In Paraguay these yanaconas were known as ‘Indios Originarios’, and generally were descendants of Indians conquered in war; they, too, were in a condition of serfdom. They lived in the house of the encomendero, and could not be sold, and the encomendero was (in theory) obliged not only to feed and clothe them, but to instruct them in religious truths. In order to see that these conditions were duly carried out, visitors were sent each year to hear what mutually the encomenderos and the Indians had to say.
Herrera[59] describes the Indians under the mitayo system by the name of mitayos tindarunas, explaining that the word tindaruna signifies ‘forced labour’. The chiefs had to provide a certain number of them every year to work in mines and manufactories, and so well was the labour in the mines known to be fatal, that the Indians upon being drawn for service disposed of all their property, and not infrequently divorced their wives. The mitayos were at the beginning Indians who had not fought against the Spaniards, but had submitted to their rule. They were grouped in townships composed of portions of a tribe under a chief to whom the Spaniards gave the position of Alcalde. In the towns thus formed only the men between eighteen and fifty were liable to be drawn for service in the mines; originally their term of service was for only two months in the year, and for the remaining ten months they were in theory as free as were the Spanish settlers. By 1612 the abuses of their system had so diminished the number of the Indians that Don Francisco de Alfaro was named by the Spanish Government to report upon it, and to reform abuses where he found it possible. His report declared that the Guaranís and Guaycurús should not be made slaves of, and it abolished in their favour the forced labour which they had previously endured. The European settlers in Asuncion thought that this was owing to the influence of the Jesuits, and therefore they expelled them from the town. Recalled to Santiago, they founded there a college, and those who remained in Paraguay pushed on the mission-work. Brabo[60] points out that the first twenty reductions founded by the Company of Jesus were settled in the first twenty years from their first appearance in the land,[61] and that from the foundation of the Mission of St. George (the last established of the first twenty towns) to that of San Joaquim, in the wild forests of the Tarumá, they employed a hundred and twelve years. In the interval they chiefly occupied themselves in the consolidation of their first settlements, and in various unsuccessful attempts to institute similar reductions amongst the Indians of the Chaco across the Paraguay.
But whilst the Jesuits were settling their reductions in the province of Guayrá and those upon the Paraná and Uruguay, a nest of hawks looked at their neophytes as pigeons ready fattening for their use. Almost eight hundred miles away, at the city of San Paulo de Piritinanga, in Brazil, a strange society had come into existence by degrees. Peopled at first by Portuguese and Dutch adventurers and malefactors, it had become a nest of pirates and a home for all the desperadoes of Brazil and Paraguay. This engaging population, being in want of wives whereby to propagate their virtues, took to themselves Indians and negresses, and bred a race worse ten times than were themselves, as often happens both in the cases of Mulattos and Mestizos in America. Under the name of Mamelucos[62] (given to them no one knows why) they soon became the terror of the land. Equally at home on horseback, in canoes upon the rivers, or in schooners on the sea, excellent marksmen and courageous fighters, they subsisted chiefly by procuring Indians as slaves for the plantations in Brazil. In a short time they exhausted all the Indians near San Paulo, and were forced to search far in the depths of the unknown interior. Little by little, following the course of the great rivers in their canoes, they reached the Jesuit settlements upon the upper waters of the Paraná, where they burned the towns and the churches, made captives of the converts, and killed the priests. Montoya relates that a Jesuit, having clasped an Indian in his arms to save him, was deluged with his blood, a Mameluco having crept up behind him and plunged his lance into the Indian behind the Jesuit’s back. The Mameluco, on being, as Montoya says, ‘reprehended’ by the Jesuit, dogmatically remarked, ‘I shall be saved in spite of God, for to be saved a man has only to believe,’[63] a remark which showed him clearly an honest opponent of the Jesuits, as they insisted greatly on the doctrine of good works.
Ruiz Montoya and others tell us that the plan of action of the Paulistas was either to attack the Jesuit reductions on Sunday, when the sheep were gathered in the fold listening to Mass, surround the church, murder the priest, and carry off the neophytes as slaves; or else, disguised as Jesuits, enter a mission, gain the confidence of the Indians, and then communicate with their soldiers, who were waiting in the woods. But not content with this, it seems, so often did they practise singing Mass to pass as Jesuits, that on returning to San Paulo, in their orgies, their great diversion was to masquerade as priests. So that the rascals not only profited by their villainy, but extracted much amusement from their wicked deeds.[64] This, in Montoya’s opinion, was even more damnable than the actual crime. And so no doubt it was, and we in England, by having made our vice as dull as virtue is in other lands, have gone some way towards morality, for vice and virtue, both deprived of humour, become not so far separated as some virtuous dull folk may think.
