spot in an official position,
+and nominated by the very Viceroy who had been the expeller of the Jesuits, his
+testimony would seem to be as valuable as that of the ablest theorist on
+government, Catholic or Protestant, who ever wrote.
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot004"></a>
+<b>[4]</b> This, of course, applies to the possessions of all European States
+in America equally with Spain.
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot005"></a>
+<b>[5]</b> Madrid, 1770.
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot006"></a>
+<b>[6]</b> Though in this respect Charlevoix is not so credulous as Padre Ruiz
+de Montoya and the older writers, he yet repeats the story of the bird that
+cleans the alligator’s teeth, the magic virtues of the tapir’s nails, and many
+others. See Charlevoix, vol. i., bk. i., p. 27, Paris, 1756.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+[The story of the bird that cleans the teeth of alligators is very nearly
+true—<i>Pluvianus aegyptius</i> has a symbiotic relationship with crocodiles in
+parts of Africa, and similar relationships exist throughout the natural
+world.—A. L., 1998.]
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot007"></a>
+<b>[7]</b> Dobrizhoffer’s book was written in Latin, and printed in Vienna in
+1784 under the title of ‘Historia de Abiponibus’, etc. A German translation by
+Professor Keil was published at Pesth in the same year. The English translation
+is of the year 1822.
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot008"></a>
+<b>[8]</b> It is to be remembered that the Spanish colonists were as a rule
+antagonistic to the Jesuits, and that, therefore, Spanish writers do not of
+necessity hold a brief for the Jesuits in Paraguay. Moreover, the names of
+Esmid (Smith), Fildo (Fields), Dobrizhoffer, Cataldini and Tomas Bruno (Brown,
+who is mentioned as being <i>natural de Yorca</i>), Filge, Limp, Pifereti,
+Enis, and Asperger, the quaint medical writer on the virtues of plants found in
+the mission territory, show how many foreign Jesuits were actually to be found
+in the reductions of Paraguay. For more information on this matter see the
+‘Coleccion de Documentos relativos á la Expulsion de los Jesuitas de la
+Republica Argentina y Paraguay’, published and collected by Francisco Javier
+Brabo, Madrid, 1872.
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot009"></a>
+<b>[9]</b> The Inca Garcilaso de la Vega, in his ‘Commentarios Reales’ (en
+Madrid 1723, en la oficina Real y á costa de Nicholas Rodriguez Franco,
+Impressor de libros, se hallaran en su casa en la calle de el Poço y en
+Palacio), derives the word from the Quichua <i>Chacú</i> = a surrounding. If he
+is right, it would then be equivalent to the Gaelic ‘tinchel’. Taylor, the
+Water-poet, has left a curious description of one of these tinchels. It was at
+a tinchel that the rising under the Earl of Mar in the ’15 was concocted.
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot010"></a>
+<b>[10]</b> See the curious map contained in the now rare work of P. Pedro
+Lozano, entitled, ‘Descripcion Chorographica . . . del Gran Chaco, Gualamba’,
+etc. Also in the interesting collection of old maps published in 1872 at Madrid
+by Francisco Javier Brabo.
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot011"></a>
+<b>[11]</b> It is, of course, to be taken into consideration that my two
+journeys in Paraguay were made after the great war which terminated in 1870,
+after lasting four years; but the writings of Demersay (‘Histoire du Paraguay
+et des Établissements des Jésuites’, Paris, 1862), those of Brabo, and of
+Azara, show the deserted state of the district of Misiones in the period from
+1767, the date of the expulsion of the Jesuits, to the middle of the nineteenth
+century.
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot012"></a>
+<b>[12]</b> <i>Cocos Australis</i>.
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot013"></a>
+<b>[13]</b> See the reports of the Marques de Valdelirios and others in the
+publications of Francisco Javier Brabo, Madrid, 1872, and in the ‘Ensayo de la
+Historia Civil de Paraguay, Buenos-Ayres y Tucuman’, por Dr. Don Gregorio
+Funes, Buenos Ayres, 1816.
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot014"></a>
+<b>[14]</b> Bernal Diaz, ‘Historia de la Conquista de la Nueva España’, vol.
+iv., cap. 207, Madrid, 1796.
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot015"></a>
+<b>[15]</b> Especially noting down the appearance and qualities of ‘el caballo
+Motilla’, the horse of Gonzalo de Sandoval. Thus does he minutely describe
+Motilla, ‘the best horse in Castille or the Indies’. ‘El mejor caballo, y de
+mejor carrera, revuelto á una mano y à otra que decian que no se habia visto
+mejor en Castilla, ni en esa tierra era castaño acastañado, y una estrella en
+la frente, y un pie izquierdo calzado, que se decia el caballo Motilla; é
+quando hay ahora diferencia sobre buenos caballos, suclen decir es en bondad
+tan bueno como Motilla.’
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot016"></a>
+<b>[16]</b> ‘La Argentina’, included in the ‘Coleccion de Angelis’, Buenos
+Ayres, 1836.
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot017"></a>
+<b>[17]</b> ‘Historia y Descubrimiento de el Rio de la Plata y Paraguay’,
+Hulderico Schmidel, contained in the collection made by Andres Gonzalez Barcia,
+and published in 1769 at Madrid under the title of ‘Historiadores Primitivos de
+las Indias Occidentales’.
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot018"></a>
+<b>[18]</b> The great Las Casas, who made seven voyages from America to
+Spain—the last at the age of seventy-two—to protect the Indians, had a strong
+opinion about ‘conquerors’ and ‘conquests’. In the dedication of his great
+treatise on the wrongs of the Indians, he says: ‘Que no permita (Felipe II.)
+las atrocidades que los tiranos inventaron, y que prosiguen haciendo con titulo
+de “conquistas”. Los que se jactan de ser “conquistadores” a que descienden de
+ellos son muchomas orgullosos arrogantes y vanos que los otros Españoles.’
+Strange that even to-day the same <i>atrocidades</i> of <i>tiranos</i> are
+going on in Africa. No doubt the descendants of these ‘conquerors’ will be as
+arrogant, proud, and vain as the descendants of the <i>conquistadores</i> of
+whom Las Casas writes.
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot019"></a>
+<b>[19]</b> Mendoza left (‘Azara Apuntamientos para la Historia Natural de los
+Quadrupedes del Paraguay’, etc.) five mares and seven horses in the year 1535.
+In 1580 Don Juan de Garay, at the second founding of the city, already found
+troops of wild horses. The cattle increased to a marvellous extent, and by the
+end of the century were wild in Patagonia. Sarmiento (‘Civilisation et
+Barbarisme’) says that early in this century they were often killed by
+travellers, who tethered their horses to the carcasses to prevent them from
+straying at night.
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot020"></a>
+<b>[20]</b> Hulderico Schmidel, ‘Historia del Descubrimiento de el Rio de la
+Plata y Paraguay’.
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot021"></a>
+<b>[21]</b> Perhaps the two most important works upon the language are the
+‘Tesoro de la Lengua Guarani’, by Ruiz de Montoya, Madrid, 1639 (it is
+dedicated to the ‘Soberana Virgen’); and the ‘Catecismo de la Lengua Guarani’,
+by Diego Diaz de la Guerra, Madrid, Año de 1630. He also wrote a ‘Bocabulario y
+Arte de la Lengua Guarani’.
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot022"></a>
+<b>[22]</b> P. Guevara, in his ‘Historia del Paraguay’, relates a curious story
+which he said was current amongst the Indians. Two brothers, Tupi and Guaraní,
+lived with their families upon the sea-coast of Brazil. In those days the world
+was quite unpopulated but by themselves. They quarrelled about a parrot, and
+Tupi with his family went north, and populated all Brazil; whilst Guaraní went
+west, and was the ancestor of all the Indians of the race of Guaranís.
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot023"></a>
+<b>[23]</b> Azara, in his ‘Descripcion y Historia del Paraguay’, has a similar
+passage: ‘Recibe bien todo Indio silvestre, al estrangero que viene de paz.’
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot024"></a>
+<b>[24]</b> ‘Por lo comun reparten pedazos de este cuerpo, del qual pedazo
+cozido en mucha agua hacen unas gachas (<i>fritters</i>) y es fiesta muy
+celebre para ellos que hacen con muchas cerimonias.’
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot025"></a>
+<b>[25]</b> ‘Histoire du Paraguay et des Établissements des Jésuites’, L.
+Alfred Demersay, Paris, 1864.
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot026"></a>
+<b>[26]</b> ‘La Argentina’, a long poem or rhyming chronicle contained in the
+collection of ‘Historiadores Primitivos de Indias’, of Gonzales Barcia, Madrid,
+1749.
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot027"></a>
+<b>[27]</b> Lozano, in his ‘Historia del Paraguay’, compares it to Greek, but
+in my opinion fails to establish his case; but, then, so few people know both
+Greek and Guaraní.
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot028"></a>
+<b>[28]</b> He passed through the whole Chaco, descending the Pilcomayo to its
+junction with the Paraguay, through territories but little explored even
+to-day. Perhaps the most complete description of the Chaco is that of P.
+Lozano, with the following comprehensive title:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+‘Descripcion chorographica de Terreno Rios, Arboles, y Animales de los
+dilatadisimas Provincias del Gran Chaco, Gualamba, y de los Ritos y Costumbres
+de la inumerables naciones barbaros é infideles que le habitan. Con un cabal
+Relacion Historica de lo que en ellos han obrado para conquistarlas algunos
+Gobernadores y Ministros Reales, y los Misioneros Jesuitas para reduc irlos à
+la fe del Verdadero Dios.’ Por el Padre Pedro Lozano, de la Compañia de Jesus,
+Año de 1733. En Cordoba por Joseph Santos Balbas.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+This book did not appear in a clandestine manner, for it had: 1. Censura, por
+C. de Palmas. 2. Licencia de la Religion, por Geronymo de Huróza, Provincial de
+los Jesuitas de Andalucia. 3. Licencia del Ordinario por el Dr. Don Francisco
+Miguel Moreno, por mandado del Sr. Provisor Alonso Joseph Gomez de Lara. 4.
+Aprobacion del Rdo. P. Diego Vasquez. 5. Privelegio de su Majestad por Don
+Miguel Fernandez Morillo. 6. Fé de Corrector por el Licenciado, Don Manuel
+Garcia Alesson, Corrector General de su Majestad (who adds in a note, ‘este
+libro corresponde à su original’). 7. Sumo de Tassa, as follows: ‘Tassaron los
+señores del Consejo este libro à seis maravedis cada pliego.’
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Palma, in the first <i>censura</i>, says that he had read it several times ‘con
+repetida complacencia’, and that, though it was ‘breve en volumen’ (it has 484
+quarto pages), that it was also short in its concise style, kept closely to the
+rules of history, and was ‘muy copiosa en la doctrina’.
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot029"></a>
+<b>[29]</b> This race at one time spread from the Orinoco to the river Plate,
+and even in the case of its offshoot, the Chiriguanás, crossed to the west bank
+of the Paraguay. Padre Ruiz Montoya, in his ‘Conquista Espiritual del
+Paraguay’, cap. i., speaking of the Guaraní race, says: ‘Domina ambos mares el
+del sur por todo el Brasil y ciñiendo el Peru con los dos mas grandes rios que
+conoce el orbe que son el de la Plata, cuya boca en Buenos-Ayres es de ochenta
+leguas, y el gran Marañon, à el inferior en nada e que pasa bien vecino de la
+ciudad de Cuzco.’
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot030"></a>
+<b>[30]</b> Barco de la Centenera, in ‘La Argentina’, canto v., also refers to
+‘La Casa del Gran Moxo’. It was situated ‘en una laguna’, and was ‘toda de
+piedra labrada’.
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot031"></a>
+<b>[31]</b> Their numerals are four in number (<i>peteî, mocoî, mbohap,
+irând</i>); after this they are said to count in Spanish in the same way as do
+the Guaraní-speaking Paraguayans. Much has been written on the Guaraní tongue
+by many authors, but perhaps the ‘Gramatica’, ‘Tesoro’, and the ‘Vocabulario’
+of Padre Antonio Ruiz Montoya, published at Madrid in 1639 and 1640, remain the
+most important works on the language. Padre Sigismundi has left a curious work
+in Guaraní on the medicinal plants of Paraguay. Before the war of 1866-70
+several MS. copies were said to exist in that country. See Du Gratz’s
+‘République du Paraguay’, cap. iv., p. 214.
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot032"></a>
+<b>[32]</b> See Demersay, ‘Histoire du Paraguay’, p. 324, for names of Guaraní
+tribes. Alfred Maury also, in his ‘La Terre et l’Homme Américain’, p. 392,
+speaks of ‘le rameau brasilio-guaranin, ou Caráibe, qui s’etendait jadis depuis
+les Petites-Antilles jusqu’au Paraguay.’
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot033"></a>
+<b>[33]</b> Few modern ‘conquerors’ in Africa seem to have engaged in personal
+combat with the natives. Even of Mr. Rhodes it is not set down that he has
+killed many Matabele with his own hands. Times change, not always for the
+bettering of things.
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot034"></a>
+<b>[34]</b> Santiago, as in duty bound, usually appeared whenever Spaniards
+were hard pressed. Few writers had the courage of Bernal Diaz, who of a similar
+appearance said: ‘But I, sinner that I was, was not worthy to see him; whom I
+did see and recognise was Francisco de Morla on his chestnut horse’ (Bernal
+Diaz, ‘Historia de la Conquista de Nueva España’, cap. xxxiv., p. 141; Madrid,
+1795).
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot035"></a>
+<b>[35]</b> Thus it will be seen that the Franciscans were at work in the
+country long before the arrival of the Jesuits. It may be on this account that
+they became such bitter enemies of the later comers.
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot036"></a>
+<b>[36]</b> ‘Comentarios de Alvar Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca’. Published by Don
+Andres Gonzalez Barcia in his collection of ‘Early Historians of the Indies’
+(Madrid, 1749).
