As has been said, there were two provinces in Portuguese South America — Brazil and Maranhão. In the former, besides the Seminary of Belem, the Society had six colleges and sixty-two residences with a total of 445 members. Orders were given to the whole 445 to assemble at Bahia, Pernambuco and San Sebastian. Everything was seized. At Bahia, the novices were stripped of their habits and sent adrift, though the families of some of them lived in far away Portugal. The rest were confined in a house surrounded by armed troops while the bishop of the city proclaimed that any one who would encourage the victims to persevere in their vocation would be excommunicated. Then, one day, without a moment's notice, all were ordered out of the house and sent to jail in different places. There they remained for the space of three months waiting for the missionaries from the interior to arrive. They came in slowly, for some of them lived eight hundred miles away, and had to tramp all that distance through the forests and over mountain ranges. Before all had made their appearance, however, the first batches were sent across to the mother country to make space. They started on March 16 and reached the Tagus on June 6. Those from Bahia had taken from April to June, and it was fully three months before the convict ship from Pernambuco arrived in port.
All this time the deported religious were kept between decks, and soldiers stood at the gangway with drawn swords to prevent any attempt to go up to get a breath of fresh air. Their food was nothing but vegetables cooked in sea-water, for there was not enough of drinking water even to slake their thirst. The result was that the ship had a cargo of half-dead men when it anchored off Lisbon; but the unfortunate wretches were kept imprisoned there for fifteen days with the port-holes closed. They were then transferred to a Genoese ship and sent to Civita Vecchia. It appears that the Provincial of these Brazilian Jesuits was named Lynch; but strange to say, there is no mention of him in any of the Menologies. The deportation from Pernambuco and San Sebastian were repetitions of this organized brutality; and the same methods were employed at Goa in India, and the other dependencies, such as Macao and China. In the transportations from these posts in the Orient, the ships had to stop at Bahia which had been witness of the first exportations; but the victims in the China ships could learn nothing of what had happened. Twenty-three of them died on one of the journeys from India. It is noted that a Turk at Algiers and a Danish Lutheran sea-captain, had shown the greatest humanity to the victims whose fellow countrymen seemed transformed into savage beasts. The prisoners had been kept in confinement twenty months before they left Goa; and when they arrived at Lisbon on October 18, 1764, they were taken off in long boats at the dead of night, and lodged in the foulest dungeons of the fortress of St. Julian.
But these were not the only victims of Carvalho. There were prisoners from every grade of society, and their number reached the appalling figure of nine thousand. Among them were eminent ecclesiastics, bishops and canons and some of the most distinguished laymen of the kingdom. A description of the prisons in which they were confined for years or till they died has been given to posterity by some of the victims. Father Weld in his "Suppression of the Society in Portugal" quotes extensively from their letters. The jails were six in number: Belem, Almeida, Azeitano, St. George, Jonquiera and St. Julian. They had annexes, also, along the African coasts or on the remote islands of the Atlantic. Belem, the Portuguese name for Bethlehem, so called because it had once been an abbey, was about four miles from Lisbon towards the ocean. It had the distinction of keeping its prisoners behind iron bars, but exposed to the public like wild beasts in a menagerie; so that the public could come and look at them and feed them if so disposed. The Portuguese criminals were given a pittance by the government, to purchase food, but the foreigners had to beg from the spectators for the means to support life. It was admirably contrived to induce insanity.
Jonquiera lay between Belem and Lisbon. The cells were numerous in this place. Moreira, the king's former confessor, and Malagrida were among the inmates. The Marquis de Lorna who was also confined there says "there were nineteen cells, each about seven paces square, and so tightly closed that a light had to be kept burning continually; otherwise they would have been in absolute darkness. When the prisoners were first put in them, the plaster was still wet and yielded to the slightest pressure. The cold was intense. Worst of all for a Catholic country, the sacraments were allowed the prisoners only once a year." The Marquis says that during the sixteen years he spent there "he never heard Mass." In these dungeons there were 221 Jesuits, 88 of whom died in their chains. The Castle of St. Julian stood on the banks of the Tagus and the walls were washed by the tide. In this place, there were 125 Jesuits of all nations; men of high birth, of great virtue and intellectual ability. The cells were situated below the sea-level; and were damp, unventilated, choked with filth and swarming with vermin. Some of the Fathers passed nineteen years in those tombs. The drinking water was putrid; the prisoners' clothes were in rags; often not sufficient for decency; many had no under garments and no shoes; their hair and beards were never cut; the food was scant and of the worst quality, and was often carried off before there was time to eat it. The oil of the single lamp in the cells was so limited that to save it, the wick was reduced to two or three threads. The same conditions prevailed in the other prisons. Meantime the jailers were making money on the supplies supposed to be served to the prisoners. Such was prison life in Portugal during the twenty years of Pombal's administration.
