When the land troubles were got over, and Bucareli, having arrived at Yapeyu, embarked upon the river, the very winds proved contrary, so that it took him many days to arrive at Candelaria, which port he reached upon August 27, 1768. But before quitting Yapeyu the Governor made a solemn feast, riding himself before his grenadiers, whose caps, he says, caused much amazement, the Indians never having seen such headgear in their lives. The difficulties of his journey over, the Jesuits dispossessed and sent down-stream to be remitted home, Bucareli in his letter next deals with questions of religion, about which he shows himself as well informed as all the Spanish conquerors seem to have been in the New World. If for the dogma of the faith he was a bar of iron, for ‘cold morality’, as Scottish preachers of the perfervid type used to refer to it, he was most keen. The Indians’ clothes, especially the graceful tupoi worn by the women, shocked him exceedingly. It was impossible to touch upon it without an outrage upon modesty.[328] Masculine virtue is a most precarious thing, but little, if at all, more stable than its female counterpart; therefore perhaps the Governor was right not to expose his soldiers to temptation, so he did well, as he informs us, in serving out clothes which obscured their charms, or perhaps hid them quite from view. ‘Such tyrannies,’[329] says the modest Governor, ‘occasioned many offences against God, and frequent illnesses and epidemics.’ The sentence is a little doubtful in its meaning, for if a scantiness of women’s dress occasioned illnesses and epidemics amongst the population of a town, Belgravia and Mayfair should surely be the most unhealthy spots on earth; though even there, I verily believe, no more offences against God occur than amongst the Moors, whose women show only their eyes to the shrinking gaze of easily offended men.
As in duty bound, Bucareli kept for the end of his despatch a rehash of all the old charges made against the Jesuits. They kept the Indians in slavery, would never let them learn Spanish, and were themselves inordinately rich. The first two accusations Father José Cardiel, in his ‘Declaracion de la Verdad’, abundantly disproves.[330] The last the Governor disproves himself; for had he found much treasure he most assuredly would have made haste to send it to the King. What he did find, a reference later to Brabo’s inventories will show, and the same source discloses all the wealth the richest Order in the world, according to their enemies, took with them in their involuntary journey back to Spain. All being finished in the missions and the Jesuits expelled, Bucareli found himself obliged to institute some system for the government of the Indian population, which he had deprived both of its spiritual and of its temporal guides.
The Jesuits’ government having been so bad, according to his own despatch, the Indians having been kept in such a miserable state, their education having been so neglected, and, above all, their women having been dressed in such light attire that Bucareli could not with modesty even describe their dress, it might have seemed but natural that he should have evolved some system of government differing in all respects from that he had destroyed. So far from that, in his instructions to his interim successor, dated at Candelaria,[331] August 23, 1768, he practically followed slavishly all the policy which the Jesuits had pursued. He ordered Captains Riva Herrera and Bruno de Zavala, to whom the arrangements were committed, to see that the Indians were instructed ‘in the true knowledge of our holy faith’, a work which the Jesuits, whatever might be their faults, had not neglected to insure. After some platitudes as to the vivifying effects of free and open trade, and an injunction to his captains to take care the Indian girls were decorously and virtuously dressed, he launched into a sermon about honest work, which, as he said, would make the Indians rich, happy, and virtuous, and alone could ever make a kingdom prosper; in fact, he used almost precisely similar language to that to-day used by a European Governor in Africa when about to make a people slaves. On the whole, however, his instructions were wise and liberal, and had they been carried out in the same spirit, and with fidelity, the Indians might have long continued in the same half-Arcadian, half-Christian state in which the Jesuits left them, and to which it seems they could attain, but not go farther without exposure to that vivifying commerce without which nations cannot prosper, but with which the greater portion of their citizens must remain ever slaves.