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot037"></a>
+<b>[37]</b> It must be allowed, however, that in their writings few of the
+Spanish <i>conquistadores</i> of America bragged much. They mostly gave the
+credit of all their doings to the God of Battles. The boasting has been
+reserved for the conquerors of Africa in our own time.
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot038"></a>
+<b>[38]</b> <i>Asiento</i> is a contract. The contract which Charles V., at the
+well-meant but unfortunate instigation of Las Casas, made with the Genoese to
+supply negroes for America is known as ‘El Asiento de los Negros’.
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot039"></a>
+<b>[39]</b> In the <i>capitulacion</i> made by Alvar Nuñez with the King occurs
+the celebrated clause, ‘Que no pasasen procuradores ni abogados a las Indias’,
+<i>i.e.</i>, that neither solicitors nor barristers should go to the Indies. It
+is unfortunate it was not held to stringently, as in Paraguay, at least, the
+Reptilia were already well represented.
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot040"></a>
+<b>[40]</b> This is perhaps the first account of the levying of the tithe in
+the New World.
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot041"></a>
+<b>[41]</b> These backwaters are known in Guaraní by the name of
+<i>aguapey</i>.
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot042"></a>
+<b>[42]</b> The vinchuca is a kind of flying bug common in Paraguay. Its shape
+is triangular, its colour gray, and its odour noxious. It is one of the
+Hemiptera, and its so-called scientific appellation is <i>onorhinus gigas</i>.
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot043"></a>
+<b>[43]</b> R. B. Cunninghame Graham writes elsewhere: “All over South America
+the jaguar is called a tiger (tigre).”—A. L., 1998.
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot044"></a>
+<b>[44]</b> Azara, in his ‘Historia del Paraguay’, etc., tells us that in 1551
+Domingo de Irala at Asuncion bought a fine black horse for five thousand gold
+crowns. He bound himself to pay for him out of the proceeds of his first
+conquest.
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot045"></a>
+<b>[45]</b> ‘Comentarios de Alvar Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca’, contained in Barcia’s
+‘Historiadores Primitivos de las Indias Occidentales’.
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot046"></a>
+<b>[46]</b> The ‘patriots’ are always those of the prevailing party in a State.
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot047"></a>
+<b>[47]</b>
+</p>
+
+<p class="center">
+‘(I.H.S.)
+</p>
+
+<p>
+‘God preserve your Excellency, say we, the Cabildo, and all the Caciques and
+Indians, men, women and children of San Luis, as your Excellency is our father.
+The Corregidor, Santiago Pindo and Don Pantaleon Caynari, in their love for us,
+have written to us of certain birds which they desire we will send them for the
+King. . . . We are sorry not to have them to send, inasmuch as they live where
+God made them, in the forests, and fly far away from us, so that we cannot
+catch them. Withal we are the vassals of God and of the King, and always
+desirous to fulfil the wishes of his Minister . . . so we pray to God that that
+best of birds, the Holy Ghost, may descend upon the King. . . . Furthermore, we
+desire to say that the Spanish custom is not to our liking—for everyone to
+take care of himself, instead of helping one another in their daily toil.’
+</p>
+
+<p>
+This quaint and touching letter was written originally in Guaraní, and is
+preserved at Buenos Ayres. ‘That best of birds, the Holy Ghost,’ shows faith
+grounded, at least, on ornithology, and the whole spirit of the simple document
+is as pathetic as its unconscious philosophy is true.
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot048"></a>
+<b>[48]</b> Guevara, ‘Historia del Paraguay’ (printed in ‘La Coleccion de
+Angelis’, Buenos Aires, 1836), book vi., p. 108, says of Alvar Nuñez: ‘Merecia
+estatua por su rectitud, justicia y Christiandad.’ And in another place Guevara
+says: ‘La Florida lo cautivó con inhumanidad; La Asuncion lo aprisionó con
+infamia; pero en una y otro parte fue ejemplar de moderacion . . . recto,
+prudente y de sano corazon.’ Alvar Nuñez died holding the office of ‘Oidor de
+la Audiencia de Sevilla’, according to P. del Techo (‘Historia del Paraguay’);
+or as a member of the Consejo de Indias, according to Charlevoix.
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot049"></a>
+<b>[49]</b> Acquaviva was General of the Order at this time; he was a man of
+marked ability and great energy.
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot050"></a>
+<b>[50]</b> Before this date the Jesuits in Paraguay had been under the
+ecclesiastical jurisdiction of the Bishops of Peru.
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot051"></a>
+<b>[51]</b> Paranapané = the White Paraná, or, according to others, the Paraná
+without fish.
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot052"></a>
+<b>[52]</b> Reduction (<i>reduccion</i>) was the Spanish name for a missionary
+establishment.
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot053"></a>
+<b>[53]</b> Some of the Spanish writers refer to Filds as Padre Tom Filds. His
+real name was Fields, and he was a Scotchman.
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot054"></a>
+<b>[54]</b> The Paulistas were the inhabitants of the Portuguese (now
+Brazilian) town of São Paulo. Azara, who hated the Jesuits (his brother, Don
+Nicolas de Azara, having been concerned in their expulsion), says that fear of
+the Paulistas contributed to the success of the Jesuits with the Indians. Dean
+Funes (‘Historia del Paraguay’, etc.) says just as reasonably that it was fear
+of the Spanish settlers.
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot055"></a>
+<b>[55]</b> There was, however, a royal Order (<i>cedula real</i>) which
+applied to all America, which especially prohibited Spaniards from living in
+the Indian towns, and, moreover, provided that even for purposes of trade no
+Spaniard should remain for more than three days in an Indian town.
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot056"></a>
+<b>[56]</b> ‘Histoire Politique et Philosophique des Indes’, vol. i., p. 289
+(Genève, 1780).
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot057"></a>
+<b>[57]</b> Cretineau Joly, ‘Histoire Religieuse, Politique et Littéraire de la
+Compagnie de Jésus’, vol. iii., cap. v., p. 322 (Paris, 1846).
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot058"></a>
+<b>[58]</b> ‘Historia General de los hechos de los Castellanos en las Islas y
+tierra firme del Mar Oceano’, decad. v., lib. iv., cap. xl.
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot059"></a>
+<b>[59]</b> ‘Historia General de los hechos de los Castellanos en las Islas y
+tierra firme del Mar Oceano’, decad. v., lib. x., cap. lxxx.
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot060"></a>
+<b>[60]</b> ‘Inventarios de los bienes hallados á la Expulsion de los Jesuitas’
+(Madrid, 1872).
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot061"></a>
+<b>[61]</b> The Franciscans had already five or six settlements.
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot062"></a>
+<b>[62]</b> The word in Brazil is used to designate a half-breed, but the
+etymology seems unknown.
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot063"></a>
+<b>[63]</b> ‘Me he de salvar a pesar de Dios, porque para salvarse el hombre no
+ha menester mas que creer’ (Ruiz Montoya, ‘Conquista Espiritual’). Montoya adds
+with a touch of humour quite in Cervantes’ vein: ‘Este, sabe ya por experiencia
+la falsedad de su doctrina, porque le mataron de tres balazos, sin confesion.’
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot064"></a>
+<b>[64]</b> The Mamelucos sometimes pushed their forays right through Paraguay
+into the district of the Moxos, and Padre Patricio Fernandez, in his curious
+‘Relacion de los Indios Chiquitos’ (Madrid, 1726), relates their adventures in
+that far-distant district, and the conflicts which the Indians, led by their
+priests and helped by the Spanish settlers, sustained.
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot065"></a>
+<b>[65]</b> Lahier (Francisci) S. I., ‘Annæ Paraguarie, Annor. 1635, et duor.
+sequ.’
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot066"></a>
+<b>[66]</b> ‘Relazioni della Provincia del Paraguai’.
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot067"></a>
+<b>[67]</b> Brabo.
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot068"></a>
+<b>[68]</b> An <i>estero</i> is a tract of country covered by water to the
+depth of two or three feet. The bottom is usually hard, but it is full of holes
+and hummocks. High pampa grass and reeds not infrequently obscure the view, and
+clouds of insects make life miserable. If the tract extends to more than a
+day’s journey, the night passed on a dry hummock, holding one’s horse and
+listening without a fire to the wild beasts, is likely to remain present to one
+in after-life, especially if alone; the only things that seem to link one to
+humanity are one’s horse and the familiar stars. Perhaps that is why Capella
+has always seemed to me in some sort my own property.
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot069"></a>
+<b>[69]</b> This curious berry, about the size of a large damson, grows on a
+little shrub in sandy and rocky soils. It has a thick yellow rind and several
+large seeds, and the property of being icy cold in the hottest weather—a true
+traveller’s joy. Dr. de Bourgade de la Dardye, in his excellent book on
+Paraguay (the English edition published in London in 1892), thinks it is either
+a eugenia or a myrtus.
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot070"></a>
+<b>[70]</b> Charlevoix, vol. i., liv. vii., p. 384.
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot071"></a>
+<b>[71]</b> <i>Ibid.</i>, liv. vii., p. 359.
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot072"></a>
+<b>[72]</b> Charlevoix, ‘Histoire du Paraguay’, vol. lvi., p. 285.
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot073"></a>
+<b>[73]</b> ‘Conquista Espiritual del Paraguay’, Ruiz de Montoya, introductory
+chapter.
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot074"></a>
+<b>[74]</b> This may either mean to the service of God or to the service of the
+King (Philip III.), for in the time of Montoya ‘Majesty’ was used in addressing
+both the King of Spain and the King of Heaven.
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot075"></a>
+<b>[75]</b> Yapeyu, or Reyes, was the southernmost of the Jesuit reductions. It
+was situated upon the Uruguay in what is now the Argentine province of Entre
+Rios.
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot076"></a>
+<b>[76]</b> ‘Conquista Espiritual’, p. 22.
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot077"></a>
+<b>[77]</b> This time, it is to be hoped, without omissions.
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot078"></a>
+<b>[78]</b> ‘Dando gracias por agravios negocian los hombres sabios.’
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot079"></a>
+<b>[79]</b> Soon afterwards ruined by the Paulistas.
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot080"></a>
+<b>[80]</b> <i>Cacique</i> = chief.
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot081"></a>
+<b>[81]</b> These raids were known as <i>malocas</i>.
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot082"></a>
+<b>[82]</b> In Paraguay it was not unusual for foreign Jesuits to hispaniolize
+their names; thus, Smith became Esmid. But it was more usual to add a Spanish
+name, as appears to have been the case with P. Vansurk Mansilla. Father Manuel
+Querini, in his report to the King of Spain in 1750, mentions the names of
+Boxer, Keiner, and Limp, with many other French, English, and German names,
+amongst those of priests at the various missions.
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot083"></a>
+<b>[83]</b> Montoya, ‘Conquista Espiritual’. Also Charlevoix.
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot084"></a>
+<b>[84]</b> It is certain that the Guaranís, like many other Indians, were
+polygamists, and Xarque, in his ‘Vida Apostolica del P. Joseph Cataldino’, thus
+explains the matter: ‘El tener tanto numero de concubinas, no solamente lo
+ocasiona su natural lascivo, sino tambien, el vicio de la embriaguez, pues
+teniendo tantas criadas tenian con mas abundancia su cerveza y vino.’ Thus
+Xarque seems to agree with the late Miss Mary Kingsley, who in one of her books
+(though she says nothing about the ‘natural lascivo’ of the negroes of the West
+Coast of Africa) seems to attribute the polygamy of the negroes to the
+difficulty a man experiences, in the countries in which she travelled, in
+getting his food prepared by one wife.
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot085"></a>
+<b>[85]</b> Charcas is situated in what is now Bolivia, and was extremely
+inconvenient for all dwellers on the eastern side of the Andes to reach.
+Whether this was a masterpiece of policy calculated to discourage lawsuits, or
+whether it was merely due to Spanish incuriousness and maladministration, is a
+moot point.
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot086"></a>
+<b>[86]</b> The Indians of the missions were not allowed to possess firearms at
+this period.
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot087"></a>
+<b>[87]</b> ‘Paraguay’, Dr. E. de Bourgade la Dardye; English edition by George
+Philips junior (London, 1892). The Indians call it Salto de Canandiyú, which,
+according to Azara, was the name of a <i>cacique</i> whom the first Spaniards
+met there.
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot088"></a>
+<b>[88]</b> ‘Descripcion y Historia del Paraguay’, Madrid, 1847.
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot089"></a>
+<b>[89]</b> ‘Y es un espantoso despeñadero de agua’, etc. (‘Descripcion del
+Paraguay’, tomo i., p. 39).
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot090"></a>
+<b>[90]</b> ‘No dan cuartel’.
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot091"></a>
+<b>[91]</b> At least, I have been unable to discover any other account by an
+eye-witness.
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot092"></a>
+<b>[92]</b> This city was situated near the great falls of Guayrá, and was
+destroyed by the Paulistas, as well as the city of Villa Rica, after the
+Jesuits and their Indians left the province.
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot093"></a>
+<b>[93]</b> ‘Conquista Espiritual’, p. 48.
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot094"></a>
+<b>[94]</b> ‘Rigoroso examen’ (‘Conquista Espiritual’).
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot095"></a>
+<b>[95]</b> In all the books and pamphlets I have searched about the Jesuits in
+Paraguay, both friendly and unfriendly to the Order, I have never found a
+charge of personal unchastity advanced against a Jesuit. In regard to the other
+religious Orders it is far otherwise.
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot096"></a>
+<b>[96]</b> Azara, ‘Descripcion e Historia del Paraguay’, tomo i., p. 40: ‘En
+las inmediaciones del Salto hay proporcion para tomar las medidas geometricas
+que se quiera y metiendose por el bosque se puede reconocer lo inferior del
+Salto, bien que para este es menester desnudare totalmente porque llueve
+mucho.’
