A Vanished Arcadia: Being Some Account of the Jesuits in Paraguay 1607-1767

by R. B. Cunninghame Graham

In every mission two chosen Jesuits lived. The elder, selected for his experience of the country and knowledge of the tongue from amongst those who had been rectors of colleges or provincials of the Order, was vested with the civil power, and was responsible direct to the Superior. The second, generally styled companion (el Compañero), acted as his lieutenant, and had full charge of all things spiritual; so that they were a check on one another, and their duties did not clash.

In difficulties the Superior transmitted orders, like a general in the field, by mounted messengers, who frequently rode over a hundred miles a day, relays of horses always being kept ready for emergencies every three leagues upon the road.

From La Candelaria roads branched off to every portion of the territory, most of them fit for carts, and all superior to those tracks which were the only thoroughfares but twenty years ago. Roads ran to Corrientes, to Asuncion, others from Yapeyú to the Salto Grande, on the Paraná. Upon the Upper Uruguay were about eighty posts, all guarded, and with horses ready to equip the messengers. But there were also roads in the district of the Upper Paraná, which I myself remember as a wilderness, uncrossed, uncrossable, where tigers roamed about and Indians shot at the rare traveller with poisoned arrows out of a blow-pipe, whilst they remained unseen in the recesses of the woods. In the districts of the Upper Uruguay and Paraná, besides the roads and relays of post-horses, they had a fleet both of canoes and boats in which they carried yerba[207] and the other products of the land. Thus, with their fleet of boats and of canoes, their highroads branching out on every side, and their relays of post-horses at intervals, most probably no State of America at the time had such interior means of communication with the seat of government. The Incas and the Aztecs certainly had posts who carried messages and brought up fish from the coast with great rapidity; but all the Spanish colonies contemporaneous with the Jesuits’ settlements in Paraguay had fallen into a state of lethargy and of interior decay. The roads the Incas used in Peru were falling fast into disuse, and it took several weeks to send a letter from Buenos Ayres to the Pacific coast.

The system of interior government in the missions was in appearance democratic—that is to say, there were officials, as mayors[208] and councillors; but most of them were named by the Jesuits, and all of them, even although elected, owed their election entirely to their priests. This sort of thought-suggested representation was the most fitting for the Indians at the time,[209] and those who look into the workings of a County Council of to-day cannot but think at times that the majority of the councillors would have been better chosen had the electorate had the benefit of some controlling hand, though from what quarter it is difficult to see. The problem which most writers on the Jesuits have quite misunderstood, is how two Jesuits were able to keep a mission of several thousand Indians in order, and to rule supreme without armed forces, or any means of making their power felt or of enforcing obedience to their decrees. Undoubtedly, the dangerous position in which the Indians stood, exposed on one side to the Paulistas, and on the other to the Spanish settlers, both of whom wished to take them as their slaves, placed power in the Jesuits’ hands: for the Indians clearly perceived that the Jesuits alone stood between them and instant slavery. Most controversialists who have opposed the Jesuits assert that the Indians of the missions were, in reality, half slaves. Nothing is further from the truth, if one consults the contemporary records, and remembers the small number of the Jesuits. The work the Indians did was inconsiderable, and under such conditions as to deprive it of much of the toilsomeness which is incident to any kind of work. The very essence of a slave’s estate is being obliged to work without remuneration for another man. Nothing was farther from the Indians than such a state of things. Their work was done for the community, and though the Jesuits, without doubt, had the full disposition of all the money earned in commerce,[210] and of the distribution of the goods, neither the money nor the goods were used for self-aggrandisement, but were laid out for the benefit of the community at large. The total population of the thirty towns is variously estimated from one hundred and forty to one hundred and eighty thousand,[211] and, curiously enough, it remained almost at the same figure during the whole period of the Jesuit rule. This fact has been adduced against the Jesuits, and it has been said that they could not have been good rulers, or the population must have increased; but those who say so forget that the Indians of Paraguay were never in great numbers, and that most writers on the wild tribes, as Dobrizhoffer[212] and Azara, remark their tendency never to increase.

