In 1731 an order came from Madrid to execute him, and without loss of time he was placed on a horse draped all in black, and, preceded by a herald and guarded by a troop of guards, taken out to the public square to be beheaded. But the good people of the capital, who, in the fashion of the world, would not most probably have stirred a step to save a saint, were mightily concerned to see a rogue receive his due deserts. The streets were filled with thousands crying out ‘Pardon!’ stones flew, and the affair looked so threatening that the Viceroy had to get on horseback and ride amongst the crowd to calm the tumult. The people met him with a shower of stones, and he, fearing the prisoner would escape, called on his guards to fire upon him. Four balls pierced Antequera, who fell dying from his horse into the arms of two accompanying priests. Thus the most turbulent of all the Governors of Paraguay ceased troubling, and the executioner, after having cut off his head, exhibited it to the people from the scaffold, with the usual moral aphorism as to the traitor’s fate.
The triumph of the Jesuits in Asuncion was but momentary, following the general rule of triumphs, which take their way along the street with trumpets and with drums amid the acclamations of the crowd, and then, the pageant over, the chief actors fall back again into the struggles and the commonplace of ordinary life.
Between the years 1728 and 1730 the people of Asuncion had been more eager in pursuit of liberty[230] than was their usual wont. The citizens were divided into camps, and daily fought amongst the sandy streets and shady orange-bordered lanes which radiate from almost every quarter of the town. The rival bands of madmen were styled respectively the ‘Communeros’ and the ‘Contrabandos’, and to the first Antequera throughout his residence in Lima gave all the assistance in his power. Neither of the two seems to have had the most elementary idea of real patriotism, or any wish for anything beyond the momentary triumph of the miserable party to which each belonged. One doctrine they held in common—a hatred of the Jesuits, and of the influence they exercised against the enslaving of the Indians, which was the aim of ‘Contrabandos’ and of ‘Communeros’ alike. One of the rival chieftains of the factions having fled for refuge to the missions, the people of Asuncion assembled troops to take him from his sanctuary by force. Arrived upon the frontier of the Jesuit territory, they found themselves opposed by an army of the Indians, who looked so formidable that the troops retired to Asuncion, and the leaders, foiled in the field, and not having force to attack the Jesuits in their own territory, set vigorously to inflame the minds of the people against them.
They worked with such success that when, in 1732, the news of Antequera’s death reached Paraguay, the people, inflamed with the idea that he was sacrificed to the hatred of the Jesuits, rose and expelled them once again. The constant expulsions of the Jesuits from Asuncion, the turmoils in the State, and the fact that every now and then the Indians had to take arms to defend their territory, acted most mischievously on the reductions, both in Paraguay and in those between the Paraná and Uruguay. Whole tribes of Indians, recently converted, went back to the woods; land was left quite untilled, and on the outskirts of the mission territory the warlike tribes of Indians, still unsubdued, raided the cattle, killed the neophytes, and carried off their wives as slaves. But still, in spite of all, the Indians clung to their priests—as they said, from affection for the religious care they had bestowed, but quite as possibly from the instinctive knowledge that, between the raiding Portuguese and the maddening patriots in Asuncion, their only safeguard against slavery lay in the Jesuits. Most fortunately for Paraguay at the time (1734), Don Bruno de Zavala, perhaps the most energetic of the Spaniards in the King’s service in America, was Viceroy in the River Plate. Having received orders to quiet the dissensions in Asuncion, in spite of being nearly seventy years of age, and having lost an arm in the Italian wars, he marched at once, taking but forty soldiers in his train, as, war being imminent with Portugal, it was not safe to deplete the slender forces in the River Plate. Arrived in Paraguay, he entered the Jesuit missions at the Reduction of San Ignacio Guazu,[231] and, having appealed to the provincial of the Order for his aid, speedily found himself at the head of a large army of the Indians. After some skirmishes he was in a position to enter Asuncion and force the people to receive him as their Governor. By one of those revulsions so frequent in a crowd of reasonable men, the people begged him to invite the Jesuits to return. They did so (1735), and were received in state, the Governor, the Bishop, and the chief clergy and officials of the place attending Mass in the Cathedral with lighted candles in their hands. His duty over, Don Bruno de Zavala set off for Chile, where he had been appointed Governor, and on his journey, at the town of Santa Fe, died suddenly, exhausted with the battles, marchings and countermarchings, rebellions, Indian incursions, the turbulence of the people in the towns, and the other cares which formed the daily duties of a Spanish officer in South America at the middle of the eighteenth century.[232] The next ten years were on the whole peaceful and profitable for the Indians of the missions and for the Jesuits. The Indians followed quietly their Arcadian lives, except when now and then a contingent of them was required to assist in any of the wars, which at that time were ceaseless throughout the eastern part of South America. The Jesuits pushed out their spiritual frontiers, advancing on the north amongst the Tobatines of the woods, and on the west endeavouring to spread their colonies amongst the Chiriguanas and other of the Chaco tribes.
