Historians, like lawyers in conveyancing, catch errors one from another, and transmit them as truths or titles to posterity. Certain it is that Echevarria sent for the nearest Jesuit priest to mediate, and he luckily, or unluckily, proved to be that Father Thadeus Ennis, who played so prominent a part in the futile rising which the enemies of the Jesuits have chosen to dignify with the high-sounding title of the ‘Jesuit War’.
If Father Ennis really thought the Indians could hold head to both the Spaniards and the Portuguese, or if he thought that the rising would draw attention to the injustice of the treaty, is difficult to say. Whether, indeed, he headed it himself, or if he merely accompanied the Indians as their spiritual guide, giving them now and then the benefit of his advice on matters temporal, after the fashion of the ambitious churchman of all time,[282] is now unknown. Whatever his opinions were upon this matter, Father Ennis showed himself almost from the first irreconcilable. He refused to meet the commissioners, and in his place sent a cacique (chief) of the Indians, one Sepe Tyaragu, an official of the reduction of San Miguel. This chief, seeing the escort of the commission was but small, ‘put on his boots’,[283] and took high ground, daring to talk about the rights of man, of the love of country, and said that liberty consisted in being allowed to enjoy his property in peace, sentiments which, though admirable enough in a white man’s mouth, for men of colour are but fit for copy-books.
The cacique firmly refused to vacate his lands, and said the King of Spain, as he lived far away, could not have understood the bearing of affairs in Paraguay. Such arguments as these, together with the perhaps offensive tone of the cacique, had such effect on the commissioners that, after having threatened him with vengeance, which at the time they had no power to carry out, they both withdrew out of the territory.
As Funes[284] well observes, the Spaniards had established themselves in these parts (the River Plate and Paraguay) to obtain a limitless submission from the Indians. Any resistance drove them to fury, and excited them to take revenge. As all the Indians’ crime was their unwillingness to quit the lands on which they had been born, it seemed a little hard to slaughter them, even before their petition to the King had been refused. Most probably all had been prepared before, for Valdelirios at once issued an order, which he had the power to do under a sealed letter from the King, to the Governor of Buenos Ayres, Andonaegui, to prepare for war. Active hostilities broke out in 1754, and Father Ennis has preserved a day-by-day account, written in priestly Latin,[285] of what took place. After some skirmishes, which at the first were favourable to the Indians, who took great courage from them,[286] the first encounter of a serious nature occurred on February 24, 1754. Quite naturally, the victory was on the side of the best-armed battalions, and the Indians lost many of their best men, and their largest piece of ordnance.[287]
With varying success the war dragged on for several years, after the style of the Gaucho warfare in the River Plate which was common twenty years ago, or that in Venezuela which obtains to-day. Alternately each party carried off the other’s horses, drove each other’s cattle, or, if they caught a straggler, tied his hands and cut his throat or lanced him, the party who had lost the man protesting he was ‘massacred’—a term in use even to-day when the party to which one’s self belongs sustains reverse. For the first two years—for wars in South America till twenty years ago were to the full as interminable as that of Troy—Father Thadeus Ennis kept his journal, faithfully chronicling all that he saw. Occasionally in a perfunctory way he says his mission with the revolted Indians was as a priest and physician to the souls and bodies of his flock; but now and then he sets down the capture of a convoy of some thirty carts, or the cutting off some messenger carrying despatches from the Generals. In this he sees the hand of God (put forth to help his Jesuits[288]), although he now and then complains the Indians were remiss in following up any success they had. After the first encounter, the Indians seem to have employed the immemorial guerilla tactics which so often waste all the strength of an army which has conquered in the field. Father Cardiel[289] describes the Indian army, quoting from the writing of a Spanish officer who served against them, as quite contemptible. Their cannon were but hollow reeds, bound round with hide, which could only be fired two or three times, and carried balls a pound in weight.[290] Some lances and bows and arrows which they had appeared to him more formidable. Most of them carried banners with the painted figure of a saint, under whose ægis they deemed themselves secure from cannon-balls. Their trenches were but shallow ditches, with a few deeper holes to shelter in, but which, as Cardiel observes, served many of them for graves, as they were open to artillery, having been constructed without ‘an ounce of military art’. The officer adds that no sooner had the Indians heard the cannon than they fled, leaving almost nine hundred on the field and losing one-sixth prisoners.[291] Finally, the officer remarks with disgust that the official chronicler of the affair ‘lies from first to last’[292] when he declares that the Indians could make any resistance against disciplined troops. With varying fortune the campaign dragged on, until in 1756 the diary of Father Ennis, bad Latinity and all, comes to an abrupt conclusion at the taking of San Lorenzo, where the stout-hearted priest was taken prisoner. His papers fell into unfriendly hands, and were made use of by Ibañez, with the context duly distorted in various passages, and served as one of the most formidable indictments against the Jesuits in the expulsion under Charles III.
Although Thadeus Ennis and other Jesuits accompanied the troops, and no doubt aided much by their advice, the Indians had as a general one Nicolas Ñeenguiru, styled in the Gazettes of the time the King of Paraguay. About this man all kinds of monstrous legends soon sprang up. One little lying book, entitled ‘Histoire de Nicolas I., Roy du Paraguai et Empereur des Mamalus’,[293] which bears upon its title-page ‘Saint Paul’,[294] 1756, especially excels. In that brief work of but one hundred and seventeen pages, printed on yellowish paper, and with one of the finest little vignettes of a basket of fruit and flowers upon its title-page that one could wish to see, a sort of parody of a Spanish picaresque novel in duodecimo is set forth with circumstance.
