— *1* As the Gaucho proverb says, 'Las armas son necesarias pero "naide" sabe cuando.' *2* Corregidores, alcaldes, regidores, alguaciles, etc. *3* Hereditary or sometimes elected chiefs. *4* 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. *5* 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 Guaranis and their captains Spaniards. Their 'cacique' was Ignacio Amandaa, 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 Guaranis, 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.' *6* '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. *7* 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 Je/sus', 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 o/ procedia de ordenes expresas.' *8* 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. *9* 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 compan~a 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.' —

Cotton and linen cloth, tobacco, hides, woods of the various hard-wood forests of the country, and, above all, 'yerba-mate', 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 Yapeyu 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-mate', they sent great quantities of hides. The inventories of the towns taken at the expulsion state that the number of green hides*1* exported annually was fifty thousand, together with six thousand cured; in addition they sold from three to four arrobas*2* 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,*3* so that the income*4* of the thirty towns must have been relatively large.*5* Two or three hundred barrels of honey*6* 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.

— *1* Ibanez ('Histoire du Paraguay sous les Je/suites') states the hides sold at about three dollars apiece. *2* The arroba was twenty-five pounds. *3* These figures are from Brabo's inventories. *4* Ibanez states that only eighty-four dollars a year were set apart for the maintenance of each priest. *5* Dean Funes ('Ensayo de le Historia Civil del Paraguay', etc.) puts it at a million reales, which almost equals 20,800 Pounds.

Ibanez ('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. *6* The honey of the missions was celebrated, and the wax made by the small bee called 'Opemus', according to Charlevoix (livre v., p. 285), 'e/tait d'une blancheur qui n'avait rien de pareil, et ces neophytes ont consacre/ tout qu'ils en peuvent avoir a bruler devant les images de la Ste. Vierge.' —

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;* 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.

— * In the inventory of the mission of San Jose 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.' —



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 Abbe Muratori* 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 Abbe'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 Guaranis. Then comes Ibanez,** 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 Abbe 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.

— * 'Il Cristianesimo Felice nelle Missione dei Padri della Compagnia di Jesu nel Paraguay'. ** 'L'Histoire du Paraguay sous les Je/suites', Amsterdam, 1700, lxxv. —

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 Parana and Uruguay, the missions extended from Nuestra Senora de Fe* (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 Parana, to Yapeyu, upon the Uruguay. The official capital was placed at Candelaria, on the east bank of the Parana. 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.

— * In all, the missions amounted to thirty; and for their relative situations vide the curious map [not available in this ASCII text], 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. —

A 'balsa' — that is, a flying bridge worked by a cable — plied fitfully across the Parana 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 Companero), 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 Yapeyu to the Salto Grande, on the Parana. 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 Parana, 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 Parana, besides the roads and relays of post-horses, they had a fleet both of canoes and boats in which they carried 'yerba'* 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.

— * 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 Parana, and almost as many more on the Uruguay (Brabo, 'Inventarios', etc.). —

The system of interior government in the missions was in appearance democratic — that is to say, there were officials, as mayors*1* 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,*2* 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,*3* 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,*4* 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*5* and Azara, remark their tendency never to increase.

— *1* Corregidores, regidores, alcaldes, etc. *2* 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.' *3* 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. *4* 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'Ame/rique Me/ridionale'). *5* 'Account of the Abipones'. London: John Murray, 1822. —

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,*1* 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 e/gal, et s'il y avait quelque exce/dant, il e/tait en faveur des Je/suites ou des peoplades.'*2* 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.*3* 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.

— *1* 'Voyage dans l'Ame/rique Me/ridionale'. Paris: Denton, 1809. *2* Pera/mas ('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 a/ los gastos').

In the Archivo General of Buenos Ayres, legajo 'Compan~ia de Jesu/s', 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. *3* Azara, 'Voyage dans l'Ame/rique Me/ridionale'; also Funes, 'Ensayo Critico de la Historia del Paraguay'; and Padre Guevara, 'Historia del Paraguay, Rio de la Plata y Tucuman'. —

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 Ibanez 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 Neenguiru, originally written in Guarani, but of which a translation is extant in the National Spanish Archives in Simancas:*

— * Archivo General de Simancas, Estado, legajo 7,450, folios 21 y 22, 5a, Copia de las cartas (sin firma; la siguiente es de Nicolas Neenguiru/) que se hallaron en letra Guarani/ traducidas por los interpreteo nombrados en las sorpresa hecha al pueblo de San Lorenzo por el Coronel D. Jose 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 a/ las doce salen afuera, y un viejo es quien cuida de la Porteria, y es quien Sierra la puerta quando descansa el Padre, o/ quando sale el Padre a/ 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 a/ misa y a/ la tarde al Rosario de Maria Santisima llamandonos con toque de campana, y antes de esto a/ los muchachos y muchachittas los llama con una campa/nilla y despues de eso el bueno de el Padre entra ha ensen~arles 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 a/ abrir por la man~ana quando entra el Sachristan y los cosineros. . . .

