Chapter VIIIDon José de Antequera—Appoints himself Governor of Asuncion—Unsettled state of affairs in the town—He is commanded to relinquish his illegal power—He refuses, and resorts to arms—After some success he is defeated and condemned to be executed—He is shot on his way to the scaffold—Renewed hatred against the Jesuits—Their labours among the Indians of the ChacoFrom the departure of Cardenas in 1650, to about 1720, was the halcyon period of the Jesuit missions in Paraguay. During that time things went on in the missions after the fashion I have attempted to describe. The people passed their time in their semi-communistic labour, sweetened by constant prayer; their pastors may or may not have done all that was possible to instruct them in the science of the time; but, still, the Indian population did not decrease, as it was observed to do from year to year in other countries of America and in the Spanish settlements in Paraguay.[226]During this period the Jesuits had made repeated efforts, but without much real success, to establish missions amongst the wild equestrian tribes in the Gran Chaco upon the western bank of the river Paraguay. Nothing, apparently, pointed to the events which, beginning in the year 1721, finally led to their expulsion, or, at least, furnished additional reasons to King Charles III. to include the Jesuits in Paraguay in the general expulsion of their order from the dominions of the Spanish crown.In that year (1721) Don José de Antequera was appointed to succeed the Governor of Paraguay, Don Diego de los Reyes Balmaceda, when his term of office had expired. The situation was, as often happened in the Spanish colonies, complicated by an inquiry into the conduct of the Governor (Balmaceda), in progress at the High Court of Charcas, which court, as in the case of Cardenas, acted most cautiously, both on account of its position, so far from Paraguay, and on account of the inordinate procrastination of everything connected with the Spanish law. If Balmaceda were condemned, then Antequera would step into his shoes at once. If, on the other hand, he were acquitted, Antequera would have to wait until the legal time of office had run its course. So far all was in order, but the High Court, either in doubt of its own wisdom or of its power to pronounce judgment definitely, had issued a decree suspending Balmaceda from his functions, but without either condemning or acquitting him. This, too, they did after having taken more than three years to sift the evidence and summon witnesses, who either had to cross the country on a mule at the imminent risk of death by famine or by Indians, or, having descended the river Plate to Buenos Ayres (which journey often took a month), wait for a ship to take them round Cape Horn to Lima, and from thence travel to Charcas on muleback, following one of the Incas’ roads.Don José de Antequera y Castro was born at Lima, and being, as Father Charlevoix[227]says, an able, eloquent, but vain and most ambitious man, endowed with plenty of imagination, some talent, and but little ballast, was not content to wait till time should place him in his governorship. So, hearing that a judge inquisitor was to be sent to Paraguay to inquire into the case, and having graduated himself and held the position of procurator fiscal in the Charcas, he solicited the post, and by some error was appointed.No sooner was the appointment signed than straight he posted off to Paraguay. As he had studied in the college of the Jesuits at La Plata, his first visit was to the reductions of the Jesuits. The missionaries received him well, and sent a troop of Indians to escort him to the boundary of their territories, never suspecting what Antequera was about to do. Having heard that the Governor, Balmaceda, was at a distant port upon the Paraná, Antequera hastened to Asuncion. Arrived there, the same madness of authority seems to have come on him which came fifty or sixty years before his time on Cardenas. Finding no special seat reserved for him in the Cathedral, he publicly reproved the dean, to the great scandal of the worshippers. This seems not to have lost him the respect of the citizens of Asuncion, who were accustomed to all kinds of vagaries, both of their rulers and their spiritual guides. No sort of violence to laws and customs seems ever to affect a people unless the violence is done to benefit them, when instantly they rise against the breaker of the law, however heavily it may bear upon themselves.But the devoted citizens of Asuncion were so accustomed to perpetual turmoil that, as Dean Funes[228]says, ‘they only stopped when it was absolutely necessary for them to breathe.’ Even the overpraised citizens of Athens at the time of Pericles, who must have been in all their ways so like the Athenians of to-day, were not more instant in the Agora or diligent in writing patriots’ names on oyster-shells than the noisy mob of half-breed patriots who in the sandy streets of Asuncion were ever agitating, always assembling, and doing everything within their power to show the world the perfect picture of a democratic State. Strange that such turbulent and patriotic people should have been ancestors of those whom I, after the termination of the war with Buenos Ayres and Brazil in 1870, knew as lethargic and downtrodden, as if the great dictator, Dr. Francia, whom the country people, speaking in bated breath, called ‘El Difunto’, had still oppressed the land. Into the turbulent hotbed of Asuncion fell Antequera, one of those Creoles of Peru who, born with talent and well educated, seemed, either from the circumstances of their birth or the surroundings amongst which they passed their youth, to differ as entirely from the Spaniards as if they had been Indians and not Creoles of white blood. Like Cardenas, Antequera was endowed with eloquence; but, unlike Cardenas, he set no store on eloquence upon its own account, but only used it for his own advancement in the world. Finding the Governor absent from Asuncion and lying under a decree suspending him from all his functions, it seems at once to have occurred to Antequera to seize his place. On this account, having ingratiated himself with some of those opposed to Balmaceda, he raised an army, and sent to seize him; but the Governor, having notice of the plot, escaped to Corrientes, and Antequera instantly assumed his post. This was too much for the Viceroy of Peru, who, though he had befriended Antequera in the past, had some respect for law. Immediately he issued a decree replacing Balmaceda in the governorship, and ordering Antequera to give him back the power he had usurped. This Antequera had no thought of doing, and he embarked on a career of violence which induced some to believe he intended to proclaim himself an independent king. Whether this was or was not the case, a state of things arose in Paraguay more pandemonic even than in the good old times of Cardenas. The Jesuits, not having seen their way to sustain the cause of their ex-pupil, were expelled once more (1725), and as before took ship for Corrientes amongst the tears of the people, their historians say,[229]and as Ibañez and those who have written against them affirm as strongly, amongst universal joy. Certain it is that in Asuncion they played a different part from that played by them in the mission territory, and no doubt mixed, as did the other Orders of religion, in the intrigues which never seemed to cease in the restless capital of Paraguay.Not being content with the expulsion of the Jesuits, Antequera defeated several generals sent against him by the Viceroy of Peru, and by acoup de maintook prisoner the ex-Governor Balmaceda, having surprised him in his house in Corrientes, and carried him back to Asuncion under a close guard. The usual reign of terror then began, and everything fell into confusion, till at last the King (Philip V.) in 1726 commanded that the Jesuits should be reinstated in their college in Asuncion, and that the missions should be taken from the jurisdiction of the Governors of Paraguay and placed under the control of the Governor of the River Plate, as had been previously done in the case of the other Jesuit missions beyond the Uruguay. But Spain was far away, and on one pretext or another so much delay occurred that it was not till March 18, 1728, that the Jesuits were reinstated in the college in Asuncion, which they were now fated to hold but for a little space. At last the Viceroy of Peru, the Marquess of Castel Fuerte, sent Don Bruno de Zavala with a sufficient army and six thousand Indians from the missions against the usurper Antequera, who fled for refuge to the Franciscan convent in Cordoba, where he remained, till, finding his position quite untenable, he fled to Charcas, where he was arrested, and sent to Lima to await his trial. Four years he waited in perfect liberty, going and coming about the town as it best pleased him, whilst the High Court heard evidence, wrote to Madrid, received instructions from the King, and generally displayed the incapacity which in all ages has been the chief distinctive features of every court of law.In 1731 an order came from Madrid to execute him, and without loss of time he was placed on a horse draped all in black, and, preceded by a herald and guarded by a troop of guards, taken out to the public square to be beheaded. But the good people of the capital, who, in the fashion of the world, would not most probably have stirred a step to save a saint, were mightily concerned to see a rogue receive his due deserts. The streets were filled with thousands crying out ‘Pardon!’ stones flew, and the affair looked so threatening that the Viceroy had to get on horseback and ride amongst the crowd to calm the tumult. The people met him with a shower of stones, and he, fearing the prisoner would escape, called on his guards to fire upon him. Four balls pierced Antequera, who fell dying from his horse into the arms of two accompanying priests. Thus the most turbulent of all the Governors of Paraguay ceased troubling, and the executioner, after having cut off his head, exhibited it to the people from the scaffold, with the usual moral aphorism as to the traitor’s fate.The triumph of the Jesuits in Asuncion was but momentary, following the general rule of triumphs, which take their way along the street with trumpets and with drums amid the acclamations of the crowd, and then, the pageant over, the chief actors fall back again into the struggles and the commonplace of ordinary life.Between the years 1728 and 1730 the people of Asuncion had been more eager in pursuit of liberty[230]than was their usual wont. The citizens were divided into camps, and daily fought amongst the sandy streets and shady orange-bordered lanes which radiate from almost every quarter of the town. The rival bands of madmen were styled respectively the ‘Communeros’ and the ‘Contrabandos’, and to the first Antequera throughout his residence in Lima gave all the assistance in his power. Neither of the two seems to have had the most elementary idea of real patriotism, or any wish for anything beyond the momentary triumph of the miserable party to which each belonged. One doctrine they held in common—a hatred of the Jesuits, and of the influence they exercised against the enslaving of the Indians, which was the aim of ‘Contrabandos’ and of ‘Communeros’ alike. One of the rival chieftains of the factions having fled for refuge to the missions, the people of Asuncion assembled troops to take him from his sanctuary by force. Arrived upon the frontier of the Jesuit territory, they found themselves opposed by an army of the Indians, who looked so formidable that the troops retired to Asuncion, and the leaders, foiled in the field, and not having force to attack the Jesuits in their own territory, set vigorously to inflame the minds of the people against them.They worked with such success that when, in 1732, the news of Antequera’s death reached Paraguay, the people, inflamed with the idea that he was sacrificed to the hatred of the Jesuits, rose and expelled them once again. The constant expulsions of the Jesuits from Asuncion, the turmoils in the State, and the fact that every now and then the Indians had to take arms to defend their territory, acted most mischievously on the reductions, both in Paraguay and in those between the Paraná and Uruguay. Whole tribes of Indians, recently converted, went back to the woods; land was left quite untilled, and on the outskirts of the mission territory the warlike tribes of Indians, still unsubdued, raided the cattle, killed the neophytes, and carried off their wives as slaves. But still, in spite of all, the Indians clung to their priests—as they said, from affection for the religious care they had bestowed, but quite as possibly from the instinctive knowledge that, between the raiding Portuguese and the maddening patriots in Asuncion, their only safeguard against slavery lay in the Jesuits. Most fortunately for Paraguay at the time (1734), Don Bruno de Zavala, perhaps the most energetic of the Spaniards in the King’s service in America, was Viceroy in the River Plate. Having received orders to quiet the dissensions in Asuncion, in spite of being nearly seventy years of age, and having lost an arm in the Italian wars, he marched at once, taking but forty soldiers in his train, as, war being imminent with Portugal, it was not safe to deplete the slender forces in the River Plate. Arrived in Paraguay, he entered the Jesuit missions at the Reduction of San Ignacio Guazu,[231]and, having appealed to the provincial of the Order for his aid, speedily found himself at the head of a large army of the Indians. After some skirmishes he was in a position to enter Asuncion and force the people to receive him as their Governor. By one of those revulsions so frequent in a crowd of reasonable men, the people begged him to invite the Jesuits to return. They did so (1735), and were received in state, the Governor, the Bishop, and the chief clergy and officials of the place attending Mass in the Cathedral with lighted candles in their hands. His duty over, Don Bruno de Zavala set off for Chile, where he had been appointed Governor, and on his journey, at the town of Santa Fe, died suddenly, exhausted with the battles, marchings and countermarchings, rebellions, Indian incursions, the turbulence of the people in the towns, and the other cares which formed the daily duties of a Spanish officer in South America at the middle of the eighteenth century.[232]The next ten years were on the whole peaceful and profitable for the Indians of the missions and for the Jesuits. The Indians followed quietly their Arcadian lives, except when now and then a contingent of them was required to assist in any of the wars, which at that time were ceaseless throughout the eastern part of South America. The Jesuits pushed out their spiritual frontiers, advancing on the north amongst the Tobatines of the woods, and on the west endeavouring to spread their colonies amongst the Chiriguanas and other of the Chaco tribes.From the conquest of Peru, when those Indians who had been but recently brought under the empire of the Incas retreated into the Chaco, it had been the refuge of the fiercest and most indomitable tribes. The Spanish colonists, the ardour of the first conquest spent, had settled down mainly to agricultural pursuits. Few had efficient firearms, and on the whole, though turbulent amongst themselves, they had become unwarlike.[233]The very name of the wild Indians (Los Indios Bravos) spread terror up and down the frontiers. This terror, which I remember still prevalent both in Mexico and on the pampas of the Argentine Republic, not more than five-and-twenty years ago, was keener upon the confines of the Chaco than anywhere in South America, except, perhaps, in Chile, upon the frontiers of Araucania.The Tobas, Mataguayos, Lules, Aguilotas, Abipones, and the rest, together with the warlike nations of the Vilelas and the Guaycurús, had from the first rejected Christianity. Attempts had several times been made to establish settlements amongst them, but the ferocity of all the tribes, their nomad habits—for many of them passed their lives on horseback—and the peculiar nature of their country, a vast domain of swamp, pierced by great rivers quite unknown to the Spanish settlers, had hitherto combined to render every effort vain. But, notwithstanding this, the Jesuits laboured incessantly, and not without success, amongst the wildest of the Chaco tribes. The gentle and eccentric Father Martin Dobrizhoffer passed many years amongst the Abipones, of whom he wrote his charming book. He enumerates many tribes, of whom he says[234]‘these are for the most converted by us, and settled in towns.’Nothing, perhaps, displays the Jesuits at their best, more than their efforts in the Chaco. The enormous territory was sparsely peopled by about seventy tribes,[235]whereof there were fifteen or sixteen of considerable size. Hardly two tribes spoke dialects by which they could communicate with one another, and almost every one of them lived in a state of warfare, not only with the Spaniards, but with the neighbouring tribes. The inventories preserved by Brabo[236]show us the town of Paisanes in the Chaco, with its rough wooden houses, and the Jesuits’ habitation in the middle of the place, stockaded, and without doors, and with but narrow openings in the wall, through which the missionaries crept. The inside of the house contained five or six rough rooms, almost unfurnished, but for a few religious books and a plentiful supply of guns.