During the year 1754, the Indians harassed the enemy by the skirmishes and won many a victory; and they would have ultimately triumphed if they had had a leader. At last in 1755, the combined forces of the enemy with thirty pieces of artillery attacked them with the result that might have been expected. The natives rushed frantically on their foes; but the musketry and cannon stretched four hundred of them in their blood; and the rest either fled to the mountains or relapsed into savage life; or made their submission to the government, many becoming as bad as their kindred in the forests because of the corruption they saw around them. The Portuguese entered into possession of the seven Reductions, but failed to find any gold. So great was their chagrin that, in 1761, Carvalho wanted the rich territory which he had given to Spain returned to Portugal; and when Spain naturally demurred, he prepared to go to war for it. He finally gained his point, and on February 12, 1761, the territories were restored to their original owners, but nothing was stipulated, about restitution to the unfortunate natives and Jesuits who had been the victims of this shameful political deal.
Some of the Indians who fled to the forests kept up a guerilla warfare against the invaders; but the greater number followed the advice of the Fathers and settled on the Paraná and on the right bank of the Uruguay. In 1762 there were 2,497 families scattered through seventeen Reductions or doctrinas, as they had begun to be called, a term that is equivalent to "parish." But the expulsion of the Fathers which followed soon after completed the ruin of this glorious work. The Indians died or became savage again; and today only beautiful ruins mark the place where this great commonwealth once stood. At the time of the Suppression, or rather when Pombal drove the Jesuits out of every Portuguese post into the dungeons of Portugal or flung them into the Papal States, the Paraguay province had five hundred and sixty-four members, twelve colleges, one university, three houses for spiritual retreats, two residences, fifty-seven Reductions and 113,716 Christian Indians. The leave-taking of the Fathers and Indians was heart-rending on both sides.
It is a long distance from the River La Plata to the Amazon; for there are about thirty-five degrees of latitude between the two places. But they were not too far apart to check Carvalho in his work of destruction. After having done all he could for the moment at one end of Brazil, he addressed himself to the Jesuit missions at the other. A glance at the past history of these establishments will reveal the frightful injustice of the brutal acts of 1754.
One hundred years before that time, Vieira had made his memorable fight against his Portuguese fellow-countrymen for the liberation of the Indians from slavery. By so doing, he had, of course, aroused the fury of the whites, and they determined to crush him. They put him in prison; and in 1660 sent him and his companions to Portugal, in a crazy ship to be tried for disturbing the peace of the colony. Nevertheless, he won the fight, although meantime three Jesuits had been killed by the Indians, and their companions expelled from the colony, in spite of the king's protection. In this act, however, the Portuguese had gone too far. His majesty saw the truth and sent the missionaries back. That was as early as 1680. In 1725 new complaints were sent to Portugal, but the supreme governor of the Maranhão district wrote, as follows, to the king: "The Fathers of the Society in this State of Maranhão are objects of enmity and have always been hated, for no other reason than for their strenuous defence of the liberty of the unfortunate Indians, and also because they used all their power to oppose the tyrannical oppression of those who would reduce to a degraded and unjust slavery men whom nature had made free. The Fathers take every possible care that the laws of your majesty on this point shall be most exactly observed. They devote themselves entirely to the promotion of the salvation of souls and the increase of the possessions of your majesty; and have added many sons to the Church and subjects to the crown from among these barbarous nations."
With regard to their alleged commerce, the governor says: "Whatever has been charged against the Fathers by wicked calumniators who, through hatred and envy, manufacture ridiculous lies about the wealth they derive from those missions, I solemnly declare to your majesty, and I speak of a matter with which I am thoroughly acquainted, that the Fathers of the Society are the only true missionaries of these regions. Whatever they receive from their labors among the Indians is applied to the good of the Indians themselves and to the decency and ornamentation of the churches, which, in these missions, are always very neat and very beautiful. Nothing whatever that is required in the missions is kept for themselves. As they have nothing of their own, whatever each missionary sends is delivered to the procurator of the mission, and every penny of it reverts to the use of the particular mission from whence it came. Missioners of other orders send quite as much produce, but each one keeps his own portion separate, to be used as he likes, so that the quantity however great being thus divided, does not make much impression on those who see it. But as the missionaries of the Society send everything together to the procurator, the quantity, when seen in bulk, excites the cupidity of the malevolent and envious."