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot097"></a>
+<b>[97]</b> Azara records (book i.) the Indian fable that no living thing could
+exist near the cataract. Though this is of course untrue, yet in most
+Paraguayan forests near water, game is both scarce and hard to find.
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot098"></a>
+<b>[98]</b> ‘Con buenas prendas de su salud eterna’ (‘Conquista Espiritual’).
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot099"></a>
+<b>[99]</b> Fathers Suarez, Contreras, and Espinosa were Montoya’s lieutenants
+in this memorable retreat. It is difficult to give the palm to the energy and
+courage of the four priests, or to the resignation and faith of the immense
+multitude of Indians who were saved by them.
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot100"></a>
+<b>[100]</b> <i>Culebra</i> is the Spanish for a serpent. These fish may have
+been waterboas, or, again, as seems probable by their digestive powers, some
+kind of hypothetical fish not yet catalogued.
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot101"></a>
+<b>[101]</b> The name of this river seems to have passed through the machine of
+some medieval typewriter, for it is like no name in any language, and Montoya
+knew Guaraní well, having written much in that language.
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot102"></a>
+<b>[102]</b> Even so late as the year 1777, in which the last treaty of
+boundaries was signed at San Ildefonso, Portugal was the gainer, though not so
+greatly as by the former treaties of 1681 and 1750.
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot103"></a>
+<b>[103]</b> ‘Efemerides o Diario de la Guerra de los Guaranies’, por P. Tadeo
+Hennis. This journal has, I think, never been published in its entirety, but
+portions of it are to be found in the collection of documents, Bulls,
+despatches, etc., published at Madrid in 1768 under the title of ‘Causa
+Jesuitica de Portugal’. The author of this book calls Hennis a German, but his
+name, Thadeus Ennis (as it is often spelt), and his love of fighting look
+un-Germanic. Portions of the diary are also to be found in the work of Bernardo
+Ibañez de Echegarray, entitled ‘Histoire du Paraguay sous les Jésuites’
+(Amsterdam, 1780). Either the original or an old manuscript copy exists in the
+archives of Simancas, where I have seen, but unfortunately did not examine, it.
+A portion of the work is also included in the ‘Coleccion de Angelis’ (Buenos
+Ayres, 1836).
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot104"></a>
+<b>[104]</b> ‘Histoire d’un Voyage faict en la Terre du Brésil’.
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot105"></a>
+<b>[105]</b> The way of the neophyte even to-day is hard, so many priests of
+different jarring sects disputing for his soul as hotly as if it were a
+preference stock which they had private intimation was just about to rise.
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot106"></a>
+<b>[106]</b> This province was sometimes called Guayrá, and sometimes La
+Provincia de Vera, Vera being the family name of Alvar Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca.
+Its position, etc., may be determined by reference to the curious volume of
+maps published at Madrid by Don Francisco Javier Brabo in 1872.
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot107"></a>
+<b>[107]</b> That a mission could be so undefended as to need trenches, that a
+Jesuit should ask leave to make such elementary defences, even in the face of
+imminent danger, seems to prove that the Jesuits at least in 1636 had no
+intention of defying the sovereign power, as was so often alleged against them.
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot108"></a>
+<b>[108]</b> San Joaquin, Santa Teresa, Santa Ana.
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot109"></a>
+<b>[109]</b> ‘Histoire du Paraguay’, liv. ix., p. 446.
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot110"></a>
+<b>[110]</b> This territory is now the Argentine province of Misiones.
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot111"></a>
+<b>[111]</b> This seems to prove the malice of those who set about that the
+Indians of the missions paid no taxes to the Crown.
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot112"></a>
+<b>[112]</b> Vieyra, the great Portuguese Jesuit, said that all miracles were
+possible to God, but yet that he had never heard that our Lord had ever cured
+anyone of folly.
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot113"></a>
+<b>[113]</b> Now a province of the Argentine Republic.
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot114"></a>
+<b>[114]</b> ‘Historia Paraquariæ’, book xii., cap. xii.
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot115"></a>
+<b>[115]</b> La Plata was sometimes called Chuquisaca, and is to-day known as
+Sucre.
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot116"></a>
+<b>[116]</b> ‘Histoire du Paraguay’, vol. i., book ix., p. 478.
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot117"></a>
+<b>[117]</b> Charlevoix, vol. i., book xi. Dean Funes, in his ‘Ensayo de la
+Historia Civil de Paraguay, Buenos Ayres y Tucuman’, vol. ii., book iii., p. 10
+(Buenos Ayres, 1816), says of him: ‘Se adquirió muy en breve una reputacion mas
+brillante que solida.’
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot118"></a>
+<b>[118]</b> But besides putting into execution all his histrionic talents, he
+had the adroitness to address himself to those feelings of self-interest which
+he knew were perhaps more powerful than those of admiration and respect for his
+own saintly proceedings in his new diocese. Crétineau Joly, in his ‘Histoire de
+la Compagnie de Jésus’, vol. iii., p. 333 (Paris, 1845), tells us that Cardenas
+‘parle aux Espagnols, il s’addresse à leurs interêts, il réveille les vieux
+levain de discorde . . . et il accuse les missionnaires d’être seuls les
+apôtres de la liberté des Indiens.’
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot119"></a>
+<b>[119]</b> ‘Oraculo Manual y Arte de Prudencia’ (Amsterdam, en casa de Juan
+Blau, 1659).
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot120"></a>
+<b>[120]</b> Charlevoix.
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot121"></a>
+<b>[121]</b> Exod. 32:27.
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot122"></a>
+<b>[122]</b> The arroba is about twenty-five pounds weight.
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot123"></a>
+<b>[123]</b> Charlevoix.
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot124"></a>
+<b>[124]</b> Camalote is a species of water-lily which forms a thick covering
+on stagnant rivers and lakes in Paraguay and in the Argentine Republic.
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot125"></a>
+<b>[125]</b> This was untrue, as the Jesuit missions were not at that time
+(1644) apportioned into parishes under the authority of the Jesuits, and such
+tribute as then was customary was all collected by government officials.
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot126"></a>
+<b>[126]</b> This was also untrue, as the tithes were never regulated in
+Paraguay till 1649.
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot127"></a>
+<b>[127]</b> This accusation was quite untrue, for the edict referred to was
+not obtained under misapprehension, but after a complete exposition of all the
+facts. Moreover, it was subsequently renewed on several occasions by the
+Spanish Kings.
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot128"></a>
+<b>[128]</b> The Venetians did not expel the Jesuits, they left Venetia of
+their own accord.
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot129"></a>
+<b>[129]</b> Fathers Montoya and Taño went respectively to Rome and to Madrid
+to lay the sorrows of the Indians before the King and Pope. Having obtained the
+edict from the King that Cardenas referred to, and a brief from the Pope (Urban
+VIII.) forbidding slavery, they had the hardihood to appear within the city of
+San Paulo and affix both edicts to the church door. As was to be expected, the
+Paulistas immediately expelled them from their territories, and hence the
+semi-truth of the sixth charge made by Bishop Cardenas.
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot130"></a>
+<b>[130]</b> Funes, ‘Historia Civil del Paraguay, Buenos-Ayres, y Tucuman’.
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot131"></a>
+<b>[131]</b> The testimony of Funes is as follows: ‘Á juicio de testigo ocular
+no es más admirable la sangre fria de sus capellanes’ (‘Historia Civil del
+Paraguay’, book iii., cap. viii.).
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot132"></a>
+<b>[132]</b> Literally, ‘taking out the blocks to air’. The effigies are made
+of hard and heavy wood, and I remember once in Concepcion de Paraguay assisting
+on a sweltering day to carry a Madonna weighing about five hundredweight.
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot133"></a>
+<b>[133]</b> The proverb says in Paraguay, ‘No se fia de mula ni mulata’.
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot134"></a>
+<b>[134]</b> ‘Pagar y apelar’.
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot135"></a>
+<b>[135]</b> Misque is at least fifteen hundred miles from Tucuman.
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot136"></a>
+<b>[136]</b> ‘Que lo hagan salir de nuestros Reynos y Señorios como ageno y
+estraño, por importar assi para la quietud de aquellas Provincias, y al
+servicio de su Majestad.’
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot137"></a>
+<b>[137]</b> A <i>yerbal</i> is a forest chiefly composed of the <i>Ilex
+Paraguayensis</i>, from the leaves of which the <i>yerba maté</i>, or
+‘Paraguayan tea’, is made.
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot138"></a>
+<b>[138]</b> Xarque, book ii., cap. xl., p. 30.
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot139"></a>
+<b>[139]</b> This Villalon has left some curious memoirs in the case which he
+submitted to the Council of the Indies which sat in Seville.
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot140"></a>
+<b>[140]</b> Charlevoix, book xii., p. 115.
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot141"></a>
+<b>[141]</b> Chipa is a kind of bread made of mandioca flour.
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot142"></a>
+<b>[142]</b> Rapadura is a kind of coarse sugar, generally sold in little
+pyramid-shaped lumps, done up in a banana leaf. It is strongly flavoured with
+lye.
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot143"></a>
+<b>[143]</b> Mani is ground-nut. [“Peanut” in American English.—A. L., 1998.]
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot144"></a>
+<b>[144]</b> The paraiso is one of the Paulinias.
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot145"></a>
+<b>[145]</b> ‘Obedesco, pero no cumplo.’
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot146"></a>
+<b>[146]</b> ‘Cosas de palacio van despacio.’
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot147"></a>
+<b>[147]</b> Dean Funes, in his ‘Ensayo de la Historia Civil del Paraguay,
+Buenos Ayres y Tucuman’ (book ii., cap. i., p. 10), says he was ‘Dotado de un
+temperamento muy facil de inflamarse, de una imaginacion viva, de una memoria
+feliz, y de un ingenio no vulgar.’
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot148"></a>
+<b>[148]</b> At the date of the expulsion the number of the cattle was 719,761;
+oxen, 44,183; horses, 27,204; sheep, 138,827 (‘Inventarios de los bienes
+hallados á la expulsion de los Jesuitas’, Francisco Javier Brabo, Madrid,
+1872).
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot149"></a>
+<b>[149]</b> <i>Cocos yatais</i>.
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot150"></a>
+<b>[150]</b> Urunday (<i>Astrenium fraxinifolium: Terebinthaceæ</i>), curapay
+(<i>Piptadenia communis: Leguminaceæ</i>), lapacho (<i>Tecoma curialis</i> and
+<i>varia: Begoniaceæ</i>), taruma (<i>Vitex Taruma: Verbenaceæ</i>), tatane
+(<i>Acacia maleolens: Leguminaceæ</i>), and cupai (<i>Copaifera
+Langsdorfii</i>). These and many other woods, such as the Palo Santo
+(<i>Guaiacum officinalis</i>), butacæ, and the <i>Cedrela Braziliensis</i>,
+known to the Jesuits as ‘cedar’, and much used by them in their churches,
+comprise the chief varieties.
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot151"></a>
+<b>[151]</b> ‘Libro compuesto por el Hermano Pedro de Montenegro de la C. de
+J., Ano 1711’, MS. folio, with pen-and-ink sketches, formerly belonged to the
+Dukes of Osuna, and was in their library. Padre Sigismundi also wrote a herbal
+in Guaraní, and a Portuguese Jesuit, Vasconellos, has left a curious book upon
+the flora of Brazil.
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot152"></a>
+<b>[152]</b> Domingo Parodi, in his ‘Notas sobre algunas plantas usuales del
+Paraguay’ (Buenos Ayres, 1886), has done much good work.
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot153"></a>
+<b>[153]</b> <i>Acacia Cavenia</i>.
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot154"></a>
+<b>[154]</b> <i>Prosopis dulcis</i>. The famous ‘balm of the missions’, known
+by the vulgar name of <i>curalo todo</i> (all-heal), was made from the gum of
+the tree called aguacciba, one of the Terebinthaceæ. It was sold by the Jesuits
+in Europe. It was so highly esteemed that the inhabitants of the villages near
+to which the tree was found were specially enjoined to send a certain quantity
+of the balsam every year to the King’s pharmacy in Madrid.
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot155"></a>
+<b>[155]</b> It was from those mountains that the Jesuits procured the seed of
+the <i>Ilex Paraguayensis</i> to plant in their reductions. The leaves beaten
+into a finish powder furnished the ‘Paraguayan tea’, called <i>yerba-maté</i>
+by the Spaniards and <i>caa</i> by the Indians, from which the Jesuits derived
+a handsome revenue. After the expulsion of the Order all the <i>yerba</i> in
+Paraguay was procured, till a few years ago, from forests in the north of
+Paraguay, in which the tree grew wild.
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot156"></a>
+<b>[156]</b> It was by the Bull of Paul III.—given at the demand of two
+monks, Fray Domingo de Betanzos and Fray Domingo de Minaya—that the Indians
+were first considered as reasoning men (<i>gente de razon</i>), and not as
+unreasonable beings (<i>gente sin razon</i>), as Juan Ortiz, Bishop of Santa
+Marta, wished.
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot157"></a>
+<b>[157]</b> Ibañez (‘Histoire du Paraguay sous les Jésuites M.D.CCIXXX.’), a
+great opponent of the Jesuits, says that European offenders and recalcitrant
+Indians in the missions were sent as a last resource to the Spanish
+settlements. This is not astonishing when we remember the curious letter of Don
+Pedro Faxardo, Bishop of Buenos Ayres (preserved by Charlevoix), written in
+1721 to the King of Spain, in which he says he thinks ‘that not a mortal crime
+is committed in the missions in a year.’ He adds that, ‘if the Jesuits were so
+rich, why are their colleges so poor?’