'Los Padres todas las man~anas 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 a/ comer mucho solo coge cinco plattitos y solo beve una vez el vino, no llenando un vaso pequen~o, 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 a/ ensenarles la doctrina christiana.' —

'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' ('mate'), 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 Guarani, and translated by someone who has preserved in Spanish all the curious inversions of the Guarani, 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 Neenguiru. Nicolas Neenguiru, 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* 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.

— * 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. —

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'* ('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.

— * 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. —

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,* and that without their work the estate was valueless.

— * Charlevoix, book iv. —

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.*1* 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 Tano 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.*2* In a most curious passage for a Liberal philosopher, he says:*3* '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.'

— *1* 'Conquista Espiritual', Ruiz Montoya. *2* 'Voyage dans l'Ame/rique Me/ridionale'. *3* Azara, 'Viage al America Meridional', tomo 2, cap 12. 'La corte ordeno/ a Don Francisco de Alfaro oidor de la Audiencia de Charcas pasar al Peru/ en calidad de visitador. La primera medida que tomo/ 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 sospecho/ que por aquel tiempo que ellos dictaron su conducta.' —

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'* 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.

— * For 'mitas' and 'encomiendas', see foregoing chapters. —

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* and Azara,** 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.

— * Brabo, 'Inventarios de los bienes hallados a la expulsion de las Jesuitas'. ** 'Voyage dans l'Ame/rique Me/ridionale'. —

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 Guaranis, 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 Jose 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.* 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. Cardiel ('Declaracion de la Verdad', p. 449), quoting from Xarque ('La Vida Apostolica del Padre Joseph Cataidino', Zaragoca 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.' —

In that year (1721) Don Jose 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 Jose de Antequera y Castro was born at Lima, and being, as Father Charlevoix* 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.

— * Charlevoix, vol. ii., livre xvii. —

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 Parana, 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* 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,** and as Ibanez 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.

— * Funes, 'Ensayo de la Historia Civil del Paraguay', etc., vol. ii., cap. v., p. 231. ** Del Techo, Lozano, Guevara, Charlevoix, etc., etc. —

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* 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.

— * 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. —

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 Parana 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,* 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.** 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.

— * 'Guazu' = 'great' in Guarani. It is frequent in place-names both in Paraguay and Corrientes. ** Dean Funes, vol. ii., cap. xii., p. 372, says of Zavala: 'Por caracter era manso, pero uso/ 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 an~os de mando, es una prueba clasica de que no estaba contagiado con esa commun flaqueza de los que gobieran en America.' —

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.* 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.

— * 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 Espan~oles a perseguir y castigar los Indios, muchos huyen de la tierra, o se esconden, por no ir a la entrada. . . . Otras (vezes) quando llegan alla/, 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 Jose 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. —

The Tobas, Mataguayos, Lules, Aguilotas, Abipones, and the rest, together with the warlike nations of the Vilelas and the Guaycurus, 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* 'these are for the most converted by us, and settled in towns.'

— * 'Account of the Abipones', p. 125. —

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,*1* 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*2* 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.*3* 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 Tacano', the poor priest forgot his troubles, and, wandering with Sancho in La Manchan oak-woods or through Castilian uplands, thought he was in Spain.*4*

— *1* Brabo, 'Inventarios', p. ix. *2* Francisco Xavier Brabo, 'Inventarios de los bienes hallados a/ la expulsion de los Jesuitas' (Madrid, 1872). *3* 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. *4* 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. —

Throughout the territory of the Gran Chaco there were but seven reductions established by the Jesuits. These were San Jose 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 Senora del Buen Consejo de los Omarapas, capital Ortega; Nuestra Senora de Pilar de los Paisanes, with Macapillo as its centre; Nuestra Senora 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,'* was slain with twelve companions of the Guaranis of Paraguay. In 1718 Fathers Arco and Blende, Sylva and Maceo, received their dusted-over martyrs' crowns.