Quite naturally, these redoubtable land and river pirates saw in the Jesuit reductions upon the Paranapané, and generally throughout the district of Guayrá, merely an opportunity of capturing more Indians than usual at a haul. In 1629 they first appeared before the Mission of San Antonio and destroyed it utterly, burning the church and houses, and driving off the Indians to sell as slaves. San Miguel and Jesus-Maria shortly suffered the same fate. In Concepcion Padre Salazar was regularly besieged, and he and all the people reduced to eating dogs, cats, rats, mice, and even snakes. At the last moment, when about to surrender, Father Cataldino, hastily arming some Indians with any rude weapons at his command, marched on the place and raised the siege. A worthy member of the Church militant this exploring, fighting, intrepid Italian priest, and one the Company of Jesus should honour, for to him, perhaps as much as to any of these first explorers of the Upper Paraná, is credit due.
But still the Mamelucos ran their course, destroying town after town, so that in the short space of a year (1630-31) they destroyed partially the reductions of San Francisco Xavier, San José, San Pedro, and La Concepcion; and the two first founded, San Ignacio and Loreto, were ruined utterly. The wretched Indians, to whom by law the Jesuits were forbidden to serve out firearms, stood no chance against the well-trained Paulistas, with their horses, guns, and bloodhounds, assisted as they were by troops of savage Indians who discharged poisoned arrows from blowpipes and from bows. Small wonder that, as Montoya, Charlevoix, Lahier,[65] and Filiberto Monero[66] all agree, despair took hold of them, so that in many instances they cursed the Jesuits and fled back to the woods. When one reflects that many of the Indian tribes looked upon baptism as a poison,[67] it is not strange that they should have associated effect with cause, and set down all their sufferings to the influence of the malignant rite to which the Jesuits had subjected them. The isolated Jesuits ran considerable risk from their own sheep, and Padre Mola, after the ruin of San Antonio, was suspected by them of being in league with the Paulistas, and had to flee for safety to another town; and as a touch of comedy is seldom wanting to make things bitterer to those in misfortune, a troop of savage Indians, having arrived to attack the Reduction of San Antonio, and finding it already burning, instantly thought poor Padre Mola had been the instigator, and, starting on his trail, almost surprised him before he reached a refuge from their patriotic rage.
Thus in the greater world reformers of all sorts have not infrequently in times of scarcity and danger been taken by their protégés for the authors of their trials and stoned, whilst the smug Government which caused the ruin, well bolstered up in the affection of its ‘taxables’, chuckled, serenely confident in the unending folly of mankind. Most certainly the Jesuits struggled to do their duty to their neophytes in what they thought they saw was right. On foot and unattended Fathers Maceta and Mansilla followed the fifteen thousand captives to Brazil, confessing those who fell upon the road before they died, and instant in supplication to the Paulistas for the prisoners’ release. Father Maceta especially behaved heroically, carrying the chains of those who could hardly drag themselves along, himself half dead with hunger and his constant toil. Especially he strove to effect the release of a captive chief called Guiravera, who had been one of his bitterest enemies, and strove so hard that a Paulista captain, either touched by his zeal or wearied with his pleading, released the chief, his wife and family, and six of the Indians of his tribe. The chief returned to become the Jesuits’ best friend, and the two priests on foot followed the captives’ train. What they endured on foot without provisions, tortured by insects, and in danger from wild beasts, as well as constant perils from the Paulistas, who now and then pricked them with lances or fired pistols over their heads to frighten them away, none but those who have journeyed in the forests of that forgotten corner of the world can estimate. I see them in their torn and sun-browned cassocks struggling through the esteros[68] in water to the knees, falling and rising oft, after the fashion of the supposititious Christian on life’s way; pushing along through forest paths across which darted humming-birds, now coming on a dying man and kneeling by his side, now gathering the berries of the guavirami[69] to eat upon the road, and then again catching sight of a jaguar as it slunk beside the trail, and all the time convinced that all their efforts, like the efforts of most of those who strive, would be in vain. So stumbling through the woods, crossing the rivers on inflated ox-skins, baked by the sun upon the open plains, at length the Jesuits reached San Paulo, where they had a college, and without resting set at once to work. In season (and what in cases of the kind is ten times more important), out of season, they besought, pleaded, and preached, and finding as little grace from the Paulista chiefs as a transgressor against some fiery dogma would find from a sour-faced North British dogmatist, they started for Rio de Janeiro to see the Council-General of Brazil. There they were told that the right person to address was the Captain-General of the colony, who had his residence in Bahia, five or six hundred miles away. Not the least daunted, they set out, and found Don Diego Luis Oliveira more or less friendly, but as usual fearful of giving offence to those who had a vested interest in the trade. Then the two Jesuits, hearing that another invasion of the Paulistas was expected in Guayrá, started back on their long journey through the woods, over the plains, across the mountain ranges, and through the dank esteros which lay between them and their missions on the Paraná. The Captain-General seems to have been roused to a sense of the position by their words, for on his annual visitation at San Paulo he spoke in public to the colonists against their slave raids, when a shot fired from the meeting ended his speech.[70] The inhabitants then signified to him that, sooner than give up what seemed to them a justifiable and honest means of life, they would be debaptized. How they proposed to debaptize themselves is not related, but perhaps after the fashion of the Guaranís—by sand, hot water, and scraping with a shell; though why the tongue should be thus scarified seems doubtful, for no sect of Christians that is known exacts that people at that sacrament should put out their tongues, and even baptism does little or nothing to increase the power of scandal inherent both in those who have been and those who never were baptized.