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot158"></a>
+<b>[158]</b> It is to be remembered that, of the thirty Jesuit missions, only
+eight were in Paraguay; the rest were in what to-day is Brazil and the
+Argentine provinces of Entre Rios, Corrientes, and Misiones.
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot159"></a>
+<b>[159]</b> Sometimes, when they had been assembled, they all deserted
+suddenly, as did the Tobatines, who in 1740 suddenly left the reduction of
+Santa Fé, and for eleven years were lost in the forests, till Father Yegros
+found them, and, as they would not return, established himself amongst them
+(Cretineau Joly, ‘Histoire de la Compagnie de Jésus’, vol. v., cap. ii.).
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot160"></a>
+<b>[160]</b> P. Cardiel, ‘Declaracion de la Verdad’, p. 282: ‘Todos los pueblos
+estan bien formados con calles á cordel. Las casas de los Indios son en algunos
+pueblos de piedras cuadradas pero sin cal . . . otras de palos y barro todas
+cubiertas de teja, y todas tienen soportales ó corredores, unas con pilares de
+piedras, otras de madera.’
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot161"></a>
+<b>[161]</b> Don Francisco Graell, an officer of dragoons in service during the
+War of the Seven Towns in 1750, gives the following description of the church
+of the mission of San Miguel: ‘La iglesia es muy capaz, toda de piedra de
+silleria con tres naves y media naranja. Muy bien pintada y dorada con un
+portico magnifico y de bellisima arquitectura, bovedas y media naranja son de
+madera, el altar mayor de talla, sin dorar y le falta el ultimo cuerpo.’
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot162"></a>
+<b>[162]</b> ‘Galerias con columnas, barandillas y escaleras de piedra
+entallada’ (Don Francisco Graell). See also P. Cardiel (‘Declaracion de la
+Verdad’, p. 247), ‘En todos los pueblos hay reloj de sol y de ruedas,’ etc. The
+work of Padre Cardiel was written in 1750 in the missions of Paraguay, but
+remained unpublished till 1800, when it appeared in Buenos Ayres from the press
+of Juan A. Alsina, Calle de Mexico 1422. It is, perhaps, after the ‘Conquista
+Espiritual’ of Father Ruiz Montoya, the most powerful contemporary
+justification of the policy of the Jesuits in Paraguay. It is powerfully but
+simply written, and contains withal that saving grace of humour which has, from
+the beginning of the world, been a stumbling-block to fools.
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot163"></a>
+<b>[163]</b> The mission of San Miguel had 1,353 families in it, or say 6,635
+souls. San Francisco de Borja contained 650 families, or 2,793 souls (Report by
+Manuel Querini to the King, dated Cordoba de Tucuman, y Agosto 1o, 1750).
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot164"></a>
+<b>[164]</b> In their extensive missions in the provinces of Chiquitos and
+Moxos they pursued the same system. As they were much more isolated in those
+provinces than in Paraguay, and consequently much less interfered with, it was
+there that their peculiar system most flourished. After the expulsion of the
+Jesuits from America in 1767, the Spaniards in Alta Peru, and subsequently the
+Bolivians, had the sense to follow the Jesuit plan in its entirety; whereas
+Bucareli, the Viceroy of Buenos Ayres, entirely changed the Jesuits’ rule in
+Paraguay. The consequence was that in Bolivia the Indians, instead of
+dispersing as they did in Paraguay, remained in the missions, and D’Orbigny
+(‘Fragment d’un Voyage au Centre de l’Amérique Méridianale’) saw at the
+missions of Santiago and El Santo Corazon, in the province of Chiquitos, the
+remains of the Jesuits’ polity. There were ten missions in Chiquitos, and
+fifteen in Moxos. At the present time the Franciscans have some small
+establishments in Bolivia.
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot165"></a>
+<b>[165]</b> ‘Pillos muy ladinos’ (Robertson, ‘Letters from Paraguay’).
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot166"></a>
+<b>[166]</b> Ferrer del Rio, in his ‘Coleccion de los articulos de la Esperanza
+sobre Carlos III.’ (Madrid, 1859), says: ‘Fuera de las misiones de los Jesuitas
+particularmente en el Paraguay se consideraban los Indios entre los seres mas
+infelices del mundo.’
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Jorge Juan and Antonio de Ulloa, in their celebrated ‘Secret Report’ (‘Noticias
+Secretas de America’): ‘La compañia (de Jesus) atiende a sus fines
+particularmente con los misioneros que llevan de España; pero con todo eso no
+se olvida de la conversion de los Indios, ni tiene abandonado este asunto pues
+aunque van poco adelante en el, que es lo que no se esperimenten en las demas
+religiones.’
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot167"></a>
+<b>[167]</b> Many travellers, as Azara, Demersay, Du Graty, and D’Orbigny, have
+remarked how fond of music was the Guaraní race, and how soon they learned the
+use of European instruments. D’Orbigny (‘Fragment d’un Voyage au Centre de
+l’Amérique Méridianale’), in his interesting account of the mission of El Santo
+Corazon, in the district of Chiquitos, says: ‘Je fus très étonné d’entendre
+exécuter après les danses indigènes des morceaux de Rossini et . . . de Weber .
+. . la grande messe chantée en musique était exécutée d’une manière très
+remarquable pour des Indiens.’
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Vargas Machuca, in his most curious and rare ‘Milicia y Descripcion de las
+Indias’, says, under the heading of ‘Musica del Indio’: ‘Usan sus musicas
+antiguas en sus regocijos, y son muy tristes en la tonada.’ To-day the Indians
+of Paraguay have songs known as <i>tristes</i>. The brigadier Don Diego de
+Alvear, in his ‘Relacion de Misiones’ (Coleccion de Angelis), says that the
+first to teach the Guaranís European music was a Flemish Jesuit, P. Juan Basco,
+who had been <i>maestro de capilla</i> to the Archduke Albert.
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot168"></a>
+<b>[168]</b> See also P. Cardiel, ‘Declaracion de la Verdad’, p. 274: ‘. . . y
+esta acabada, se toca á Misa á que entran todos cantando el Bendito, y alabado
+en su lengua, ó en Castellano, que en las dos lenguas lo saben.’
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot169"></a>
+<b>[169]</b> Dean Funes, in his ‘Ensayo de la Historia del Paraguay’, etc.,
+says that in the <i>estancia</i> of Santa Tecla, in the missions of Paraguay,
+during the time of the Jesuits, there were 50,000 head of cattle.
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot170"></a>
+<b>[170]</b> ‘Inventarios de los bienes hallados á la expulsion de los
+Jesuitas’, Introduction, xxvii, Francisco Javier Brabo.
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot171"></a>
+<b>[171]</b> The rare and much-sought-after ‘Manuale ad usum Patrum Societatis
+Jesu qui in Reductionibus Paraquariæ versantur, ex Rituale Romano ad Toletano
+decerptum’, was printed at the mission of Loreto. It contains prayers in
+Guaraní as well as in Latin. Here also was printed a curious book of Guaraní
+sermons by Nicolas Yapuguay, many Guaraní vocabularies, and the ‘Arte de la
+Lengua Guaraní’ of Ruiz Montoya.
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot172"></a>
+<b>[172]</b> P. Cardiel, ‘Declaracion de la Verdad’, p. 295: ‘De estos granos
+comunales se da para sembrar’, etc.
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot173"></a>
+<b>[173]</b> This jerked beef is called <i>charqui</i> in South America.
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot174"></a>
+<b>[174]</b> The poorer classes in Paraguay all used to wear the <i>tipoi</i>.
+They covered themselves when it was cold with a white cotton sheet wrapped in
+many folds.
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot175"></a>
+<b>[175]</b> The Jesuits themselves were dressed in homespun clothes, for
+Matias Angles—quoted in the introduction to the ‘Declaracion de la Verdad’ of
+Father Cardiel, published at Buenos Ayres in 1900 (the introduction by P. Pablo
+Hernandez)—says: ‘El vestuario de los Padres es de lienzo de algodon teñido
+de negro, hilado y fabricado por las mismas Indias de los pueblos; y si tal
+qual Padre tiene un capote ó manteo de paña de Castilla se sucede de unos á
+otros, y dura un siglo entero.’
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot176"></a>
+<b>[176]</b> In the ‘Relacion de Misiones’ of the Brigadier Don Diego de
+Alvear, written between 1788 and 1801, and preserved in the ‘Coleccion de
+Angelis’, occurs the following curious description of the feast-day of a patron
+saint of a Jesuit reduction: ‘They make a long alley of interwoven canes, which
+ends in a triumphal arch, which they adorn with branches of palms and other
+trees with considerable grace and taste (<i>con bastante gracia y
+simetria</i>). Under the arch they hang their images of saints, their clothes,
+their first-fruits—as corn and sugar-cane, and calabashes full of maize-beer
+(<i>chicha</i>)—their meat and bread, together with animals both alive and
+dead, such as they can procure (<i>como los pueden haber con su
+diligencia</i>). Then, forming in a ring, they dance and shout, ‘Viva el rey!
+Viva el santo tutelar!’
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot177"></a>
+<b>[177]</b> Many and curious are the names by which the office-bearers went.
+Thus, in the Mission of el Santo Corazon, in the Chiquitos, I find the
+following: Corregidor, the Mayor; Teniente, Lieutenant; Alferez,
+Sub-Lieutenant; Alcalde Primero, Head Alcalde; Alcalde Segundo, Second Alcalde;
+Commandante, Captain (of the Militia); Justicia Mayor, Chief Justice; Sargento
+Mayor, Sergeant-Major. Then came fiscales, fiscals; sacristan mayor,
+head-beadle; capitan de estancia, chief of the cattle farm; capitan de
+pinturas, carpinteria, herreros, etc.—captain of painters, carpenters,
+smiths, etc. All the offices were competed for ardently, and those of
+Corregidor and Alcalde in especial were prized so highly that Indians who were
+degraded from them for bad conduct or carelessness not infrequently died of
+grief.
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot178"></a>
+<b>[178]</b> In each reduction there were two priests. In all Paraguay, at the
+expulsion of the Order in 1767, there were only seventy-eight Jesuits (Dean
+Funes, ‘Ensayo de la Historia del Paraguay’, etc., cap. i., vol. ii.).
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot179"></a>
+<b>[179]</b> In the mission of Los Apostoles there were 599 of these ‘horses of
+the saint’, according to an inventory preserved by Brabo.
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot180"></a>
+<b>[180]</b> Furnished to Bucareli, Viceroy of Buenos Ayres at the expulsion,
+and first printed by Brabo (‘Inventarios de los bienes hallados á la expulsion
+de los Jesuitas’).
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot181"></a>
+<b>[181]</b> The Jesuits exercised the Indians a great deal in dancing, taking
+advantage of their love of dancing in their savage state. D’Orbigny and
+Demersay (‘Fragment d’un Voyage au Centre de l’Amérique Méridianale’, and
+‘Histoire Physique, etc., du Paraguay’) found between the years 1830 and 1855
+that the Indians of the Moxos and Chiquitos still danced as they had done in
+the time of the Jesuits.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I have seen them in the then (1873) almost deserted mission of Jesus, buried in
+the great woods on the shore of the Paraná, dance a strange, half-savage dance
+outside the ruined church.
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot182"></a>
+<b>[182]</b> Cardiel, in his ‘Declaracion de la Verdad’, p. 239, says: ‘Todos
+los pueblos ponen su castillo en la plaza y en el medio de el colocan el
+retratro del Rey, y el Indio Alferez Real . . . va al castillo con el
+Estandarte Real y alli hace su homenage con otros rendimientos anteel Retratro
+Real,’ saying in Guaraní, ‘Toicohengatú ñande Mbaru bicha guazú! Toicohengatú
+ñande Rey marangatú! Toicohengatú ñande Rey Fernando Sesto!’ (‘Long live our
+King, the great chief! Long live our good King! Long live our King Ferdinand
+VI.’).
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot183"></a>
+<b>[183]</b> ‘Chupas de damasco carmesi con encajes de plata.’
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot184"></a>
+<b>[184]</b> It may be roughly translated, ‘a good stone wall between a male
+and female saint.’
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot185"></a>
+<b>[185]</b> These clothes were the property of the community, and not of the
+individual Indians.
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot186"></a>
+<b>[186]</b> Brabo, xxxv., Introduction to ‘Los inventarios de los bienes.’
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot187"></a>
+<b>[187]</b> A recent writer in the little journal published on yellow
+packing-paper in the Socialist colony of Cosme, in Paraguay (<i>Cosme
+Monthly</i>, November, 1898), has a curious passage corroborating what I have
+so often observed myself. Under the heading of ‘A Paraguayan Market’, he says:
+‘The Guaraní clings stubbornly to the Guaraní customs. This is irritating to
+the European, but who shall say that the Guaraní is not right? . . . European
+settlement cannot but be fatal to the Guaraní, however profitable it may be to
+land-owning and mercantile classes. . . . The Paraguayan market is a woman’s
+club . . . they will come thirty or forty miles with a clothful of the white
+curd-cheese of the country, contentedly journeying on foot along the narrow
+paths. They will cut a cabbage into sixteenths and eat their cheese themselves
+rather than sell it under market price.’ Long may they do so, for so long will
+they be free, and perhaps poor; but, then, in countries such as Paraguay
+freedom and poverty are identical.
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot188"></a>
+<b>[188]</b> As the Gaucho proverb says, ‘Las armas son necesarias pero “naide”
+sabe cuando.’
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot189"></a>
+<b>[189]</b> Corregidores, alcaldes, regidores, alguaciles, etc.
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot190"></a>
+<b>[190]</b> Hereditary or sometimes elected chiefs.
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot191"></a>
+<b>[191]</b> I remember seeing on the tombstone of a Spanish sailor his hope of
+salvation through the intercession of the Lord High Admiral Christ. After the
+Spanish custom, officers were often generals both by sea and land, so that
+soldiers were not excluded from the Lord High Admiral’s intercession.