One of the particularly outrageous features of these imprisonments was that Pombal preferred to hold foreigners rather than native Portuguese. The foreigners, having no friends in the country, would not, in all probability, be claimed by their relatives; and as the ministers of nearly all the nations of Europe were of the same mind as himself, he had no fear of political intervention. Thus we find in a letter of Father Kaulen, a German Jesuit, which was published by Christopher de Murr, that in one section of St. Julian, besides fifty-four Portuguese Jesuits, there were thirteen Germans, one Italian, three Frenchmen, two Spaniards, and three Chinese. These Chinese Jesuits must have made curious reflections on the meaning of the term "Christian nations." "There are others in the towers," adds Father Kaulen, "but I cannot find out who they are, or how many, or to what country they belong."
The three Frenchmen, Fathers du Gad and de Ranceau along with Brother Delsart were set free at the demand of Marie Leczinska, the wife of Louis XV; it was through them that Father Kaulen was able to send his letter to the provincial of the Lower Rhine. He himself was probably liberated later by the intervention of Maria Theresa, but there is no record of it. His letter is of great value as he had personal experience of what he writes. His experience was a long one, for he entered the prison in 1759; and this communication to his provincial is dated October 12, 1766. In it he writes: —
"I was taken prisoner by a soldier with a drawn sword and brought to Fort Olreida on the frontier of Portugal. There I was put in a frightful cell filled with rats which got into my bed and ate my food. I could not chase them away, it was so dark. We were twenty Jesuits, each one in a separate cell. During the first four months we were treated with some consideration. After that, they gave us only enough food to keep us from dying of hunger. They took away our breviaries, medals, etc. One of the Fathers resisted so vigorously when they tried to deprive him of his crucifix that they desisted. The sick got no help or medicine.
"After three years they transferred nineteen of us to another place because of a war that had broken out. We travelled across Portugal surrounded by a troop of cavalry, and were brought to Lisbon; and after passing the night in a jail with the worst kind of criminals, we were sent to St. Julian, which is on the seashore. It is a horrible hole, underground, dark and foul. The food is bad, the water swarming with worms. We have half a pound of bread a day. We receive the sacraments only when we are dying. The doctor lives outside but if we fall sick during the night, he is not called. The prison is filled with worms and insects and little animals such as I never saw before. The walls are dripping wet, so that our clothes soon rot. One of the Fathers died and his face was so brilliant that one of the soldiers exclaimed: 'That's the face of a saint.' We are not unhappy, and the three French Fathers who left us envied our lot.
"Very few of us have even the shreds of our soutanes left. Indeed we have scarcely enough clothes for decency. At night a rough covering full of sharp points serves as a blanket; and the straw on which we sleep as well as the blanket that covers us soon become foul, and it is very hard to get them renewed. We are not allowed to speak to any one. The jailor is extremely brutal and seems to make a point of adding to our sufferings; only with the greatest reluctance does he give us what we need. Yet we could be set free in a moment if we abandoned the Society. Some of the Fathers who were at Macao and had undergone all sorts of sufferings at the hands of the pagans, such as prison chains and torture say to us that perhaps God found it better to have them suffer in their own country for nothing, than among idolaters for the Faith.
"We ask the prayers of the Fathers of the province, but not because we lament our condition. On the contrary, we are happy. As for myself, though I would like to see my companions set free, I would not change places with you outside. We wish all our Fathers good health so that they may work courageously for God in Germany to make up for the little glory he receives here in Portugal.