From the conquest of Peru, when those Indians who had been but recently brought under the empire of the Incas retreated into the Chaco, it had been the refuge of the fiercest and most indomitable tribes. The Spanish colonists, the ardour of the first conquest spent, had settled down mainly to agricultural pursuits. Few had efficient firearms, and on the whole, though turbulent amongst themselves, they had become unwarlike.[233] The very name of the wild Indians (Los Indios Bravos) spread terror up and down the frontiers. This terror, which I remember still prevalent both in Mexico and on the pampas of the Argentine Republic, not more than five-and-twenty years ago, was keener upon the confines of the Chaco than anywhere in South America, except, perhaps, in Chile, upon the frontiers of Araucania.
The Tobas, Mataguayos, Lules, Aguilotas, Abipones, and the rest, together with the warlike nations of the Vilelas and the Guaycurús, had from the first rejected Christianity. Attempts had several times been made to establish settlements amongst them, but the ferocity of all the tribes, their nomad habits—for many of them passed their lives on horseback—and the peculiar nature of their country, a vast domain of swamp, pierced by great rivers quite unknown to the Spanish settlers, had hitherto combined to render every effort vain. But, notwithstanding this, the Jesuits laboured incessantly, and not without success, amongst the wildest of the Chaco tribes. The gentle and eccentric Father Martin Dobrizhoffer passed many years amongst the Abipones, of whom he wrote his charming book. He enumerates many tribes, of whom he says[234] ‘these are for the most converted by us, and settled in towns.’
Nothing, perhaps, displays the Jesuits at their best, more than their efforts in the Chaco. The enormous territory was sparsely peopled by about seventy tribes,[235] whereof there were fifteen or sixteen of considerable size. Hardly two tribes spoke dialects by which they could communicate with one another, and almost every one of them lived in a state of warfare, not only with the Spaniards, but with the neighbouring tribes. The inventories preserved by Brabo[236] show us the town of Paisanes in the Chaco, with its rough wooden houses, and the Jesuits’ habitation in the middle of the place, stockaded, and without doors, and with but narrow openings in the wall, through which the missionaries crept. The inside of the house contained five or six rough rooms, almost unfurnished, but for a few religious books and a plentiful supply of guns.[237] Their beds were of unvarnished wood, with curtains of rough cotton spun by the Indians. Sometimes they had a sofa of leather slung between four stakes, a rack for medicine bottles, and for the wine for Mass. Lastly, one priest, in the settlement amongst the Toquitistines, had among his books copies of Cervantes and Quevedo; one hopes he read them half smiling, half with a tear in his eye, for your true humour is akin to tears. Perhaps, reading ‘Don Quixote’ or ‘El Gran Tacaño’, the poor priest forgot his troubles, and, wandering with Sancho in La Manchan oak-woods or through Castilian uplands, thought he was in Spain.[238]
Throughout the territory of the Gran Chaco there were but seven reductions established by the Jesuits. These were San José de Bilelas, with its little town Petacas; San Juan Bautista de los Iristines, with its townlet of the same name; San Esteban de los Lules, with the town of Miraflores; Nuestra Señora del Buen Consejo de los Omarapas, capital Ortega; Nuestra Señora de Pilar de los Paisanes, with Macapillo as its centre; Nuestra Señora del Rosario de los Tobas, with its chief place called San Lucas; and, lastly, the establishment amongst the Abipones, known as La Concepcion. In all these missions the Jesuits lived in constant peril of their lives. In reading their old chronicles one finds the records of their obscure and half-forgotten martyrdoms, their sufferings, and the brief record of their deaths by an arrow or a club. In 1711 Father Cavallero, with all his following, was slain by the savage Pinzocas. In 1717 Father Romero, having, as a Jesuit writer says, ‘nothing but moral force behind him,’[239] was slain with twelve companions of the Guaranís of Paraguay. In 1718 Fathers Arco and Blende, Sylva and Maceo, received their dusted-over martyrs’ crowns.
Right up the western bank of the river Paraguay, in the old maps, the crosses mark the sites where Jesuits were slain. That they all died to further crafty schemes, or for some hidden purpose of a Machiavelian nature, even a Dominican will scarcely urge. That they did good—more or less good than Protestant fanatics of the same kidney might have achieved—it were invidious to inquire. That which is certain is that they were single-hearted men, faithful unto the end to what they thought was right, faithful even to the shedding of their own blood, which is, one may believe, the way in which the scriptural injunction should be rightly read.
In the dim future, when some shadow of common-sense dawns on the world, and when men recognise that it is better to let others follow their destiny as it best pleases them, without the officious interference of their fellows, it may be that they will say all missionaries of whatsoever sect or congregation should have stayed at home, and not gone gadding to the desert places of the earth seeking to remedy the errors of their God by their exertions; but whilst the ideal still remains of sacrifice (which may, for all I know, be useless in itself, or even harmful), they must perforce allow the Jesuits in Paraguay high rank, or else be stultified.