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot192"></a>
+<b>[192]</b> Dean Funes (‘Ensayo de la Historia de Paraguay’, etc.) says:
+‘These Indians went under the command of Don Antonio de Vera Moxica; their
+sergeants were Guaranís and their captains Spaniards. Their <i>cacique</i> was
+Ignacio Amandaá, who commanded in chief under Vera Moxica.’ They fought
+bravely, and returned again and again to the assault of the town after several
+repulses, manifesting the same dogged courage and indifference to death which
+their descendants showed in the war against Brazil in 1866-70. In that war
+bodies of Paraguayans frequently attacked strong positions defended by
+artillery, and allowed themselves to be shot down to the last man rather than
+retire. At other times, concealed behind masses of floating herbage, from their
+canoes they sprang on board Brazilian ironclads, and were all killed in the
+vain endeavour to capture the vessels. I knew a little pettifogging lawyer, one
+Izquierdo, who, with ten companions, attempted in a canoe to take the Brazilian
+flagship (an ironclad); left alone on her deck, after the death of his
+companions, he sprang into the water under a shower of bullets, and, badly
+wounded, swam over to the Chaco, the desert side of the river. There for three
+days he remained, subsisting on wild oranges, and then swam across again on a
+raft of sticks, in spite of the alligators and many fierce fish which abound in
+Paraguay. He got well, and, though lame, was, when I knew him, as arrant a
+little scrivening knave as you could hope to meet in either hemisphere.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+On many other occasions the mission Indians performed notable services for the
+Spanish Government. In 1681, when the French attacked Buenos Ayres, a
+detachment of two thousand Indians was sent to its assistance. Philip V.
+himself wrote to the Provincial of Paraguay on this occasion asking him to send
+troops to the defence of the city.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In 1785 four thousand Guaranís, commanded by Don Baltazar Garcia, were at the
+second siege of the Colonia del Sacramento. Funes says of them: ‘A juicio de un
+testigo ocular, no es menos admirable la sangre fria de sus capellanes.’
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot193"></a>
+<b>[193]</b> ‘Perro Luterano’. It is astonishing how in Spain the comparatively
+innocuous Luther has fallen heir to the heritage of hatred that should more
+properly have belonged to the inhuman and treacherous Calvin.
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot194"></a>
+<b>[194]</b> Philip V. in 1745, after an examination which lasted six years,
+approved of all the actions of the Jesuits in Paraguay (Cretineau Joly,
+‘Histoire de la Compagnie de Jésus’, vol. v., p. 103). So that a curious letter
+of a Jeronimite friar (one Padre Cevallos), written in 1774, is well within due
+limits when it says that all the Jesuits did in Paraguay was ‘todo probado por
+reales cedulas ó procedia de ordenes expresas.’
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot195"></a>
+<b>[195]</b> One is obliged to allow, in common fairness, that Calvin carried
+out in his own practice what he advocated—as witness his conduct with
+Servetus, whom he first calumniated, then entrapped, and lastly murdered in
+cold blood.
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot196"></a>
+<b>[196]</b> Don Francisco Corr sent the following list of arms to the Viceroy
+Zabala, of Buenos Ayres (Funes, ‘Ensayo’, etc.): ‘Armas buenas, 850; lanzas de
+hierro, 3,850; pedreras (culverins), 10. Las flechas no se cuentan.’ He says:
+‘Todos los Indios quando han de salir a compaña llevan 150 flechas de hierro,
+menos los que llevan armos de fuego. Asi mismo cargan “bolas” que son dos
+piedras en una cuerda. Los de a pie que no llevan escopetas tienen lanza,
+flecha, y honda con su provision de piedras en un bolson como de granaderos. Se
+prestan caballos entre los pueblos.’
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot197"></a>
+<b>[197]</b> Ibañez (‘Histoire du Paraguay sous les Jésuites’) states the hides
+sold at about three dollars apiece.
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot198"></a>
+<b>[198]</b> The arroba was twenty-five pounds.
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot199"></a>
+<b>[199]</b> These figures are from Brabo’s inventories.
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot200"></a>
+<b>[200]</b> Ibañez states that only eighty-four dollars a year were set apart
+for the maintenance of each priest.
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot201"></a>
+<b>[201]</b> Dean Funes (‘Ensayo de le Historia Civil del Paraguay’, etc.) puts
+it at a million reales, which almost equals &pound;20,800.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Ibañez (‘La Republica Jesuitica’), with the noble disregard of consequences so
+noticeable in most polemical writers, boldly alters this to a million dollars,
+his object being to prove that the Jesuits exacted exorbitant taxation from the
+neophytes.
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot202"></a>
+<b>[202]</b> The honey of the missions was celebrated, and the wax made by the
+small bee called ‘Opemus’, according to Charlevoix (livre v., p. 285), ‘était
+d’une blancheur qui n’avait rien de pareil, et ces neophytes ont consacré tout
+qu’ils en peuvent avoir à bruler devant les images de la Ste. Vierge.’
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot203"></a>
+<b>[203]</b> In the inventory of the mission of San José I find: ‘Item, doce
+pares de grillos’; but I am bound to say that in this instance they were for
+the use of ‘los Guaicurus infieles prisioneros que estan en dicha mision.’
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot204"></a>
+<b>[204]</b> ‘Il Cristianesimo Felice nelle Missione dei Padri della Compagnia
+di Jesu nel Paraguay’.
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot205"></a>
+<b>[205]</b> ‘L’Histoire du Paraguay sous les Jésuites’, Amsterdam, 1700, lxxv.
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot206"></a>
+<b>[206]</b> In all, the missions amounted to thirty; and for their relative
+situations <i>vide</i> the curious <a href="#map">map</a>, the original of which was published in the work of Padre Pedro
+Lozano, C. de J., ‘Descripcion chorographica del terreno, rios, arboles y
+animales de las dilatadissimas provincias del Gran Chaco, Gualanba’, etc.
+Cordoba, del Tucuman, en el Colegio de la Assumpcion, por Joseph Santos Balbas,
+1733.
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot207"></a>
+<b>[207]</b> A letter of a certain Jesuit (name lost, but dated 1715) says that
+there were at least two thousand canoes in constant use on the Paraná, and
+almost as many more on the Uruguay (Brabo, ‘Inventarios’, etc.).
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot208"></a>
+<b>[208]</b> Corregidores, regidores, alcaldes, etc.
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot209"></a>
+<b>[209]</b> It is not to be supposed, however, that the Indians were kept in
+ignorance. P. Cardiel (‘Declaracion de la Verdad’, p. 222), quoting from the
+Cedula Real of 1743, says that ‘in every one of the towns there is a school
+established to teach reading and writing in Spanish, and that on that account a
+great number of Indians are to be met who write well.’ Cardiel adds, on the
+same page, ‘Dos de ellos estan copiando ahora esto que yo escribo, y de mejor
+letra que la mia.’
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot210"></a>
+<b>[210]</b> Dean Funes (‘Ensayo Critico’, etc.) puts the income from commerce
+of the thirty towns at a hundred thousand dollars, and informs us that, after
+taxation (to the Crown) had been deducted from it, it was applied to the
+maintenance of the churches and other necessary expenses, and by the end of the
+year little of it remained.
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot211"></a>
+<b>[211]</b> Don Martin de Barua, in his memorial to the King (1736),
+complaining of the Jesuits, puts the number of taxable Indians at forty
+thousand. The Commission appointed to examine into the charges in 1736, which
+reported in 1745 (a reasonable interval), affirmed that the taxable Indians
+only numbered 19,116. Each Indian paid an annual poll-tax of one dollar a year
+to the Crown. In addition to that, every town gave one hundred dollars a year.
+The salary of the priests was six hundred dollars a year (Azara, ‘Voyage dans
+l’Amérique Méridionale’).
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot212"></a>
+<b>[212]</b> ‘Account of the Abipones’. London: John Murray, 1822.
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot213"></a>
+<b>[213]</b> ‘Voyage dans l’Amérique Méridionale’. Paris: Denton, 1809.
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot214"></a>
+<b>[214]</b> Perámas (‘De vita et moribus sex sacerdotum Paraguaycorum, Petrus
+Joanes Andrea’, lxxxiv.) states that it appeared, from papers left after their
+expulsion, that the income of the Jesuit College of Cordoba just paid the
+expenses of administration (‘era con escasa diferencia igual á los gastos’).
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In the Archivo General of Buenos Ayres, legajo ‘Compañia de Jesús’, there is a
+document referred to by P. Hernandez in his introduction to the work of P.
+Cardiel (‘Declaracion de la Verdad’), which states that in the year of the
+expulsion the income of the thirty towns fell a little short of the expenses.
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot215"></a>
+<b>[215]</b> Azara, ‘Voyage dans l’Amérique Méridionale’; also Funes, ‘Ensayo
+Critico de la Historia del Paraguay’; and Padre Guevara, ‘Historia del
+Paraguay, Rio de la Plata y Tucuman’.
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot216"></a>
+<b>[216]</b> Archivo General de Simancas, Estado, legajo 7,450, folios 21 y 22,
+5<i>a</i>, Copia de las cartas (sin firma; la siguiente es de Nicolas
+Neenguirú) que se hallaron en letra Guaraní traducidas por los interpreteo
+nombrados en las sorpresa hecha al pueblo de San Lorenzo por el Coronel D. José
+Joaquin de Viana, Gobernador de Montevideo, el dia 20 de Mayo de 1756:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+‘El modo de vivir del Padre es, cerrar bien todas las puertas y quedarse el
+solo, su Mayordomo, y su muchacho. Son ya Indios de edad, y solo estos asisten
+solo de dia adentro, y á las doce salen afuera, y un viejo es quien cuida de la
+Porteria, y es quien Sierra la puerta quando descansa el Padre, ó quando sale
+el Padre á ver su chacara. Y aun entonces van solos, sino es con un Indio de
+hedad quien los giua y cuida de el caballo y despues de esto á misa y á la
+tarde al Rosario de Maria Santisima llamandonos con toque de campana, y antes
+de esto á los muchachos y muchachittas los llama con una campánilla y despues
+de eso el bueno de el Padre entra ha enseñarles la Doctrina, y el persinarse de
+el mismo modo, todos los dias de fiesta nos Predica la palabra de Dios, del
+mismo modo el Santo Sacramento de la Penitencia y de la Communion, en estas
+cosas se exercitta el bueno del Padre y todas las noches se sierra la porteria
+y la llave se lleva al aposento del Padre y solo se vuelve á abrir por la
+mañana quando entra el Sachristan y los cosineros. . . .
+</p>
+
+<p>
+‘Los Padres todas las mañanas nos dicen misas, y despues de misa, se van a su
+aposento y hai cogen un poco de aqua caliente con Yerva y no otra cosa mas;
+despues de esto sale a la puerta de su aposento y ahai todos los que oyeron
+misa se arrimen a besarle la mano, y despues de esto sale afuera a ver los
+Indios si trabajan en los oficios que cada uno tiene, y despues se van a su
+aposento a resar el oficio divino, en su libro, y para que Dios le ayude en
+todas sus cosas. A las once de el dia van a comer un poquitto, no á comer mucho
+solo coge cinco plattitos y solo beve una vez el vino, no llenando un vaso
+pequeño, y aguardiente nunca lo toman y el vino no lo hai en nuestro pueblo,
+solo lo traen de la Candelaria segun lo que envia el Padre Superior lo trahen
+de acia Buenos Aires. . . . Despues que sale de comer y para descansar an poco,
+y mientras descansa salen fuera los que assisten en la casa del Padre, y los
+que trabajan dentro en algunas obras y tamvien el Sachristan y el cosinero:
+todos estos salen fuera y quando no se toca la campana estan serradas las
+puertas, y solo un viejo es el que cuida de las puertas, y quando vuelvan a
+tocar la campana, vuelve este a abrirlas para que vuelvan a entrar los que
+trabajan dentro, y el Padre Coge el Brebiario no a ir a parte ninguna. A la
+tarde tocan la campanilla paraque se recojan las criatturas, y entre el Padre á
+ensenarles la doctrina christiana.’
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot217"></a>
+<b>[217]</b> Perhaps the entire isolation of the Jesuits in these two provinces
+accounts for their absolute quiet; and if this is so, it goes far to prove that
+they were right to attempt the same isolation in Paraguay. The comparative
+nearness of the Spanish settlements frustrated their attempts in this instance.
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot218"></a>
+<b>[218]</b> For ‘reasoning men’, and how this monstrous superstition still
+prevails in Venezuela, see the charming book of S. Perez Triana, ‘De Bogota al
+Atlantico’, etc., pp. 156-158 (Paris: Impresa Sud Americana). A really
+interesting book of travels, without cant, and without an eye on the public.
+Strange to relate, the author seems to have killed nothing during his journey.
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot219"></a>
+<b>[219]</b> Charlevoix, book iv.
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot220"></a>
+<b>[220]</b> ‘Conquista Espiritual’, Ruiz Montoya.
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot221"></a>
+<b>[221]</b> ‘Voyage dans l’Amérique Méridionale’.
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot222"></a>
+<b>[222]</b> Azara, ‘Viage al America Meridional’, tomo 2, cap 12. ‘La corte
+ordenó a Don Francisco de Alfaro oidor de la Audiencia de Charcas pasar al Perú
+en calidad de visitador. La primera medida que tomó en 1612 fue ordenar que
+ninguno en lo sucesivo pudiese ir a casa de Indios, con el pretexto de
+reducirlos, y que no se diesen encomiendas del modo que hemos explicado, es
+decir con servicio personal. No alcanzo sobre que podia fundarse una medida tan
+politicamente absurda: pero como este oidor favorecia las <i>ideas de los
+Jesuitas</i>, se sospechó que por aquel tiempo que ellos dictaron su conducta.’