[237]Their beds were of unvarnished wood, with curtains of rough cotton spun by the Indians. Sometimes they had a sofa of leather slung between four stakes, a rack for medicine bottles, and for the wine for Mass. Lastly, one priest, in the settlement amongst the Toquitistines, had among his books copies of Cervantes and Quevedo; one hopes he read them half smiling, half with a tear in his eye, for your true humour is akin to tears. Perhaps, reading ‘Don Quixote’ or ‘El Gran Tacaño’, the poor priest forgot his troubles, and, wandering with Sancho in La Manchan oak-woods or through Castilian uplands, thought he was in Spain.[238]Throughout the territory of the Gran Chaco there were but seven reductions established by the Jesuits. These were San José de Bilelas, with its little town Petacas; San Juan Bautista de los Iristines, with its townlet of the same name; San Esteban de los Lules, with the town of Miraflores; Nuestra Señora del Buen Consejo de los Omarapas, capital Ortega; Nuestra Señora de Pilar de los Paisanes, with Macapillo as its centre; Nuestra Señora del Rosario de los Tobas, with its chief place called San Lucas; and, lastly, the establishment amongst the Abipones, known as La Concepcion. In all these missions the Jesuits lived in constant peril of their lives. In reading their old chronicles one finds the records of their obscure and half-forgotten martyrdoms, their sufferings, and the brief record of their deaths by an arrow or a club. In 1711 Father Cavallero, with all his following, was slain by the savage Pinzocas. In 1717 Father Romero, having, as a Jesuit writer says, ‘nothing but moral force behind him,’[239]was slain with twelve companions of the Guaranís of Paraguay. In 1718 Fathers Arco and Blende, Sylva and Maceo, received their dusted-over martyrs’ crowns.Right up the western bank of the river Paraguay, in the old maps, the crosses mark the sites where Jesuits were slain. That they all died to further crafty schemes, or for some hidden purpose of a Machiavelian nature, even a Dominican will scarcely urge. That they did good—more or less good than Protestant fanatics of the same kidney might have achieved—it were invidious to inquire. That which is certain is that they were single-hearted men, faithful unto the end to what they thought was right, faithful even to the shedding of their own blood, which is, one may believe, the way in which the scriptural injunction should be rightly read.In the dim future, when some shadow of common-sense dawns on the world, and when men recognise that it is better to let others follow their destiny as it best pleases them, without the officious interference of their fellows, it may be that they will say all missionaries of whatsoever sect or congregation should have stayed at home, and not gone gadding to the desert places of the earth seeking to remedy the errors of their God by their exertions; but whilst the ideal still remains of sacrifice (which may, for all I know, be useless in itself, or even harmful), they must perforce allow the Jesuits in Paraguay high rank, or else be stultified.But in the Chaco the Jesuits found conditions most different from those prevailing in their missions between the Uruguay and Paraná. Instead of open plains, vast swamps; instead of docile semi-Arcadians like the Guaranís, who almost worshipped them, fierce nomad horsemen, broken into a hundred little tribes, always at war, and caring little for religion of any sort or kind. Again, there seems in the Chaco to have been no means of amassing any kind of wealth, as all the territory was quite uncultivated and in a virgin state; but, still, the settlements had existed long enough for cattle to increase.[240]Lastly, the incursions of the barbarous tribes were a constant menace both to the Jesuits and their neophytes. Yet in their indefatigable way the Jesuits made considerable progress amongst the Chaco tribes, as both the curious ‘History of the Abipones’ by Father Dobrizhoffer and the inventories preserved by Brabo prove.[241]Besides their seven establishments in the Gran Chaco, they had three establishments in the north of Paraguay in the great woods which fringe the central mountain range of the country, known as the Cordillera de M’baracayu. These missions, called San Joaquin del Taruma, San Estanislao, and Belen, were quite apart from all the other missions of the Guaranís, far distant from the Chaco, and removed by an enormous distance from those of the Order in the Moxos and amongst the Chiquitos, forming, as it were, an oasis in the recesses of the Tarumensian woods. These three reductions, founded respectively in 1747,[242]1747, and 1760, were, as their dates indicate, the swansong of the Jesuits in Paraguay. Founded as they were far from the Spanish settlements, they were quite removed from the intrigues and interferences of the Spanish settlers, which were the curse of the other missions on the Paraná. The Tobatines Indians[243]were of a different class to the Guaranís, though possibly of the same stock originally. Not having come in contact until recent years with the Spaniards, and having had two fierce and prolonged wars with the nearest settlements, they had remained more in their primitive condition than any of the Indians with whom the Jesuits had come in contact in Paraguay. During the short period of Jesuit rule amongst them (1746-1767) things seem to have gone on in a half-Arcadian way. In San Joaquin, Dobrizhoffer, as he says himself, devoted eight years of unregretted labour to the Indians. Most certainly he was one of the Jesuits who understood the Indians best, and his descriptions of them and their life are among the most delightful which have been preserved. He tells of the romantic but fruitless search during eighteen months throughout the forests of the Taruma by Fathers Yegros, Escandon, Villagarcia, and Rodriguez, for the Itatines who had left the reduction of Nuestra Señora de Santa Fe, and had hidden in the woods.Then, commenting upon the strangeness of all affairs sublunary, he relates that accident at length effected what labour could not do. In 1746 Father Sebastian de Yegros, after a search of forty days, came on the Indians—as it were, directed by Providence, or, as we now say, accident. He built a town for them, and, as Dobrizhoffer says, ‘assembled them in Christian polity.’ To the new-founded village cattle of every kind were sent, with clothes—useful, of course, to those who had never worn them—axes, and furniture, and lastly a few music masters,[244]without whose help those who build cities spend their toil in vain.To the new town (in which the simple-hearted priest remained eight years), in 1753, came Don Carlos Morphi, an Irishman, and Governor of Paraguay; and, having stayed five days with Dobrizhoffer, departed, marvelling at the accuracy with which the new-made Christians (Cristianos nuevos) managed their double-basses, their flageolets, their violins, and, in general, all their instruments, whether of music or of war.Modestly, but with prolixity, as befits a virtuous, God-fearing man, the simple Jesuit relates a special instance of the way in which he was enabled to work both for his own glory and for the profit of the Lord. Not far from San Estanislao was situate the forest of M’baevera, in which grew quantities of trees from which theyerba-maté(Paraguayan tea) was made. To reach it was a work of pain and trouble, for through the woods a track called apicadahad to be cut; the rivers were deep, bridgeless, and had to have branches strewed along the track to give a footing to the struggling mules.[245]An expedition having been sent under a certain Spaniard called Villalba to collectyerba, came suddenly upon a deserted Indian hut. As they had started quite unarmed, except with knives and axes to cut down the boughs, a panic seized them, and, instead of collecting any leaves,[246]they hurried back to San Estanislao. No sooner did Dobrizhoffer hear the news than he set out to find the Indians, with a few neophytes, upon his own account. Having travelled the ‘mournful solitudes’ for eighteen days, they came upon no sign of Indians, and returned footsore and hungry, ‘the improvement of our patience being our sole recompense.’He himself walked all the way, and ‘often barefoot’, suffering ‘what neither I can describe nor yet my reader credit.’ The missionary calling has undergone considerable change since 1750. Hardships which the greater faith or stronger constitutions of the missionaries of the last century rendered endurable are now largely fallen out of fashion, and your missionary seldom walks barefoot, even in a wood, because to do so would give offence, and bring discredit on the society for which he works.Though unsuccessful in his search that year, Dobrizhoffer, not daunted by his barefoot marching, set out again upon the Gospel trail next spring. After another journey of some twenty days, during the whole course of which it rained incessantly, he came on a community of seemingly quite happy sylvans, whom he proceeded to convert. In the first hut he met with there were eight doors, and in it dwelt some sixty Indians—a palm-built, grass-thatched phalanstery, with hammocks slung from the rude beams, in which ‘these heathen’ used to sleep. Each separate family had its own fire, on the hearth of which stood mugs and gourds and pots of rudely-fashioned earthenware. Naked and not ashamed ‘these savages’, and the men wore upon their heads high crowns of parrot feathers. For arms they carried bows and arrows, and the first man Dobrizhoffer saw was holding a dead pheasant in one hand, and in the other a short bow. In the woods around the phalanstery was an ‘amazing’ quantity of maize, of fruits of divers sorts, and of tobacco. From the hives which the wild bees make in hollow trees, they collected honey in large quantities, which served them (at least so Dobrizhoffer says) for meat and drink alike.Their name for the god they worshipped was Tupá, but ‘of that God and his commandments they care to know but little.’ This sounds ambiguous, and would appear at first sight as if the confidence betwixt the creators and their God had been but slight. Perhaps the ambiguity may be set down to the translator[247]who turned the Latin in which the memoirs first were formed into the vulgar tongue.A thing remarkable enough when one considers how prone mankind is to act differently was that, although the Itatines knew an evil spirit under the name of Aná, yet they paid little adoration to him, apparently content to know as little of him and his laws as they did of their God.Those hapless, harmless folk, as innocent of God and devil, right and wrong, and all the other things which by all rights they should have known, as they are said to be implanted in the mind of man, no matter what his state, seem to have lived quite happily in their involuntary sin.[248]But Dobrizhoffer, in his simple faith and zeal for what he thought was right, wept bitter tears when he thought upon their unregenerate state.A sycophantic Guaraní from the reductions then took up his parable, and said: ‘God save ye, brothers; we are come to visit you as friends. This father-priest is God’s own minister, and comes to visit you, and pray for your estate.’ An aged Indian interrupted him, saying he did not want a father-priest, and that St. Thomas in the past had prayed sufficiently, as fruits of every sort abounded in the land. The Indian, in his unsophisticated way, seems to have thought the presence of a priest acted but as manure on the ground where he abode; but the Jesuit, almost as simple-minded as himself, took it in kindliness, and journeyed with the Indian to a large village about three days away. Arrived there, all the inhabitants of the place sat in a circle round the missionary. They appeared (he says) in so much modesty and silence ‘that I seemed to behold statues, and not live Indians.’ To awaken their attention he played upon the viol d’amore, and, having thus captured their ears, began to preach to them. The good priest probably believed all that he said, for, after dwelling on the perils of the road, he said: ‘My friends, my errand is to make you happy.’ It did not seem to him that their free life in woods, in which abounded maize, fruits, and tobacco, with game of every kind, could possibly have induced content. Content, as Christians know, comes but with faith, and a true knowledge of the dogma is above liberty. Kindly, but muddle-headedly, he deplored their lot, their want of clothes, their want of interest in their God, their lack of knowledge of that God’s commands. Then, coming to the point, he spoke of hell, and told the astonished Indians that it was quite impossible for them to avoid its flames, unless, taught by a priest, they came to know God’s law. He then briefly (as he says) explained the mysteries of our faith. They listened rapt, except that ‘the boys laughed a little’ when he spoke of hell.[249]Nothing more painful than to see a child laughing unconscious of its peril in the traffic of a crowded street, and we may well believe that the kind-hearted Dobrizhoffer shuddered at the laughter of these children when he reflected that had he taken the wrong path, crossing the marshes or in the woods, the laughers had been damned. Much more he said to them after exhausting hell, and, to ‘add weight’ to his oration, presented each of them with scissors, knives, glass beads, axes, small looking-glasses, and fishing-hooks, for he knew well that sermons which end in ‘give me’ have but a small effect.He says himself quite frankly, ‘I seemed to have borne down all before me because I had mingled my oration with a copious largess.’[250]Glass beads and looking-glasses have from the time when the first Christian missionary preached to the Indians been potent factors in conversion, and still to-day do yeoman service in the great work of bringing souls to God.Seated around the fire ‘smoking tobacco through a reed’, and pondering perchance over the mysteries of the new expounded faith, thecaciqueof 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. Thecacique, 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’ (thecaciquesaid) ‘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 thecacique, who inquired, ‘What is it that displeases, then, the dweller in the skies?’Lies, calumnies, adulteries, thefts, all were enumerated, and received the Indian’s assent; but the injunction not to kill provoked a bystander to ask if it was not permitted to a man to slay those who attacked his life. He added, ‘I have endeavoured so to do since the first day I carried arms.’‘Fanatical casuist’ is a stout argument in the mouth of a man nurtured upon Suarez and Molina, but no doubt it did good service, and Dobrizhoffer uses it when speaking of the chief. But Dobrizhoffer did better work than mere theological disputation, for he prevailed upon eighteen of the Indians to accompany him to the settlement of San Joaquin; and after having ‘for some months tried the constancy’ of a youth called Arapotiyu, he admitted him to the sacrament of baptism, and ‘not long afterwards united him in marriage according to the Christian rites.’ It is evident that baptism should precede marriage; but it is an open question as to the duration of the interval between the two ceremonies, and we may be permitted to wonder whether, after all, both might not be advantageously dispensed at the same time. In the case of Arapotiyu the system worked satisfactorily, for he ‘surpassed in every kind of virtue, and might have been taken for an old disciple of Christianity.’ Even ‘old Christians’ occasionally, despite their more laborious induction into the rites and customs of their faith, have fallen from grace, perhaps from the undue prolongation of the term between the ceremonies.In the case of another youth (one Gato) things did not go so smoothly, for though he, too, by his conduct obtained both baptism and Christian wedlock, Dobrizhoffer adds without comment, ‘not many months after he died of a slow disease.’[251]The slow disease was not improbably the nostalgia of the woods, from which the efforts of the good missionary had so successfully withdrawn him.The labours of the Jesuits in the three isolated missions in the north of Paraguay[252]seem to have been as successful as those in the Chaco were unfortunate. In dealing with the wild equestrian tribes of the Gran Chaco, the system of the Jesuits was not so likely to achieve success as amongst the peaceful Guaranís. That of the Spanish settlers was entirely ineffectual, and has remained so down to the present day, when still the shattered remnants of the Lules, Lenguas, Mocobios, and the rest, roam on their horses or in their canoes about the Chaco and its rivers, having received no other benefits from contact with the European races but gunpowder and gin.