— * 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. —

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 Parana. Instead of open plains, vast swamps; instead of docile semi-Arcadians like the Guaranis, 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.* 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.**

— * The total number of cattle was 78,171, as against 698,353 in the towns of the Guaranis. See Brabo, 'Inventarios de los bienes hallados a/ la expulsion de los Jesuitas', Appendix, p. 668. ** '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; sera/ de edad de veinte y siete an~os, mas o/ menos segun su aspecto.'

'Item, Pedro, sera/ de diez y seis an~os y es medio fatuo.'

'Item, Jose/ Felix, sera/ de un mes y medio.' —

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 Guaranis, 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,* 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 Parana. The Tobatines Indians** were of a different class to the Guaranis, 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 Senora de Santa Fe, and had hidden in the woods.

— * 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 Senora 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. ** Dobrizhoffer calls the Tobatines by the name of Itatines. Charlevoix and others refer to them as Tobatines. —

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,* without whose help those who build cities spend their toil in vain.

— * 'Account of the Abipones', p. 54. —

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-mate' (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.*

— * 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. —

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,* 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.'

— * The whole operation of collecting and preparing the leaves of the 'Ilex Paraguayensis', to make the 'yerba-mate', 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'. —

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 Tupa, 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* who turned the Latin in which the memoirs first were formed into the vulgar tongue.

— * 'Traduttore traditore', as the proverb says. —

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 Ana, 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.* But Dobrizhoffer, in his simple faith and zeal for what he thought was right, wept bitter tears when he thought upon their unregenerate state.

— * Charlevoix says, in his 'Histoire de la Nouvelle France', speaking of the Indians in general: 'L'expe/rience a fait voir qu'il e/toit plus a propos de les laisser dans leur simplicite/ et dans leur ignorance, que les sauvages peuvent e^tre des bons Chre/tiens sans rien prendre de notre politesse et de notre fac,on de vivre, ou du moins qu'il falloit laisser faire au tems pour les tirer de leur grossie ete/, qui ne les empe^che pas de vivre dans une grande innocence, d'avoir beaucoup de modestie, et de servir Dieu avec une pie/te/ et une ferveur, que les rendent tres propres aux plus sublimes ope/rations de la gra^ce.' Had more people thought with Charlevoix, and not been too anxious to draw savages incontrovertibly to our 'politesse' (sic) and 'fac,on', 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. —

A sycophantic Guarani 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.* 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.

— * 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 Chirignanos, 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. —

He says himself quite frankly, 'I seemed to have borne down all before me because I had mingled my oration with a copious largess.'* 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.

— * 'Account of the Abipones', p. 74. —

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.'* The slow disease was not improbably the nostalgia of the woods, from which the efforts of the good missionary had so successfully withdrawn him.

— * 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.' —

The labours of the Jesuits in the three isolated missions in the north of Paraguay* 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 Guaranis. 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.

— * San Joaquin, San Estanislao, and Belen. —



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,*1* 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*2* 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.*3* 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.

— *1* Notably those of Azara. *2* 'Account of the Abipones', p. 15. *3* 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'. —

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.*1* 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 Parana 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*2* 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.*3* 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.

— *1* 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. *2* These were the towns of San Angel, San Nicolas, San Luis, San Lorenzo, San Miguel, San Juan, and San Borja. *3* 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. —

At that date Francois 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,*1* 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.*2* The opposition that the two commissioners so confidently hoped to find,*3* 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:*4* '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,*5* 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.;*6* 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.'

— *1* 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 Ibanez, 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 Espan~olas y Portuguesas en el Uruguay y Parana/'. 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 Ibanez 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. *2* Vide 'Exc. por los cartas que recibi con los avisos, y llegada del P. Altamirano, entiendo acabara/ de persuadirse a que los Padres de la Campan~ia son los sublevados, sino los quitan de las aldeas sus Santos Padres (como ellos los llaman) no experimentara/n mas que rebeliones insolencias y desprecios. . . .' — Letter quoted by Ibanez ('Causa Jesuitica'), and also preserved at Simancas. *3* The Marques de Valdelirios, writing to Don Jose 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 desengan~o trabajan seriamente en la mudanza de sus pueblos.' *4* 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 a/ la Expulsion de los Jesuitas', Madrid, 1872, p. 320. *5* 'Oficiales mecanicos'. *6* This refers to the same subject, and prohibits any Spaniard from settling in an Indian town in any part of America. —