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot223"></a>
+<b>[223]</b> For <i>mitas</i> and <i>encomiendas</i>, see foregoing chapters.
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot224"></a>
+<b>[224]</b> Brabo, ‘Inventarios de los bienes hallados a la expulsion de las
+Jesuitas’.
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot225"></a>
+<b>[225]</b> ‘Voyage dans l’Amérique Méridionale’.
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot226"></a>
+<b>[226]</b> P. Cardiel (‘Declaracion de la Verdad’, p. 449), quoting from
+Xarque (‘La Vida Apostolica del Padre Joseph Cataidino’, Zaragoça por Juan de
+Ypa, 1664), says, <i>re</i> the diminution of the Indians under the Spanish
+rule: ‘Para que se vea cuanta razon tiene el Juez reparese que segun los
+padrones del siglo pasado (vg. 1600-1700) en la ciudad y jurisdicion de
+Santiago del Estero habia 80,000 Indios y ahora, apenas hay ochenta. En la
+jurisdicion de Cordoba de Tucuman, habia 40,000; hoy no hay 40. En la
+jurisdicion y cercanias de la ciudad de Buenos Ayres, habia 30,000; hoy apenas
+hay 30.’
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot227"></a>
+<b>[227]</b> Charlevoix, vol. ii., livre xvii.
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot228"></a>
+<b>[228]</b> Funes, ‘Ensayo de la Historia Civil del Paraguay’, etc., vol. ii.,
+cap. v., p. 231.
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot229"></a>
+<b>[229]</b> Del Techo, Lozano, Guevara, Charlevoix, etc., etc.
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot230"></a>
+<b>[230]</b> Liberty is commonly only attained by blood. It is, I think, quite
+legitimate in playing the liberty game to kill all who disagree with your
+party, or to banish them. In these degenerate times, lovers of liberty have to
+stop short at calumny, just as if they were mere tyrants.
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot231"></a>
+<b>[231]</b> <i>Guazu</i> = ‘great’ in Guaraní. It is frequent in place-names
+both in Paraguay and Corrientes.
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot232"></a>
+<b>[232]</b> Dean Funes, vol. ii., cap. xii., p. 372, says of Zavala: ‘Por
+caracter era manso, pero usó algunas veces de severidad, porque sabia que para
+servir bien a los hombres es preciso de cuando en cuando tener valor de
+desagradarlos. . . . La pobreza en que murio despues de tantos años de mando,
+es una prueba clasica de que no estaba contagiado con esa commun flaqueza de
+los que gobieran en America.’
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot233"></a>
+<b>[233]</b> In the long and interesting letter of Jaime Aguilar, the
+provincial of the Jesuits in Paraguay, to the King of Spain (Philip V., 1737),
+occurs the following passage:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+‘Y si alguna vez, que no son muchas, se animan los Españoles a perseguir y
+castigar los Indios, muchos huyen de la tierra, o se esconden, por no ir a la
+entrada. . . . Otras (vezes) quando llegan allá, el Enemigo les quitan la
+Cavallada, dexandolos a pie y se vuelven a casa como pueden.’
+</p>
+
+<p>
+This I have seen myself, not thirty years ago, on the frontiers of the
+Argentine Republic. The popular Argentine poem, ‘La Vuelta de Martin Fierro’,
+by José Hernandez (Buenos Ayres, 1880), has an illustration showing an
+expedition against the Indians returning. Some of the men are on foot; others
+are riding two on the same horse, and officers are animating their men with the
+flat of their swords.
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot234"></a>
+<b>[234]</b> ‘Account of the Abipones’, p. 125.
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot235"></a>
+<b>[235]</b> Brabo, ‘Inventarios’, p. ix.
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot236"></a>
+<b>[236]</b> Francisco Xavier Brabo, ‘Inventarios de los bienes hallados á la
+expulsion de los Jesuitas’ (Madrid, 1872).
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot237"></a>
+<b>[237]</b> The lists of cannons, guns, and arms of all kinds in the
+inventories of the Chaco towns, preserved by Brabo, serve to show not only the
+dangers to which the Jesuits were exposed, but also how thoroughly the Jesuits
+understood the fickle nature of those with whom they lived.
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot238"></a>
+<b>[238]</b> Another priest, the list of whose effects Brabo has preserved in
+his ‘Inventarios’, had a book called ‘El Alivio de Tristes’. Even a Protestant
+may be excused for hoping that it merited its title.
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot239"></a>
+<b>[239]</b> Cretineau Joly, tome v., chap. ii., p. 95. Your moral force is
+excellent in a civilized country; but your modern missionary usually prefers
+something more in accordance with the spirit of the times.
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot240"></a>
+<b>[240]</b> The total number of cattle was 78,171, as against 698,353 in the
+towns of the Guaranís. See Brabo, ‘Inventarios de los bienes hallados á la
+expulsion de los Jesuitas’, Appendix, p. 668.
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot241"></a>
+<b>[241]</b> ‘History of the Abipones’, from the Latin of Martin Dobrizhoffer,
+London, 1822.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It is a curious circumstance that in the missions in the Chaco there were negro
+slaves, though in the Paraguayan missions they were unknown. In the inventory
+of the town of San Lucas appear the following entries, under the head of
+‘Negros Esclavos’:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+‘Justo, que sirve de capataz en el campo; será de edad de veinte y siete años,
+mas ó menos segun su aspecto.’
+</p>
+
+<p>
+‘Item, Pedro, será de diez y seis años y es medio fatuo.’
+</p>
+
+<p>
+‘Item, José Felix, será de un mes y medio.’
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot242"></a>
+<b>[242]</b> Though 1747 was the date of the final founding of these
+reductions, as early as 1697 about four hundred Indians were discovered in the
+woods of the Taruma by Fathers Robles and Ximenes, and established in the
+mission of Nuestra Señora de Fe; but in the year 1721 they all returned to the
+woods, a famine and an outbreak of the small-pox having frightened them. After
+being again established in a mission, and again having left it, in 1746, they
+were established definitely at San Joaquin.
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot243"></a>
+<b>[243]</b> Dobrizhoffer calls the Tobatines by the name of Itatines.
+Charlevoix and others refer to them as Tobatines.
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot244"></a>
+<b>[244]</b> ‘Account of the Abipones’, p. 54.
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot245"></a>
+<b>[245]</b> In 1873, when I visited the outskirts of this forest, the
+conditions were similar to those which Dobrizhoffer describes, with the
+addition that the depopulation of the country, owing to the recent long war,
+had allowed the tigers to multiply to an extraordinary degree, and my guide and
+myself, after feeding our horses, had to sleep alternately, the waker holding
+the two horses hobbled and bridled.
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot246"></a>
+<b>[246]</b> The whole operation of collecting and preparing the leaves of the
+<i>Ilex Paraguayensis</i>, to make the <i>yerba-maté</i>, was most curious.
+Bands of men used to sally out for a six-months’ expedition, either by land
+with bullock-waggons, or up one of the rivers in flat-bottomed boats, which
+were poled along against the rapid current by crews of six to twelve men.
+Arrived at the <i>yerbal</i>, as the forest was called, they built shelters,
+after the fashion of those in use amongst the larger of the anthropoid apes.
+Some roamed the woods in search of the proper trees, the boughs of which they
+cut down with machetes, whilst others remained and built a large shed of canes
+called a <i>barbacoa</i>. On this shed were laid the bundles of boughs brought
+from the woods, and a large fire was lighted underneath. During forty-eight
+hours (if I remember rightly) the toasting went on; then, when sufficiently
+dry, the leaves were stripped from the twigs, and placed on a sort of open
+space of hard clay, something like a Spanish threshing-floor. On this they were
+pounded fine, and the powder rammed into raw-hide bags. This concluded the
+operations, and the <i>yerba</i> was then ready for the ‘higgling of the
+market’.
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot247"></a>
+<b>[247]</b> <i>Traduttore traditore</i>, as the proverb says.
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot248"></a>
+<b>[248]</b> Charlevoix says, in his ‘Histoire de la Nouvelle France’, speaking
+of the Indians in general: ‘L’expérience a fait voir qu’il étoit plus à propos
+de les laisser dans leur simplicité et dans leur ignorance, que les sauvages
+peuvent être des bons Chrétiens sans rien prendre de notre politesse et de
+notre façon de vivre, ou du moins qu’il falloit laisser faire au tems pour les
+tirer de leur grossièreté, qui ne les empêche pas de vivre dans une grande
+innocence, d’avoir beaucoup de modestie, et de servir Dieu avec une piété et
+une ferveur, que les rendent très propres aux plus sublimes opérations de la
+grâce.’ Had more people thought with Charlevoix, and not been too anxious to
+draw savages incontrovertibly to our ‘politesse’ (<i>sic</i>) and ‘façon’, and
+left more to time (‘au tems’), how much misery might have been saved, and how
+many interesting peoples preserved! For, in spite of the domination of the
+Anglo-Saxon race, it might have been wise to leave other types, if only to
+remind us of our superiority.
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot249"></a>
+<b>[249]</b> Hell not infrequently seems to have struck the Indians as a joke,
+for Charlevoix relates that when the first missionaries expatiated on its
+flames to the Chirignanós, they said, ‘If there is fire in hell, we could soon
+get enough water to put it out.’ This answer scandalized the good priest, who
+could not foresee that the flames of Tophet would be extinguished without the
+necessity of any other waters than those of indifference.
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot250"></a>
+<b>[250]</b> ‘Account of the Abipones’, p. 74.
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot251"></a>
+<b>[251]</b> Padre del Techo, in his ‘History of Paraguay’, says of the wood
+Indians that ‘they died like plants which, grown in the shade, will not bear
+the sun.’
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot252"></a>
+<b>[252]</b> San Joaquin, San Estanislao, and Belen.
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot253"></a>
+<b>[253]</b> Notably those of Azara.
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot254"></a>
+<b>[254]</b> ‘Account of the Abipones’, p. 15.
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot255"></a>
+<b>[255]</b> As that of Philip V., from the palace of Buen Retiro, December 28,
+1743, and his two letters to the Jesuits of Paraguay. Also the previous edict
+obtained by Montoya from Philip II., and by the various additions on the same
+head made from time to time to the code known as ‘The Laws of the Indies’.
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot256"></a>
+<b>[256]</b> Since the discovery of America the Spaniards and the Portuguese
+had been in constant rivalry throughout the south-eastern portion. Their
+frontier, between what are now Brazil and Argentina, had never been defined. In
+1494 King John II. of Castile concluded a treaty signed at Tordesillas with the
+King of Portugal, placing the dividing-line between the countries two hundred
+leagues more to the westward than that of the famous Bull of Pope Alexander VI.
+(May 4, 1493), which placed it at one hundred leagues west of Cape Verd,
+cutting the world in two from the Arctic to the Antarctic Pole. From the
+signing of the treaty of Tordesillas trouble began in South America between the
+Powers, as by that treaty a portion of Brazil came into the power of Portugal.
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot257"></a>
+<b>[257]</b> These were the towns of San Angel, San Nicolas, San Luis, San
+Lorenzo, San Miguel, San Juan, and San Borja.
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot258"></a>
+<b>[258]</b> According to the 1913 edition of the Catholic Encyclopedia (in the
+article titled “Reductions of Paraguay”) this treaty, signed in secret on 15
+January 1750, was a deliberate assault on the Jesuit Order by the Ministers of
+Spain and Portugal, the latter of whom, Pombal, is said to have been
+responsible also for the false and libelous ‘Histoire de Nicolas I., Roy du
+Paraguai et Empereur des Mamalus’ (referred to in this chapter) which was
+distributed throughout Europe as another attack on the Jesuits. As anyone
+familiar with the situation could see that the Indians would not be happy about
+the treaty’s requirement to abandon their homes, it was a well-calculated,
+though detestable, move.—A. L., 1998.
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot259"></a>
+<b>[259]</b> Most of the dates of the events subsequent to the cession of the
+seven reductions on the Uruguay are taken from ‘La Causa Jesuitica de Portugal’
+(Madrid, 1768), written by Ibañez, a great enemy of the Jesuits. In it is also
+an account of the events in Paraguay between 1750 and 1756, called ‘Relacion de
+la Guerra que sustentaron los Jesuitas contra las tropas Españolas y
+Portuguesas en el Uruguay y Paraná’. No proof has ever been brought forward
+that the Jesuits as a body ever incited the revolt of the Indians, though
+undoubtedly Father Tadeo Ennis, a hot-headed priest, stirred up his own
+particular reduction to resist. It does not seem likely that the Jesuits could
+have thought it possible to wage a successful war against Spain and Portugal.
+The dates taken from Ibañez tally with original letters from the Marques de
+Valdelirios, the Spanish boundary commissioner, and others, which are preserved
+in the Spanish national archives at Simancas.
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot260"></a>
+<b>[260]</b> <i>Vide</i> ‘Exc. por los cartas que recibi con los avisos, y
+llegada del P. Altamirano, entiendo acabará de persuadirse a que los Padres de
+la Campañia son los sublevados, sino los quitan de las aldeas sus Santos Padres
+(como ellos los llaman) no experimentarán mas que rebeliones insolencias y
+desprecios. . . .’—Letter quoted by Ibañez (‘Causa Jesuitica’), and also
+preserved at Simancas.
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot261"></a>
+<b>[261]</b> The Marques de Valdelirios, writing to Don José de Carvajal from
+Monte Video, June 28, 1752 (Simancas, Legajo 7,447), says: ‘Estoy cierto de que
+los padres estan ya en la persuasion de que el tratado no se ha de dejar de
+executar.’ This being so, it was evident that the Marquis, at the date of
+writing, was of opinion that the Jesuits were not going to oppose the execution
+of the treaty, as he goes on to say: ‘Y es credible que con este desengaño
+trabajan seriamente en la mudanza de sus pueblos.’
