Footnotes:[1]The doctrine of the ‘Ciencia Media’ occurs in the celebrated ‘Concordia gratiæ et liberi arbitrii’, by Luis de Molina (1588). The concilium de Auxiliis was held to determine whether or notconcordiawas possible between freewill and grace. As the Jesuits stuck by Molina and his doctrines in despite of councils and of popes, the common saying arose in Spain: ‘Pasteles en la pasteleria y ciencia media en la Compañia.’[2]Dean Funes, ‘Ensayo de la Historia Civil del Paraguay’, etc., Buenos Aires, 1816.[3]Idem.The letter is dated 1771 and the Jesuits were expelled in 1767. As the writer of the letter was on the spot in an official position, and nominated by the very Viceroy who had been the expeller of the Jesuits, his testimony would seem to be as valuable as that of the ablest theorist on government, Catholic or Protestant, who ever wrote.[4]This, of course, applies to the possessions of all European States in America equally with Spain.[5]Madrid, 1770.[6]Though in this respect Charlevoix is not so credulous as Padre Ruiz de Montoya and the older writers, he yet repeats the story of the bird that cleans the alligator’s teeth, the magic virtues of the tapir’s nails, and many others. See Charlevoix, vol. i., bk. i., p. 27, Paris, 1756.[The story of the bird that cleans the teeth of alligators is very nearly true—Pluvianus aegyptiushas a symbiotic relationship with crocodiles in parts of Africa, and similar relationships exist throughout the natural world.—A. L., 1998.][7]Dobrizhoffer’s book was written in Latin, and printed in Vienna in 1784 under the title of ‘Historia de Abiponibus’, etc. A German translation by Professor Keil was published at Pesth in the same year. The English translation is of the year 1822.[8]It is to be remembered that the Spanish colonists were as a rule antagonistic to the Jesuits, and that, therefore, Spanish writers do not of necessity hold a brief for the Jesuits in Paraguay. Moreover, the names of Esmid (Smith), Fildo (Fields), Dobrizhoffer, Cataldini and Tomas Bruno (Brown, who is mentioned as beingnatural de Yorca), Filge, Limp, Pifereti, Enis, and Asperger, the quaint medical writer on the virtues of plants found in the mission territory, show how many foreign Jesuits were actually to be found in the reductions of Paraguay. For more information on this matter see the ‘Coleccion de Documentos relativos á la Expulsion de los Jesuitas de la Republica Argentina y Paraguay’, published and collected by Francisco Javier Brabo, Madrid, 1872.[9]The Inca Garcilaso de la Vega, in his ‘Commentarios Reales’ (en Madrid 1723, en la oficina Real y á costa de Nicholas Rodriguez Franco, Impressor de libros, se hallaran en su casa en la calle de el Poço y en Palacio), derives the word from the QuichuaChacú= a surrounding. If he is right, it would then be equivalent to the Gaelic ‘tinchel’. Taylor, the Water-poet, has left a curious description of one of these tinchels. It was at a tinchel that the rising under the Earl of Mar in the ’15 was concocted.[10]See the curious map contained in the now rare work of P. Pedro Lozano, entitled, ‘Descripcion Chorographica . . . del Gran Chaco, Gualamba’, etc. Also in the interesting collection of old maps published in 1872 at Madrid by Francisco Javier Brabo.[11]It is, of course, to be taken into consideration that my two journeys in Paraguay were made after the great war which terminated in 1870, after lasting four years; but the writings of Demersay (‘Histoire du Paraguay et des Établissements des Jésuites’, Paris, 1862), those of Brabo, and of Azara, show the deserted state of the district of Misiones in the period from 1767, the date of the expulsion of the Jesuits, to the middle of the nineteenth century.[12]Cocos Australis.[13]See the reports of the Marques de Valdelirios and others in the publications of Francisco Javier Brabo, Madrid, 1872, and in the ‘Ensayo de la Historia Civil de Paraguay, Buenos-Ayres y Tucuman’, por Dr. Don Gregorio Funes, Buenos Ayres, 1816.[14]Bernal Diaz, ‘Historia de la Conquista de la Nueva España’, vol. iv., cap. 207, Madrid, 1796.[15]Especially noting down the appearance and qualities of ‘el caballo Motilla’, the horse of Gonzalo de Sandoval. Thus does he minutely describe Motilla, ‘the best horse in Castille or the Indies’. ‘El mejor caballo, y de mejor carrera, revuelto á una mano y à otra que decian que no se habia visto mejor en Castilla, ni en esa tierra era castaño acastañado, y una estrella en la frente, y un pie izquierdo calzado, que se decia el caballo Motilla; é quando hay ahora diferencia sobre buenos caballos, suclen decir es en bondad tan bueno como Motilla.’[16]‘La Argentina’, included in the ‘Coleccion de Angelis’, Buenos Ayres, 1836.[17]‘Historia y Descubrimiento de el Rio de la Plata y Paraguay’, Hulderico Schmidel, contained in the collection made by Andres Gonzalez Barcia, and published in 1769 at Madrid under the title of ‘Historiadores Primitivos de las Indias Occidentales’.[18]The great Las Casas, who made seven voyages from America to Spain—the last at the age of seventy-two—to protect the Indians, had a strong opinion about ‘conquerors’ and ‘conquests’. In the dedication of his great treatise on the wrongs of the Indians, he says: ‘Que no permita (Felipe II.) las atrocidades que los tiranos inventaron, y que prosiguen haciendo con titulo de “conquistas”. Los que se jactan de ser “conquistadores” a que descienden de ellos son muchomas orgullosos arrogantes y vanos que los otros Españoles.’ Strange that even to-day the sameatrocidadesoftiranosare going on in Africa. No doubt the descendants of these ‘conquerors’ will be as arrogant, proud, and vain as the descendants of theconquistadoresof whom Las Casas writes.[19]Mendoza left (‘Azara Apuntamientos para la Historia Natural de los Quadrupedes del Paraguay’, etc.) five mares and seven horses in the year 1535. In 1580 Don Juan de Garay, at the second founding of the city, already found troops of wild horses. The cattle increased to a marvellous extent, and by the end of the century were wild in Patagonia. Sarmiento (‘Civilisation et Barbarisme’) says that early in this century they were often killed by travellers, who tethered their horses to the carcasses to prevent them from straying at night.[20]Hulderico Schmidel, ‘Historia del Descubrimiento de el Rio de la Plata y Paraguay’.[21]Perhaps the two most important works upon the language are the ‘Tesoro de la Lengua Guarani’, by Ruiz de Montoya, Madrid, 1639 (it is dedicated to the ‘Soberana Virgen’); and the ‘Catecismo de la Lengua Guarani’, by Diego Diaz de la Guerra, Madrid, Año de 1630. He also wrote a ‘Bocabulario y Arte de la Lengua Guarani’.[22]P. Guevara, in his ‘Historia del Paraguay’, relates a curious story which he said was current amongst the Indians. Two brothers, Tupi and Guaraní, lived with their families upon the sea-coast of Brazil. In those days the world was quite unpopulated but by themselves. They quarrelled about a parrot, and Tupi with his family went north, and populated all Brazil; whilst Guaraní went west, and was the ancestor of all the Indians of the race of Guaranís.[23]Azara, in his ‘Descripcion y Historia del Paraguay’, has a similar passage: ‘Recibe bien todo Indio silvestre, al estrangero que viene de paz.’[24]‘Por lo comun reparten pedazos de este cuerpo, del qual pedazo cozido en mucha agua hacen unas gachas (fritters) y es fiesta muy celebre para ellos que hacen con muchas cerimonias.’[25]‘Histoire du Paraguay et des Établissements des Jésuites’, L. Alfred Demersay, Paris, 1864.[26]‘La Argentina’, a long poem or rhyming chronicle contained in the collection of ‘Historiadores Primitivos de Indias’, of Gonzales Barcia, Madrid, 1749.[27]Lozano, in his ‘Historia del Paraguay’, compares it to Greek, but in my opinion fails to establish his case; but, then, so few people know both Greek and Guaraní.[28]He passed through the whole Chaco, descending the Pilcomayo to its junction with the Paraguay, through territories but little explored even to-day. Perhaps the most complete description of the Chaco is that of P. Lozano, with the following comprehensive title:‘Descripcion chorographica de Terreno Rios, Arboles, y Animales de los dilatadisimas Provincias del Gran Chaco, Gualamba, y de los Ritos y Costumbres de la inumerables naciones barbaros é infideles que le habitan. Con un cabal Relacion Historica de lo que en ellos han obrado para conquistarlas algunos Gobernadores y Ministros Reales, y los Misioneros Jesuitas para reduc irlos à la fe del Verdadero Dios.’ Por el Padre Pedro Lozano, de la Compañia de Jesus, Año de 1733. En Cordoba por Joseph Santos Balbas.This book did not appear in a clandestine manner, for it had: 1. Censura, por C. de Palmas. 2. Licencia de la Religion, por Geronymo de Huróza, Provincial de los Jesuitas de Andalucia. 3. Licencia del Ordinario por el Dr. Don Francisco Miguel Moreno, por mandado del Sr. Provisor Alonso Joseph Gomez de Lara. 4. Aprobacion del Rdo. P. Diego Vasquez. 5. Privelegio de su Majestad por Don Miguel Fernandez Morillo. 6. Fé de Corrector por el Licenciado, Don Manuel Garcia Alesson, Corrector General de su Majestad (who adds in a note, ‘este libro corresponde à su original’). 7. Sumo de Tassa, as follows: ‘Tassaron los señores del Consejo este libro à seis maravedis cada pliego.’Palma, in the firstcensura, says that he had read it several times ‘con repetida complacencia’, and that, though it was ‘breve en volumen’ (it has 484 quarto pages), that it was also short in its concise style, kept closely to the rules of history, and was ‘muy copiosa en la doctrina’.[29]This race at one time spread from the Orinoco to the river Plate, and even in the case of its offshoot, the Chiriguanás, crossed to the west bank of the Paraguay. Padre Ruiz Montoya, in his ‘Conquista Espiritual del Paraguay’, cap. i., speaking of the Guaraní race, says: ‘Domina ambos mares el del sur por todo el Brasil y ciñiendo el Peru con los dos mas grandes rios que conoce el orbe que son el de la Plata, cuya boca en Buenos-Ayres es de ochenta leguas, y el gran Marañon, à el inferior en nada e que pasa bien vecino de la ciudad de Cuzco.’[30]Barco de la Centenera, in ‘La Argentina’, canto v., also refers to ‘La Casa del Gran Moxo’. It was situated ‘en una laguna’, and was ‘toda de piedra labrada’.[31]Their numerals are four in number (peteî, mocoî, mbohap, irând); after this they are said to count in Spanish in the same way as do the Guaraní-speaking Paraguayans. Much has been written on the Guaraní tongue by many authors, but perhaps the ‘Gramatica’, ‘Tesoro’, and the ‘Vocabulario’ of Padre Antonio Ruiz Montoya, published at Madrid in 1639 and 1640, remain the most important works on the language. Padre Sigismundi has left a curious work in Guaraní on the medicinal plants of Paraguay. Before the war of 1866-70 several MS. copies were said to exist in that country. See Du Gratz’s ‘République du Paraguay’, cap. iv., p. 214.[32]See Demersay, ‘Histoire du Paraguay’, p. 324, for names of Guaraní tribes. Alfred Maury also, in his ‘La Terre et l’Homme Américain’, p. 392, speaks of ‘le rameau brasilio-guaranin, ou Caráibe, qui s’etendait jadis depuis les Petites-Antilles jusqu’au Paraguay.’[33]Few modern ‘conquerors’ in Africa seem to have engaged in personal combat with the natives. Even of Mr. Rhodes it is not set down that he has killed many Matabele with his own hands. Times change, not always for the bettering of things.[34]Santiago, as in duty bound, usually appeared whenever Spaniards were hard pressed. Few writers had the courage of Bernal Diaz, who of a similar appearance said: ‘But I, sinner that I was, was not worthy to see him; whom I did see and recognise was Francisco de Morla on his chestnut horse’ (Bernal Diaz, ‘Historia de la Conquista de Nueva España’, cap. xxxiv., p. 141; Madrid, 1795).[35]Thus it will be seen that the Franciscans were at work in the country long before the arrival of the Jesuits. It may be on this account that they became such bitter enemies of the later comers.[36]‘Comentarios de Alvar Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca’. Published by Don Andres Gonzalez Barcia in his collection of ‘Early Historians of the Indies’ (Madrid, 1749).[37]It must be allowed, however, that in their writings few of the Spanishconquistadoresof America bragged much. They mostly gave the credit of all their doings to the God of Battles. The boasting has been reserved for the conquerors of Africa in our own time.[38]Asientois a contract. The contract which Charles V., at the well-meant but unfortunate instigation of Las Casas, made with the Genoese to supply negroes for America is known as ‘El Asiento de los Negros’.[39]In thecapitulacionmade by Alvar Nuñez with the King occurs the celebrated clause, ‘Que no pasasen procuradores ni abogados a las Indias’,i.e., that neither solicitors nor barristers should go to the Indies. It is unfortunate it was not held to stringently, as in Paraguay, at least, the Reptilia were already well represented.[40]This is perhaps the first account of the levying of the tithe in the New World.[41]These backwaters are known in Guaraní by the name ofaguapey.[42]The vinchuca is a kind of flying bug common in Paraguay. Its shape is triangular, its colour gray, and its odour noxious. It is one of the Hemiptera, and its so-called scientific appellation isonorhinus gigas.[43]R. B. Cunninghame Graham writes elsewhere: “All over South America the jaguar is called a tiger (tigre).”—A. L., 1998.[44]Azara, in his ‘Historia del Paraguay’, etc., tells us that in 1551 Domingo de Irala at Asuncion bought a fine black horse for five thousand gold crowns. He bound himself to pay for him out of the proceeds of his first conquest.[45]‘Comentarios de Alvar Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca’, contained in Barcia’s ‘Historiadores Primitivos de las Indias Occidentales’.[46]The ‘patriots’ are always those of the prevailing party in a State.[47]‘(I.H.S.)‘God preserve your Excellency, say we, the Cabildo, and all the Caciques and Indians, men, women and children of San Luis, as your Excellency is our father. The Corregidor, Santiago Pindo and Don Pantaleon Caynari, in their love for us, have written to us of certain birds which they desire we will send them for the King. . . . We are sorry not to have them to send, inasmuch as they live where God made them, in the forests, and fly far away from us, so that we cannot catch them. Withal we are the vassals of God and of the King, and always desirous to fulfil the wishes of his Minister . . . so we pray to God that that best of birds, the Holy Ghost, may descend upon the King. . . . Furthermore, we desire to say that the Spanish custom is not to our liking—for everyone to take care of himself, instead of helping one another in their daily toil.’This quaint and touching letter was written originally in Guaraní, and is preserved at Buenos Ayres. ‘That best of birds, the Holy Ghost,’ shows faith grounded, at least, on ornithology, and the whole spirit of the simple document is as pathetic as its unconscious philosophy is true.