Don José de Antequera—Appoints himself Governor of Asuncion—Unsettled state of affairs in the town—He is commanded to relinquish his illegal power—He refuses, and resorts to arms—After some success he is defeated and condemned to be executed—He is shot on his way to the scaffold—Renewed hatred against the Jesuits—Their labours among the Indians of the Chaco
From the departure of Cardenas in 1650, to about 1720, was the halcyon period of the Jesuit missions in Paraguay. During that time things went on in the missions after the fashion I have attempted to describe. The people passed their time in their semi-communistic labour, sweetened by constant prayer; their pastors may or may not have done all that was possible to instruct them in the science of the time; but, still, the Indian population did not decrease, as it was observed to do from year to year in other countries of America and in the Spanish settlements in Paraguay.[226]During this period the Jesuits had made repeated efforts, but without much real success, to establish missions amongst the wild equestrian tribes in the Gran Chaco upon the western bank of the river Paraguay. Nothing, apparently, pointed to the events which, beginning in the year 1721, finally led to their expulsion, or, at least, furnished additional reasons to King Charles III. to include the Jesuits in Paraguay in the general expulsion of their order from the dominions of the Spanish crown.
In that year (1721) Don José de Antequera was appointed to succeed the Governor of Paraguay, Don Diego de los Reyes Balmaceda, when his term of office had expired. The situation was, as often happened in the Spanish colonies, complicated by an inquiry into the conduct of the Governor (Balmaceda), in progress at the High Court of Charcas, which court, as in the case of Cardenas, acted most cautiously, both on account of its position, so far from Paraguay, and on account of the inordinate procrastination of everything connected with the Spanish law. If Balmaceda were condemned, then Antequera would step into his shoes at once. If, on the other hand, he were acquitted, Antequera would have to wait until the legal time of office had run its course. So far all was in order, but the High Court, either in doubt of its own wisdom or of its power to pronounce judgment definitely, had issued a decree suspending Balmaceda from his functions, but without either condemning or acquitting him. This, too, they did after having taken more than three years to sift the evidence and summon witnesses, who either had to cross the country on a mule at the imminent risk of death by famine or by Indians, or, having descended the river Plate to Buenos Ayres (which journey often took a month), wait for a ship to take them round Cape Horn to Lima, and from thence travel to Charcas on muleback, following one of the Incas’ roads.
Don José de Antequera y Castro was born at Lima, and being, as Father Charlevoix[227]says, an able, eloquent, but vain and most ambitious man, endowed with plenty of imagination, some talent, and but little ballast, was not content to wait till time should place him in his governorship. So, hearing that a judge inquisitor was to be sent to Paraguay to inquire into the case, and having graduated himself and held the position of procurator fiscal in the Charcas, he solicited the post, and by some error was appointed.
No sooner was the appointment signed than straight he posted off to Paraguay. As he had studied in the college of the Jesuits at La Plata, his first visit was to the reductions of the Jesuits. The missionaries received him well, and sent a troop of Indians to escort him to the boundary of their territories, never suspecting what Antequera was about to do. Having heard that the Governor, Balmaceda, was at a distant port upon the Paraná, Antequera hastened to Asuncion. Arrived there, the same madness of authority seems to have come on him which came fifty or sixty years before his time on Cardenas. Finding no special seat reserved for him in the Cathedral, he publicly reproved the dean, to the great scandal of the worshippers. This seems not to have lost him the respect of the citizens of Asuncion, who were accustomed to all kinds of vagaries, both of their rulers and their spiritual guides. No sort of violence to laws and customs seems ever to affect a people unless the violence is done to benefit them, when instantly they rise against the breaker of the law, however heavily it may bear upon themselves.
But the devoted citizens of Asuncion were so accustomed to perpetual turmoil that, as Dean Funes[228]says, ‘they only stopped when it was absolutely necessary for them to breathe.’ Even the overpraised citizens of Athens at the time of Pericles, who must have been in all their ways so like the Athenians of to-day, were not more instant in the Agora or diligent in writing patriots’ names on oyster-shells than the noisy mob of half-breed patriots who in the sandy streets of Asuncion were ever agitating, always assembling, and doing everything within their power to show the world the perfect picture of a democratic State. Strange that such turbulent and patriotic people should have been ancestors of those whom I, after the termination of the war with Buenos Ayres and Brazil in 1870, knew as lethargic and downtrodden, as if the great dictator, Dr. Francia, whom the country people, speaking in bated breath, called ‘El Difunto’, had still oppressed the land. Into the turbulent hotbed of Asuncion fell Antequera, one of those Creoles of Peru who, born with talent and well educated, seemed, either from the circumstances of their birth or the surroundings amongst which they passed their youth, to differ as entirely from the Spaniards as if they had been Indians and not Creoles of white blood. Like Cardenas, Antequera was endowed with eloquence; but, unlike Cardenas, he set no store on eloquence upon its own account, but only used it for his own advancement in the world. Finding the Governor absent from Asuncion and lying under a decree suspending him from all his functions, it seems at once to have occurred to Antequera to seize his place. On this account, having ingratiated himself with some of those opposed to Balmaceda, he raised an army, and sent to seize him; but the Governor, having notice of the plot, escaped to Corrientes, and Antequera instantly assumed his post. This was too much for the Viceroy of Peru, who, though he had befriended Antequera in the past, had some respect for law. Immediately he issued a decree replacing Balmaceda in the governorship, and ordering Antequera to give him back the power he had usurped. This Antequera had no thought of doing, and he embarked on a career of violence which induced some to believe he intended to proclaim himself an independent king. Whether this was or was not the case, a state of things arose in Paraguay more pandemonic even than in the good old times of Cardenas. The Jesuits, not having seen their way to sustain the cause of their ex-pupil, were expelled once more (1725), and as before took ship for Corrientes amongst the tears of the people, their historians say,[229]and as Ibañez and those who have written against them affirm as strongly, amongst universal joy. Certain it is that in Asuncion they played a different part from that played by them in the mission territory, and no doubt mixed, as did the other Orders of religion, in the intrigues which never seemed to cease in the restless capital of Paraguay.
Not being content with the expulsion of the Jesuits, Antequera defeated several generals sent against him by the Viceroy of Peru, and by acoup de maintook prisoner the ex-Governor Balmaceda, having surprised him in his house in Corrientes, and carried him back to Asuncion under a close guard. The usual reign of terror then began, and everything fell into confusion, till at last the King (Philip V.) in 1726 commanded that the Jesuits should be reinstated in their college in Asuncion, and that the missions should be taken from the jurisdiction of the Governors of Paraguay and placed under the control of the Governor of the River Plate, as had been previously done in the case of the other Jesuit missions beyond the Uruguay. But Spain was far away, and on one pretext or another so much delay occurred that it was not till March 18, 1728, that the Jesuits were reinstated in the college in Asuncion, which they were now fated to hold but for a little space. At last the Viceroy of Peru, the Marquess of Castel Fuerte, sent Don Bruno de Zavala with a sufficient army and six thousand Indians from the missions against the usurper Antequera, who fled for refuge to the Franciscan convent in Cordoba, where he remained, till, finding his position quite untenable, he fled to Charcas, where he was arrested, and sent to Lima to await his trial. Four years he waited in perfect liberty, going and coming about the town as it best pleased him, whilst the High Court heard evidence, wrote to Madrid, received instructions from the King, and generally displayed the incapacity which in all ages has been the chief distinctive features of every court of law.