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot262"></a>
+<b>[262]</b> The instructions were prepared in 1768 by Bucareli for the
+guidance of Don Juan Joseph de Vertiz, his interim successor in the government
+of the River Plate, and were delivered to him in 1770 when Bucareli returned to
+Spain. They are printed by Brabo in his ‘Coleccion de Documentos relativos á la
+Expulsion de los Jesuitas’, Madrid, 1872, p. 320.
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot263"></a>
+<b>[263]</b> ‘Oficiales mecanicos’.
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot264"></a>
+<b>[264]</b> This refers to the same subject, and prohibits any Spaniard from
+settling in an Indian town in any part of America.
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot265"></a>
+<b>[265]</b> Dean Funes, ‘Ensayo de la Historia Civil del Paraguay’, etc., tome
+iii., p. 45.
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot266"></a>
+<b>[266]</b> Dean Funes says ‘una difusa memoria’; but, then, even though
+friendly, churchmen and cats rarely forego a scratch. The proverb has it,
+‘Palabras de santo, uñas de gato’.
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot267"></a>
+<b>[267]</b> Though Ibañez (‘Republica Jesuitica’, tome i., cap. i.) says:
+‘This treaty caused entire satisfaction to all the world except the English,
+who feared their commerce would suffer by it (<i>i.e.</i>, by the closing of
+the Colonia del Sacramento as an entry for smuggled goods), and the Jesuits.’
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Raynal, also an ex-Jesuit, but a man of far higher character than Ibañez, says
+(tome iii., lib. 97): ‘This treaty met censure on both sides, the ministers in
+Lisbon themselves alleging that it was a false policy to sacrifice the Colonia
+del Sacramento, the clandestine commerce of which amounted to two millions of
+dollars a year . . . for possessions whose advantages were uncertain and
+position remote. The outcries were even stronger in Madrid. There they imagined
+that the Portuguese would soon rule all along the Uruguay . . . and from thence
+penetrate up the rivers into Tucuman, Chile, and Potosi.’
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot268"></a>
+<b>[268]</b> Quoting the Pope who advised St. Augustine on his first mission
+visit to England, to convert the natives to Christianity, to go slowly.
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot269"></a>
+<b>[269]</b> D. Martin de Echaria, Don Rafael de Menedo, and Don Marcos de
+Lauazabel.
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot270"></a>
+<b>[270]</b> From a letter preserved at Simancas (Legajo 7,447), written by P.
+Diego Palacios to P. Luiz de Altamirano, dated San Miguel, June 20, 1752, it
+appears that there were in the territory of the seven towns plantations of
+<i>yerba</i> trees, cotton, and valuable woods.
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot271"></a>
+<b>[271]</b> Archivo de Simancas, Legajo 7,378, folio 17—a long and curious
+letter.
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot272"></a>
+<b>[272]</b> ‘Stroner’ may have been ‘Stoner’, in which case he must have been
+an Englishman. There were few English names amongst the Paraguayan Jesuits, if
+one except Juan Bruno de Yorca (John Brown of York), Padre Esmid (Smith), the
+supposititious ‘Stoner’, and the doubtful Taddeo Ennis, who, though said to be
+a Bohemian, was not impossibly a Milesian.
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot273"></a>
+<b>[273]</b> Dean Funes, ‘Ensayo de la Historia Civil de Paraguay’, etc., book
+v., p. 52.
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot274"></a>
+<b>[274]</b> They also said, in a memorial presented to the Marquis of
+Valdelirios by the Provincial Barreda, preserved at Simancas (Legajo 7,447),
+‘That they had voluntarily made themselves vassals of the King of Spain—despues
+de Christianarnos, nos hizimos voluntariamente vasallos de nuestro Catholico
+Rey de España para que amparandonos con su poder fomentase nuestra devota
+Christiandad.’ It was not likely, therefore, that they would voluntarily become
+subject to the Portuguese, their most bitter persecutors.
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot275"></a>
+<b>[275]</b> José Barreda, the Father Provincial of the missions, in a curious
+letter under date of August 2nd, 1753, tells the Marquis of Valdelirios that he
+fears not only that the 30,000 Indians resident in the seven towns may rebel,
+but that they may be joined by the Indians of the other reductions, and that it
+is possible they may all apostatize and return to the woods. Brabo, in the
+notes to his ‘Atlas de Cartas Geograficas de los Paises de la America
+Meridianal’ (Madrid, 1872), gives a synopsis of this letter, which formed part
+of his collection, and contained the greatest quantity of interesting papers on
+the Jesuits in Paraguay and Bolivia which has ever been brought together. In
+1872, after publishing his ‘Atlas’, his ‘Coleccion de Documentos’, and his
+‘Inventarios’, he presented his papers (more than 30,000 in number) to the
+Archivo Historico Nacional of Madrid. There they remain, and form a rich mine
+for dogged scholars who have not passed their youth on horseback with the lazo
+in their hands.
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot276"></a>
+<b>[276]</b> Archivo de Simancas, Legajo 7,378, folio 146.
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot277"></a>
+<b>[277]</b> <i>Ibid.</i>: ‘Que toda la polvora que tengan los curas y
+misioneros se queme o se inutilize y pierda hechandola al rio, y que en los
+pueblos donde se fabrica, cese luego este labor.’
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot278"></a>
+<b>[278]</b> In another letter, also preserved at Simancas, and dated at
+Yapeyu, he complains bitterly of his own suffering on the journey: ‘Me moli
+tanto con el traqueo violento del carreton que no he podido volver sobre mi.’
+The roads to the missions seem to have been as bad as those which produced the
+historical exclamation, ‘O dura tellus Hispaniæ!’ It is certainly the case that
+Ibañez, in his ‘Republica Jesuitica’ (Madrid, 1768), gives a very different
+version of the doings of Altamirano; for he says that Rafael de Cordoba,
+Altamirano’s secretary, ‘embarked in a schooner called <i>La Real</i> a great
+quantity of guns and lead for balls, packing them all in boxes, which, he said,
+were full of objects of a pious nature. . . . This,’ says Ibañez, ‘was told me
+by the master of the schooner <i>José el Ingles</i>, a man worthy of credence.’
+This is pleasing to one’s national pride, but, still, one seems to want a
+little better authority even than that of ‘Bardolph, the Englishman’.
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot279"></a>
+<b>[279]</b> Dean Funes, book v., cap. iii., p. 54.
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot280"></a>
+<b>[280]</b> In a most curious letter (preserved at Simancas, Legajo 7,447),
+the mayor and council of the reduction of San Juan write to Altamirano
+upbraiding him with being their enemy, and tell him that ‘St. Michael sent by
+God showed their poor grandfathers (<i>sus pobres abuelos</i>) where to plant a
+cross, and afterwards to march due south from the cross and they would find a
+holy father of the Company.’ This, of course, turned out as the saint had
+foretold, and after a long day’s march they encountered the Jesuit and became
+Christians.
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot281"></a>
+<b>[281]</b> This account seems to have been lost, and a careful search has not
+disinterred it from the Maelstrom of Simancas, that prison-house of so many
+documents, without whose aid so much of Spanish history cannot be written.
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot282"></a>
+<b>[282]</b> His ‘Efemerides’, or Journal, printed and mutilated by Ibañez in
+his ‘Republica de Paraguay’, gives the best account of the brief ‘war’ which
+has come down to us; it is supplemented by the ‘Declaracion de la Verdad’ of
+Father Cardiel, which deals with the misstatements of Ibañez and others against
+the Jesuits. In regard to his own share in the war, Padre Ennis says: ‘Atque in
+exercitas curatorem, spiritualem medicum secum ire postulat.’
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot283"></a>
+<b>[283]</b> ‘Se puso las botas’.
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot284"></a>
+<b>[284]</b> Dean Funes, ‘Ensayo de la Historia Civil del Paraguay’, Buenos
+Ayres, etc., book v., cap. iv., p. 58.
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot285"></a>
+<b>[285]</b> Luckily Ibañez (‘Republica Jesuitica de Paraguay’) has not
+corrected the many faults of spelling and Latinity into which Padre Ennis fell.
+Those, though left in from malice, as Ibañez was a bitter enemy of the Jesuits,
+serve to present the man in his habit as he wrote. However, Ibañez has so much
+mutilated the text of the journal that occasionally the sense is left obscure.
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot286"></a>
+<b>[286]</b> ‘Hoc itaque nuncio læti altero ac incensi . . . Sacramento
+expiationis et pane fortim roborati’ (Ennis, ‘Efemerides’).
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot287"></a>
+<b>[287]</b> Cardiel, in his ‘Declaracion de la Verdad’, p. 426, says: ‘Lo
+mismo es 28,000 mil Indios que igual numero de muchachos.’
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot288"></a>
+<b>[288]</b> ‘Nec tamen resipiscebat et Divinam Nemesim quamquam clare
+experiebatur pro causâ Societatis.’
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot289"></a>
+<b>[289]</b> ‘Declaracion de la Verdad’, p. 404.
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot290"></a>
+<b>[290]</b> In fact, they much resembled those ‘crakys of warre’ which, with
+the ‘tymmeris for helmys’, Barbour, in the ‘Bruce’, takes notice of as the two
+noteworthy events of a battle that he chronicles:
+</p>
+
+<p class="letter"> ‘Twa noweltyis that day thai saw,<br/>
+That forouth in Scotland had bene nane.<br/>
+Tymmeris for helmys war the tane,<br/>
+That thaim thoucht thane off gret bewté<br/>
+And alsua wondyr for to se.<br/>
+The tothyr, crakys war, off wer,<br/>
+That thai befor herd neuir er.’<br/>
+          <i>The Bruce</i>, Booke Fourteene, p. 392.
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot291"></a>
+<b>[291]</b> This was in an action in the year 1756.
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot292"></a>
+<b>[292]</b> ‘Miente de la cruz a la fecha’.
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot293"></a>
+<b>[293]</b> The Mamalucos, or Paulistas, were, of course, the bitterest
+enemies of everything Paraguayan, so that a King had as well been styled of
+‘Iceland and of Paraguay’.
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot294"></a>
+<b>[294]</b> If this assumes to be Sâo Paulo de Piritinanga in Brazil, it is
+not unlikely one of the few books published there in the eighteenth century, if
+not the only one. Happy is the city of one book, especially when that work has
+nothing of a theological character in it, even though it lies from <i>la cruz á
+la fecha</i>.
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot295"></a>
+<b>[295]</b> ‘Account of the Abipones’, vol. i., p. 32.
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot296"></a>
+<b>[296]</b> The only man the Indians produced who showed any aptitude as a
+leader was a chief called Sepe Tyaragu. At his death in action in 1756 Nicolas
+Ñeenguiru succeeded to his post.
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot297"></a>
+<b>[297]</b> <i>Milvago Chimango</i>.
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot298"></a>
+<b>[298]</b> <i>Polyhorus tharus</i>. In relation to the word ‘tharus’, which
+figures as a sort of scientific (or doggerel) cognomen to this bird, Mr. W. H.
+Hudson once pointed out to me that, like some other ‘scientific facts’, it
+originated in a mistake. The Pampa Indian name of the bird is ‘traré’. Molina
+(Don Juan Ignacio), in his ‘History of Chile’, happened to spell the word
+‘tharé’, instead of ‘traré’, and then proceeded to make a dog-Latin form of it.
+Thus the bird has received its present scientific name.
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot299"></a>
+<b>[299]</b> Cardiel, ‘Declaracion de la Verdad’, p. 430: ‘. . . llego alli
+despues de la fuga y desamparo de los pueblos . . . saco a los dos Padres que
+estaban muy afligidos por la soledad y alboroto.’
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot300"></a>
+<b>[300]</b> In a letter (Archivo de Simancas, Legajo 7,378, folio 128),
+Valdelirios, writing to the governor of Buenos Ayres, Don José de Caravajal y
+Lancastre, says: ‘Inagotables son los recursos de los Padres para que se dilate
+y no se ratifique el tratado. . . .’ But he gives no proof except that they had
+sent petitions to the King—surely a very constitutional thing for them to do.
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot301"></a>
+<b>[301]</b> The letter was written originally in Guaraní, and a certified
+translation of it exists at Simancas, Legajo 7,385, folio 13.
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot302"></a>
+<b>[302]</b> Altamirano.
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot303"></a>
+<b>[303]</b> Don Pedro Cevallos, Governor of Buenos Ayres, who was in Paraguay
+in 1755, sent there to fight the troops of King Nicolas, found, as he himself
+says, ‘no King, and no troops, but a few half-armed Indians.’ Writing to the
+King, he says: ‘Los Jesuitas son utiles en el Paraguay.’
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot304"></a>
+<b>[304]</b> The figures in Chapter VII. serve to show that in Paraguay, at
+least, they were not exactly millionaires. In Mexico, Palafox, the saintly
+Bishop of Puebla, had set about all kinds of stories as to their riches, but
+Geronimo Terenichi, an ecclesiastic sent to Mexico to examine into the question
+of the Jesuits and their wealth, after a year of residence, expressly says
+‘they were very poor, and laden with debt’ (‘eran muy pobres y estaban cargados
+de deudas’): ‘Coleccion de los articulos de la Esperanza, sobre la Historia del
+Reinado de Carlos III.’, p. 435. Madrid, 1859.
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot305"></a>
+<b>[305]</b> They were expressly proclaimed to be ‘ocultas y reservadas’.
+Carlos III., in defence of his ‘occult’ and ‘reserved’ reasons, said, ‘mis
+razones, solo Dios y yo debemos conocerlas’ (‘Reinado de Carlos III.’, vol.
+iii., p. 120. Ferrer del Rio, Madrid, 1856). No doubt Carlos III. satisfied his
+conscience with this dictum, but it is permissible to doubt whether the power
+alluded to in such a cousin-like manner by the King was equally satisfied.