[48]Guevara, ‘Historia del Paraguay’ (printed in ‘La Coleccion de Angelis’, Buenos Aires, 1836), book vi., p. 108, says of Alvar Nuñez: ‘Merecia estatua por su rectitud, justicia y Christiandad.’ And in another place Guevara says: ‘La Florida lo cautivó con inhumanidad; La Asuncion lo aprisionó con infamia; pero en una y otro parte fue ejemplar de moderacion . . . recto, prudente y de sano corazon.’ Alvar Nuñez died holding the office of ‘Oidor de la Audiencia de Sevilla’, according to P. del Techo (‘Historia del Paraguay’); or as a member of the Consejo de Indias, according to Charlevoix.[49]Acquaviva was General of the Order at this time; he was a man of marked ability and great energy.[50]Before this date the Jesuits in Paraguay had been under the ecclesiastical jurisdiction of the Bishops of Peru.[51]Paranapané = the White Paraná, or, according to others, the Paraná without fish.[52]Reduction (reduccion) was the Spanish name for a missionary establishment.[53]Some of the Spanish writers refer to Filds as Padre Tom Filds. His real name was Fields, and he was a Scotchman.[54]The Paulistas were the inhabitants of the Portuguese (now Brazilian) town of São Paulo. Azara, who hated the Jesuits (his brother, Don Nicolas de Azara, having been concerned in their expulsion), says that fear of the Paulistas contributed to the success of the Jesuits with the Indians. Dean Funes (‘Historia del Paraguay’, etc.) says just as reasonably that it was fear of the Spanish settlers.[55]There was, however, a royal Order (cedula real) which applied to all America, which especially prohibited Spaniards from living in the Indian towns, and, moreover, provided that even for purposes of trade no Spaniard should remain for more than three days in an Indian town.[56]‘Histoire Politique et Philosophique des Indes’, vol. i., p. 289 (Genève, 1780).[57]Cretineau Joly, ‘Histoire Religieuse, Politique et Littéraire de la Compagnie de Jésus’, vol. iii., cap. v., p. 322 (Paris, 1846).[58]‘Historia General de los hechos de los Castellanos en las Islas y tierra firme del Mar Oceano’, decad. v., lib. iv., cap. xl.[59]‘Historia General de los hechos de los Castellanos en las Islas y tierra firme del Mar Oceano’, decad. v., lib. x., cap. lxxx.[60]‘Inventarios de los bienes hallados á la Expulsion de los Jesuitas’ (Madrid, 1872).[61]The Franciscans had already five or six settlements.[62]The word in Brazil is used to designate a half-breed, but the etymology seems unknown.[63]‘Me he de salvar a pesar de Dios, porque para salvarse el hombre no ha menester mas que creer’ (Ruiz Montoya, ‘Conquista Espiritual’). Montoya adds with a touch of humour quite in Cervantes’ vein: ‘Este, sabe ya por experiencia la falsedad de su doctrina, porque le mataron de tres balazos, sin confesion.’[64]The Mamelucos sometimes pushed their forays right through Paraguay into the district of the Moxos, and Padre Patricio Fernandez, in his curious ‘Relacion de los Indios Chiquitos’ (Madrid, 1726), relates their adventures in that far-distant district, and the conflicts which the Indians, led by their priests and helped by the Spanish settlers, sustained.[65]Lahier (Francisci) S. I., ‘Annæ Paraguarie, Annor. 1635, et duor. sequ.’[66]‘Relazioni della Provincia del Paraguai’.[67]Brabo.[68]Anesterois a tract of country covered by water to the depth of two or three feet. The bottom is usually hard, but it is full of holes and hummocks. High pampa grass and reeds not infrequently obscure the view, and clouds of insects make life miserable. If the tract extends to more than a day’s journey, the night passed on a dry hummock, holding one’s horse and listening without a fire to the wild beasts, is likely to remain present to one in after-life, especially if alone; the only things that seem to link one to humanity are one’s horse and the familiar stars. Perhaps that is why Capella has always seemed to me in some sort my own property.[69]This curious berry, about the size of a large damson, grows on a little shrub in sandy and rocky soils. It has a thick yellow rind and several large seeds, and the property of being icy cold in the hottest weather—a true traveller’s joy. Dr. de Bourgade de la Dardye, in his excellent book on Paraguay (the English edition published in London in 1892), thinks it is either a eugenia or a myrtus.[70]Charlevoix, vol. i., liv. vii., p. 384.[71]Ibid., liv. vii., p. 359.[72]Charlevoix, ‘Histoire du Paraguay’, vol. lvi., p. 285.[73]‘Conquista Espiritual del Paraguay’, Ruiz de Montoya, introductory chapter.[74]This may either mean to the service of God or to the service of the King (Philip III.), for in the time of Montoya ‘Majesty’ was used in addressing both the King of Spain and the King of Heaven.[75]Yapeyu, or Reyes, was the southernmost of the Jesuit reductions. It was situated upon the Uruguay in what is now the Argentine province of Entre Rios.[76]‘Conquista Espiritual’, p. 22.[77]This time, it is to be hoped, without omissions.[78]‘Dando gracias por agravios negocian los hombres sabios.’[79]Soon afterwards ruined by the Paulistas.[80]Cacique= chief.[81]These raids were known asmalocas.[82]In Paraguay it was not unusual for foreign Jesuits to hispaniolize their names; thus, Smith became Esmid. But it was more usual to add a Spanish name, as appears to have been the case with P. Vansurk Mansilla. Father Manuel Querini, in his report to the King of Spain in 1750, mentions the names of Boxer, Keiner, and Limp, with many other French, English, and German names, amongst those of priests at the various missions.[83]Montoya, ‘Conquista Espiritual’. Also Charlevoix.[84]It is certain that the Guaranís, like many other Indians, were polygamists, and Xarque, in his ‘Vida Apostolica del P. Joseph Cataldino’, thus explains the matter: ‘El tener tanto numero de concubinas, no solamente lo ocasiona su natural lascivo, sino tambien, el vicio de la embriaguez, pues teniendo tantas criadas tenian con mas abundancia su cerveza y vino.’ Thus Xarque seems to agree with the late Miss Mary Kingsley, who in one of her books (though she says nothing about the ‘natural lascivo’ of the negroes of the West Coast of Africa) seems to attribute the polygamy of the negroes to the difficulty a man experiences, in the countries in which she travelled, in getting his food prepared by one wife.[85]Charcas is situated in what is now Bolivia, and was extremely inconvenient for all dwellers on the eastern side of the Andes to reach. Whether this was a masterpiece of policy calculated to discourage lawsuits, or whether it was merely due to Spanish incuriousness and maladministration, is a moot point.[86]The Indians of the missions were not allowed to possess firearms at this period.[87]‘Paraguay’, Dr. E. de Bourgade la Dardye; English edition by George Philips junior (London, 1892). The Indians call it Salto de Canandiyú, which, according to Azara, was the name of acaciquewhom the first Spaniards met there.[88]‘Descripcion y Historia del Paraguay’, Madrid, 1847.[89]‘Y es un espantoso despeñadero de agua’, etc. (‘Descripcion del Paraguay’, tomo i., p. 39).[90]‘No dan cuartel’.[91]At least, I have been unable to discover any other account by an eye-witness.[92]This city was situated near the great falls of Guayrá, and was destroyed by the Paulistas, as well as the city of Villa Rica, after the Jesuits and their Indians left the province.[93]‘Conquista Espiritual’, p. 48.[94]‘Rigoroso examen’ (‘Conquista Espiritual’).[95]In all the books and pamphlets I have searched about the Jesuits in Paraguay, both friendly and unfriendly to the Order, I have never found a charge of personal unchastity advanced against a Jesuit. In regard to the other religious Orders it is far otherwise.[96]Azara, ‘Descripcion e Historia del Paraguay’, tomo i., p. 40: ‘En las inmediaciones del Salto hay proporcion para tomar las medidas geometricas que se quiera y metiendose por el bosque se puede reconocer lo inferior del Salto, bien que para este es menester desnudare totalmente porque llueve mucho.’[97]Azara records (book i.) the Indian fable that no living thing could exist near the cataract. Though this is of course untrue, yet in most Paraguayan forests near water, game is both scarce and hard to find.[98]‘Con buenas prendas de su salud eterna’ (‘Conquista Espiritual’).[99]Fathers Suarez, Contreras, and Espinosa were Montoya’s lieutenants in this memorable retreat. It is difficult to give the palm to the energy and courage of the four priests, or to the resignation and faith of the immense multitude of Indians who were saved by them.[100]Culebrais the Spanish for a serpent. These fish may have been waterboas, or, again, as seems probable by their digestive powers, some kind of hypothetical fish not yet catalogued.[101]The name of this river seems to have passed through the machine of some medieval typewriter, for it is like no name in any language, and Montoya knew Guaraní well, having written much in that language.[102]Even so late as the year 1777, in which the last treaty of boundaries was signed at San Ildefonso, Portugal was the gainer, though not so greatly as by the former treaties of 1681 and 1750.[103]‘Efemerides o Diario de la Guerra de los Guaranies’, por P. Tadeo Hennis. This journal has, I think, never been published in its entirety, but portions of it are to be found in the collection of documents, Bulls, despatches, etc., published at Madrid in 1768 under the title of ‘Causa Jesuitica de Portugal’. The author of this book calls Hennis a German, but his name, Thadeus Ennis (as it is often spelt), and his love of fighting look un-Germanic. Portions of the diary are also to be found in the work of Bernardo Ibañez de Echegarray, entitled ‘Histoire du Paraguay sous les Jésuites’ (Amsterdam, 1780). Either the original or an old manuscript copy exists in the archives of Simancas, where I have seen, but unfortunately did not examine, it. A portion of the work is also included in the ‘Coleccion de Angelis’ (Buenos Ayres, 1836).[104]‘Histoire d’un Voyage faict en la Terre du Brésil’.[105]The way of the neophyte even to-day is hard, so many priests of different jarring sects disputing for his soul as hotly as if it were a preference stock which they had private intimation was just about to rise.[106]This province was sometimes called Guayrá, and sometimes La Provincia de Vera, Vera being the family name of Alvar Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca. Its position, etc., may be determined by reference to the curious volume of maps published at Madrid by Don Francisco Javier Brabo in 1872.[107]That a mission could be so undefended as to need trenches, that a Jesuit should ask leave to make such elementary defences, even in the face of imminent danger, seems to prove that the Jesuits at least in 1636 had no intention of defying the sovereign power, as was so often alleged against them.[108]San Joaquin, Santa Teresa, Santa Ana.[109]‘Histoire du Paraguay’, liv. ix., p. 446.[110]This territory is now the Argentine province of Misiones.[111]This seems to prove the malice of those who set about that the Indians of the missions paid no taxes to the Crown.[112]Vieyra, the great Portuguese Jesuit, said that all miracles were possible to God, but yet that he had never heard that our Lord had ever cured anyone of folly.[113]Now a province of the Argentine Republic.[114]‘Historia Paraquariæ’, book xii., cap. xii.[115]La Plata was sometimes called Chuquisaca, and is to-day known as Sucre.[116]‘Histoire du Paraguay’, vol. i., book ix., p. 478.[117]Charlevoix, vol. i., book xi. Dean Funes, in his ‘Ensayo de la Historia Civil de Paraguay, Buenos Ayres y Tucuman’, vol. ii., book iii., p. 10 (Buenos Ayres, 1816), says of him: ‘Se adquirió muy en breve una reputacion mas brillante que solida.’[118]But besides putting into execution all his histrionic talents, he had the adroitness to address himself to those feelings of self-interest which he knew were perhaps more powerful than those of admiration and respect for his own saintly proceedings in his new diocese. Crétineau Joly, in his ‘Histoire de la Compagnie de Jésus’, vol. iii., p. 333 (Paris, 1845), tells us that Cardenas ‘parle aux Espagnols, il s’addresse à leurs interêts, il réveille les vieux levain de discorde . . . et il accuse les missionnaires d’être seuls les apôtres de la liberté des Indiens.’[119]‘Oraculo Manual y Arte de Prudencia’ (Amsterdam, en casa de Juan Blau, 1659).[120]Charlevoix.[121]Exod. 32:27.[122]The arroba is about twenty-five pounds weight.[123]Charlevoix.[124]Camalote is a species of water-lily which forms a thick covering on stagnant rivers and lakes in Paraguay and in the Argentine Republic.[125]This was untrue, as the Jesuit missions were not at that time (1644) apportioned into parishes under the authority of the Jesuits, and such tribute as then was customary was all collected by government officials.[126]This was also untrue, as the tithes were never regulated in Paraguay till 1649.[127]This accusation was quite untrue, for the edict referred to was not obtained under misapprehension, but after a complete exposition of all the facts. Moreover, it was subsequently renewed on several occasions by the Spanish Kings.[128]The Venetians did not expel the Jesuits, they left Venetia of their own accord.[129]Fathers Montoya and Taño went respectively to Rome and to Madrid to lay the sorrows of the Indians before the King and Pope. Having obtained the edict from the King that Cardenas referred to, and a brief from the Pope (Urban VIII.) forbidding slavery, they had the hardihood to appear within the city of San Paulo and affix both edicts to the church door. As was to be expected, the Paulistas immediately expelled them from their territories, and hence the semi-truth of the sixth charge made by Bishop Cardenas.[130]Funes, ‘Historia Civil del Paraguay, Buenos-Ayres, y Tucuman’.[131]The testimony of Funes is as follows: ‘Á juicio de testigo ocular no es más admirable la sangre fria de sus capellanes’ (‘Historia Civil del Paraguay’, book iii., cap. viii.).[132]Literally, ‘taking out the blocks to air’. The effigies are made of hard and heavy wood, and I remember once in Concepcion de Paraguay assisting on a sweltering day to carry a Madonna weighing about five hundredweight.[133]The proverb says in Paraguay, ‘No se fia de mula ni mulata’.[134]‘Pagar y apelar’.[135]Misque is at least fifteen hundred miles from Tucuman.