In 1731 an order came from Madrid to execute him, and without loss of time he was placed on a horse draped all in black, and, preceded by a herald and guarded by a troop of guards, taken out to the public square to be beheaded. But the good people of the capital, who, in the fashion of the world, would not most probably have stirred a step to save a saint, were mightily concerned to see a rogue receive his due deserts. The streets were filled with thousands crying out ‘Pardon!’ stones flew, and the affair looked so threatening that the Viceroy had to get on horseback and ride amongst the crowd to calm the tumult. The people met him with a shower of stones, and he, fearing the prisoner would escape, called on his guards to fire upon him. Four balls pierced Antequera, who fell dying from his horse into the arms of two accompanying priests. Thus the most turbulent of all the Governors of Paraguay ceased troubling, and the executioner, after having cut off his head, exhibited it to the people from the scaffold, with the usual moral aphorism as to the traitor’s fate.
The triumph of the Jesuits in Asuncion was but momentary, following the general rule of triumphs, which take their way along the street with trumpets and with drums amid the acclamations of the crowd, and then, the pageant over, the chief actors fall back again into the struggles and the commonplace of ordinary life.
Between the years 1728 and 1730 the people of Asuncion had been more eager in pursuit of liberty[230]than was their usual wont. The citizens were divided into camps, and daily fought amongst the sandy streets and shady orange-bordered lanes which radiate from almost every quarter of the town. The rival bands of madmen were styled respectively the ‘Communeros’ and the ‘Contrabandos’, and to the first Antequera throughout his residence in Lima gave all the assistance in his power. Neither of the two seems to have had the most elementary idea of real patriotism, or any wish for anything beyond the momentary triumph of the miserable party to which each belonged. One doctrine they held in common—a hatred of the Jesuits, and of the influence they exercised against the enslaving of the Indians, which was the aim of ‘Contrabandos’ and of ‘Communeros’ alike. One of the rival chieftains of the factions having fled for refuge to the missions, the people of Asuncion assembled troops to take him from his sanctuary by force. Arrived upon the frontier of the Jesuit territory, they found themselves opposed by an army of the Indians, who looked so formidable that the troops retired to Asuncion, and the leaders, foiled in the field, and not having force to attack the Jesuits in their own territory, set vigorously to inflame the minds of the people against them.
They worked with such success that when, in 1732, the news of Antequera’s death reached Paraguay, the people, inflamed with the idea that he was sacrificed to the hatred of the Jesuits, rose and expelled them once again. The constant expulsions of the Jesuits from Asuncion, the turmoils in the State, and the fact that every now and then the Indians had to take arms to defend their territory, acted most mischievously on the reductions, both in Paraguay and in those between the Paraná and Uruguay. Whole tribes of Indians, recently converted, went back to the woods; land was left quite untilled, and on the outskirts of the mission territory the warlike tribes of Indians, still unsubdued, raided the cattle, killed the neophytes, and carried off their wives as slaves. But still, in spite of all, the Indians clung to their priests—as they said, from affection for the religious care they had bestowed, but quite as possibly from the instinctive knowledge that, between the raiding Portuguese and the maddening patriots in Asuncion, their only safeguard against slavery lay in the Jesuits. Most fortunately for Paraguay at the time (1734), Don Bruno de Zavala, perhaps the most energetic of the Spaniards in the King’s service in America, was Viceroy in the River Plate. Having received orders to quiet the dissensions in Asuncion, in spite of being nearly seventy years of age, and having lost an arm in the Italian wars, he marched at once, taking but forty soldiers in his train, as, war being imminent with Portugal, it was not safe to deplete the slender forces in the River Plate. Arrived in Paraguay, he entered the Jesuit missions at the Reduction of San Ignacio Guazu,[231]and, having appealed to the provincial of the Order for his aid, speedily found himself at the head of a large army of the Indians. After some skirmishes he was in a position to enter Asuncion and force the people to receive him as their Governor. By one of those revulsions so frequent in a crowd of reasonable men, the people begged him to invite the Jesuits to return. They did so (1735), and were received in state, the Governor, the Bishop, and the chief clergy and officials of the place attending Mass in the Cathedral with lighted candles in their hands. His duty over, Don Bruno de Zavala set off for Chile, where he had been appointed Governor, and on his journey, at the town of Santa Fe, died suddenly, exhausted with the battles, marchings and countermarchings, rebellions, Indian incursions, the turbulence of the people in the towns, and the other cares which formed the daily duties of a Spanish officer in South America at the middle of the eighteenth century.[232]The next ten years were on the whole peaceful and profitable for the Indians of the missions and for the Jesuits. The Indians followed quietly their Arcadian lives, except when now and then a contingent of them was required to assist in any of the wars, which at that time were ceaseless throughout the eastern part of South America. The Jesuits pushed out their spiritual frontiers, advancing on the north amongst the Tobatines of the woods, and on the west endeavouring to spread their colonies amongst the Chiriguanas and other of the Chaco tribes.
From the conquest of Peru, when those Indians who had been but recently brought under the empire of the Incas retreated into the Chaco, it had been the refuge of the fiercest and most indomitable tribes. The Spanish colonists, the ardour of the first conquest spent, had settled down mainly to agricultural pursuits. Few had efficient firearms, and on the whole, though turbulent amongst themselves, they had become unwarlike.[233]The very name of the wild Indians (Los Indios Bravos) spread terror up and down the frontiers. This terror, which I remember still prevalent both in Mexico and on the pampas of the Argentine Republic, not more than five-and-twenty years ago, was keener upon the confines of the Chaco than anywhere in South America, except, perhaps, in Chile, upon the frontiers of Araucania.
The Tobas, Mataguayos, Lules, Aguilotas, Abipones, and the rest, together with the warlike nations of the Vilelas and the Guaycurús, had from the first rejected Christianity. Attempts had several times been made to establish settlements amongst them, but the ferocity of all the tribes, their nomad habits—for many of them passed their lives on horseback—and the peculiar nature of their country, a vast domain of swamp, pierced by great rivers quite unknown to the Spanish settlers, had hitherto combined to render every effort vain. But, notwithstanding this, the Jesuits laboured incessantly, and not without success, amongst the wildest of the Chaco tribes. The gentle and eccentric Father Martin Dobrizhoffer passed many years amongst the Abipones, of whom he wrote his charming book. He enumerates many tribes, of whom he says[234]‘these are for the most converted by us, and settled in towns.’