All this relatively large population of Indians was ruled, as has been seen, by a quite inconsiderable number of priests, who, not disposing of any European force, and being almost always on bad terms with the Spanish settlers in Paraguay on account of the firm stand they made against the enslaving of the Indians, had no means of coercion at their command. Hence the Indians must have been contented with their rule, for if they had not been so the Jesuits possessed no power to stop them from returning to their savage life. Azara,[213] although in the main an opponent of the Jesuits, in the same way that a ‘good Liberal’ of to-day would oppose anything of a Socialistic tendency, yet has this most significant passage in their favour. After enumerating the amount of taxes paid by the missions to the Crown, he says ‘en faisant le bilan tout se trouvait égal, et s’il y avait quelque excédant, il était en faveur des Jésuites ou des peoplades.’[214] Seldom enough does such a result take place when the balance is struck to-day in any country between the rulers and their ‘taxables’. Following their system of perfect isolation from the world to its logical sequence, the Jesuits surrounded all the territories of their different towns with walls and ditches, and at the gates planted a guard to prevent egress or ingress between the missions and the outer world.[215] Much capital has been made out of this, as it is attempted to be shown that the Indians were thereby treated as prisoners in their own territories. Nothing, however, has been said of the fact that, if the ditches, palisades, and guard-houses kept in the Indians, they also had the effect of keeping the Spaniards out. When men who looked upon the Indians as without reason, and captured them for slaves when it was possible, began to talk of liberty, it looks as if the ‘sacred name of liberty’ was used but as a stalking-horse—as greasy Testaments are used to swear upon in police-courts, when the witness, with his tongue in his cheek, raises his eyes to heaven, and then with fervency imprints a kiss upon his thumb.

It will be seen that the communism of the missions was of a limited character, and, though the land was cultivated by the labour of the community, that the products were administered by the Jesuits alone. Though it has been stated by many polemical writers, such as Ibañez and Azara, and more recently by Washburne, who was American Minister in Paraguay during the war with Brazil and the Argentine Republic (1866-70), that the Jesuits had amassed great wealth in Paraguay, no proof has ever been advanced for such a charge. Certainly Cardenas made the same statement, but it was never in his power to bring any confirmation of what he said. This power alone was in the hands of Bucareli (1767), the Viceroy of Buenos Ayres, under whose auspices the expulsion of the Jesuits was carried out. By several extracts from Brabo’s inventories, and by the statement of the receivers sent by Bucareli, I hope to show that there was no great wealth at any time in the mission territory, and that the income was expended in the territory itself. It may be that the expenditure on churches was excessive, and also that the money laid out on religious ceremonies was not productive; but the Jesuits, strange as it may appear, did not conduct the missions after the fashion of a business concern, but rather as the rulers of some Utopia—those foolish beings who think happiness is preferable to wealth.

Nothing can give a better idea of the way of life of a Jesuit priest and of his daily labours than the curious letter of Nicolas Ñeenguiru, originally written in Guaraní, but of which a translation is extant in the National Spanish Archives in Simancas:[216]

‘The manner of living of the father is to shut all the doors, and remain alone with his servant and his cook (who are Indians of a considerable age), and these only wait on him; but by day only, and at twelve o’clock, they go out, and an old man has care of the porter’s lodge, and it is he who shuts the gate when the father is asleep, or when he goes out to see his cultivated ground, and even then they go alone, except it be with an old Indian, who guides them and attends to the (father’s) horse; and after that he goes to Mass, and in the evening to the Rosary of the Blessed Virgin, calling us together by the sound of the bell, and before that he calls the boys and girls with a small bell, and after that the good father begins to teach them doctrine and how to cross themselves. In the same way, on every feast day, he preaches to us the Word of God, in the same way the Holy Sacrament of Penitence and of the Communion; in these things does the good Father employ himself, and every night the porter’s lodge is closed, and the key taken to the Father’s room, which is only opened in the morning in order that the sacristan and the cooks may enter. . . .

‘The Fathers every morning say Mass for us, and after Mass they go to their rooms, and then they take some hot water and yerba (maté), and nothing more; after that he comes to the door of his apartment, and then all those who heard Mass come to kiss his hand, and after that he goes out to see if the Indians are diligent at their tasks, and afterwards they go to their room to read the divine service for the day in his book, and to pray that God may prosper him in all his affairs. At eleven o’clock they go to eat a little, not to eat much, for he only has five dishes, and only drinks wine once, not filling a little glass; and spirits they never drink, and there is no wine in our town, except that which is brought from Candelaria, according to that which the Superior sends, and they bring it from somewhere near Buenos Aires. . . . After he has finished eating, to rest a little he goes into the church; afterwards—yes, he retires to rest a little, and whilst he is resting those who work in the father’s house go out, and those who do any kind of indoor work, and also the sacristan and the cook: all these go out, and as long as the bell does not ring the doors are shut, and only an old man guards the gate, and when they ring the bell again he opens the doors so that those who work indoors may go inside, and the father takes his breviary and goes nowhere. In the evening they ring the bell so that the children may come home, and the father comes in to teach them Christian doctrine.’

Perhaps the foregoing simple description, written by an Indian in Guaraní, and translated by someone who has preserved in Spanish all the curious inversions of the Guaraní, presents as good a picture of the daily life of a mission priest in Paraguay as any that has ever been given to the public by writers much more ambitious than myself or Ñeenguiru. Nicolas Ñeenguiru, the writer of the letter, afterwards figured in the war against the Portuguese, and several of his letters are preserved in the archives of Simancas, though none so interesting and simple as that I have transcribed.