[136]‘Que lo hagan salir de nuestros Reynos y Señorios como ageno y estraño, por importar assi para la quietud de aquellas Provincias, y al servicio de su Majestad.’[137]Ayerbalis a forest chiefly composed of theIlex Paraguayensis, from the leaves of which theyerba maté, or ‘Paraguayan tea’, is made.[138]Xarque, book ii., cap. xl., p. 30.[139]This Villalon has left some curious memoirs in the case which he submitted to the Council of the Indies which sat in Seville.[140]Charlevoix, book xii., p. 115.[141]Chipa is a kind of bread made of mandioca flour.[142]Rapadura is a kind of coarse sugar, generally sold in little pyramid-shaped lumps, done up in a banana leaf. It is strongly flavoured with lye.[143]Mani is ground-nut. [“Peanut” in American English.—A. L., 1998.][144]The paraiso is one of the Paulinias.[145]‘Obedesco, pero no cumplo.’[146]‘Cosas de palacio van despacio.’[147]Dean Funes, in his ‘Ensayo de la Historia Civil del Paraguay, Buenos Ayres y Tucuman’ (book ii., cap. i., p. 10), says he was ‘Dotado de un temperamento muy facil de inflamarse, de una imaginacion viva, de una memoria feliz, y de un ingenio no vulgar.’[148]At the date of the expulsion the number of the cattle was 719,761; oxen, 44,183; horses, 27,204; sheep, 138,827 (‘Inventarios de los bienes hallados á la expulsion de los Jesuitas’, Francisco Javier Brabo, Madrid, 1872).[149]Cocos yatais.[150]Urunday (Astrenium fraxinifolium: Terebinthaceæ), curapay (Piptadenia communis: Leguminaceæ), lapacho (Tecoma curialisandvaria: Begoniaceæ), taruma (Vitex Taruma: Verbenaceæ), tatane (Acacia maleolens: Leguminaceæ), and cupai (Copaifera Langsdorfii). These and many other woods, such as the Palo Santo (Guaiacum officinalis), butacæ, and theCedrela Braziliensis, known to the Jesuits as ‘cedar’, and much used by them in their churches, comprise the chief varieties.[151]‘Libro compuesto por el Hermano Pedro de Montenegro de la C. de J., Ano 1711’, MS. folio, with pen-and-ink sketches, formerly belonged to the Dukes of Osuna, and was in their library. Padre Sigismundi also wrote a herbal in Guaraní, and a Portuguese Jesuit, Vasconellos, has left a curious book upon the flora of Brazil.[152]Domingo Parodi, in his ‘Notas sobre algunas plantas usuales del Paraguay’ (Buenos Ayres, 1886), has done much good work.[153]Acacia Cavenia.[154]Prosopis dulcis. The famous ‘balm of the missions’, known by the vulgar name ofcuralo todo(all-heal), was made from the gum of the tree called aguacciba, one of the Terebinthaceæ. It was sold by the Jesuits in Europe. It was so highly esteemed that the inhabitants of the villages near to which the tree was found were specially enjoined to send a certain quantity of the balsam every year to the King’s pharmacy in Madrid.[155]It was from those mountains that the Jesuits procured the seed of theIlex Paraguayensisto plant in their reductions. The leaves beaten into a finish powder furnished the ‘Paraguayan tea’, calledyerba-matéby the Spaniards andcaaby the Indians, from which the Jesuits derived a handsome revenue. After the expulsion of the Order all theyerbain Paraguay was procured, till a few years ago, from forests in the north of Paraguay, in which the tree grew wild.[156]It was by the Bull of Paul III.—given at the demand of two monks, Fray Domingo de Betanzos and Fray Domingo de Minaya—that the Indians were first considered as reasoning men (gente de razon), and not as unreasonable beings (gente sin razon), as Juan Ortiz, Bishop of Santa Marta, wished.[157]Ibañez (‘Histoire du Paraguay sous les Jésuites M.D.CCIXXX.’), a great opponent of the Jesuits, says that European offenders and recalcitrant Indians in the missions were sent as a last resource to the Spanish settlements. This is not astonishing when we remember the curious letter of Don Pedro Faxardo, Bishop of Buenos Ayres (preserved by Charlevoix), written in 1721 to the King of Spain, in which he says he thinks ‘that not a mortal crime is committed in the missions in a year.’ He adds that, ‘if the Jesuits were so rich, why are their colleges so poor?’[158]It is to be remembered that, of the thirty Jesuit missions, only eight were in Paraguay; the rest were in what to-day is Brazil and the Argentine provinces of Entre Rios, Corrientes, and Misiones.[159]Sometimes, when they had been assembled, they all deserted suddenly, as did the Tobatines, who in 1740 suddenly left the reduction of Santa Fé, and for eleven years were lost in the forests, till Father Yegros found them, and, as they would not return, established himself amongst them (Cretineau Joly, ‘Histoire de la Compagnie de Jésus’, vol. v., cap. ii.).[160]P. Cardiel, ‘Declaracion de la Verdad’, p. 282: ‘Todos los pueblos estan bien formados con calles á cordel. Las casas de los Indios son en algunos pueblos de piedras cuadradas pero sin cal . . . otras de palos y barro todas cubiertas de teja, y todas tienen soportales ó corredores, unas con pilares de piedras, otras de madera.’[161]Don Francisco Graell, an officer of dragoons in service during the War of the Seven Towns in 1750, gives the following description of the church of the mission of San Miguel: ‘La iglesia es muy capaz, toda de piedra de silleria con tres naves y media naranja. Muy bien pintada y dorada con un portico magnifico y de bellisima arquitectura, bovedas y media naranja son de madera, el altar mayor de talla, sin dorar y le falta el ultimo cuerpo.’[162]‘Galerias con columnas, barandillas y escaleras de piedra entallada’ (Don Francisco Graell). See also P. Cardiel (‘Declaracion de la Verdad’, p. 247), ‘En todos los pueblos hay reloj de sol y de ruedas,’ etc. The work of Padre Cardiel was written in 1750 in the missions of Paraguay, but remained unpublished till 1800, when it appeared in Buenos Ayres from the press of Juan A. Alsina, Calle de Mexico 1422. It is, perhaps, after the ‘Conquista Espiritual’ of Father Ruiz Montoya, the most powerful contemporary justification of the policy of the Jesuits in Paraguay. It is powerfully but simply written, and contains withal that saving grace of humour which has, from the beginning of the world, been a stumbling-block to fools.[163]The mission of San Miguel had 1,353 families in it, or say 6,635 souls. San Francisco de Borja contained 650 families, or 2,793 souls (Report by Manuel Querini to the King, dated Cordoba de Tucuman, y Agosto 1o, 1750).[164]In their extensive missions in the provinces of Chiquitos and Moxos they pursued the same system. As they were much more isolated in those provinces than in Paraguay, and consequently much less interfered with, it was there that their peculiar system most flourished. After the expulsion of the Jesuits from America in 1767, the Spaniards in Alta Peru, and subsequently the Bolivians, had the sense to follow the Jesuit plan in its entirety; whereas Bucareli, the Viceroy of Buenos Ayres, entirely changed the Jesuits’ rule in Paraguay. The consequence was that in Bolivia the Indians, instead of dispersing as they did in Paraguay, remained in the missions, and D’Orbigny (‘Fragment d’un Voyage au Centre de l’Amérique Méridianale’) saw at the missions of Santiago and El Santo Corazon, in the province of Chiquitos, the remains of the Jesuits’ polity. There were ten missions in Chiquitos, and fifteen in Moxos. At the present time the Franciscans have some small establishments in Bolivia.[165]‘Pillos muy ladinos’ (Robertson, ‘Letters from Paraguay’).[166]Ferrer del Rio, in his ‘Coleccion de los articulos de la Esperanza sobre Carlos III.’ (Madrid, 1859), says: ‘Fuera de las misiones de los Jesuitas particularmente en el Paraguay se consideraban los Indios entre los seres mas infelices del mundo.’Jorge Juan and Antonio de Ulloa, in their celebrated ‘Secret Report’ (‘Noticias Secretas de America’): ‘La compañia (de Jesus) atiende a sus fines particularmente con los misioneros que llevan de España; pero con todo eso no se olvida de la conversion de los Indios, ni tiene abandonado este asunto pues aunque van poco adelante en el, que es lo que no se esperimenten en las demas religiones.’[167]Many travellers, as Azara, Demersay, Du Graty, and D’Orbigny, have remarked how fond of music was the Guaraní race, and how soon they learned the use of European instruments. D’Orbigny (‘Fragment d’un Voyage au Centre de l’Amérique Méridianale’), in his interesting account of the mission of El Santo Corazon, in the district of Chiquitos, says: ‘Je fus très étonné d’entendre exécuter après les danses indigènes des morceaux de Rossini et . . . de Weber . . . la grande messe chantée en musique était exécutée d’une manière très remarquable pour des Indiens.’Vargas Machuca, in his most curious and rare ‘Milicia y Descripcion de las Indias’, says, under the heading of ‘Musica del Indio’: ‘Usan sus musicas antiguas en sus regocijos, y son muy tristes en la tonada.’ To-day the Indians of Paraguay have songs known astristes. The brigadier Don Diego de Alvear, in his ‘Relacion de Misiones’ (Coleccion de Angelis), says that the first to teach the Guaranís European music was a Flemish Jesuit, P. Juan Basco, who had beenmaestro de capillato the Archduke Albert.[168]See also P. Cardiel, ‘Declaracion de la Verdad’, p. 274: ‘. . . y esta acabada, se toca á Misa á que entran todos cantando el Bendito, y alabado en su lengua, ó en Castellano, que en las dos lenguas lo saben.’[169]Dean Funes, in his ‘Ensayo de la Historia del Paraguay’, etc., says that in theestanciaof Santa Tecla, in the missions of Paraguay, during the time of the Jesuits, there were 50,000 head of cattle.[170]‘Inventarios de los bienes hallados á la expulsion de los Jesuitas’, Introduction, xxvii, Francisco Javier Brabo.[171]The rare and much-sought-after ‘Manuale ad usum Patrum Societatis Jesu qui in Reductionibus Paraquariæ versantur, ex Rituale Romano ad Toletano decerptum’, was printed at the mission of Loreto. It contains prayers in Guaraní as well as in Latin. Here also was printed a curious book of Guaraní sermons by Nicolas Yapuguay, many Guaraní vocabularies, and the ‘Arte de la Lengua Guaraní’ of Ruiz Montoya.[172]P. Cardiel, ‘Declaracion de la Verdad’, p. 295: ‘De estos granos comunales se da para sembrar’, etc.[173]This jerked beef is calledcharquiin South America.[174]The poorer classes in Paraguay all used to wear thetipoi. They covered themselves when it was cold with a white cotton sheet wrapped in many folds.[175]The Jesuits themselves were dressed in homespun clothes, for Matias Angles—quoted in the introduction to the ‘Declaracion de la Verdad’ of Father Cardiel, published at Buenos Ayres in 1900 (the introduction by P. Pablo Hernandez)—says: ‘El vestuario de los Padres es de lienzo de algodon teñido de negro, hilado y fabricado por las mismas Indias de los pueblos; y si tal qual Padre tiene un capote ó manteo de paña de Castilla se sucede de unos á otros, y dura un siglo entero.’[176]In the ‘Relacion de Misiones’ of the Brigadier Don Diego de Alvear, written between 1788 and 1801, and preserved in the ‘Coleccion de Angelis’, occurs the following curious description of the feast-day of a patron saint of a Jesuit reduction: ‘They make a long alley of interwoven canes, which ends in a triumphal arch, which they adorn with branches of palms and other trees with considerable grace and taste (con bastante gracia y simetria). Under the arch they hang their images of saints, their clothes, their first-fruits—as corn and sugar-cane, and calabashes full of maize-beer (chicha)—their meat and bread, together with animals both alive and dead, such as they can procure (como los pueden haber con su diligencia). Then, forming in a ring, they dance and shout, ‘Viva el rey! Viva el santo tutelar!’[177]Many and curious are the names by which the office-bearers went. Thus, in the Mission of el Santo Corazon, in the Chiquitos, I find the following: Corregidor, the Mayor; Teniente, Lieutenant; Alferez, Sub-Lieutenant; Alcalde Primero, Head Alcalde; Alcalde Segundo, Second Alcalde; Commandante, Captain (of the Militia); Justicia Mayor, Chief Justice; Sargento Mayor, Sergeant-Major. Then came fiscales, fiscals; sacristan mayor, head-beadle; capitan de estancia, chief of the cattle farm; capitan de pinturas, carpinteria, herreros, etc.—captain of painters, carpenters, smiths, etc. All the offices were competed for ardently, and those of Corregidor and Alcalde in especial were prized so highly that Indians who were degraded from them for bad conduct or carelessness not infrequently died of grief.[178]In each reduction there were two priests. In all Paraguay, at the expulsion of the Order in 1767, there were only seventy-eight Jesuits (Dean Funes, ‘Ensayo de la Historia del Paraguay’, etc., cap. i., vol. ii.).[179]In the mission of Los Apostoles there were 599 of these ‘horses of the saint’, according to an inventory preserved by Brabo.[180]Furnished to Bucareli, Viceroy of Buenos Ayres at the expulsion, and first printed by Brabo (‘Inventarios de los bienes hallados á la expulsion de los Jesuitas’).[181]The Jesuits exercised the Indians a great deal in dancing, taking advantage of their love of dancing in their savage state. D’Orbigny and Demersay (‘Fragment d’un Voyage au Centre de l’Amérique Méridianale’, and ‘Histoire Physique, etc., du Paraguay’) found between the years 1830 and 1855 that the Indians of the Moxos and Chiquitos still danced as they had done in the time of the Jesuits.I have seen them in the then (1873) almost deserted mission of Jesus, buried in the great woods on the shore of the Paraná, dance a strange, half-savage dance outside the ruined church.[182]Cardiel, in his ‘Declaracion de la Verdad’, p. 239, says: ‘Todos los pueblos ponen su castillo en la plaza y en el medio de el colocan el retratro del Rey, y el Indio Alferez Real . . . va al castillo con el Estandarte Real y alli hace su homenage con otros rendimientos anteel Retratro Real,’ saying in Guaraní, ‘Toicohengatú ñande Mbaru bicha guazú! Toicohengatú ñande Rey marangatú! Toicohengatú ñande Rey Fernando Sesto!’ (‘Long live our King, the great chief! Long live our good King! Long live our King Ferdinand VI.’).[183]‘Chupas de damasco carmesi con encajes de plata.’[184]It may be roughly translated, ‘a good stone wall between a male and female saint.’[185]These clothes were the property of the community, and not of the individual Indians.[186]Brabo, xxxv., Introduction to ‘Los inventarios de los bienes.’