In 1631 Montoya and others came in the forests of Guayrá upon the wild Caaguas. These they strove hard to civilize, but, after labouring long, with all their eloquence were able to induce only eighteen to return with them to the Encarnacion. It was ‘with difficulty that they were able to give them a sufficient knowledge of the mysteries of our faith to be able to bestow the rite of baptism.’ It may be that the Caaguas, not having much to occupy their minds, approached the mysteries of our faith in more receptive attitudes than is attained by those whose minds are full. But, anyhow, Montoya, with true prudence, deferred their baptism till just before their death, for a few months of life outside the forests proved fatal to them all. Faith is a wondrous thing, and able to move most things, even common-sense. One wonders, though, why, when the Jesuits learned from experience that the poor Indians invariably died when exposed to the burning sun upon the plains, they continued in their fatal efforts to inflict baptism on the unoffending people of the woods. If it were necessary, it surely might have taken place in their own homes, and the patients then might have been left to chance, to see how the reception of the holy rite acted upon their lives.
In 1631 the Mamelucos broke into the province of Guayrá. All was confusion, and Montoya sent Father Diaz Taño to Asuncion to beg the Governor, Don Luis de Cespedes, to send them help. He answered that he could do nothing, and thus by leaving the whole territory of Guayrá without defence lost a rich province to the Crown of Spain. Though at the time (1631) Portugal and Spain were united, yet in the Indies their subjects were at war, and though in Europe Spain was the stronger of the two, in America the Portuguese conquered about that time rich provinces, which to-day form part of the quondam Empire of Brazil.
Upon the failure of Don Luis de Cespedes to render help, Padre Diaz Taño was despatched to Charcas[85] to lay the matter before the Audiencia Real (the High Court of the Indies). The frequent journeys and diplomatic negotiations in which the Jesuits of Paraguay were engaged rendered them far more apt to manage business than members of the other Orders in America. Whilst in Guayrá all was confusion, and the Paulistas swept through the land ruining everything, upon the Uruguay things prospered, and Padre Romero founded two new reductions (1631), known as San Carlos and Apostoles; he also laid the foundation of that territory in which the persecuted neophytes of Guayrá were soon to find a safe retreat. Father Diaz Taño by this time had returned from Charcas with a decree of the High Court, declaring the action of Don Luis de Cespedes in failing to protect Guayrá against the Mamelucos prejudicial to the interests of the King; but as neither he nor the High Court of Charcas possessed any power by means of which to stimulate the Governor to greater zeal, the decree was useless, and Taño and Ruiz Montoya found themselves summoned hastily to meet a new attack. But before they arrived the missions, both of San Francisco Xavier and of San José, had been destroyed. As there were still three reductions undestroyed, Montoya, as Provincial of Guayrá, called all the Jesuits of the province to deliberate as to their chance of making a defence. The debate ran high; some of the priests wished that the neophytes should fight to the end; others, more sensible, pointed out that the ill-armed and quite untrained militia of the missions could do nothing with their bows and arrows against the well-led and well-disciplined Paulistas all armed with guns.[86] Padre Truxillo gave it as his opinion that it would be more prudent to transport the Indians to a place of safety, and pointed out that near the cataract of Guayrá they would be able to cross the river and place it between themselves and the Paulistas in case of an attack. This advice seemed prudent to the rest, and Father Truxillo set out to make his preparation for the march. Few European travellers even to-day have visited the great cataract known as El Salto de Guayrá, or in Portuguese As sete Quedas. Bourgade la Dardye[87] has described it in his book on Paraguay. Situated as it is in the midst of almost impenetrable forests, it has not even now been properly placed upon the map. Bourgade la Dardye inclines to think he was the first to visit it since the expedition sent by the elder Lopez, President of Paraguay, under Lieutenant Patiño in 1861. Before that time it had been left unvisited since 1788, when the Boundary Commissioners sent to determine the dividing line between the Spanish and Portuguese possessions camped near it for a week. Felix de Azara writes about it in his ‘Historia del Paraguay’,[88] but he does little more than reproduce the account given by the Boundary Commissioners. He places it in 24° 4′ 27″ lat., and refers to it as ‘a tremendous precipice of water[89] worthy of Homer or of Virgil’s pen.’ He says the waters do not fall vertically as from a balcony or window (como por un balcon ó ventana), but by an inclined plane at an inclination of about fifty degrees. The river close to the top of the falls is about four thousand nine hundred Castilian yards in breadth, and suddenly narrows to about seventy yards, and rushes over the fall with such terrific violence as if it wished to ‘displace the centre of the earth, and cause thus the nutation which astronomers have observed in the earth’s axis.’ The dew or vapour which rises from the fall is seen in the shape of a column from many miles away, and on it hangs a perpetual rainbow, which trembles as the earth seems to tremble under one’s feet. ‘The noise,’ he says, ‘is heard full six leagues off, and in the neighbourhood neither bird nor beast is found.’ In Azara’s time the journey was not too pleasant, for he says: ‘He who wishes to see this fall must cross the desert for thirty leagues from the town of Curuguaty to the river Guatimi. There he must choose trees to construct canoes. In these he must embark all those who go with him, arms and provisions, and besides, where he embarks, leave an armed escort to secure his base of supplies from the wild Indians’ attack. In the canoes he then must navigate the Guatimi for thirty leagues until it joins the Paraná, and always with much care, for in the woods upon its banks are Indians who give no quarter.[90] . . . Then there remain three leagues to sail upon the Paraná, then one can reach the falls either in the canoes or struggling along the woods which fringe the river’s bank.’