Nothing, perhaps, displays the Jesuits at their best, more than their efforts in the Chaco. The enormous territory was sparsely peopled by about seventy tribes,[235]whereof there were fifteen or sixteen of considerable size. Hardly two tribes spoke dialects by which they could communicate with one another, and almost every one of them lived in a state of warfare, not only with the Spaniards, but with the neighbouring tribes. The inventories preserved by Brabo[236]show us the town of Paisanes in the Chaco, with its rough wooden houses, and the Jesuits’ habitation in the middle of the place, stockaded, and without doors, and with but narrow openings in the wall, through which the missionaries crept. The inside of the house contained five or six rough rooms, almost unfurnished, but for a few religious books and a plentiful supply of guns.[237]Their beds were of unvarnished wood, with curtains of rough cotton spun by the Indians. Sometimes they had a sofa of leather slung between four stakes, a rack for medicine bottles, and for the wine for Mass. Lastly, one priest, in the settlement amongst the Toquitistines, had among his books copies of Cervantes and Quevedo; one hopes he read them half smiling, half with a tear in his eye, for your true humour is akin to tears. Perhaps, reading ‘Don Quixote’ or ‘El Gran Tacaño’, the poor priest forgot his troubles, and, wandering with Sancho in La Manchan oak-woods or through Castilian uplands, thought he was in Spain.[238]
Throughout the territory of the Gran Chaco there were but seven reductions established by the Jesuits. These were San José de Bilelas, with its little town Petacas; San Juan Bautista de los Iristines, with its townlet of the same name; San Esteban de los Lules, with the town of Miraflores; Nuestra Señora del Buen Consejo de los Omarapas, capital Ortega; Nuestra Señora de Pilar de los Paisanes, with Macapillo as its centre; Nuestra Señora del Rosario de los Tobas, with its chief place called San Lucas; and, lastly, the establishment amongst the Abipones, known as La Concepcion. In all these missions the Jesuits lived in constant peril of their lives. In reading their old chronicles one finds the records of their obscure and half-forgotten martyrdoms, their sufferings, and the brief record of their deaths by an arrow or a club. In 1711 Father Cavallero, with all his following, was slain by the savage Pinzocas. In 1717 Father Romero, having, as a Jesuit writer says, ‘nothing but moral force behind him,’[239]was slain with twelve companions of the Guaranís of Paraguay. In 1718 Fathers Arco and Blende, Sylva and Maceo, received their dusted-over martyrs’ crowns.
Right up the western bank of the river Paraguay, in the old maps, the crosses mark the sites where Jesuits were slain. That they all died to further crafty schemes, or for some hidden purpose of a Machiavelian nature, even a Dominican will scarcely urge. That they did good—more or less good than Protestant fanatics of the same kidney might have achieved—it were invidious to inquire. That which is certain is that they were single-hearted men, faithful unto the end to what they thought was right, faithful even to the shedding of their own blood, which is, one may believe, the way in which the scriptural injunction should be rightly read.
In the dim future, when some shadow of common-sense dawns on the world, and when men recognise that it is better to let others follow their destiny as it best pleases them, without the officious interference of their fellows, it may be that they will say all missionaries of whatsoever sect or congregation should have stayed at home, and not gone gadding to the desert places of the earth seeking to remedy the errors of their God by their exertions; but whilst the ideal still remains of sacrifice (which may, for all I know, be useless in itself, or even harmful), they must perforce allow the Jesuits in Paraguay high rank, or else be stultified.
But in the Chaco the Jesuits found conditions most different from those prevailing in their missions between the Uruguay and Paraná. Instead of open plains, vast swamps; instead of docile semi-Arcadians like the Guaranís, who almost worshipped them, fierce nomad horsemen, broken into a hundred little tribes, always at war, and caring little for religion of any sort or kind. Again, there seems in the Chaco to have been no means of amassing any kind of wealth, as all the territory was quite uncultivated and in a virgin state; but, still, the settlements had existed long enough for cattle to increase.[240]Lastly, the incursions of the barbarous tribes were a constant menace both to the Jesuits and their neophytes. Yet in their indefatigable way the Jesuits made considerable progress amongst the Chaco tribes, as both the curious ‘History of the Abipones’ by Father Dobrizhoffer and the inventories preserved by Brabo prove.[241]
Besides their seven establishments in the Gran Chaco, they had three establishments in the north of Paraguay in the great woods which fringe the central mountain range of the country, known as the Cordillera de M’baracayu. These missions, called San Joaquin del Taruma, San Estanislao, and Belen, were quite apart from all the other missions of the Guaranís, far distant from the Chaco, and removed by an enormous distance from those of the Order in the Moxos and amongst the Chiquitos, forming, as it were, an oasis in the recesses of the Tarumensian woods. These three reductions, founded respectively in 1747,[242]1747, and 1760, were, as their dates indicate, the swansong of the Jesuits in Paraguay. Founded as they were far from the Spanish settlements, they were quite removed from the intrigues and interferences of the Spanish settlers, which were the curse of the other missions on the Paraná. The Tobatines Indians[243]were of a different class to the Guaranís, though possibly of the same stock originally. Not having come in contact until recent years with the Spaniards, and having had two fierce and prolonged wars with the nearest settlements, they had remained more in their primitive condition than any of the Indians with whom the Jesuits had come in contact in Paraguay. During the short period of Jesuit rule amongst them (1746-1767) things seem to have gone on in a half-Arcadian way. In San Joaquin, Dobrizhoffer, as he says himself, devoted eight years of unregretted labour to the Indians. Most certainly he was one of the Jesuits who understood the Indians best, and his descriptions of them and their life are among the most delightful which have been preserved. He tells of the romantic but fruitless search during eighteen months throughout the forests of the Taruma by Fathers Yegros, Escandon, Villagarcia, and Rodriguez, for the Itatines who had left the reduction of Nuestra Señora de Santa Fe, and had hidden in the woods.
Then, commenting upon the strangeness of all affairs sublunary, he relates that accident at length effected what labour could not do. In 1746 Father Sebastian de Yegros, after a search of forty days, came on the Indians—as it were, directed by Providence, or, as we now say, accident. He built a town for them, and, as Dobrizhoffer says, ‘assembled them in Christian polity.’ To the new-founded village cattle of every kind were sent, with clothes—useful, of course, to those who had never worn them—axes, and furniture, and lastly a few music masters,[244]without whose help those who build cities spend their toil in vain.
To the new town (in which the simple-hearted priest remained eight years), in 1753, came Don Carlos Morphi, an Irishman, and Governor of Paraguay; and, having stayed five days with Dobrizhoffer, departed, marvelling at the accuracy with which the new-made Christians (Cristianos nuevos) managed their double-basses, their flageolets, their violins, and, in general, all their instruments, whether of music or of war.
Modestly, but with prolixity, as befits a virtuous, God-fearing man, the simple Jesuit relates a special instance of the way in which he was enabled to work both for his own glory and for the profit of the Lord. Not far from San Estanislao was situate the forest of M’baevera, in which grew quantities of trees from which theyerba-maté(Paraguayan tea) was made. To reach it was a work of pain and trouble, for through the woods a track called apicadahad to be cut; the rivers were deep, bridgeless, and had to have branches strewed along the track to give a footing to the struggling mules.[245]
An expedition having been sent under a certain Spaniard called Villalba to collectyerba, came suddenly upon a deserted Indian hut. As they had started quite unarmed, except with knives and axes to cut down the boughs, a panic seized them, and, instead of collecting any leaves,[246]they hurried back to San Estanislao. No sooner did Dobrizhoffer hear the news than he set out to find the Indians, with a few neophytes, upon his own account. Having travelled the ‘mournful solitudes’ for eighteen days, they came upon no sign of Indians, and returned footsore and hungry, ‘the improvement of our patience being our sole recompense.’