[187]A recent writer in the little journal published on yellow packing-paper in the Socialist colony of Cosme, in Paraguay (Cosme Monthly, November, 1898), has a curious passage corroborating what I have so often observed myself. Under the heading of ‘A Paraguayan Market’, he says: ‘The Guaraní clings stubbornly to the Guaraní customs. This is irritating to the European, but who shall say that the Guaraní is not right? . . . European settlement cannot but be fatal to the Guaraní, however profitable it may be to land-owning and mercantile classes. . . . The Paraguayan market is a woman’s club . . . they will come thirty or forty miles with a clothful of the white curd-cheese of the country, contentedly journeying on foot along the narrow paths. They will cut a cabbage into sixteenths and eat their cheese themselves rather than sell it under market price.’ Long may they do so, for so long will they be free, and perhaps poor; but, then, in countries such as Paraguay freedom and poverty are identical.[188]As the Gaucho proverb says, ‘Las armas son necesarias pero “naide” sabe cuando.’[189]Corregidores, alcaldes, regidores, alguaciles, etc.[190]Hereditary or sometimes elected chiefs.[191]I remember seeing on the tombstone of a Spanish sailor his hope of salvation through the intercession of the Lord High Admiral Christ. After the Spanish custom, officers were often generals both by sea and land, so that soldiers were not excluded from the Lord High Admiral’s intercession.[192]Dean Funes (‘Ensayo de la Historia de Paraguay’, etc.) says: ‘These Indians went under the command of Don Antonio de Vera Moxica; their sergeants were Guaranís and their captains Spaniards. Theircaciquewas Ignacio Amandaá, who commanded in chief under Vera Moxica.’ They fought bravely, and returned again and again to the assault of the town after several repulses, manifesting the same dogged courage and indifference to death which their descendants showed in the war against Brazil in 1866-70. In that war bodies of Paraguayans frequently attacked strong positions defended by artillery, and allowed themselves to be shot down to the last man rather than retire. At other times, concealed behind masses of floating herbage, from their canoes they sprang on board Brazilian ironclads, and were all killed in the vain endeavour to capture the vessels. I knew a little pettifogging lawyer, one Izquierdo, who, with ten companions, attempted in a canoe to take the Brazilian flagship (an ironclad); left alone on her deck, after the death of his companions, he sprang into the water under a shower of bullets, and, badly wounded, swam over to the Chaco, the desert side of the river. There for three days he remained, subsisting on wild oranges, and then swam across again on a raft of sticks, in spite of the alligators and many fierce fish which abound in Paraguay. He got well, and, though lame, was, when I knew him, as arrant a little scrivening knave as you could hope to meet in either hemisphere.On many other occasions the mission Indians performed notable services for the Spanish Government. In 1681, when the French attacked Buenos Ayres, a detachment of two thousand Indians was sent to its assistance. Philip V. himself wrote to the Provincial of Paraguay on this occasion asking him to send troops to the defence of the city.In 1785 four thousand Guaranís, commanded by Don Baltazar Garcia, were at the second siege of the Colonia del Sacramento. Funes says of them: ‘A juicio de un testigo ocular, no es menos admirable la sangre fria de sus capellanes.’[193]‘Perro Luterano’. It is astonishing how in Spain the comparatively innocuous Luther has fallen heir to the heritage of hatred that should more properly have belonged to the inhuman and treacherous Calvin.[194]Philip V. in 1745, after an examination which lasted six years, approved of all the actions of the Jesuits in Paraguay (Cretineau Joly, ‘Histoire de la Compagnie de Jésus’, vol. v., p. 103). So that a curious letter of a Jeronimite friar (one Padre Cevallos), written in 1774, is well within due limits when it says that all the Jesuits did in Paraguay was ‘todo probado por reales cedulas ó procedia de ordenes expresas.’[195]One is obliged to allow, in common fairness, that Calvin carried out in his own practice what he advocated—as witness his conduct with Servetus, whom he first calumniated, then entrapped, and lastly murdered in cold blood.[196]Don Francisco Corr sent the following list of arms to the Viceroy Zabala, of Buenos Ayres (Funes, ‘Ensayo’, etc.): ‘Armas buenas, 850; lanzas de hierro, 3,850; pedreras (culverins), 10. Las flechas no se cuentan.’ He says: ‘Todos los Indios quando han de salir a compaña llevan 150 flechas de hierro, menos los que llevan armos de fuego. Asi mismo cargan “bolas” que son dos piedras en una cuerda. Los de a pie que no llevan escopetas tienen lanza, flecha, y honda con su provision de piedras en un bolson como de granaderos. Se prestan caballos entre los pueblos.’[197]Ibañez (‘Histoire du Paraguay sous les Jésuites’) states the hides sold at about three dollars apiece.[198]The arroba was twenty-five pounds.[199]These figures are from Brabo’s inventories.[200]Ibañez states that only eighty-four dollars a year were set apart for the maintenance of each priest.[201]Dean Funes (‘Ensayo de le Historia Civil del Paraguay’, etc.) puts it at a million reales, which almost equals £20,800.Ibañez (‘La Republica Jesuitica’), with the noble disregard of consequences so noticeable in most polemical writers, boldly alters this to a million dollars, his object being to prove that the Jesuits exacted exorbitant taxation from the neophytes.[202]The honey of the missions was celebrated, and the wax made by the small bee called ‘Opemus’, according to Charlevoix (livre v., p. 285), ‘était d’une blancheur qui n’avait rien de pareil, et ces neophytes ont consacré tout qu’ils en peuvent avoir à bruler devant les images de la Ste. Vierge.’[203]In the inventory of the mission of San José I find: ‘Item, doce pares de grillos’; but I am bound to say that in this instance they were for the use of ‘los Guaicurus infieles prisioneros que estan en dicha mision.’[204]‘Il Cristianesimo Felice nelle Missione dei Padri della Compagnia di Jesu nel Paraguay’.[205]‘L’Histoire du Paraguay sous les Jésuites’, Amsterdam, 1700, lxxv.[206]In all, the missions amounted to thirty; and for their relative situationsvidethe curiousmap, the original of which was published in the work of Padre Pedro Lozano, C. de J., ‘Descripcion chorographica del terreno, rios, arboles y animales de las dilatadissimas provincias del Gran Chaco, Gualanba’, etc. Cordoba, del Tucuman, en el Colegio de la Assumpcion, por Joseph Santos Balbas, 1733.[207]A letter of a certain Jesuit (name lost, but dated 1715) says that there were at least two thousand canoes in constant use on the Paraná, and almost as many more on the Uruguay (Brabo, ‘Inventarios’, etc.).[208]Corregidores, regidores, alcaldes, etc.[209]It is not to be supposed, however, that the Indians were kept in ignorance. P. Cardiel (‘Declaracion de la Verdad’, p. 222), quoting from the Cedula Real of 1743, says that ‘in every one of the towns there is a school established to teach reading and writing in Spanish, and that on that account a great number of Indians are to be met who write well.’ Cardiel adds, on the same page, ‘Dos de ellos estan copiando ahora esto que yo escribo, y de mejor letra que la mia.’[210]Dean Funes (‘Ensayo Critico’, etc.) puts the income from commerce of the thirty towns at a hundred thousand dollars, and informs us that, after taxation (to the Crown) had been deducted from it, it was applied to the maintenance of the churches and other necessary expenses, and by the end of the year little of it remained.[211]Don Martin de Barua, in his memorial to the King (1736), complaining of the Jesuits, puts the number of taxable Indians at forty thousand. The Commission appointed to examine into the charges in 1736, which reported in 1745 (a reasonable interval), affirmed that the taxable Indians only numbered 19,116. Each Indian paid an annual poll-tax of one dollar a year to the Crown. In addition to that, every town gave one hundred dollars a year. The salary of the priests was six hundred dollars a year (Azara, ‘Voyage dans l’Amérique Méridionale’).[212]‘Account of the Abipones’. London: John Murray, 1822.[213]‘Voyage dans l’Amérique Méridionale’. Paris: Denton, 1809.[214]Perámas (‘De vita et moribus sex sacerdotum Paraguaycorum, Petrus Joanes Andrea’, lxxxiv.) states that it appeared, from papers left after their expulsion, that the income of the Jesuit College of Cordoba just paid the expenses of administration (‘era con escasa diferencia igual á los gastos’).In the Archivo General of Buenos Ayres, legajo ‘Compañia de Jesús’, there is a document referred to by P. Hernandez in his introduction to the work of P. Cardiel (‘Declaracion de la Verdad’), which states that in the year of the expulsion the income of the thirty towns fell a little short of the expenses.[215]Azara, ‘Voyage dans l’Amérique Méridionale’; also Funes, ‘Ensayo Critico de la Historia del Paraguay’; and Padre Guevara, ‘Historia del Paraguay, Rio de la Plata y Tucuman’.[216]Archivo General de Simancas, Estado, legajo 7,450, folios 21 y 22, 5a, Copia de las cartas (sin firma; la siguiente es de Nicolas Neenguirú) que se hallaron en letra Guaraní traducidas por los interpreteo nombrados en las sorpresa hecha al pueblo de San Lorenzo por el Coronel D. José Joaquin de Viana, Gobernador de Montevideo, el dia 20 de Mayo de 1756:‘El modo de vivir del Padre es, cerrar bien todas las puertas y quedarse el solo, su Mayordomo, y su muchacho. Son ya Indios de edad, y solo estos asisten solo de dia adentro, y á las doce salen afuera, y un viejo es quien cuida de la Porteria, y es quien Sierra la puerta quando descansa el Padre, ó quando sale el Padre á ver su chacara. Y aun entonces van solos, sino es con un Indio de hedad quien los giua y cuida de el caballo y despues de esto á misa y á la tarde al Rosario de Maria Santisima llamandonos con toque de campana, y antes de esto á los muchachos y muchachittas los llama con una campánilla y despues de eso el bueno de el Padre entra ha enseñarles la Doctrina, y el persinarse de el mismo modo, todos los dias de fiesta nos Predica la palabra de Dios, del mismo modo el Santo Sacramento de la Penitencia y de la Communion, en estas cosas se exercitta el bueno del Padre y todas las noches se sierra la porteria y la llave se lleva al aposento del Padre y solo se vuelve á abrir por la mañana quando entra el Sachristan y los cosineros. . . .‘Los Padres todas las mañanas nos dicen misas, y despues de misa, se van a su aposento y hai cogen un poco de aqua caliente con Yerva y no otra cosa mas; despues de esto sale a la puerta de su aposento y ahai todos los que oyeron misa se arrimen a besarle la mano, y despues de esto sale afuera a ver los Indios si trabajan en los oficios que cada uno tiene, y despues se van a su aposento a resar el oficio divino, en su libro, y para que Dios le ayude en todas sus cosas. A las once de el dia van a comer un poquitto, no á comer mucho solo coge cinco plattitos y solo beve una vez el vino, no llenando un vaso pequeño, y aguardiente nunca lo toman y el vino no lo hai en nuestro pueblo, solo lo traen de la Candelaria segun lo que envia el Padre Superior lo trahen de acia Buenos Aires. . . . Despues que sale de comer y para descansar an poco, y mientras descansa salen fuera los que assisten en la casa del Padre, y los que trabajan dentro en algunas obras y tamvien el Sachristan y el cosinero: todos estos salen fuera y quando no se toca la campana estan serradas las puertas, y solo un viejo es el que cuida de las puertas, y quando vuelvan a tocar la campana, vuelve este a abrirlas para que vuelvan a entrar los que trabajan dentro, y el Padre Coge el Brebiario no a ir a parte ninguna. A la tarde tocan la campanilla paraque se recojan las criatturas, y entre el Padre á ensenarles la doctrina christiana.’[217]Perhaps the entire isolation of the Jesuits in these two provinces accounts for their absolute quiet; and if this is so, it goes far to prove that they were right to attempt the same isolation in Paraguay. The comparative nearness of the Spanish settlements frustrated their attempts in this instance.[218]For ‘reasoning men’, and how this monstrous superstition still prevails in Venezuela, see the charming book of S. Perez Triana, ‘De Bogota al Atlantico’, etc., pp. 156-158 (Paris: Impresa Sud Americana). A really interesting book of travels, without cant, and without an eye on the public. Strange to relate, the author seems to have killed nothing during his journey.[219]Charlevoix, book iv.[220]‘Conquista Espiritual’, Ruiz Montoya.[221]‘Voyage dans l’Amérique Méridionale’.[222]Azara, ‘Viage al America Meridional’, tomo 2, cap 12. ‘La corte ordenó a Don Francisco de Alfaro oidor de la Audiencia de Charcas pasar al Perú en calidad de visitador. La primera medida que tomó en 1612 fue ordenar que ninguno en lo sucesivo pudiese ir a casa de Indios, con el pretexto de reducirlos, y que no se diesen encomiendas del modo que hemos explicado, es decir con servicio personal. No alcanzo sobre que podia fundarse una medida tan politicamente absurda: pero como este oidor favorecia lasideas de los Jesuitas, se sospechó que por aquel tiempo que ellos dictaron su conducta.’[223]Formitasandencomiendas, see foregoing chapters.[224]Brabo, ‘Inventarios de los bienes hallados a la expulsion de las Jesuitas’.[225]‘Voyage dans l’Amérique Méridionale’.[226]P. Cardiel (‘Declaracion de la Verdad’, p. 449), quoting from Xarque (‘La Vida Apostolica del Padre Joseph Cataidino’, Zaragoça por Juan de Ypa, 1664), says,rethe diminution of the Indians under the Spanish rule: ‘Para que se vea cuanta razon tiene el Juez reparese que segun los padrones del siglo pasado (vg. 1600-1700) en la ciudad y jurisdicion de Santiago del Estero habia 80,000 Indios y ahora, apenas hay ochenta. En la jurisdicion de Cordoba de Tucuman, habia 40,000; hoy no hay 40. En la jurisdicion y cercanias de la ciudad de Buenos Ayres, habia 30,000; hoy apenas hay 30.’[227]Charlevoix, vol. ii., livre xvii.[228]Funes, ‘Ensayo de la Historia Civil del Paraguay’, etc., vol. ii., cap. v., p. 231.[229]Del Techo, Lozano, Guevara, Charlevoix, etc., etc.[230]Liberty is commonly only attained by blood. It is, I think, quite legitimate in playing the liberty game to kill all who disagree with your party, or to banish them. In these degenerate times, lovers of liberty have to stop short at calumny, just as if they were mere tyrants.
[1]The doctrine of the ‘Ciencia Media’ occurs in the celebrated ‘Concordia gratiæ et liberi arbitrii’, by Luis de Molina (1588). The concilium de Auxiliis was held to determine whether or notconcordiawas possible between freewill and grace. As the Jesuits stuck by Molina and his doctrines in despite of councils and of popes, the common saying arose in Spain: ‘Pasteles en la pasteleria y ciencia media en la Compañia.’