Azara was, perhaps, of all the travellers of the last century, the man who above all things shines in accuracy, and in point of fact his description of the cataract is the best we have up to the present time. Bourgade la Dardye tells us that not far above the cataract the Paraná expands into a lake almost five miles in breadth, and from the lake the river issues in two great arms, which have forced their way through the mountains known as the Sierra de Mbaracyu.
Dr. Bourgade la Dardye seems to think the circular eddies found in the whirls are the most curious features of the falls. He describes them thus: ‘They flow in falls varying from fifty to sixty feet in depth; these circular eddies, which are quite independent of one another, range along an arc of about two miles in its stretch. They are detached like giant caldrons yawning unexpectedly at one’s feet, in which the flood seethes with incredible fury; every one of these has opened for itself a narrow orifice in the rock, through which like a stone from a sling the water is hurled into the central whirlpool. The width of these outlets rarely exceeds fifteen yards, but their depth cannot be estimated. They all empty themselves into one immense central chamber about two hundred feet wide, rushing into it with astounding velocity. . . . A more imposing spectacle can scarcely be conceived, and I doubt whether abysses such as these exist elsewhere in the world.’ He places the falls in latitude 24° 2′ 59″, but corrects the longitude given by Azara as 56° 55′ west of Paris to 58° 18′ 8″—that is, 53° 57′ 53″ west from Greenwich, which certainly has some importance in fixing the breadth of the territory of Paraguay.
But neither Azara nor the French traveller, with their yards and feet, their longitude and latitude, and the rest, give an idea of the grandeur of the place. Buried in the primeval forests, forgotten by the world, known to the wandering Indians who give no quarter (any more to-day than in Azara’s time), the giant cataract is a lost wonder of the world. In the ruined missions on the Paraná, two hundred miles away, I have heard the Indians talk of it with awe. They told how through the woods tangled with undergrowth, matted together with lianas, they had hewed a path. Monkeys and parrots chattered at them, and a white miasmatic vapour hung over trees and lakes, burying the clearings in its wreaths, and lifting only at mid-day, to close again upon the woods at night. They talked of alligators, jaguars, the giant ant-eater, and the mysterious bird known to them as the ‘ipetatá’, which in its tail carries a burning fire. In the recesses of the thickets demons lurked, and wild Caaguas, who with a blowpipe and a poisoned arrow slew you and your horse, themselves unseen. Pools covered with Victoria regia; masses of red and yellow flowers upon the trees, the trees themselves gigantic, and the moss which floated from their branches long as a spear; the voyage in canoes, whirled like a cork upon the rapids; lastly the falls themselves, and how they, awestricken at the sight, fell prostrate and promised many candles to the Virgin and the saints on their return, they talked of into the watches of the night.