He himself walked all the way, and ‘often barefoot’, suffering ‘what neither I can describe nor yet my reader credit.’ The missionary calling has undergone considerable change since 1750. Hardships which the greater faith or stronger constitutions of the missionaries of the last century rendered endurable are now largely fallen out of fashion, and your missionary seldom walks barefoot, even in a wood, because to do so would give offence, and bring discredit on the society for which he works.
Though unsuccessful in his search that year, Dobrizhoffer, not daunted by his barefoot marching, set out again upon the Gospel trail next spring. After another journey of some twenty days, during the whole course of which it rained incessantly, he came on a community of seemingly quite happy sylvans, whom he proceeded to convert. In the first hut he met with there were eight doors, and in it dwelt some sixty Indians—a palm-built, grass-thatched phalanstery, with hammocks slung from the rude beams, in which ‘these heathen’ used to sleep. Each separate family had its own fire, on the hearth of which stood mugs and gourds and pots of rudely-fashioned earthenware. Naked and not ashamed ‘these savages’, and the men wore upon their heads high crowns of parrot feathers. For arms they carried bows and arrows, and the first man Dobrizhoffer saw was holding a dead pheasant in one hand, and in the other a short bow. In the woods around the phalanstery was an ‘amazing’ quantity of maize, of fruits of divers sorts, and of tobacco. From the hives which the wild bees make in hollow trees, they collected honey in large quantities, which served them (at least so Dobrizhoffer says) for meat and drink alike.
Their name for the god they worshipped was Tupá, but ‘of that God and his commandments they care to know but little.’ This sounds ambiguous, and would appear at first sight as if the confidence betwixt the creators and their God had been but slight. Perhaps the ambiguity may be set down to the translator[247]who turned the Latin in which the memoirs first were formed into the vulgar tongue.
A thing remarkable enough when one considers how prone mankind is to act differently was that, although the Itatines knew an evil spirit under the name of Aná, yet they paid little adoration to him, apparently content to know as little of him and his laws as they did of their God.
Those hapless, harmless folk, as innocent of God and devil, right and wrong, and all the other things which by all rights they should have known, as they are said to be implanted in the mind of man, no matter what his state, seem to have lived quite happily in their involuntary sin.[248]But Dobrizhoffer, in his simple faith and zeal for what he thought was right, wept bitter tears when he thought upon their unregenerate state.
A sycophantic Guaraní from the reductions then took up his parable, and said: ‘God save ye, brothers; we are come to visit you as friends. This father-priest is God’s own minister, and comes to visit you, and pray for your estate.’ An aged Indian interrupted him, saying he did not want a father-priest, and that St. Thomas in the past had prayed sufficiently, as fruits of every sort abounded in the land. The Indian, in his unsophisticated way, seems to have thought the presence of a priest acted but as manure on the ground where he abode; but the Jesuit, almost as simple-minded as himself, took it in kindliness, and journeyed with the Indian to a large village about three days away. Arrived there, all the inhabitants of the place sat in a circle round the missionary. They appeared (he says) in so much modesty and silence ‘that I seemed to behold statues, and not live Indians.’ To awaken their attention he played upon the viol d’amore, and, having thus captured their ears, began to preach to them. The good priest probably believed all that he said, for, after dwelling on the perils of the road, he said: ‘My friends, my errand is to make you happy.’ It did not seem to him that their free life in woods, in which abounded maize, fruits, and tobacco, with game of every kind, could possibly have induced content. Content, as Christians know, comes but with faith, and a true knowledge of the dogma is above liberty. Kindly, but muddle-headedly, he deplored their lot, their want of clothes, their want of interest in their God, their lack of knowledge of that God’s commands. Then, coming to the point, he spoke of hell, and told the astonished Indians that it was quite impossible for them to avoid its flames, unless, taught by a priest, they came to know God’s law. He then briefly (as he says) explained the mysteries of our faith. They listened rapt, except that ‘the boys laughed a little’ when he spoke of hell.[249]Nothing more painful than to see a child laughing unconscious of its peril in the traffic of a crowded street, and we may well believe that the kind-hearted Dobrizhoffer shuddered at the laughter of these children when he reflected that had he taken the wrong path, crossing the marshes or in the woods, the laughers had been damned. Much more he said to them after exhausting hell, and, to ‘add weight’ to his oration, presented each of them with scissors, knives, glass beads, axes, small looking-glasses, and fishing-hooks, for he knew well that sermons which end in ‘give me’ have but a small effect.
He says himself quite frankly, ‘I seemed to have borne down all before me because I had mingled my oration with a copious largess.’[250]Glass beads and looking-glasses have from the time when the first Christian missionary preached to the Indians been potent factors in conversion, and still to-day do yeoman service in the great work of bringing souls to God.
Seated around the fire ‘smoking tobacco through a reed’, and pondering perchance over the mysteries of the new expounded faith, thecaciqueof 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. Thecacique, 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’ (thecaciquesaid) ‘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 thecacique, who inquired, ‘What is it that displeases, then, the dweller in the skies?’
Lies, calumnies, adulteries, thefts, all were enumerated, and received the Indian’s assent; but the injunction not to kill provoked a bystander to ask if it was not permitted to a man to slay those who attacked his life. He added, ‘I have endeavoured so to do since the first day I carried arms.’
‘Fanatical casuist’ is a stout argument in the mouth of a man nurtured upon Suarez and Molina, but no doubt it did good service, and Dobrizhoffer uses it when speaking of the chief. But Dobrizhoffer did better work than mere theological disputation, for he prevailed upon eighteen of the Indians to accompany him to the settlement of San Joaquin; and after having ‘for some months tried the constancy’ of a youth called Arapotiyu, he admitted him to the sacrament of baptism, and ‘not long afterwards united him in marriage according to the Christian rites.’ It is evident that baptism should precede marriage; but it is an open question as to the duration of the interval between the two ceremonies, and we may be permitted to wonder whether, after all, both might not be advantageously dispensed at the same time. In the case of Arapotiyu the system worked satisfactorily, for he ‘surpassed in every kind of virtue, and might have been taken for an old disciple of Christianity.’ Even ‘old Christians’ occasionally, despite their more laborious induction into the rites and customs of their faith, have fallen from grace, perhaps from the undue prolongation of the term between the ceremonies.
In the case of another youth (one Gato) things did not go so smoothly, for though he, too, by his conduct obtained both baptism and Christian wedlock, Dobrizhoffer adds without comment, ‘not many months after he died of a slow disease.’[251]The slow disease was not improbably the nostalgia of the woods, from which the efforts of the good missionary had so successfully withdrawn him.
The labours of the Jesuits in the three isolated missions in the north of Paraguay[252]seem to have been as successful as those in the Chaco were unfortunate. In dealing with the wild equestrian tribes of the Gran Chaco, the system of the Jesuits was not so likely to achieve success as amongst the peaceful Guaranís. That of the Spanish settlers was entirely ineffectual, and has remained so down to the present day, when still the shattered remnants of the Lules, Lenguas, Mocobios, and the rest, roam on their horses or in their canoes about the Chaco and its rivers, having received no other benefits from contact with the European races but gunpowder and gin.