[2]Dean Funes, ‘Ensayo de la Historia Civil del Paraguay’, etc., Buenos Aires, 1816.
[3]Idem.The letter is dated 1771 and the Jesuits were expelled in 1767. As the writer of the letter was on the spot in an official position, and nominated by the very Viceroy who had been the expeller of the Jesuits, his testimony would seem to be as valuable as that of the ablest theorist on government, Catholic or Protestant, who ever wrote.
[4]This, of course, applies to the possessions of all European States in America equally with Spain.
[5]Madrid, 1770.
[6]Though in this respect Charlevoix is not so credulous as Padre Ruiz de Montoya and the older writers, he yet repeats the story of the bird that cleans the alligator’s teeth, the magic virtues of the tapir’s nails, and many others. See Charlevoix, vol. i., bk. i., p. 27, Paris, 1756.
[The story of the bird that cleans the teeth of alligators is very nearly true—Pluvianus aegyptiushas a symbiotic relationship with crocodiles in parts of Africa, and similar relationships exist throughout the natural world.—A. L., 1998.]
[7]Dobrizhoffer’s book was written in Latin, and printed in Vienna in 1784 under the title of ‘Historia de Abiponibus’, etc. A German translation by Professor Keil was published at Pesth in the same year. The English translation is of the year 1822.
[8]It is to be remembered that the Spanish colonists were as a rule antagonistic to the Jesuits, and that, therefore, Spanish writers do not of necessity hold a brief for the Jesuits in Paraguay. Moreover, the names of Esmid (Smith), Fildo (Fields), Dobrizhoffer, Cataldini and Tomas Bruno (Brown, who is mentioned as beingnatural de Yorca), Filge, Limp, Pifereti, Enis, and Asperger, the quaint medical writer on the virtues of plants found in the mission territory, show how many foreign Jesuits were actually to be found in the reductions of Paraguay. For more information on this matter see the ‘Coleccion de Documentos relativos á la Expulsion de los Jesuitas de la Republica Argentina y Paraguay’, published and collected by Francisco Javier Brabo, Madrid, 1872.
[9]The Inca Garcilaso de la Vega, in his ‘Commentarios Reales’ (en Madrid 1723, en la oficina Real y á costa de Nicholas Rodriguez Franco, Impressor de libros, se hallaran en su casa en la calle de el Poço y en Palacio), derives the word from the QuichuaChacú= a surrounding. If he is right, it would then be equivalent to the Gaelic ‘tinchel’. Taylor, the Water-poet, has left a curious description of one of these tinchels. It was at a tinchel that the rising under the Earl of Mar in the ’15 was concocted.
[10]See the curious map contained in the now rare work of P. Pedro Lozano, entitled, ‘Descripcion Chorographica . . . del Gran Chaco, Gualamba’, etc. Also in the interesting collection of old maps published in 1872 at Madrid by Francisco Javier Brabo.
[11]It is, of course, to be taken into consideration that my two journeys in Paraguay were made after the great war which terminated in 1870, after lasting four years; but the writings of Demersay (‘Histoire du Paraguay et des Établissements des Jésuites’, Paris, 1862), those of Brabo, and of Azara, show the deserted state of the district of Misiones in the period from 1767, the date of the expulsion of the Jesuits, to the middle of the nineteenth century.
[12]Cocos Australis.
[13]See the reports of the Marques de Valdelirios and others in the publications of Francisco Javier Brabo, Madrid, 1872, and in the ‘Ensayo de la Historia Civil de Paraguay, Buenos-Ayres y Tucuman’, por Dr. Don Gregorio Funes, Buenos Ayres, 1816.
[14]Bernal Diaz, ‘Historia de la Conquista de la Nueva España’, vol. iv., cap. 207, Madrid, 1796.
[15]Especially noting down the appearance and qualities of ‘el caballo Motilla’, the horse of Gonzalo de Sandoval. Thus does he minutely describe Motilla, ‘the best horse in Castille or the Indies’. ‘El mejor caballo, y de mejor carrera, revuelto á una mano y à otra que decian que no se habia visto mejor en Castilla, ni en esa tierra era castaño acastañado, y una estrella en la frente, y un pie izquierdo calzado, que se decia el caballo Motilla; é quando hay ahora diferencia sobre buenos caballos, suclen decir es en bondad tan bueno como Motilla.’
[16]‘La Argentina’, included in the ‘Coleccion de Angelis’, Buenos Ayres, 1836.
[17]‘Historia y Descubrimiento de el Rio de la Plata y Paraguay’, Hulderico Schmidel, contained in the collection made by Andres Gonzalez Barcia, and published in 1769 at Madrid under the title of ‘Historiadores Primitivos de las Indias Occidentales’.
[18]The great Las Casas, who made seven voyages from America to Spain—the last at the age of seventy-two—to protect the Indians, had a strong opinion about ‘conquerors’ and ‘conquests’. In the dedication of his great treatise on the wrongs of the Indians, he says: ‘Que no permita (Felipe II.) las atrocidades que los tiranos inventaron, y que prosiguen haciendo con titulo de “conquistas”. Los que se jactan de ser “conquistadores” a que descienden de ellos son muchomas orgullosos arrogantes y vanos que los otros Españoles.’ Strange that even to-day the sameatrocidadesoftiranosare going on in Africa. No doubt the descendants of these ‘conquerors’ will be as arrogant, proud, and vain as the descendants of theconquistadoresof whom Las Casas writes.
[19]Mendoza left (‘Azara Apuntamientos para la Historia Natural de los Quadrupedes del Paraguay’, etc.) five mares and seven horses in the year 1535. In 1580 Don Juan de Garay, at the second founding of the city, already found troops of wild horses. The cattle increased to a marvellous extent, and by the end of the century were wild in Patagonia. Sarmiento (‘Civilisation et Barbarisme’) says that early in this century they were often killed by travellers, who tethered their horses to the carcasses to prevent them from straying at night.
[20]Hulderico Schmidel, ‘Historia del Descubrimiento de el Rio de la Plata y Paraguay’.
[21]Perhaps the two most important works upon the language are the ‘Tesoro de la Lengua Guarani’, by Ruiz de Montoya, Madrid, 1639 (it is dedicated to the ‘Soberana Virgen’); and the ‘Catecismo de la Lengua Guarani’, by Diego Diaz de la Guerra, Madrid, Año de 1630. He also wrote a ‘Bocabulario y Arte de la Lengua Guarani’.
[22]P. Guevara, in his ‘Historia del Paraguay’, relates a curious story which he said was current amongst the Indians. Two brothers, Tupi and Guaraní, lived with their families upon the sea-coast of Brazil. In those days the world was quite unpopulated but by themselves. They quarrelled about a parrot, and Tupi with his family went north, and populated all Brazil; whilst Guaraní went west, and was the ancestor of all the Indians of the race of Guaranís.
[23]Azara, in his ‘Descripcion y Historia del Paraguay’, has a similar passage: ‘Recibe bien todo Indio silvestre, al estrangero que viene de paz.’
[24]‘Por lo comun reparten pedazos de este cuerpo, del qual pedazo cozido en mucha agua hacen unas gachas (fritters) y es fiesta muy celebre para ellos que hacen con muchas cerimonias.’
[25]‘Histoire du Paraguay et des Établissements des Jésuites’, L. Alfred Demersay, Paris, 1864.
[26]‘La Argentina’, a long poem or rhyming chronicle contained in the collection of ‘Historiadores Primitivos de Indias’, of Gonzales Barcia, Madrid, 1749.
[27]Lozano, in his ‘Historia del Paraguay’, compares it to Greek, but in my opinion fails to establish his case; but, then, so few people know both Greek and Guaraní.
[28]He passed through the whole Chaco, descending the Pilcomayo to its junction with the Paraguay, through territories but little explored even to-day. Perhaps the most complete description of the Chaco is that of P. Lozano, with the following comprehensive title:
‘Descripcion chorographica de Terreno Rios, Arboles, y Animales de los dilatadisimas Provincias del Gran Chaco, Gualamba, y de los Ritos y Costumbres de la inumerables naciones barbaros é infideles que le habitan. Con un cabal Relacion Historica de lo que en ellos han obrado para conquistarlas algunos Gobernadores y Ministros Reales, y los Misioneros Jesuitas para reduc irlos à la fe del Verdadero Dios.’ Por el Padre Pedro Lozano, de la Compañia de Jesus, Año de 1733. En Cordoba por Joseph Santos Balbas.
This book did not appear in a clandestine manner, for it had: 1. Censura, por C. de Palmas. 2. Licencia de la Religion, por Geronymo de Huróza, Provincial de los Jesuitas de Andalucia. 3. Licencia del Ordinario por el Dr. Don Francisco Miguel Moreno, por mandado del Sr. Provisor Alonso Joseph Gomez de Lara. 4. Aprobacion del Rdo. P. Diego Vasquez. 5. Privelegio de su Majestad por Don Miguel Fernandez Morillo. 6. Fé de Corrector por el Licenciado, Don Manuel Garcia Alesson, Corrector General de su Majestad (who adds in a note, ‘este libro corresponde à su original’). 7. Sumo de Tassa, as follows: ‘Tassaron los señores del Consejo este libro à seis maravedis cada pliego.’
Palma, in the firstcensura, says that he had read it several times ‘con repetida complacencia’, and that, though it was ‘breve en volumen’ (it has 484 quarto pages), that it was also short in its concise style, kept closely to the rules of history, and was ‘muy copiosa en la doctrina’.
[29]This race at one time spread from the Orinoco to the river Plate, and even in the case of its offshoot, the Chiriguanás, crossed to the west bank of the Paraguay. Padre Ruiz Montoya, in his ‘Conquista Espiritual del Paraguay’, cap. i., speaking of the Guaraní race, says: ‘Domina ambos mares el del sur por todo el Brasil y ciñiendo el Peru con los dos mas grandes rios que conoce el orbe que son el de la Plata, cuya boca en Buenos-Ayres es de ochenta leguas, y el gran Marañon, à el inferior en nada e que pasa bien vecino de la ciudad de Cuzco.’
[30]Barco de la Centenera, in ‘La Argentina’, canto v., also refers to ‘La Casa del Gran Moxo’. It was situated ‘en una laguna’, and was ‘toda de piedra labrada’.
[31]Their numerals are four in number (peteî, mocoî, mbohap, irând); after this they are said to count in Spanish in the same way as do the Guaraní-speaking Paraguayans. Much has been written on the Guaraní tongue by many authors, but perhaps the ‘Gramatica’, ‘Tesoro’, and the ‘Vocabulario’ of Padre Antonio Ruiz Montoya, published at Madrid in 1639 and 1640, remain the most important works on the language. Padre Sigismundi has left a curious work in Guaraní on the medicinal plants of Paraguay. Before the war of 1866-70 several MS. copies were said to exist in that country. See Du Gratz’s ‘République du Paraguay’, cap. iv., p. 214.
[32]See Demersay, ‘Histoire du Paraguay’, p. 324, for names of Guaraní tribes. Alfred Maury also, in his ‘La Terre et l’Homme Américain’, p. 392, speaks of ‘le rameau brasilio-guaranin, ou Caráibe, qui s’etendait jadis depuis les Petites-Antilles jusqu’au Paraguay.’
[33]Few modern ‘conquerors’ in Africa seem to have engaged in personal combat with the natives. Even of Mr. Rhodes it is not set down that he has killed many Matabele with his own hands. Times change, not always for the bettering of things.
[34]Santiago, as in duty bound, usually appeared whenever Spaniards were hard pressed. Few writers had the courage of Bernal Diaz, who of a similar appearance said: ‘But I, sinner that I was, was not worthy to see him; whom I did see and recognise was Francisco de Morla on his chestnut horse’ (Bernal Diaz, ‘Historia de la Conquista de Nueva España’, cap. xxxiv., p. 141; Madrid, 1795).
[35]Thus it will be seen that the Franciscans were at work in the country long before the arrival of the Jesuits. It may be on this account that they became such bitter enemies of the later comers.
[36]‘Comentarios de Alvar Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca’. Published by Don Andres Gonzalez Barcia in his collection of ‘Early Historians of the Indies’ (Madrid, 1749).
[37]It must be allowed, however, that in their writings few of the Spanishconquistadoresof America bragged much. They mostly gave the credit of all their doings to the God of Battles. The boasting has been reserved for the conquerors of Africa in our own time.
[38]Asientois a contract. The contract which Charles V., at the well-meant but unfortunate instigation of Las Casas, made with the Genoese to supply negroes for America is known as ‘El Asiento de los Negros’.
[39]In thecapitulacionmade by Alvar Nuñez with the King occurs the celebrated clause, ‘Que no pasasen procuradores ni abogados a las Indias’,i.e., that neither solicitors nor barristers should go to the Indies. It is unfortunate it was not held to stringently, as in Paraguay, at least, the Reptilia were already well represented.
[40]This is perhaps the first account of the levying of the tithe in the New World.
[41]These backwaters are known in Guaraní by the name ofaguapey.
[42]The vinchuca is a kind of flying bug common in Paraguay. Its shape is triangular, its colour gray, and its odour noxious. It is one of the Hemiptera, and its so-called scientific appellation isonorhinus gigas.
[43]R. B. Cunninghame Graham writes elsewhere: “All over South America the jaguar is called a tiger (tigre).”—A. L., 1998.
[44]Azara, in his ‘Historia del Paraguay’, etc., tells us that in 1551 Domingo de Irala at Asuncion bought a fine black horse for five thousand gold crowns. He bound himself to pay for him out of the proceeds of his first conquest.
[45]‘Comentarios de Alvar Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca’, contained in Barcia’s ‘Historiadores Primitivos de las Indias Occidentales’.
[46]The ‘patriots’ are always those of the prevailing party in a State.
[47]
‘(I.H.S.)
‘God preserve your Excellency, say we, the Cabildo, and all the Caciques and Indians, men, women and children of San Luis, as your Excellency is our father. The Corregidor, Santiago Pindo and Don Pantaleon Caynari, in their love for us, have written to us of certain birds which they desire we will send them for the King. . . . We are sorry not to have them to send, inasmuch as they live where God made them, in the forests, and fly far away from us, so that we cannot catch them. Withal we are the vassals of God and of the King, and always desirous to fulfil the wishes of his Minister . . . so we pray to God that that best of birds, the Holy Ghost, may descend upon the King. . . . Furthermore, we desire to say that the Spanish custom is not to our liking—for everyone to take care of himself, instead of helping one another in their daily toil.’
