[276] Archivo de Simancas, Legajo 7,378, folio 146.
[277] Ibid.: ‘Que toda la polvora que tengan los curas y misioneros se queme o se inutilize y pierda hechandola al rio, y que en los pueblos donde se fabrica, cese luego este labor.’
[278] In another letter, also preserved at Simancas, and dated at Yapeyu, he complains bitterly of his own suffering on the journey: ‘Me moli tanto con el traqueo violento del carreton que no he podido volver sobre mi.’ The roads to the missions seem to have been as bad as those which produced the historical exclamation, ‘O dura tellus Hispaniæ!’ It is certainly the case that Ibañez, in his ‘Republica Jesuitica’ (Madrid, 1768), gives a very different version of the doings of Altamirano; for he says that Rafael de Cordoba, Altamirano’s secretary, ‘embarked in a schooner called La Real a great quantity of guns and lead for balls, packing them all in boxes, which, he said, were full of objects of a pious nature. . . . This,’ says Ibañez, ‘was told me by the master of the schooner José el Ingles, a man worthy of credence.’ This is pleasing to one’s national pride, but, still, one seems to want a little better authority even than that of ‘Bardolph, the Englishman’.
[279] Dean Funes, book v., cap. iii., p. 54.
[280] In a most curious letter (preserved at Simancas, Legajo 7,447), the mayor and council of the reduction of San Juan write to Altamirano upbraiding him with being their enemy, and tell him that ‘St. Michael sent by God showed their poor grandfathers (sus pobres abuelos) where to plant a cross, and afterwards to march due south from the cross and they would find a holy father of the Company.’ This, of course, turned out as the saint had foretold, and after a long day’s march they encountered the Jesuit and became Christians.
[281] This account seems to have been lost, and a careful search has not disinterred it from the Maelstrom of Simancas, that prison-house of so many documents, without whose aid so much of Spanish history cannot be written.
[282] His ‘Efemerides’, or Journal, printed and mutilated by Ibañez in his ‘Republica de Paraguay’, gives the best account of the brief ‘war’ which has come down to us; it is supplemented by the ‘Declaracion de la Verdad’ of Father Cardiel, which deals with the misstatements of Ibañez and others against the Jesuits. In regard to his own share in the war, Padre Ennis says: ‘Atque in exercitas curatorem, spiritualem medicum secum ire postulat.’
[284] Dean Funes, ‘Ensayo de la Historia Civil del Paraguay’, Buenos Ayres, etc., book v., cap. iv., p. 58.
[285] Luckily Ibañez (‘Republica Jesuitica de Paraguay’) has not corrected the many faults of spelling and Latinity into which Padre Ennis fell. Those, though left in from malice, as Ibañez was a bitter enemy of the Jesuits, serve to present the man in his habit as he wrote. However, Ibañez has so much mutilated the text of the journal that occasionally the sense is left obscure.