About this time (1630) the poor Jesuits were much tormented by the return to paganism of their Indians, and most especially by a hideous dwarf who set himself up as a god, and found a host of worshippers. Good Father Charlevoix thinks that ce petit-monstre,[71] despairing of being thought a man, had no resource but to give out he was a god, and remarks that, as even more hideous gods have been adored, it is not surprising that the Indians took him at his word. When stripped of the somewhat strange phraseology of the simple Jesuit, there is nothing really shocking in the incident. People in general, in making gods, endue them with their own least admirable attributes, and logically these poor Indians but followed out the general scheme.
But in the midst of heresies and dwarf-gods, with the Paulistas almost always in the field, a man arose who was to lead the Jesuits and their neophytes out of Guayrá and settle them securely below the cataract in the Misiones of Paraguay. Born probably late in the sixteenth century in Spain, Antonio Ruiz de Montoya was amongst the first of the Jesuit Fathers who came to Paraguay. In 1612 we find him recently arrived from Spain;[72] sent up to the province of Guayrá to the assistance of Fathers Maceta and Cataldino. For thirty years,[73] as he himself informs us in his book, he remained in Paraguay, and in his own pathetic words he tells us how most of his life was spent. ‘I have lived,’ he says, ‘all through the period of thirty years in Paraguay, as in the desert searching for wild beasts—that is, for savage Indians—crossing wild countries, traversing mountain chains, in order to find Indians and bring them to the true sheepfold of the Holy Church and to the service of His Majesty.[74] With my companions I established thirteen reductions or townships in the wilds, and this I did with great anxiety, in hunger, nakedness, and frequent peril of my life. And all these years I passed far from my brother Spaniards have made me almost a rustic and ignorant of the polished language of the Court.’ Travelling as he did continually, few knew the country from Guayrá to Yapeyu[75] so well as he; he tells us that for ‘all travelling equipment’ he took a hammock, and a little mandioca flour, that he usually travelled on foot with either sandals or bare feet, and that for eight or nine years he never once tasted bread.
About the year 1611-12 we find him charged with a mission to the Provincial at Asuncion to disabuse him of a report which had been carried there that the Jesuits of Guayrá were garnering in no fruit from all their labours in the wilds. The rumour had been so much repeated that the superiors in Asuncion were on the point of calling back the missionaries and giving up all hope. Montoya, accompanied by six Indians, set out upon the journey, which by land to-day is enough to appal the boldest traveller. Walking along, he found himself about the middle of his way alone, his Indians having loitered in the rear. Night caught him in the forests, and a storm came on. He passed the night at the foot of a large tree, hungry and wet, and, waking in the morning, found himself so crippled with arthritic pains as to be obliged to continue his journey on his hands and knees. Alone and helpless, he dragged himself to a place called Maracayu, and, failing to obtain a canoe, went on another league, and there lay down to die, his leg being swelled enormously with the rheumatic pains. Then, as he says himself, he prayed to San Ignacio, telling him that from a sentiment of obedience he had set out upon the journey through the waste. Nothing could have been better, for the saint (who must have seen him all the time), flattered, perhaps, that his own chief virtue had been the cause of so much pain, promptly healed him and restored his leg to its usual size, and Montoya went on his way rejoicing to Asuncion. The Provincial heard and was disabused, but was unable to send a single man to help, and poor Montoya set off again back to Guayrá alone, having gained nothing but his sufferings on the road.