This quaint and touching letter was written originally in Guaraní, and is preserved at Buenos Ayres. ‘That best of birds, the Holy Ghost,’ shows faith grounded, at least, on ornithology, and the whole spirit of the simple document is as pathetic as its unconscious philosophy is true.
[48]Guevara, ‘Historia del Paraguay’ (printed in ‘La Coleccion de Angelis’, Buenos Aires, 1836), book vi., p. 108, says of Alvar Nuñez: ‘Merecia estatua por su rectitud, justicia y Christiandad.’ And in another place Guevara says: ‘La Florida lo cautivó con inhumanidad; La Asuncion lo aprisionó con infamia; pero en una y otro parte fue ejemplar de moderacion . . . recto, prudente y de sano corazon.’ Alvar Nuñez died holding the office of ‘Oidor de la Audiencia de Sevilla’, according to P. del Techo (‘Historia del Paraguay’); or as a member of the Consejo de Indias, according to Charlevoix.
[49]Acquaviva was General of the Order at this time; he was a man of marked ability and great energy.
[50]Before this date the Jesuits in Paraguay had been under the ecclesiastical jurisdiction of the Bishops of Peru.
[51]Paranapané = the White Paraná, or, according to others, the Paraná without fish.
[52]Reduction (reduccion) was the Spanish name for a missionary establishment.
[53]Some of the Spanish writers refer to Filds as Padre Tom Filds. His real name was Fields, and he was a Scotchman.
[54]The Paulistas were the inhabitants of the Portuguese (now Brazilian) town of São Paulo. Azara, who hated the Jesuits (his brother, Don Nicolas de Azara, having been concerned in their expulsion), says that fear of the Paulistas contributed to the success of the Jesuits with the Indians. Dean Funes (‘Historia del Paraguay’, etc.) says just as reasonably that it was fear of the Spanish settlers.
[55]There was, however, a royal Order (cedula real) which applied to all America, which especially prohibited Spaniards from living in the Indian towns, and, moreover, provided that even for purposes of trade no Spaniard should remain for more than three days in an Indian town.
[56]‘Histoire Politique et Philosophique des Indes’, vol. i., p. 289 (Genève, 1780).
[57]Cretineau Joly, ‘Histoire Religieuse, Politique et Littéraire de la Compagnie de Jésus’, vol. iii., cap. v., p. 322 (Paris, 1846).
[58]‘Historia General de los hechos de los Castellanos en las Islas y tierra firme del Mar Oceano’, decad. v., lib. iv., cap. xl.
[59]‘Historia General de los hechos de los Castellanos en las Islas y tierra firme del Mar Oceano’, decad. v., lib. x., cap. lxxx.
[60]‘Inventarios de los bienes hallados á la Expulsion de los Jesuitas’ (Madrid, 1872).
[61]The Franciscans had already five or six settlements.
[62]The word in Brazil is used to designate a half-breed, but the etymology seems unknown.
[63]‘Me he de salvar a pesar de Dios, porque para salvarse el hombre no ha menester mas que creer’ (Ruiz Montoya, ‘Conquista Espiritual’). Montoya adds with a touch of humour quite in Cervantes’ vein: ‘Este, sabe ya por experiencia la falsedad de su doctrina, porque le mataron de tres balazos, sin confesion.’
[64]The Mamelucos sometimes pushed their forays right through Paraguay into the district of the Moxos, and Padre Patricio Fernandez, in his curious ‘Relacion de los Indios Chiquitos’ (Madrid, 1726), relates their adventures in that far-distant district, and the conflicts which the Indians, led by their priests and helped by the Spanish settlers, sustained.
[65]Lahier (Francisci) S. I., ‘Annæ Paraguarie, Annor. 1635, et duor. sequ.’
[66]‘Relazioni della Provincia del Paraguai’.
[67]Brabo.
[68]Anesterois a tract of country covered by water to the depth of two or three feet. The bottom is usually hard, but it is full of holes and hummocks. High pampa grass and reeds not infrequently obscure the view, and clouds of insects make life miserable. If the tract extends to more than a day’s journey, the night passed on a dry hummock, holding one’s horse and listening without a fire to the wild beasts, is likely to remain present to one in after-life, especially if alone; the only things that seem to link one to humanity are one’s horse and the familiar stars. Perhaps that is why Capella has always seemed to me in some sort my own property.
[69]This curious berry, about the size of a large damson, grows on a little shrub in sandy and rocky soils. It has a thick yellow rind and several large seeds, and the property of being icy cold in the hottest weather—a true traveller’s joy. Dr. de Bourgade de la Dardye, in his excellent book on Paraguay (the English edition published in London in 1892), thinks it is either a eugenia or a myrtus.
[70]Charlevoix, vol. i., liv. vii., p. 384.
[71]Ibid., liv. vii., p. 359.
[72]Charlevoix, ‘Histoire du Paraguay’, vol. lvi., p. 285.
[73]‘Conquista Espiritual del Paraguay’, Ruiz de Montoya, introductory chapter.
[74]This may either mean to the service of God or to the service of the King (Philip III.), for in the time of Montoya ‘Majesty’ was used in addressing both the King of Spain and the King of Heaven.
[75]Yapeyu, or Reyes, was the southernmost of the Jesuit reductions. It was situated upon the Uruguay in what is now the Argentine province of Entre Rios.
[76]‘Conquista Espiritual’, p. 22.
[77]This time, it is to be hoped, without omissions.
[78]‘Dando gracias por agravios negocian los hombres sabios.’
[79]Soon afterwards ruined by the Paulistas.
[80]Cacique= chief.
[81]These raids were known asmalocas.
[82]In Paraguay it was not unusual for foreign Jesuits to hispaniolize their names; thus, Smith became Esmid. But it was more usual to add a Spanish name, as appears to have been the case with P. Vansurk Mansilla. Father Manuel Querini, in his report to the King of Spain in 1750, mentions the names of Boxer, Keiner, and Limp, with many other French, English, and German names, amongst those of priests at the various missions.
[83]Montoya, ‘Conquista Espiritual’. Also Charlevoix.
[84]It is certain that the Guaranís, like many other Indians, were polygamists, and Xarque, in his ‘Vida Apostolica del P. Joseph Cataldino’, thus explains the matter: ‘El tener tanto numero de concubinas, no solamente lo ocasiona su natural lascivo, sino tambien, el vicio de la embriaguez, pues teniendo tantas criadas tenian con mas abundancia su cerveza y vino.’ Thus Xarque seems to agree with the late Miss Mary Kingsley, who in one of her books (though she says nothing about the ‘natural lascivo’ of the negroes of the West Coast of Africa) seems to attribute the polygamy of the negroes to the difficulty a man experiences, in the countries in which she travelled, in getting his food prepared by one wife.
[85]Charcas is situated in what is now Bolivia, and was extremely inconvenient for all dwellers on the eastern side of the Andes to reach. Whether this was a masterpiece of policy calculated to discourage lawsuits, or whether it was merely due to Spanish incuriousness and maladministration, is a moot point.
[86]The Indians of the missions were not allowed to possess firearms at this period.
[87]‘Paraguay’, Dr. E. de Bourgade la Dardye; English edition by George Philips junior (London, 1892). The Indians call it Salto de Canandiyú, which, according to Azara, was the name of acaciquewhom the first Spaniards met there.
[88]‘Descripcion y Historia del Paraguay’, Madrid, 1847.
[89]‘Y es un espantoso despeñadero de agua’, etc. (‘Descripcion del Paraguay’, tomo i., p. 39).
[90]‘No dan cuartel’.
[91]At least, I have been unable to discover any other account by an eye-witness.
[92]This city was situated near the great falls of Guayrá, and was destroyed by the Paulistas, as well as the city of Villa Rica, after the Jesuits and their Indians left the province.
[93]‘Conquista Espiritual’, p. 48.
[94]‘Rigoroso examen’ (‘Conquista Espiritual’).
[95]In all the books and pamphlets I have searched about the Jesuits in Paraguay, both friendly and unfriendly to the Order, I have never found a charge of personal unchastity advanced against a Jesuit. In regard to the other religious Orders it is far otherwise.
[96]Azara, ‘Descripcion e Historia del Paraguay’, tomo i., p. 40: ‘En las inmediaciones del Salto hay proporcion para tomar las medidas geometricas que se quiera y metiendose por el bosque se puede reconocer lo inferior del Salto, bien que para este es menester desnudare totalmente porque llueve mucho.’
[97]Azara records (book i.) the Indian fable that no living thing could exist near the cataract. Though this is of course untrue, yet in most Paraguayan forests near water, game is both scarce and hard to find.
[98]‘Con buenas prendas de su salud eterna’ (‘Conquista Espiritual’).
[99]Fathers Suarez, Contreras, and Espinosa were Montoya’s lieutenants in this memorable retreat. It is difficult to give the palm to the energy and courage of the four priests, or to the resignation and faith of the immense multitude of Indians who were saved by them.
[100]Culebrais the Spanish for a serpent. These fish may have been waterboas, or, again, as seems probable by their digestive powers, some kind of hypothetical fish not yet catalogued.
[101]The name of this river seems to have passed through the machine of some medieval typewriter, for it is like no name in any language, and Montoya knew Guaraní well, having written much in that language.
[102]Even so late as the year 1777, in which the last treaty of boundaries was signed at San Ildefonso, Portugal was the gainer, though not so greatly as by the former treaties of 1681 and 1750.
[103]‘Efemerides o Diario de la Guerra de los Guaranies’, por P. Tadeo Hennis. This journal has, I think, never been published in its entirety, but portions of it are to be found in the collection of documents, Bulls, despatches, etc., published at Madrid in 1768 under the title of ‘Causa Jesuitica de Portugal’. The author of this book calls Hennis a German, but his name, Thadeus Ennis (as it is often spelt), and his love of fighting look un-Germanic. Portions of the diary are also to be found in the work of Bernardo Ibañez de Echegarray, entitled ‘Histoire du Paraguay sous les Jésuites’ (Amsterdam, 1780). Either the original or an old manuscript copy exists in the archives of Simancas, where I have seen, but unfortunately did not examine, it. A portion of the work is also included in the ‘Coleccion de Angelis’ (Buenos Ayres, 1836).
[104]‘Histoire d’un Voyage faict en la Terre du Brésil’.
[105]The way of the neophyte even to-day is hard, so many priests of different jarring sects disputing for his soul as hotly as if it were a preference stock which they had private intimation was just about to rise.
[106]This province was sometimes called Guayrá, and sometimes La Provincia de Vera, Vera being the family name of Alvar Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca. Its position, etc., may be determined by reference to the curious volume of maps published at Madrid by Don Francisco Javier Brabo in 1872.
[107]That a mission could be so undefended as to need trenches, that a Jesuit should ask leave to make such elementary defences, even in the face of imminent danger, seems to prove that the Jesuits at least in 1636 had no intention of defying the sovereign power, as was so often alleged against them.
[108]San Joaquin, Santa Teresa, Santa Ana.
[109]‘Histoire du Paraguay’, liv. ix., p. 446.
[110]This territory is now the Argentine province of Misiones.
[111]This seems to prove the malice of those who set about that the Indians of the missions paid no taxes to the Crown.
[112]Vieyra, the great Portuguese Jesuit, said that all miracles were possible to God, but yet that he had never heard that our Lord had ever cured anyone of folly.
[113]Now a province of the Argentine Republic.
[114]‘Historia Paraquariæ’, book xii., cap. xii.
[115]La Plata was sometimes called Chuquisaca, and is to-day known as Sucre.
[116]‘Histoire du Paraguay’, vol. i., book ix., p. 478.
[117]Charlevoix, vol. i., book xi. Dean Funes, in his ‘Ensayo de la Historia Civil de Paraguay, Buenos Ayres y Tucuman’, vol. ii., book iii., p. 10 (Buenos Ayres, 1816), says of him: ‘Se adquirió muy en breve una reputacion mas brillante que solida.’
[118]But besides putting into execution all his histrionic talents, he had the adroitness to address himself to those feelings of self-interest which he knew were perhaps more powerful than those of admiration and respect for his own saintly proceedings in his new diocese. Crétineau Joly, in his ‘Histoire de la Compagnie de Jésus’, vol. iii., p. 333 (Paris, 1845), tells us that Cardenas ‘parle aux Espagnols, il s’addresse à leurs interêts, il réveille les vieux levain de discorde . . . et il accuse les missionnaires d’être seuls les apôtres de la liberté des Indiens.’
[119]‘Oraculo Manual y Arte de Prudencia’ (Amsterdam, en casa de Juan Blau, 1659).
[120]Charlevoix.
[121]Exod. 32:27.
[122]The arroba is about twenty-five pounds weight.
[123]Charlevoix.
[124]Camalote is a species of water-lily which forms a thick covering on stagnant rivers and lakes in Paraguay and in the Argentine Republic.
[125]This was untrue, as the Jesuit missions were not at that time (1644) apportioned into parishes under the authority of the Jesuits, and such tribute as then was customary was all collected by government officials.
[126]This was also untrue, as the tithes were never regulated in Paraguay till 1649.
[127]This accusation was quite untrue, for the edict referred to was not obtained under misapprehension, but after a complete exposition of all the facts. Moreover, it was subsequently renewed on several occasions by the Spanish Kings.
[128]The Venetians did not expel the Jesuits, they left Venetia of their own accord.
[129]Fathers Montoya and Taño went respectively to Rome and to Madrid to lay the sorrows of the Indians before the King and Pope. Having obtained the edict from the King that Cardenas referred to, and a brief from the Pope (Urban VIII.) forbidding slavery, they had the hardihood to appear within the city of San Paulo and affix both edicts to the church door. As was to be expected, the Paulistas immediately expelled them from their territories, and hence the semi-truth of the sixth charge made by Bishop Cardenas.
[130]Funes, ‘Historia Civil del Paraguay, Buenos-Ayres, y Tucuman’.
[131]The testimony of Funes is as follows: ‘Á juicio de testigo ocular no es más admirable la sangre fria de sus capellanes’ (‘Historia Civil del Paraguay’, book iii., cap. viii.).
[132]Literally, ‘taking out the blocks to air’. The effigies are made of hard and heavy wood, and I remember once in Concepcion de Paraguay assisting on a sweltering day to carry a Madonna weighing about five hundredweight.
[133]The proverb says in Paraguay, ‘No se fia de mula ni mulata’.
[134]‘Pagar y apelar’.
[135]Misque is at least fifteen hundred miles from Tucuman.
[136]‘Que lo hagan salir de nuestros Reynos y Señorios como ageno y estraño, por importar assi para la quietud de aquellas Provincias, y al servicio de su Majestad.’