Somehow, I like those countries which, as the province of Guayrá and Paraguay, appear to have no future, and of which the charm is in the past. It pleases me to think that the sharp business men of times gone by, patting their stomachs (the prison of their brain), predicted great advancement, and were all deceived. For then it seems as if the prognostications of to-day’s schemes may also fail, and countries which they have doomed to progress still remain as is Guayrá, their towns deserted, with but the broken spire of some old church emerging from the verdure of the tropics, as the St. Paul’s Rocks rise sheer out of the sea. If there is charm in the unknown, there is at least as great a charm in the forgotten, and the Salto de Guayrá is one of the most forgotten corners of the earth. To this wild place Father Mendoza proposed to lead the Indians from the Reductions of San José and San Francisco Xavier, and then unite with them any of the fugitives he could assemble from those reductions which had been destroyed. But even the doglike patience of the Indians was at an end, and they preferred to die or be led captives rather than run the chances of escape in such a solitary place. In their despair, and placed between the Paulistas and the fear of emigration, the neophytes turned, as even more civilized people than themselves will turn, on their best friends, and held the Jesuits responsible for all their woes. Two Indian women, wives of caciques, having been taken by the Paulistas, the Indians broke into the church where a Jesuit (Padre Salazar) was officiating, and interrupted him during the Mass with the most bitter insults. One of the Indians menaced him with a lance, another with an arrow, whilst a third tried to snatch the chalice from his hands. He escaped, and ran, holding the chalice, out into the woods, followed by two little Indian boys. Wandering about, he fell in with the other Jesuits, all like himself outcasts, without a church, and almost deserted by the Indians. Padre Ruiz Montoya alone possessed a shadow of authority, and he advised the outcasts with the remnant of their flocks to retire into the woods, and sow a crop of maize for food, whilst he endeavoured to get help from Paraguay. Hardly was this done, when news was brought him which made him alter all his plans. Two messengers came to inform him that an army of Paulistas was marching on Villa Rica, and that a strong detachment of them was advancing from the south. Then Padre Montoya took a supreme resolve, and ordered the evacuation of the two principal reductions (San Ignacio and Loreto) which yet remained intact. They were the first which had been founded in Guayrá, and were as important as any of the Spanish towns in Paraguay. The churches, all the Jesuit writers, as Montoya, Charlevoix, Mastrilli, and Lozano, are agreed, were finer than any in the land. The Indians were, according to Montoya, far better Christians than the inhabitants of the Spanish settlements, and their faith and innocence were above all praise. They cultivated cotton and had large herds of cattle, so that the most bitter enemies of the Jesuits must allow that much had been accomplished in the short space of two-and-twenty years. In 1609 the Jesuits came to Guayrá, and found it absolutely untouched; and when in 1631 they left it, it was upon the road to become one of the most flourishing American provinces of the Spanish throne. The other missionaries imagined that nothing would persuade the Indians to depart from their homes, where for so many years they had been happy; but after Montoya explained to them his plans, they all assented to them as with a single voice.
The plan by means of which the Jesuit Moses led his sheep out of the wilderness of Guayrá was most remarkable. The river Paraná forms a great artery between Brazil and Paraguay; upon each side of it a network of rivers disembogue. The Paranapané, on which most of the missions of Guayrá were situated, flows from the east, and falls into the Paraná, not much more than fifty miles above the cataract. After the last of the once-flourishing six Jesuit reductions had been evacuated at the orders of Montoya, he collected all the boats, rafts, and canoes, and after much persuasion got all the Indians persuaded to follow him to seek for safer habitations lower down the Paraná. The population of the six reductions has been estimated at about one hundred thousand souls; but of these, during the years of 1629 and 1630, thousands had been led captive to San Paulo, and thousands had dispersed into the woods. Still, assembled on the banks of the Paranapané, there was a multitude of Indians of every sex and age. Fortunately or unfortunately, no record by an eye-witness exists,[91] except that written by Montoya, and he is modest to a fault about all details, and absolutely silent as to the part he played himself. He tells us that at the starting-point were gathered two thousand five hundred families, and this in spite of the dispersions and the efforts made by the Spanish settlers in the town of Ciudad Real,[92] who feared, with cause, to be exposed to the full fury of the Paulistas without allies. It appears the Indians were in a state of spiritual exaltation, for some young men having remarked the Jesuits were packing up a Christ and an image of the Blessed Virgin, which in happier times had been miraculous, they declared that to affront exile, and even death, in such good company was a foretaste of heaven.