About 1739, Eduardo dos Santos was sent by John V as a special commissioner to Maranhão. After spending twenty months in visiting every mission and examining every detail he wrote as follows: "The execrable barbarity with which the Indians are reduced to slavery has become such a matter of custom that it is rather looked on as a virtue. All that is adduced against this inhuman custom is received with such repugnance and so quickly forgotten that the Fathers of the Society in whose charity these unfortunate creatures often find refuge and protection, and who take compassion on their miserable lot, become, for this very reason, objects of hatred to these avaricious men."
Such were the official verdicts of the conduct of the Jesuits on the Amazon a few years before Pombal came into power. But in 1753 regardless of all this he sent out his brother Francis Xavier Mendoza, a particularly worthless individual, and made him Governor of Gran Para and Maranhão, giving him a great squadron of ships and a considerable body of troops with orders to humble the Jesuits and send back to Portugal any of them who opposed his will. Everything was done to create opposition. They were forbidden to speak or to preach to the Indians except in Portuguese; the soldiers were quartered in the Jesuit settlements, and were instructed to treat the natives with especial violence and brutality.
In 1754 a council was held in Lisbon to settle the question about expelling the Society from the missions of Maranhão. The order was held up temporarily by the queen; but when she died, a despatch was sent in June 1755 ordering their immediate withdrawal from all "temporal and civil government of the missions." The instructions stated that it was "in order that God might be better served." Unfortunately the bishop of the place co-operated with Carvalho in everything that was proposed. He suppressed one of the colleges, restricted the number of Fathers in the others, to twelve, and sent the rest back to Portugal; and in order to excite the settlers against the Society, he had the Bull of Benedict XIV which condemned Indian slavery read from the pulpits, proclaiming that it had been inspired by the Jesuits. Meantime, in the reports home, the insignificant Indian villages where they labored were magnified into splendid cities and towns all owned by the Society; two pieces of cannon which had never fired a ball were described as a whole park of artillery, and a riot among the troops was set down as a rebellion excited by the Jesuits.
The first three Fathers to be banished from Brazil were José, Hundertpfund and da Cruz. José was a royal appointee sent out to determine the boundary line between the Spanish and Portuguese American possessions. But that did not trouble Pombal; nor did the German nationality of Hundertpfund, nor did he deign to state the precise nature of their offenses. A fourth victim named Ballister had had the bad taste to preach on the text: "Make for yourself friends of the Mammon of iniquity." He was forthwith accused of attacking one of Carvalho's commercial enterprises, and promptly ordered out of the country. Again, when some mercantile rivals sent a petition to the king against Carvalho's monopolies, Father Fonseca was charged with prompting it, and he was outlawed though absolutely innocent. And so it went on. Carvalho's brother was instructed to invent any kind of an excuse to increase the number of these expatriations.
While these outrages were being perpetrated in the colonies, Lisbon's historic earthquake of 1755 occurred. The city was literally laid in ruins. Thousands of people were instantly killed; and while other thousands lay struggling in the ruins, the rising flood of the Tagus and a deluge of rain completed the disaster. Singularly enough, Carvalho's house escaped the general wreck; and the foolish king considered that exception to be a Divine intervention in behalf of his great minister, and possibly, on that account, left him unchecked in the fury which even the awful calamity which had fallen on his country did not at all moderate. The Jesuits were praised by both king and patriarch for their heroic devotion both during and after the great disaster, but those commendations only infuriated Pombal the more. When one of the Fathers, the holy Malagrida, had dared to say in the pulpit that the earthquake was a punishment for the vice that was rampant in the capital, Pombal regarded it as a reflection on his administration; and the offender, though seventy years old and universally regarded as a saint, was banished from the city as inciting the people to rebellion.