[137]Ayerbalis a forest chiefly composed of theIlex Paraguayensis, from the leaves of which theyerba maté, or ‘Paraguayan tea’, is made.
[138]Xarque, book ii., cap. xl., p. 30.
[139]This Villalon has left some curious memoirs in the case which he submitted to the Council of the Indies which sat in Seville.
[140]Charlevoix, book xii., p. 115.
[141]Chipa is a kind of bread made of mandioca flour.
[142]Rapadura is a kind of coarse sugar, generally sold in little pyramid-shaped lumps, done up in a banana leaf. It is strongly flavoured with lye.
[143]Mani is ground-nut. [“Peanut” in American English.—A. L., 1998.]
[144]The paraiso is one of the Paulinias.
[145]‘Obedesco, pero no cumplo.’
[146]‘Cosas de palacio van despacio.’
[147]Dean Funes, in his ‘Ensayo de la Historia Civil del Paraguay, Buenos Ayres y Tucuman’ (book ii., cap. i., p. 10), says he was ‘Dotado de un temperamento muy facil de inflamarse, de una imaginacion viva, de una memoria feliz, y de un ingenio no vulgar.’
[148]At the date of the expulsion the number of the cattle was 719,761; oxen, 44,183; horses, 27,204; sheep, 138,827 (‘Inventarios de los bienes hallados á la expulsion de los Jesuitas’, Francisco Javier Brabo, Madrid, 1872).
[149]Cocos yatais.
[150]Urunday (Astrenium fraxinifolium: Terebinthaceæ), curapay (Piptadenia communis: Leguminaceæ), lapacho (Tecoma curialisandvaria: Begoniaceæ), taruma (Vitex Taruma: Verbenaceæ), tatane (Acacia maleolens: Leguminaceæ), and cupai (Copaifera Langsdorfii). These and many other woods, such as the Palo Santo (Guaiacum officinalis), butacæ, and theCedrela Braziliensis, known to the Jesuits as ‘cedar’, and much used by them in their churches, comprise the chief varieties.
[151]‘Libro compuesto por el Hermano Pedro de Montenegro de la C. de J., Ano 1711’, MS. folio, with pen-and-ink sketches, formerly belonged to the Dukes of Osuna, and was in their library. Padre Sigismundi also wrote a herbal in Guaraní, and a Portuguese Jesuit, Vasconellos, has left a curious book upon the flora of Brazil.
[152]Domingo Parodi, in his ‘Notas sobre algunas plantas usuales del Paraguay’ (Buenos Ayres, 1886), has done much good work.
[153]Acacia Cavenia.
[154]Prosopis dulcis. The famous ‘balm of the missions’, known by the vulgar name ofcuralo todo(all-heal), was made from the gum of the tree called aguacciba, one of the Terebinthaceæ. It was sold by the Jesuits in Europe. It was so highly esteemed that the inhabitants of the villages near to which the tree was found were specially enjoined to send a certain quantity of the balsam every year to the King’s pharmacy in Madrid.
[155]It was from those mountains that the Jesuits procured the seed of theIlex Paraguayensisto plant in their reductions. The leaves beaten into a finish powder furnished the ‘Paraguayan tea’, calledyerba-matéby the Spaniards andcaaby the Indians, from which the Jesuits derived a handsome revenue. After the expulsion of the Order all theyerbain Paraguay was procured, till a few years ago, from forests in the north of Paraguay, in which the tree grew wild.
[156]It was by the Bull of Paul III.—given at the demand of two monks, Fray Domingo de Betanzos and Fray Domingo de Minaya—that the Indians were first considered as reasoning men (gente de razon), and not as unreasonable beings (gente sin razon), as Juan Ortiz, Bishop of Santa Marta, wished.
[157]Ibañez (‘Histoire du Paraguay sous les Jésuites M.D.CCIXXX.’), a great opponent of the Jesuits, says that European offenders and recalcitrant Indians in the missions were sent as a last resource to the Spanish settlements. This is not astonishing when we remember the curious letter of Don Pedro Faxardo, Bishop of Buenos Ayres (preserved by Charlevoix), written in 1721 to the King of Spain, in which he says he thinks ‘that not a mortal crime is committed in the missions in a year.’ He adds that, ‘if the Jesuits were so rich, why are their colleges so poor?’
[158]It is to be remembered that, of the thirty Jesuit missions, only eight were in Paraguay; the rest were in what to-day is Brazil and the Argentine provinces of Entre Rios, Corrientes, and Misiones.
[159]Sometimes, when they had been assembled, they all deserted suddenly, as did the Tobatines, who in 1740 suddenly left the reduction of Santa Fé, and for eleven years were lost in the forests, till Father Yegros found them, and, as they would not return, established himself amongst them (Cretineau Joly, ‘Histoire de la Compagnie de Jésus’, vol. v., cap. ii.).
[160]P. Cardiel, ‘Declaracion de la Verdad’, p. 282: ‘Todos los pueblos estan bien formados con calles á cordel. Las casas de los Indios son en algunos pueblos de piedras cuadradas pero sin cal . . . otras de palos y barro todas cubiertas de teja, y todas tienen soportales ó corredores, unas con pilares de piedras, otras de madera.’
[161]Don Francisco Graell, an officer of dragoons in service during the War of the Seven Towns in 1750, gives the following description of the church of the mission of San Miguel: ‘La iglesia es muy capaz, toda de piedra de silleria con tres naves y media naranja. Muy bien pintada y dorada con un portico magnifico y de bellisima arquitectura, bovedas y media naranja son de madera, el altar mayor de talla, sin dorar y le falta el ultimo cuerpo.’
[162]‘Galerias con columnas, barandillas y escaleras de piedra entallada’ (Don Francisco Graell). See also P. Cardiel (‘Declaracion de la Verdad’, p. 247), ‘En todos los pueblos hay reloj de sol y de ruedas,’ etc. The work of Padre Cardiel was written in 1750 in the missions of Paraguay, but remained unpublished till 1800, when it appeared in Buenos Ayres from the press of Juan A. Alsina, Calle de Mexico 1422. It is, perhaps, after the ‘Conquista Espiritual’ of Father Ruiz Montoya, the most powerful contemporary justification of the policy of the Jesuits in Paraguay. It is powerfully but simply written, and contains withal that saving grace of humour which has, from the beginning of the world, been a stumbling-block to fools.
[163]The mission of San Miguel had 1,353 families in it, or say 6,635 souls. San Francisco de Borja contained 650 families, or 2,793 souls (Report by Manuel Querini to the King, dated Cordoba de Tucuman, y Agosto 1o, 1750).
[164]In their extensive missions in the provinces of Chiquitos and Moxos they pursued the same system. As they were much more isolated in those provinces than in Paraguay, and consequently much less interfered with, it was there that their peculiar system most flourished. After the expulsion of the Jesuits from America in 1767, the Spaniards in Alta Peru, and subsequently the Bolivians, had the sense to follow the Jesuit plan in its entirety; whereas Bucareli, the Viceroy of Buenos Ayres, entirely changed the Jesuits’ rule in Paraguay. The consequence was that in Bolivia the Indians, instead of dispersing as they did in Paraguay, remained in the missions, and D’Orbigny (‘Fragment d’un Voyage au Centre de l’Amérique Méridianale’) saw at the missions of Santiago and El Santo Corazon, in the province of Chiquitos, the remains of the Jesuits’ polity. There were ten missions in Chiquitos, and fifteen in Moxos. At the present time the Franciscans have some small establishments in Bolivia.
[165]‘Pillos muy ladinos’ (Robertson, ‘Letters from Paraguay’).
[166]Ferrer del Rio, in his ‘Coleccion de los articulos de la Esperanza sobre Carlos III.’ (Madrid, 1859), says: ‘Fuera de las misiones de los Jesuitas particularmente en el Paraguay se consideraban los Indios entre los seres mas infelices del mundo.’
Jorge Juan and Antonio de Ulloa, in their celebrated ‘Secret Report’ (‘Noticias Secretas de America’): ‘La compañia (de Jesus) atiende a sus fines particularmente con los misioneros que llevan de España; pero con todo eso no se olvida de la conversion de los Indios, ni tiene abandonado este asunto pues aunque van poco adelante en el, que es lo que no se esperimenten en las demas religiones.’
[167]Many travellers, as Azara, Demersay, Du Graty, and D’Orbigny, have remarked how fond of music was the Guaraní race, and how soon they learned the use of European instruments. D’Orbigny (‘Fragment d’un Voyage au Centre de l’Amérique Méridianale’), in his interesting account of the mission of El Santo Corazon, in the district of Chiquitos, says: ‘Je fus très étonné d’entendre exécuter après les danses indigènes des morceaux de Rossini et . . . de Weber . . . la grande messe chantée en musique était exécutée d’une manière très remarquable pour des Indiens.’
Vargas Machuca, in his most curious and rare ‘Milicia y Descripcion de las Indias’, says, under the heading of ‘Musica del Indio’: ‘Usan sus musicas antiguas en sus regocijos, y son muy tristes en la tonada.’ To-day the Indians of Paraguay have songs known astristes. The brigadier Don Diego de Alvear, in his ‘Relacion de Misiones’ (Coleccion de Angelis), says that the first to teach the Guaranís European music was a Flemish Jesuit, P. Juan Basco, who had beenmaestro de capillato the Archduke Albert.
[168]See also P. Cardiel, ‘Declaracion de la Verdad’, p. 274: ‘. . . y esta acabada, se toca á Misa á que entran todos cantando el Bendito, y alabado en su lengua, ó en Castellano, que en las dos lenguas lo saben.’
[169]Dean Funes, in his ‘Ensayo de la Historia del Paraguay’, etc., says that in theestanciaof Santa Tecla, in the missions of Paraguay, during the time of the Jesuits, there were 50,000 head of cattle.
[170]‘Inventarios de los bienes hallados á la expulsion de los Jesuitas’, Introduction, xxvii, Francisco Javier Brabo.
[171]The rare and much-sought-after ‘Manuale ad usum Patrum Societatis Jesu qui in Reductionibus Paraquariæ versantur, ex Rituale Romano ad Toletano decerptum’, was printed at the mission of Loreto. It contains prayers in Guaraní as well as in Latin. Here also was printed a curious book of Guaraní sermons by Nicolas Yapuguay, many Guaraní vocabularies, and the ‘Arte de la Lengua Guaraní’ of Ruiz Montoya.
[172]P. Cardiel, ‘Declaracion de la Verdad’, p. 295: ‘De estos granos comunales se da para sembrar’, etc.
[173]This jerked beef is calledcharquiin South America.
[174]The poorer classes in Paraguay all used to wear thetipoi. They covered themselves when it was cold with a white cotton sheet wrapped in many folds.
[175]The Jesuits themselves were dressed in homespun clothes, for Matias Angles—quoted in the introduction to the ‘Declaracion de la Verdad’ of Father Cardiel, published at Buenos Ayres in 1900 (the introduction by P. Pablo Hernandez)—says: ‘El vestuario de los Padres es de lienzo de algodon teñido de negro, hilado y fabricado por las mismas Indias de los pueblos; y si tal qual Padre tiene un capote ó manteo de paña de Castilla se sucede de unos á otros, y dura un siglo entero.’
[176]In the ‘Relacion de Misiones’ of the Brigadier Don Diego de Alvear, written between 1788 and 1801, and preserved in the ‘Coleccion de Angelis’, occurs the following curious description of the feast-day of a patron saint of a Jesuit reduction: ‘They make a long alley of interwoven canes, which ends in a triumphal arch, which they adorn with branches of palms and other trees with considerable grace and taste (con bastante gracia y simetria). Under the arch they hang their images of saints, their clothes, their first-fruits—as corn and sugar-cane, and calabashes full of maize-beer (chicha)—their meat and bread, together with animals both alive and dead, such as they can procure (como los pueden haber con su diligencia). Then, forming in a ring, they dance and shout, ‘Viva el rey! Viva el santo tutelar!’
[177]Many and curious are the names by which the office-bearers went. Thus, in the Mission of el Santo Corazon, in the Chiquitos, I find the following: Corregidor, the Mayor; Teniente, Lieutenant; Alferez, Sub-Lieutenant; Alcalde Primero, Head Alcalde; Alcalde Segundo, Second Alcalde; Commandante, Captain (of the Militia); Justicia Mayor, Chief Justice; Sargento Mayor, Sergeant-Major. Then came fiscales, fiscals; sacristan mayor, head-beadle; capitan de estancia, chief of the cattle farm; capitan de pinturas, carpinteria, herreros, etc.—captain of painters, carpenters, smiths, etc. All the offices were competed for ardently, and those of Corregidor and Alcalde in especial were prized so highly that Indians who were degraded from them for bad conduct or carelessness not infrequently died of grief.
[178]In each reduction there were two priests. In all Paraguay, at the expulsion of the Order in 1767, there were only seventy-eight Jesuits (Dean Funes, ‘Ensayo de la Historia del Paraguay’, etc., cap. i., vol. ii.).
[179]In the mission of Los Apostoles there were 599 of these ‘horses of the saint’, according to an inventory preserved by Brabo.
[180]Furnished to Bucareli, Viceroy of Buenos Ayres at the expulsion, and first printed by Brabo (‘Inventarios de los bienes hallados á la expulsion de los Jesuitas’).
[181]The Jesuits exercised the Indians a great deal in dancing, taking advantage of their love of dancing in their savage state. D’Orbigny and Demersay (‘Fragment d’un Voyage au Centre de l’Amérique Méridianale’, and ‘Histoire Physique, etc., du Paraguay’) found between the years 1830 and 1855 that the Indians of the Moxos and Chiquitos still danced as they had done in the time of the Jesuits.
I have seen them in the then (1873) almost deserted mission of Jesus, buried in the great woods on the shore of the Paraná, dance a strange, half-savage dance outside the ruined church.
[182]Cardiel, in his ‘Declaracion de la Verdad’, p. 239, says: ‘Todos los pueblos ponen su castillo en la plaza y en el medio de el colocan el retratro del Rey, y el Indio Alferez Real . . . va al castillo con el Estandarte Real y alli hace su homenage con otros rendimientos anteel Retratro Real,’ saying in Guaraní, ‘Toicohengatú ñande Mbaru bicha guazú! Toicohengatú ñande Rey marangatú! Toicohengatú ñande Rey Fernando Sesto!’ (‘Long live our King, the great chief! Long live our good King! Long live our King Ferdinand VI.’).
[183]‘Chupas de damasco carmesi con encajes de plata.’
[184]It may be roughly translated, ‘a good stone wall between a male and female saint.’
[185]These clothes were the property of the community, and not of the individual Indians.