The instructions given, he left the missions never to return, leaving behind him the reputation of an honest man, having made, as it would appear, no money during his sojourn in their territories. On October 20, 1768, he wrote from Buenos Ayres to Aranda, telling him that his work was done, and asking him as a particular favour to implore the King to give him some employment ‘out of America, and particularly not under either the secretaryship or the Council of the Indies.’[332] Thus it appears that either the work in which he had been engaged was uncongenial to him, or he mistrusted the future and the Indians when the Jesuits’ sheltering hands had been withdrawn, and thought the King might blame him for what was sure to come. One passage in his letter of instructions shows that the antique, but still current, fashion of going to any length to obtain a country in which are situated even supposititious gold-mines had its influence even with such an honest man as Bucareli was. He specially enjoins upon the officials left in charge ‘to find out from what quarter the Indians of those towns extract those pieces of the precious metals which they sometimes bring to their priests.’ So that the fable of the false mines started by Cardenas, although a thousand times disproved, still lingered in the minds of those who could not understand what motive except that of growing rich could cause the Jesuits to bury themselves in the recesses of the Paraguayan woods. The release from things American and under the jurisdiction of the Council of the Indies did not come to Bucareli for almost two more years, during which time he struggled manfully with the affairs of the Jesuit missions, repelled the Chaco Indians on one side, and on the other implored for troops to defend the island of Chiloe against the heretic English, who at that time appear to have been meditating the advancement of their empire in the extremest south. One curious letter was reserved for Bucareli to indite before he quitted Buenos Ayres for the last time. On January 15, 1770, he sent a long declaration signed by the celebrated Nicolas Ñeenguirú and other Indians, giving an account of the part played by him in the abortive resistance which he made against the cession of the seven towns. This is the last time that Nicolas, the ‘King’ of Paraguay and ‘Emperor of the Mamelucos’, appears in any document as far as I can find. His name at one time was well known in Paraguay, the River Plate and Spain, and served to father many lies upon; and at the last, the Jesuits gone, he seems to have turned against them, and said all that was required by Bucareli to get up his case. It appears from Bucareli’s letter that the family of the Ñeenguirú had been well known in the missions from the time of Cardenas. In 1770[333] we find him shorn of his kingly and imperial dignities, the mayor of Concepcion in Paraguay, tall, taciturn, with long, lank hair, and much respected by his brother Indians, who held his stirrup for him when he got upon his horse. To find him in the humour to give tongue about the Jesuits was a trump-card in Bucareli’s hand, for if it could be proved that in 1750 they had resisted the forces of the crown of Spain, the public, always anxious to believe a lie, would naturally applaud the action of the King in their expulsion from his territories. Nicolas, who seems to have been but a poor creature at the best, testified that everything which he had done as General of the Indians was by the order of Fathers Limp and Ennis, and that he was a poor Indian who did but that which he was told. He finished up his testimony with thanks to the good King for having taken him out of the power of the Jesuits, and kept him in his post of mayor at Concepcion. In fact, all was the same to him as long as he was left with his alcalde’s staff.[334]
Upon August 14, 1778, Bucareli sailed for Spain, leaving Don Juan José Vertiz as his successor in the viceroyalty of the provinces of the River Plate. The missions were all placed under the care of friars of the begging Orders, chiefly Franciscans, and the system of the Jesuit government was left unchanged. In 1771, writing from San Lorenzo (el Escorial) in Spain, Bucareli, who seemed fated never to escape from the affairs of Paraguay, sends a long constitution for the thirty towns which follows all the Jesuits’ rules of government to the last tittle of their policy. Brabo has preserved the document, which runs to forty-seven pages of close print in its entirety. A carefully thought-out and well-conceived digest of a constitution it most certainly is, and yet it follows to the most minute particular the policy the Jesuits laid down.