Montoya, in opposition to the modern style, tries to shift the burden of the praise on to the shoulders of the Provincial, Padre Francisco Lopez Truxillo,[93] but with indifferent success. This matter of bearing your own praise will require regulation in the future, when an advance of civilization has opened people’s eyes to the perception that praise is just as disagreeable to the sufferer as is blame. The sentinel whom they had placed to warn them of the enemy’s approach gave the alarm. Montoya sent at once to Ciudad Real for help, but the Spanish settlers were too hard pressed themselves to give assistance. Nothing remained but to make a portage of all their rafts, boats, and canoes, and then to re-embark and sail down the Paraná out of the reach of the Paulistas. Montoya passed in review his boats, and found he had seven hundred, and that twelve thousand people had embarked with him on leaving the Paranapané. When the Paulistas found the Jesuits had evacuated all their towns, they burnt the churches, on the principle, perhaps, that, the nests once pulled down, the rooks would not return. They turned the Jesuit cells into barracks for themselves, taking, as Montoya says with horror, ‘infamous women’ into those chaste abodes, where never woman had passed through the doors. The Paulistas then entered into a rigorous examination[94] of the Jesuits’ private lives, hoping to find some scandal to bring against them. Especially they questioned the Indian women, giving them presents to discover everything they knew. All was in vain, the discipline of the Order, or the strict conscientiousness of the individual members of it, not having given scandal any hold.[95] The most difficult part of the great exodus was now to come. The rapids and the cataracts of the Paraná extend to nearly ninety miles, and the whole country is a maze of tangled forest interspersed with rocks. No paths exist, the place is desert, and over the dank mass of vegetation the moisture from the clouds of vapour thrown up by the falling water descends in never-ending rain.[96] In order to endeavour to save the trouble of reconstructing new rafts and canoes at the bottom of the cataract, Montoya launched three hundred empty boats (sending an Indian in advance) to see if any of them would arrive safely at the bottom of the falls. Not one escaped; and so the pilgrimage began, almost without provisions and without arms, in the middle of a country quite uncultivated, and where game was scarce.[97] To make things worse, intelligence was brought that, a few miles below the beginning of the falls, the Spaniards of Guayrá had built a wooden fort, surrounded with a strong stockade, hoping to intercept the retreating Indians, and make slaves of any who might fall into their hands. Montoya himself, dressed as an Indian, went out to observe the enemy, and on his return the whole immense assemblage silently plunged into the woods, leaving so little traces of its passage that the Spaniards in the fort were still expecting them when they were far beyond their reach.
Each Indian had to take his bundle on his back; even the children carried bundles in proportion to their strength. The missionaries carried what was held most sacred, as altar-plate and images of saints. In front a band of men armed with machétes (cane-knives) opened the way through the dense woods and pathless jungle of the bank; and as they marched along, Montoya says they sang hymns which the Jesuits had taught them, and at the sound of them fugitives who had been hiding in the woods came out and joined their march. Especially those from the out-station of Tayaoba joined them; their priest, Pedro de Espinosa, had met his death ‘with a good chance of his eternal welfare,’ as Montoya says.[98] But after the second day the hymns no longer sounded through the woods, nor did they play upon the harps and other instruments, whose strings being all broken and the wood unglued, ‘they left them on the rocks, being too sad to look at them.’ All through the weary journey Montoya seems never once to have despaired, and sets down in his book the adventures of each separate day, never forgetting to chronicle anything strange or pathetic as it occurred to him. On the fourth day he sent off Fathers Diego, Nicolas Hennerio, and Mansilla into the province of Itatines to found a mission there, acting upon orders which had just reached him from the Provincial of the Order shortly before he had started from Guayrá. They took with them ‘bells, images, and everything suitable for the foundation of a mission’; but the first two were martyred by the wild Indians, and the third just fled in time to save his life. It took the fugitive Indians eight weary days of marching to reach the lower end of the cataract, where once again the Paraná was navigable. On their arrival they hoped to find provisions and more boats; but none were there, their own stores were almost done, and the people too exhausted to march on. Fever broke out, and many of them died; and others, lost in the forests, without a guide, wandered about till death released them from their march. A weaker man than Padre Montoya might have despaired of ever issuing from the woods. However, he set the Indians to work to make canoes, and others[99] to cultivate patches of maize for food, working himself alternately with axe and hoe to give example to the neophytes. Others, again, cut down the enormous canes, which in that region grew to fifty feet in height, to make them into rafts.