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot306"></a>
+<b>[306]</b> This celebrated tumult, generally known in Spain as ‘el Motin de
+Aranjuez’, and sometimes as ‘el Motin de Esquilace’, occurred on Palm Sunday,
+1766. The ostensible reason was an edict of the King (Charles III.) prohibiting
+the use of long cloaks and broad-brimmed hats, which had been for long popular
+in Spain. The tumult assumed such formidable dimensions that the Walloon Guards
+were unable to quell it, but two friars, Padre Osma and Padre Cueva, in some
+manner were able to stem the confusion. The King and the court were so much
+disturbed that they quitted Madrid and went to Aranjuez. There is no proof that
+the Jesuits had any hand at all in the affair.
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot307"></a>
+<b>[307]</b> Ferrer del Rio, in his history of the reign of Charles III.
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot308"></a>
+<b>[308]</b> Such, at least, several of his letters to the Pope, Clement XII.,
+would seem to indicate. It is not impossible that the strenuous opposition
+which the Jesuits gave to the Inquisition may have had something to do with
+their expulsion. Some of them went great lengths in their attacks. P. Antonio
+Vieyra, the celebrated Portuguese Jesuit, in his ‘Relaçaõ Exactissima,
+Instructiva, Curioza, Verdadeira, Noticioza do Procedimento das Inquiziçois de
+Portugal’ (Em Veneza, 1750), is almost as severe as Protestant writers have
+been against the Inquisition. Particularly does he inveigh against the prison
+system of the Holy Office (pp. 3-5, chap. i.). In the last chapter (p. 154),
+Vieyra calls Saavedra, the founder of the Portuguese Inquisition, a tyrant, and
+in recounting his deeds calls him <i>tyranno, cruel, falsario, herege</i>, and
+<i>ladram</i> (a thief), and finishes by asserting that the tribunal invented
+by such a man ‘had its roots in hell’, and that ‘its ministers could not go to
+heaven’.
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot309"></a>
+<b>[309]</b> His full name was Don Francisco de Paula Bucareli y Ursua.
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot310"></a>
+<b>[310]</b> Brabo (‘Coleccion de Documentos’, etc.) says of him, ‘speaking of
+the petty jealousies and intrigues which the decree of expulsion evoked: ‘En
+medio de tantas contrariedades, crimenes y miserias destaca serena la figura de
+Bucareli, no solo llevando a cabo con incansable celo su cometido, si no
+atendiendo a suplir en la organizacion religiosa, intelectual y civil los
+numerosos vacios que dejaba la falta del absorbente y decisivo influjo
+jesuitico.’
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot311"></a>
+<b>[311]</b> ‘Ensayo de la Historia Civil del Paraguay’, etc., vol. iii., cap.
+viii., p. 119.
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot312"></a>
+<b>[312]</b> Funes, ‘Ensayo de la Historia Civil’, etc., vol. iii., cap. viii.
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot313"></a>
+<b>[313]</b> ‘Tambien en algunos pueblos hay unas escopetas inglesas muy largas
+con sus horquillas si se quieren usar de ellas no son muy pesadas y tienen buen
+alcance’ (Funes, ‘Ensayo de la Historia Civil del Paraguay’, etc., vol. iii.,
+cap. viii.).
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot314"></a>
+<b>[314]</b> There were in the year 1759 throughout the world 271 Jesuit
+missions, 1,542 religious houses, 61 cattle farms, 340 residences, 171
+seminaries, 1,542 churches, and 22,589 Jesuits, whereof 11,293 were priests. Of
+the above houses, missions, and churches, the greater portion were in America
+(Ferrer del Rio, ‘Historia del Reinado de Carlos III.’, Madrid, 1856).
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In the River Plate and Paraguay there were about 400 Jesuits, of whom 300 were
+priests. The other hundred, according to Ibañez (‘Republica Jesuitica’), were
+‘mostly poor devils who were in want of food, and came into the Order for a
+meal.’ Ibañez rarely spoke the truth, not even when it would have been
+expedient to do so; and certainly amongst these ‘poor devils’ could not have
+been included Asperger, the writer on Indian medicines, and other distinguished
+men who inhabited the Paraguayan missions as lay brothers.
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot315"></a>
+<b>[315]</b> Dean Funes, ‘Ensayo de la Historia Civil’, etc., vol. iii., book
+v., cap. ix.
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot316"></a>
+<b>[316]</b> The fine library was dispersed, and many priceless MSS. treating
+of the discovery and conquest, and of expeditions by the Jesuits amongst tribes
+of Indians now extinct, were lost. Nothing seems to have been preserved except
+matter which the dispersers thought might prove incriminating to the Jesuits.
+It is a well-known principle to judge and condemn a man, and then to search for
+evidence against him. The books were kept in a place known as La Granja de
+Santa Catalina, and a man of letters, Dr. Don Antonio Aldao, was charged to
+catalogue and remit them to the capital. Dean Funes says (book v., cap. ix., p.
+156) that he complied with his instructions (‘verificóla felizmente y con
+arreglo a sus instrucciones’), but, anyhow, most of the books were lost. It is
+a common phrase amongst doctors, ‘The operation was entirely successful, but
+the patient unfortunately succumbed.’ Amongst the books was the celebrated
+‘Monita Secreta’, used by Ibañez in his charges (after the expulsion) against
+the Jesuits.
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot317"></a>
+<b>[317]</b> Dean Funes (‘Ensayo de la Historia Civil’, vol. iii., cap. viii.)
+seems to have gauged the feelings of the Governor when he says: ‘Temblo de
+susto Bucareli considerando en riesgo una conquista, que debia aumentar su
+gloria y su fortuna.’ ‘Su fortuna’ is delicious, and shows your true
+conqueror’s melancholy.
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot318"></a>
+<b>[318]</b> The Tebicuari forms the northern boundary between the territory of
+Misiones and the rest of Paraguay. It is a large river, and in my time
+(1872-1875) was bridgeless, and had to be crossed in canoes, whilst the horses
+swam, or were towed behind the canoes with ropes.
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot319"></a>
+<b>[319]</b> Yapeyú was the largest of all the missions. The name signifies a
+chisel in Guaraní.
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot320"></a>
+<b>[320]</b> Bucareli, in a letter to El Conde de Aranda (Brabo, ‘Coleccion de
+Documentos relativos á la Expulsion de los Jesuitas’, Madrid, 1872), says in
+reference to the perils by which he imagined himself surrounded: ‘El misero
+diminuto estado de la tropa, por el atraso de sus pagas y la falta que encontré
+de caudales en estas cajas, era una urgencia que me atormentaba.’
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot321"></a>
+<b>[321]</b> This war, undertaken by a fool (Lopez) against enormous odds,
+served to show what a people even when in the wrong, and in a bad cause, can do
+when it believes itself to be fighting for national liberty. As a matter of
+fact, Paraguayan liberty was not threatened for an instant, and Lopez declared
+war against both Brazil and the Argentine Republic out of mere ambition to be a
+second Napoleon. His solitary qualifications for the character were that, like
+his prototype, he was fat and loved women. The war commenced in 1865 and
+finished in 1870, and left the country almost a desert. So lonely was it, that
+I have often in those days seen tigers calmly walk across a road in mid-day,
+and a shout or a pistol-shot but little quickened their movements.
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot322"></a>
+<b>[322]</b> <i>Capilla</i> was the name given in Paraguay to some of the
+smaller villages which had a chapel, the chapel (<i>capilla</i>) being more
+important than the houses.
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot323"></a>
+<b>[323]</b> El V. P. José Pignatelli, in his ‘La Compañia de Jesus en su
+Extincion y Restablecimento’, says that the Paraguayan Jesuits were all sent to
+Faenza.
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot324"></a>
+<b>[324]</b> ‘Carta del Gobernador de Buenos Ayres (Bucareli) al Comte de
+Aranda’. Brabo, ‘Coleccion de Documentos Relativos a la Expulsion de los
+Jesuitos’, p. 8, Madrid, 1872: ‘Les hice vestir a la Española asistiendolos y
+tratandolos de modo que conozcan la mejora de su suerte. . . .’
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot325"></a>
+<b>[325]</b> Brabo, ‘Coleccion de Documentos’, etc., p. 101. The letter is
+headed ‘I. H. T., Ore Rey Nitu Don Carlos Tercero’.
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot326"></a>
+<b>[326]</b> Brabo, ‘Coleccion de Documentos’, etc., p. 185.
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot327"></a>
+<b>[327]</b> Ceremonies, no doubt, have their uses in enslaving mankind. A
+courtier once said to a Spanish King, ‘Your Majesty is but a ceremony
+yourself.’
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot328"></a>
+<b>[328]</b> Letter to Aranda: Brabo, ‘Coleccion de Documentos’, p. 196: ‘Y las
+mujeres en tal extremo, que es impossible demostralo sin faltar a la modestia.’
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot329"></a>
+<b>[329]</b> ‘Semejantes tiranias’.
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot330"></a>
+<b>[330]</b> P. 222: ‘Y teniendo presente que por lo que mira a este punto
+resulta de los informes que solo hablan estos Indios su idioma natural, pero
+que no es prohibicion de los PP. Jesuitos, sino por el amor que tienen a su
+nativo lenguage pues en cada uno de los pueblos han establecido esculas de leer
+y escriber en lengua española, y que por este motivo se encuentra un numero
+grande de Indios muy habiles en escribir (dos de ellos etan copiando hora esto
+que yo escribo y de mejor letra que la mia).’ Also pp. 223-225, etc.
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot331"></a>
+<b>[331]</b> Brabo, ‘Coleccion de Documentos’, etc., p. 200.
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot332"></a>
+<b>[332]</b> ‘Y sobre todo, fuera de la America y libre de Secretaria y Consejo
+de Indias.’ Brabo, ‘Coleccion de Documentos’, etc.: Letter of Bucareli to
+Aranda, p. 231.
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot333"></a>
+<b>[333]</b> Brabo, ‘Coleccion de Documentos’, etc., p. 280.
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot334"></a>
+<b>[334]</b> The alcaldes of Indian villages usually have a long cane with a
+silver head, like those formerly carried by footmen, as a badge of their
+office. In remote places I have seen them, with their canes in their hands, a
+battered tall hat upon their heads, a linen jacket and trousers, and
+barefooted, riding on an ox, and thought that they served to maintain the
+majesty of the law quite as well as if they had had stuff gowns, horsehair
+wigs, and had been seated on a sack of wool.
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot335"></a>
+<b>[335]</b> Vol. iii., book v., cap. viii., p. 130 (‘Ensayo de la Historia
+Civil del Paraguay’, etc.): ‘Los Caciques y corregidores que acompañaban a
+Bucareli, habian sido alhagados por todos los artificios de sugestion. Esto á
+la verdad, no era mas que coronar las victimas, que se destinaban al
+sacrificio.’
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot336"></a>
+<b>[336]</b> Chapter IX.
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot337"></a>
+<b>[337]</b> Brabo, p. 304.
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot338"></a>
+<b>[338]</b> Brabo, ‘Coleccion de Documentos’, p. 320: ‘Y porque estoy
+informado que muchos Indios de los que se habian ausentado con las tropas
+Portuguesas, y que han residido por gran tiempo en el Rio Pardo, Viamont, y
+otras partes se han restituido a sus pueblos, ciudaran . . . de que todos estos
+con sus families seran traslados a los mas interiores o distantes de aquellas
+fronteras por no ser conveniente se mantengan en ellas o sus inmediaciones, y
+asi en lo sucesivo lo ejecutaran . . . con los Indios que se restituyan, sin
+dejar alguno, para evitar todo motivo de communicacion que puede ser muy
+prejudicial.’
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot339"></a>
+<b>[339]</b> ‘No conviene dejarles una entera libertad, que seria por extremo
+fatal y prejudicial á sus intereses pues la astucia y sagacidad de los
+españoles triumfaria facilemente de su rudeza.’
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot340"></a>
+<b>[340]</b> Brabo, ‘Bucareli’s Instructions’, p. 327: ‘Que el commercio de los
+españoles ha de ser libre.’
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot341"></a>
+<b>[341]</b> The Paraguayan Jesuits were allowed to take away all their
+personal property, and it appears that they did so.
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot342"></a>
+<b>[342]</b> Cayetano Ibarguen had only two, P. Lorenzo Balda three, and so on
+(Brabo, ‘Coleccion de Documentos’, p. 388).
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot343"></a>
+<b>[343]</b> So late as 1818 Rengger, in his ‘Essai Historique sur la
+Révolution du Paraguay’, etc., talks of arriving in Buenos Ayres ‘après un
+court trajet de soixante jours.’ From thence to Corrientes he took seven weeks,
+but does not say if the passage was considered short or long.
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot344"></a>
+<b>[344]</b> Funes, ‘Ensayo Critico de la Historia Civil del Paraguay’, etc.;
+Don Feliz de Azara, ‘Descripcion y Historia del Paraguay’, etc.; and also
+‘Memorias sobre el estado rural del Rio de la Plata en 1801’.
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot345"></a>
+<b>[345]</b> ‘Ensayo de la Historia Civil’, vol. i., book ii., p. 341.
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot346"></a>
+<b>[346]</b> Funes, ‘Ensayo de la Historia Civil’, etc., book v., cap. viii.,
+p. 133.
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot347"></a>
+<b>[347]</b> Brabo, ‘Inventarios’, Appendix, p. 669.
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot348"></a>
+<b>[348]</b> Demersay (‘Histoire du Paraguay’), writing in 1847, says of the
+mission of La Cruz he saw a few trees still standing in a miserable state.
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot349"></a>
+<b>[349]</b> Funes, ‘Ensayo de la Historia Civil’, etc., book vi., cap. viii.,
+p. 395.
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+<a name="foot350"></a>
+<b>[350]</b> Hudson, ‘Naturalist in La Plata’.
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div>*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 1479 ***</div>
+</body>
+</html>
+
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