Dean Funes[335] seemed to see that the flattering of Nicolas Ñeenguiru and the other Indian chiefs was an entire affair of artifice, and that it was but a mere crowning of the victims who were destined to be sacrificed. It may be that the constitution made by Bucareli at the Escorial was similarly but a blind to keep the Indians quiet till the Government had time to exploit them at its ease. Still, Bucareli in all his actions seems to have been an honest man; one of those honest, narrow-minded men who have sown more misery in the world than all the rogues and scoundrels since the flood. Be all that as it may, his constitution in a thousand ways recalled the Jesuits’ polity in their days of rule. In a former chapter[336] I have pointed out a curious instance in which this constitution traverses entirely statements made by the Jesuits’ enemies that their exclusive policy was for their own ends, and not, as they alleged, for the protection of the Indians. But there are other instances quite as remarkable which show that the Jesuits not only had grasped perfectly what the best course of treatment was for their subjects, but that the official mind of Bucareli, trained as he was, so to speak, in the strictest sect of Pharisees, and prejudiced against the Jesuits in every way, yet discerned clearly as an honest man that the plan they had laid down was the most suitable for future rulers to pursue.
At the time of forming his constitution he had been gone but scarce a year from Buenos Ayres, and yet he writes[337] complaining bitterly of what was happening in the missions of Paraguay. He points out that all his trouble will have been in vain ‘if the Governor and his lieutenants are not stimulated to address themselves to the service of God and of the King, with that zeal which everyone should impart to his duty.’ Then, after a puff preliminary of the beauty of freedom, human and Divine, he sets forth how the Indians are in future to be ruled. First, as in duty bound, he points out that anything savouring of communism is against the laws of Heaven and of man; that the Indians in their semi-communism were really slaves, the industrious working for the idle, and so forth; that their clothes were scanty; that they were not allowed to freely mix with Spaniards, and were kept a race apart. Then like a prudent statesman having made his apologia ‘pro existentia sua’, and blown off much virtuous steam, he comes to business, and business, as we know, is the great soberer of theorists, no matter on what side they theorize.
After the article to which I have referred in Chapter IX. comes this most curious paragraph, taken in connection with the inalienable right which, according to himself, the Indians had of free communication with the outer world:[338] ‘And because I am informed that many Indians who have been absent in the army of the Portuguese, and have resided for lengthened periods in Rio Pardo, Viamont and other parts, have returned to their towns, you will take care that all these with their families shall be removed to those (towns) either in the interior or distant from those frontiers, as it is not convenient that they should remain on them (the frontiers) or close to them; and thus you will proceed successively with the Indians who return, without leaving one, in order to avoid any chance of communication, which might be most prejudicial.’ Surely a satire on his own abuse of the Jesuits for keeping the Indians mewed up from intercourse with the outside world. It may be that he had perceived the Indians were not fit to hold their own; indeed, it is certain he had done so, for on p. 326 he writes, ‘It is not convenient to leave them (the Indians) entire liberty,[339] for it would be in the extreme fatal and prejudicial to their interests, because the astuteness and sagacity of the Spaniards would triumph easily over their rusticity.’ ‘Sagacity’ is an ingenious euphuism, and might well be used with good effect in the like circumstances, when occasion serves, to-day. But as no single article of any document set forth by any Government can be straightforward and single in its purpose, and as all laws are made with an eye upon some party presently in power, after the paragraph just quoted, on the next page occurs the following sentence under the head of ‘Commerce with the Spaniards is to be free’.[340] ‘It is laid down that between the Indians and the Spaniards commerce should be free, in order that mutual dealings should unite them in friendship.’ Therefore to the ordinary mind it is impossible to make out what really was intended, and whether commerce was to be free or not. Those little differences apart, the constitution ran entirely upon Jesuit lines. That semi-communism which was so prejudicial during the Jesuits’ rule was formally re-organized in chapter iv. of the constitution (p. 343) the instant that their power was placed in other hands. Even the prohibition to the Spaniards to enter the Jesuit towns, and reside there, was formally kept up in chapter iii., with the sole alteration that for three months of the year they might reside amongst the Indians on certain well-defined conditions most prolixly set forth. So that it will be seen that, if the Jesuits did ill, as usual, any ill they did was carefully perpetuated by their successors, and, quite as naturally, all that they strove to do in favour of the Indians was most carefully undone.
Chapter XI
Conclusion