[186]Brabo, xxxv., Introduction to ‘Los inventarios de los bienes.’
[187]A recent writer in the little journal published on yellow packing-paper in the Socialist colony of Cosme, in Paraguay (Cosme Monthly, November, 1898), has a curious passage corroborating what I have so often observed myself. Under the heading of ‘A Paraguayan Market’, he says: ‘The Guaraní clings stubbornly to the Guaraní customs. This is irritating to the European, but who shall say that the Guaraní is not right? . . . European settlement cannot but be fatal to the Guaraní, however profitable it may be to land-owning and mercantile classes. . . . The Paraguayan market is a woman’s club . . . they will come thirty or forty miles with a clothful of the white curd-cheese of the country, contentedly journeying on foot along the narrow paths. They will cut a cabbage into sixteenths and eat their cheese themselves rather than sell it under market price.’ Long may they do so, for so long will they be free, and perhaps poor; but, then, in countries such as Paraguay freedom and poverty are identical.
[188]As the Gaucho proverb says, ‘Las armas son necesarias pero “naide” sabe cuando.’
[189]Corregidores, alcaldes, regidores, alguaciles, etc.
[190]Hereditary or sometimes elected chiefs.
[191]I remember seeing on the tombstone of a Spanish sailor his hope of salvation through the intercession of the Lord High Admiral Christ. After the Spanish custom, officers were often generals both by sea and land, so that soldiers were not excluded from the Lord High Admiral’s intercession.
[192]Dean Funes (‘Ensayo de la Historia de Paraguay’, etc.) says: ‘These Indians went under the command of Don Antonio de Vera Moxica; their sergeants were Guaranís and their captains Spaniards. Theircaciquewas Ignacio Amandaá, who commanded in chief under Vera Moxica.’ They fought bravely, and returned again and again to the assault of the town after several repulses, manifesting the same dogged courage and indifference to death which their descendants showed in the war against Brazil in 1866-70. In that war bodies of Paraguayans frequently attacked strong positions defended by artillery, and allowed themselves to be shot down to the last man rather than retire. At other times, concealed behind masses of floating herbage, from their canoes they sprang on board Brazilian ironclads, and were all killed in the vain endeavour to capture the vessels. I knew a little pettifogging lawyer, one Izquierdo, who, with ten companions, attempted in a canoe to take the Brazilian flagship (an ironclad); left alone on her deck, after the death of his companions, he sprang into the water under a shower of bullets, and, badly wounded, swam over to the Chaco, the desert side of the river. There for three days he remained, subsisting on wild oranges, and then swam across again on a raft of sticks, in spite of the alligators and many fierce fish which abound in Paraguay. He got well, and, though lame, was, when I knew him, as arrant a little scrivening knave as you could hope to meet in either hemisphere.
On many other occasions the mission Indians performed notable services for the Spanish Government. In 1681, when the French attacked Buenos Ayres, a detachment of two thousand Indians was sent to its assistance. Philip V. himself wrote to the Provincial of Paraguay on this occasion asking him to send troops to the defence of the city.
In 1785 four thousand Guaranís, commanded by Don Baltazar Garcia, were at the second siege of the Colonia del Sacramento. Funes says of them: ‘A juicio de un testigo ocular, no es menos admirable la sangre fria de sus capellanes.’
[193]‘Perro Luterano’. It is astonishing how in Spain the comparatively innocuous Luther has fallen heir to the heritage of hatred that should more properly have belonged to the inhuman and treacherous Calvin.
[194]Philip V. in 1745, after an examination which lasted six years, approved of all the actions of the Jesuits in Paraguay (Cretineau Joly, ‘Histoire de la Compagnie de Jésus’, vol. v., p. 103). So that a curious letter of a Jeronimite friar (one Padre Cevallos), written in 1774, is well within due limits when it says that all the Jesuits did in Paraguay was ‘todo probado por reales cedulas ó procedia de ordenes expresas.’
[195]One is obliged to allow, in common fairness, that Calvin carried out in his own practice what he advocated—as witness his conduct with Servetus, whom he first calumniated, then entrapped, and lastly murdered in cold blood.
[196]Don Francisco Corr sent the following list of arms to the Viceroy Zabala, of Buenos Ayres (Funes, ‘Ensayo’, etc.): ‘Armas buenas, 850; lanzas de hierro, 3,850; pedreras (culverins), 10. Las flechas no se cuentan.’ He says: ‘Todos los Indios quando han de salir a compaña llevan 150 flechas de hierro, menos los que llevan armos de fuego. Asi mismo cargan “bolas” que son dos piedras en una cuerda. Los de a pie que no llevan escopetas tienen lanza, flecha, y honda con su provision de piedras en un bolson como de granaderos. Se prestan caballos entre los pueblos.’
[197]Ibañez (‘Histoire du Paraguay sous les Jésuites’) states the hides sold at about three dollars apiece.
[198]The arroba was twenty-five pounds.
[199]These figures are from Brabo’s inventories.
[200]Ibañez states that only eighty-four dollars a year were set apart for the maintenance of each priest.
[201]Dean Funes (‘Ensayo de le Historia Civil del Paraguay’, etc.) puts it at a million reales, which almost equals £20,800.
Ibañez (‘La Republica Jesuitica’), with the noble disregard of consequences so noticeable in most polemical writers, boldly alters this to a million dollars, his object being to prove that the Jesuits exacted exorbitant taxation from the neophytes.
[202]The honey of the missions was celebrated, and the wax made by the small bee called ‘Opemus’, according to Charlevoix (livre v., p. 285), ‘était d’une blancheur qui n’avait rien de pareil, et ces neophytes ont consacré tout qu’ils en peuvent avoir à bruler devant les images de la Ste. Vierge.’
[203]In the inventory of the mission of San José I find: ‘Item, doce pares de grillos’; but I am bound to say that in this instance they were for the use of ‘los Guaicurus infieles prisioneros que estan en dicha mision.’
[204]‘Il Cristianesimo Felice nelle Missione dei Padri della Compagnia di Jesu nel Paraguay’.
[205]‘L’Histoire du Paraguay sous les Jésuites’, Amsterdam, 1700, lxxv.
[206]In all, the missions amounted to thirty; and for their relative situationsvidethe curiousmap, the original of which was published in the work of Padre Pedro Lozano, C. de J., ‘Descripcion chorographica del terreno, rios, arboles y animales de las dilatadissimas provincias del Gran Chaco, Gualanba’, etc. Cordoba, del Tucuman, en el Colegio de la Assumpcion, por Joseph Santos Balbas, 1733.
[207]A letter of a certain Jesuit (name lost, but dated 1715) says that there were at least two thousand canoes in constant use on the Paraná, and almost as many more on the Uruguay (Brabo, ‘Inventarios’, etc.).
[208]Corregidores, regidores, alcaldes, etc.
[209]It is not to be supposed, however, that the Indians were kept in ignorance. P. Cardiel (‘Declaracion de la Verdad’, p. 222), quoting from the Cedula Real of 1743, says that ‘in every one of the towns there is a school established to teach reading and writing in Spanish, and that on that account a great number of Indians are to be met who write well.’ Cardiel adds, on the same page, ‘Dos de ellos estan copiando ahora esto que yo escribo, y de mejor letra que la mia.’
[210]Dean Funes (‘Ensayo Critico’, etc.) puts the income from commerce of the thirty towns at a hundred thousand dollars, and informs us that, after taxation (to the Crown) had been deducted from it, it was applied to the maintenance of the churches and other necessary expenses, and by the end of the year little of it remained.
[211]Don Martin de Barua, in his memorial to the King (1736), complaining of the Jesuits, puts the number of taxable Indians at forty thousand. The Commission appointed to examine into the charges in 1736, which reported in 1745 (a reasonable interval), affirmed that the taxable Indians only numbered 19,116. Each Indian paid an annual poll-tax of one dollar a year to the Crown. In addition to that, every town gave one hundred dollars a year. The salary of the priests was six hundred dollars a year (Azara, ‘Voyage dans l’Amérique Méridionale’).
[212]‘Account of the Abipones’. London: John Murray, 1822.
[213]‘Voyage dans l’Amérique Méridionale’. Paris: Denton, 1809.
[214]Perámas (‘De vita et moribus sex sacerdotum Paraguaycorum, Petrus Joanes Andrea’, lxxxiv.) states that it appeared, from papers left after their expulsion, that the income of the Jesuit College of Cordoba just paid the expenses of administration (‘era con escasa diferencia igual á los gastos’).
In the Archivo General of Buenos Ayres, legajo ‘Compañia de Jesús’, there is a document referred to by P. Hernandez in his introduction to the work of P. Cardiel (‘Declaracion de la Verdad’), which states that in the year of the expulsion the income of the thirty towns fell a little short of the expenses.
[215]Azara, ‘Voyage dans l’Amérique Méridionale’; also Funes, ‘Ensayo Critico de la Historia del Paraguay’; and Padre Guevara, ‘Historia del Paraguay, Rio de la Plata y Tucuman’.
[216]Archivo General de Simancas, Estado, legajo 7,450, folios 21 y 22, 5a, Copia de las cartas (sin firma; la siguiente es de Nicolas Neenguirú) que se hallaron en letra Guaraní traducidas por los interpreteo nombrados en las sorpresa hecha al pueblo de San Lorenzo por el Coronel D. José Joaquin de Viana, Gobernador de Montevideo, el dia 20 de Mayo de 1756:
‘El modo de vivir del Padre es, cerrar bien todas las puertas y quedarse el solo, su Mayordomo, y su muchacho. Son ya Indios de edad, y solo estos asisten solo de dia adentro, y á las doce salen afuera, y un viejo es quien cuida de la Porteria, y es quien Sierra la puerta quando descansa el Padre, ó quando sale el Padre á ver su chacara. Y aun entonces van solos, sino es con un Indio de hedad quien los giua y cuida de el caballo y despues de esto á misa y á la tarde al Rosario de Maria Santisima llamandonos con toque de campana, y antes de esto á los muchachos y muchachittas los llama con una campánilla y despues de eso el bueno de el Padre entra ha enseñarles la Doctrina, y el persinarse de el mismo modo, todos los dias de fiesta nos Predica la palabra de Dios, del mismo modo el Santo Sacramento de la Penitencia y de la Communion, en estas cosas se exercitta el bueno del Padre y todas las noches se sierra la porteria y la llave se lleva al aposento del Padre y solo se vuelve á abrir por la mañana quando entra el Sachristan y los cosineros. . . .
‘Los Padres todas las mañanas nos dicen misas, y despues de misa, se van a su aposento y hai cogen un poco de aqua caliente con Yerva y no otra cosa mas; despues de esto sale a la puerta de su aposento y ahai todos los que oyeron misa se arrimen a besarle la mano, y despues de esto sale afuera a ver los Indios si trabajan en los oficios que cada uno tiene, y despues se van a su aposento a resar el oficio divino, en su libro, y para que Dios le ayude en todas sus cosas. A las once de el dia van a comer un poquitto, no á comer mucho solo coge cinco plattitos y solo beve una vez el vino, no llenando un vaso pequeño, y aguardiente nunca lo toman y el vino no lo hai en nuestro pueblo, solo lo traen de la Candelaria segun lo que envia el Padre Superior lo trahen de acia Buenos Aires. . . . Despues que sale de comer y para descansar an poco, y mientras descansa salen fuera los que assisten en la casa del Padre, y los que trabajan dentro en algunas obras y tamvien el Sachristan y el cosinero: todos estos salen fuera y quando no se toca la campana estan serradas las puertas, y solo un viejo es el que cuida de las puertas, y quando vuelvan a tocar la campana, vuelve este a abrirlas para que vuelvan a entrar los que trabajan dentro, y el Padre Coge el Brebiario no a ir a parte ninguna. A la tarde tocan la campanilla paraque se recojan las criatturas, y entre el Padre á ensenarles la doctrina christiana.’
[217]Perhaps the entire isolation of the Jesuits in these two provinces accounts for their absolute quiet; and if this is so, it goes far to prove that they were right to attempt the same isolation in Paraguay. The comparative nearness of the Spanish settlements frustrated their attempts in this instance.
[218]For ‘reasoning men’, and how this monstrous superstition still prevails in Venezuela, see the charming book of S. Perez Triana, ‘De Bogota al Atlantico’, etc., pp. 156-158 (Paris: Impresa Sud Americana). A really interesting book of travels, without cant, and without an eye on the public. Strange to relate, the author seems to have killed nothing during his journey.
[219]Charlevoix, book iv.
[220]‘Conquista Espiritual’, Ruiz Montoya.
[221]‘Voyage dans l’Amérique Méridionale’.
[222]Azara, ‘Viage al America Meridional’, tomo 2, cap 12. ‘La corte ordenó a Don Francisco de Alfaro oidor de la Audiencia de Charcas pasar al Perú en calidad de visitador. La primera medida que tomó en 1612 fue ordenar que ninguno en lo sucesivo pudiese ir a casa de Indios, con el pretexto de reducirlos, y que no se diesen encomiendas del modo que hemos explicado, es decir con servicio personal. No alcanzo sobre que podia fundarse una medida tan politicamente absurda: pero como este oidor favorecia lasideas de los Jesuitas, se sospechó que por aquel tiempo que ellos dictaron su conducta.’
[223]Formitasandencomiendas, see foregoing chapters.
[224]Brabo, ‘Inventarios de los bienes hallados a la expulsion de las Jesuitas’.
[225]‘Voyage dans l’Amérique Méridionale’.
[226]P. Cardiel (‘Declaracion de la Verdad’, p. 449), quoting from Xarque (‘La Vida Apostolica del Padre Joseph Cataidino’, Zaragoça por Juan de Ypa, 1664), says,rethe diminution of the Indians under the Spanish rule: ‘Para que se vea cuanta razon tiene el Juez reparese que segun los padrones del siglo pasado (vg. 1600-1700) en la ciudad y jurisdicion de Santiago del Estero habia 80,000 Indios y ahora, apenas hay ochenta. En la jurisdicion de Cordoba de Tucuman, habia 40,000; hoy no hay 40. En la jurisdicion y cercanias de la ciudad de Buenos Ayres, habia 30,000; hoy apenas hay 30.’
[227]Charlevoix, vol. ii., livre xvii.
[228]Funes, ‘Ensayo de la Historia Civil del Paraguay’, etc., vol. ii., cap. v., p. 231.
[229]Del Techo, Lozano, Guevara, Charlevoix, etc., etc.
[230]Liberty is commonly only attained by blood. It is, I think, quite legitimate in playing the liberty game to kill all who disagree with your party, or to banish them. In these degenerate times, lovers of liberty have to stop short at calumny, just as if they were mere tyrants.