The itinerary of this voyage recounts the first recorded navigation through El Infiernillo; and, while it is too meager to permit retracing the trip in detail, it seems practically certain that the vessels entered Bahia Tepopa, watered at Pozo Hardy, passed around Punta Perla and thence southward through the strait, and emerged through Boca Infierno into Bahia Kunkaak, afterward proceeding westward and northward around the outer coast, and thus circumnavigating Tiburon. While Ugarte’s pilot, Guilermo Estrafort (or Strafort),[85] displayed great energy and courage in charting the coast, the voyage neither yielded published maps nor affected current and subsequent cartography; for, although Ugarte’s narrative and Estrafort’s map and journal were sent to Mexico to be presented to the viceroy, they were apparently lost.[86] Nor does the itinerary indicate recognition of Kino’s error in identification of the Seri island, though several days were occupied in voyaging from the island to the latitude of Caborca; indeed, it seems probable that it was either Salvatierra, Kino’s intimate associate, or Ugarte, Kino’s colleague and Salvatierra’s intimate friend, who fixed the name of the pioneer padre on the geographic features still known as Bahia Kino and Punta Kino—features which Kino never knew, as already shown.
Although both Salvatierra and Ugarte were on superficially amicable terms with the Seri, the amity was evidently of the shallowest and most evanescent sort. Venegas says:
Of the Seris and Tepocas, although the padre passed among them with the pay in his hand, he could not induce them to assist him in any way, even when they saw the party in the greatest distress; while others toiled, they reclined with the greatest serenity, nor have they shown the priests the slightest civility during the forty years of their acquaintance—they utterly refused to part with ollas of coarse ware, even for a liberal exchange.[87]
And the contemporary lore, crystallized in current administrative policy and later records, and corroborated by deep-rooted customs maintained for centuries and still persisting, is significant; it indicates that then, as now, it was the habit of the Tiburon islanders to flee from or fawn upon powerful visitors, to ambush or assail by night parties of moderate strength, to openly attack none but the weak or defenseless, yet ever to delight in tricking the credulity and consuming the stores and stock of aliens, and to revel in shedding alien blood when occasion offered. The adventurous hunters and gold seekers of the mainland, and the still hardier pearl fishers of the coast, wrote nothing; but both civil and ecclesiastical records imply common knowledge that weaker parties venturing into the purlieus of Seriland never returned—they disappeared and left no sign.
While Salvatierra and Ugarte were occupied on the coast, the missionaries were no less industrious in the interior. The mission of Santa Magdalena de Tepoca was apparently soon abandoned; but the so-called Seri missions at Populo (Nuestra Señora del Populo) and Angeles (Nuestra Señora de los Angeles) were maintained from the time of Kino’s coming up to the expulsion of the Jesuits (in 1767), while that at Nacameri was nearly as well sustained. The relations of these missions to Seriland are significant: according to the anonymous author of Sonora’s classic, “Rudo Ensayo”, written in 1763, Nacameri lay in the valley of Rio Opodepe (or Horcasitas), 7 leagues below the town of the same name (still extant); 9 leagues down the same stream lay Populo (on the site of the present town of Horcasitas); Angeles lay 3 or 4 leagues farther downstream, or over 12 leagues above the site of Pitic[88] (the present Hermosillo); while various references indicate that the temporary mission of Santa Magdalena was located in the same valley, probably a few leagues above Opodepe.[89] Accordingly, the missions ranged from 100 to 150 miles inland, measured in an air line, or four hard days’ journey, as shown by Escalante’s record, from the Seri coast. The nearest mission at Angeles was 75 miles, or three days’ journey, from the inland margin of Seriland proper, and the intervening territory was a depopulated expanse (“el grande despoblado”) according to Villa-Señor,[90] ranged but not inhabited by Seri and Tepoka hunting parties. Never traversed by white men, save those of Coronado’s parties nearly two centuries before and of Escalante’s hurried expeditions of 1700, this “despoblado” was practically unknown; even the surprisingly well-informed author of “Rudo Ensayo” was unaware of the existence of Rio Bacuache, and noted only such prominent mountains as Cerro Prieto and “Bacoatzi the Great in the land of the Seris”,[91] lying far outside the tribal home. The remoteness of the missions from the habitat of the tribe bears testimony to the dread with which they were regarded, and to the slightness of the influence exerted on the tribesmen by the zealous padres.