Nicolas Roubioni is duly born in 1710, in a small ‘bourgade de l’Andalousie’ bearing the name of Taratos. The name carries conviction from the start, and pronounced à la française, with the accent equal upon all the syllables, is quite as Spanish as the most exigent of comic operas could possibly desire. His father, ‘ancien militaire’, left him alone to educate himself as he best liked. Arrived at eighteen years of age he runs away to Seville, and after several adventures in the style of those of Rinconete and Cortadillo, seen through French spectacles, enters the service of a lady bearing the well-known Spanish name of Donna Maria della Cupidità. Under the unnecessary alias of Medelino, and in the capacity of cook, he becomes the lady’s lover as in duty bound. ‘Chassé’ from Seville by a jealous brother of his love, he flies for refuge to a ‘bourgade’ (name not chronicled) some seven leagues away. He then becomes a muleteer, and at Medina Sidonia kills a man, and, forced to flee, repairs to Malaga, where he lives peacefully ten years. Finding life dull there, he journeys to Aragon and joins the Jesuits, and from henceforth his future is assured. After an interval he reappears at Huesca, and at once falls in love with ‘une belle espagnole’, Donna Victoria Fortini, whom he courts under the guise of a gentleman of Seville, returning every night to the convent of the Jesuits to change his clothes. So great becomes his effrontery that under the style and title of ‘Comte de la Emmandés’, he publicly marries ‘sa belle’, the Jesuits either consenting, or too astounded at the fact to intervene. Things getting hot in Huesca, he embarks for Buenos Ayres as a missionary, leaving poor Donna de la Victoria ‘dans une inquiétude mortelle’, as she might well have been. Arrived in Buenos Ayres just at the moment of the cession of the seven Jesuit towns, he sees his opportunity, learns Guaraní in the brief space of six or seven weeks, and joins the Indians. They naturally, having been trained to look on every foreigner outside the Order of the Jesuits as an enemy, receive him as their King. Under the title of the ‘Son of the Sun and Star of Liberty’ he rules them, looked on as a God. The brief mendacious chronicle leaves him on the throne, just after having joined the empire of the Mamalucos to that of Paraguay, and promising to give the world more of his history when it comes to hand.
By stories such as those contained in the mendacious little book imprinted at St. Paul, the easy-minded public—then, as now, always more easily impressed with lies than with the truth—was biassed against the Jesuits in Paraguay. Father Dobrizhoffer,[295] who knew ‘King’ Nicolas from his youth up, has left a very different version of his history, in which no Donna della Cupidità or de la Victoria even remotely flourishes. Nicolas Ñeenguiru was born in the township of La Concepcion, of which in after-life he rose to be the mayor. He married an Indian woman, not ‘une belle Andalouse’, and Dobrizhoffer says a friend of his, one Father Zierheim, had him whipped publicly for petty theft when a young man. At the time (1753) when, in company with another Indian, one José, mayor of San Miguel, he headed the Indian revolt, he was a man of middle age, tall, taciturn and grave, and not ill-looking, though marked across the cheek with a disfiguring scar. At no time was he even a lay brother of the Jesuit Order, as by their rules in Paraguay no Indians were ever taken either as lay brothers or as priests. So little was the man feared by the authorities that, once the Indians’ resistance was over, Nicolas went to the Spanish camp, was quietly heard, dismissed, and then continued in his office as the mayor of his native place. The legend sprang from a mistake in Guaraní, to which perhaps a little malice gave its artful charm. In Guaraní the word ‘Rubicha’ signifies a chief, whereas ‘Nfurabicha’ means king. The two, pronounced by one but ill acquainted with the language sound identical. Nothing was more likely than that the Indians should call their general their chief; had they thought really of settling upon a king, it is certain that they would have chosen one of the family of some well-known chief, and not an Indian merely appointed mayor by the Jesuits. But be that as it may, General Ñeenguiru, though he has left some interesting letters, which are preserved in the archives of Simancas, showed no capacity for generalship.[296] Throughout the course of the campaign he endeavoured to replace his want of skill by tricks and by intrigues, but of so futile a nature that they were frustrated and rendered useless at once. His first endeavour was to gain time, when he found himself with seventeen hundred men opposed to Andonaegui, Governor of Buenos Ayres, who had an army well equipped with guns, of about two thousand men. Ñeenguiru wrote to Andonaegui, telling him that the Indians were ready to submit, and then, whilst waiting for an answer, set about fortifying the position which he held. Warned by a spy, Andonaegui attacked at once, and drove the Indians from their trenches like a flock of sheep, taking their wooden cannon, lances, and banners, and killing thirteen hundred of them.
A glorious victory, and, as Father Ennis says, ‘to be expected, and which, had it chanced otherwise, must have covered the Spaniards and the Portuguese with shame.’ In fact, a victory of the same kind as those which since that time have been most usual when well-armed European troops have faced half-naked, ill-armed savages, but which, of course, reflect no credit on the victor, or, at best, just as much credit as a butcher rightfully receives when he defeats a calf.
But even after the victory over the Indians of Nicolas Ñeenguiru the troubles of the allies were not quite at an end. The usual dissensions between allies who mutually detest each other soon broke out, and Gomez Freire, the General of the Portuguese, only prevented a collision with the Spaniards by considerable tact. After a short campaign of a few months, the allies entered the rebellious towns and took possession of them all, with the exception of San Lorenzo, which continued to hold out. A month or two served to reduce it, too, and the whole territory of the seven towns submitted to the power of the joint forces of Portugal and Spain. The struggle over, Ñeenguiru was quietly again reinstated mayor of Concepcion, the bruised wooden cannon duly set up as monuments, the dead left on the plains and the esteros for the chimangos[297] and the caranchos[298] to gorge upon, and, law’s due majesty once more vindicated, the conquerors set about, in 1757, to trace the limits between the territories of the two Christian Kings.