Despite the efforts of both priesthood and soldiery, the number of Seri converts at the missions was limited. In 1700 there were ten families at Populo; true, they had slipped away to maverick the herds (“por ladrones de ganados”), but Escalante overtook them and whipped them back to the shadow of the church; later he captured 120 Tepoka people (probably some twenty families, with a few strays), and recaptured 300 backsliders (perhaps fifty families or more), and haled them all to the mission, where lands were allotted to them and where they were carefully guarded by the ecclesiastics—until opportunity came for reescape; and to this congregation Escalante added a few Seri prisoners taken on Tiburon, as noted above. In 1727 Brigadier Pedro de Rivera noted a dozen tribes in central Sonora, including the “Seris” and “Tepocas”, numbering 21,746 “of all ages and both sexes”, all receiving the ministrations of “los Padres de la Compañia de Jesvs”. He added: “Besides the above-named Indians there are found in the middle part of the province of Ostimuri, in the western part bordering on the Gulf of California, certain nations of pagans in small numbers; they are the Salineros, Cocomaques, and Guaymas.”[92] Neither the numbers of Seri and Tepoka at the missions, nor the respective proportions at the missions and on the native habitat, were recorded by the brigadier. According to Alegre, eighty families (including those transferred from Pitic) were gathered at Populo and Angeles, under the specially sedulous efforts of Judge José Rafael Gallardo, in 1749;[93] although Padre Nicolas de Perera, “who for the longest time bore with their insolent behavior, ... did not see more than 300 hundred persons when they had all come together”.[94] It would appear that the great majority of the Populo and Angeles converts belonged to the Tepoka, while others belonged to the Guayma and Upanguayma, with whom the Seri were at war about that time;[95] yet there were enough representatives of the Seri to gain a shocking character for sloth, filth, thievery, treachery, obstinacy, and drunkenness. Assuming that a quarter of the converts were Seri (and this ratio is larger than any of the known records would indicate), there could hardly have been more than a hundred of the tribe gathered about the several missions at this palmiest time of Jesuit missionizing; and the records show that by far the greater portion of these were women, children, cripples, and vieillards, the warriors being commonly slain in the vigorous proselyting expeditions conducted by the civil and military coadjutors of the padres. If at this time the Seri population reached the 2,000 estimated by Dávila[96] and others, the proportion of proselytes (or apostates from Seri naturalism) was but 5 per cent of the tribe and naturally comprised the less vigorous and characteristic element. The writer of “Rudo Ensayo” reckons that during six years preceding 1763 the Seri stole from the settlers (for eating, the sole use to which they put such stock) “more than 4,000 mules, mares, and horses”,[97] i. e., enough to sustain two or three hundred people, or a full thousand if this meat formed no more than a fourth or a fifth of their diet, as the contemporary records imply—and this was after the “extermination” of the Seri by Parilla in 1750.
Evidently the good padres greatly overestimated their knowledge of and influence on this savage yet subtle tribe; actually they touched the Seri character only lightly and temporarily, contributing slightly to spontaneous acculturation, but never coming into relation with the tribe as a whole.
And despite the efforts of both soldiers and priests, the savages continued to ravage the settlements, to repel pioneering, to decimate the herds and murder the vaqueros who sought to protect them, to plunder everything portable and ambuscade punitive parties, and even to engage in open hostilities. “In 1730 the Seris, Tepocas, Salineros, and Tiburon islanders kept the province in great excitement, killing twenty-seven persons and threatening all the pueblos with a general conflagration”;[98] and both before and after this date the recorded sanguinary episodes were too frequent for even passing mention, while the indications between lines point to robberies and assassinations and minor conflicts too many for full record even by the patient chroniclers of the time.