Early days of the missions—New settlements founded—Relations of Jesuits
with Indians and Spanish colonists—Destruction of missions by the
Mamelucos—Father Maceta—Padre Antonio Ruiz de Montoya—His work and
influence—Retreat of the Jesuits down the Paraná
It does not seem doubtful but that the work done by Fathers Ortega and
Filds[53] had borne some fruit. Perhaps not quite after the fashion
that the Jesuits believed; but when Maceta and Cataldino arrived at
Guayrá and founded the Reduction of Loreto, their success at first was
of a nature that almost justified the epithet ‘miraculous’, an epithet
which indeed all men apply to any enterprise of theirs which meets
success. Almost from the first inception of the missions, the Jesuits
found themselves in the strange position of, though being hated by the
Spanish settlers, yet recurred to as mediators when any of the wild
tribes proved too powerful for the Spanish arms. Thus, far from cities,
far from even such elementary civilization as Paraguay should show,
almost upon the edge of the great cataract of the Paraná, the Jesuits
founded their first reduction; to which the Indians flocked in such
numbers that a second was soon necessary, to which they gave the name
of San Ignacio, in memory of the founder of their rule.
For the first few years all went well with the Jesuits. The Indians,
happy to escape the persecutions of the Spaniards on the one hand, and
the incursions of the Paulistas[54] on the other, flocked to the
reductions, mission after mission was soon formed, and the wild Indians
gathered up into townships and taught the arts of peace. But though the
Guaranís at first entered into the Jesuit reductions as a refuge
against their persecutors, the Portuguese and Spaniards, soon, as was
only natural to men accustomed to a wild forest life, they found the
Jesuit discipline too irksome, and often fled back to the woods. Then
the poor priest, left without his flock, had to take up the trail of
the flying neophytes, follow them to the recesses of the forests, and
persuade them to come back.
As a means to secure the confidence of the Indians, the Jesuits found
themselves obliged to communicate as rarely as possible with the
Spanish settlements. Thus, from the first the policy of isolation,
which was one of the chief charges brought against the Order in later
years, was of necessity begun.[55] Voltaire, no lover of religious
Orders, says of the Jesuits:[56] ‘When in 1768 the missions of Paraguay
left the hands of the Jesuits, they had arrived at perhaps the highest
degree of civilization to which it is possible to conduct a young
people, and certainly at a far superior state than that which existed
in the rest of the new hemisphere. The laws were respected there,
morals were pure, a happy brotherhood united every heart, all the
useful arts were in a flourishing state, and even some of the more
agreeable sciences; plenty was universal.’
It is, however, to be remembered that Voltaire wrote as a philosopher,
and not as an economist, and that his statement most probably would be
traversed by those who see advancement rather in material improvement
than in moral happiness, for without doubt, in Lima and in Mexico upon
the whole, society must have made amongst the Spanish and
Spanish-descended citizens greater advances than in the Jesuit
reductions of Paraguay. In some respects their almost inaccessible
situation close to the cataract of the Paraná was favourable to the
early Jesuits, and in quick succession the villages of Loreto, San
Francisco Xavier, San José, San Ignacio, San Pedro, and others of less
importance, were founded, containing in all about forty thousand
souls.[57]
So in the Jesuit reductions of the province of Guayrá was first begun
the system of treating the Indians kindly, and standing between them
and the Spanish settlers, which made the Company of Jesus so hated
afterwards in Paraguay. Little by little their influence grew, so that
when, in 1614, Padre Antonio Ruiz de Montoya arrived, he found that
there were already one hundred and nineteen Jesuits in Guayrá and in
Paraguay. Of all the Jesuits who, during the long period of their
labours, appeared in Paraguay, he was the most remarkable; one of the
most learned men of the age in which he lived, he yet united in himself
the qualities of a man of action to those of scholar and of missionary.
Without his presence most likely not a tenth part of the Indians would
have escaped after the destruction of the missions of Guayrá in 1630
and 1631 at the hands of the half-civilized hordes known as Paulistas
or Mamalucos, who from the city of San Paulo carried fire and sword
amongst the Guaranís.
It is easy to understand that the Spanish colonists, who had looked on
all the Indians as slaves, were rendered furious by the advent of the
Jesuits, who treated them as men.
To-day the European colonist in Africa labours less to enslave than to
exterminate the natives; but if a body of clergy of any sect having the
abnegation and disregard of consequences of the Jesuits of old should
arise, fancy the fury that would be evoked if they insisted that it
were as truly murder to slay a black man as it is to kill a man whose
skin is white. Most fortunately, our clergy of to-day, especially those
of the various churches militant in Uganda, think otherwise, and hold
that Christ was the first inventor of the ‘colour-line’.
At the first settlement of South America great semi-feudal fiefs called
_encomiendas_ were granted to the conquerors. One of the conditions of
their tenure was that the _encomenderos_ (the owners of the fiefs)
‘should see to the religious education of the Indians’. Much the same
kind of thing as to enjoin kindness and Christian forbearance upon the
directors of a modern Chartered Company. But, in addition to the
_encomiendas_, two other systems were in vogue called _yanaconas_ and
_mitayos_, which were in fact designed to reduce the Indians to the
condition of mere slaves.
Herrera[58] says that the ‘_yanaconas_ were men destined from birth to
perpetual slavery and captivity, and in their clothing, treatment, and
the conditions of their toil, were differently treated from free men.’
In Paraguay these _yanaconas_ were known as ‘Indios Originarios’, and
generally were descendants of Indians conquered in war; they, too, were
in a condition of serfdom. They lived in the house of the
_encomendero_, and could not be sold, and the _encomendero_ was (in
theory) obliged not only to feed and clothe them, but to instruct them
in religious truths. In order to see that these conditions were duly
carried out, visitors were sent each year to hear what mutually the
_encomenderos_ and the Indians had to say.
Herrera[59] describes the Indians under the _mitayo_ system by the name
of _mitayos tindarunas_, explaining that the word _tindaruna_ signifies
‘forced labour’. The chiefs had to provide a certain number of them
every year to work in mines and manufactories, and so well was the
labour in the mines known to be fatal, that the Indians upon being
drawn for service disposed of all their property, and not infrequently
divorced their wives. The _mitayos_ were at the beginning Indians who
had not fought against the Spaniards, but had submitted to their rule.
They were grouped in townships composed of portions of a tribe under a
chief to whom the Spaniards gave the position of Alcalde. In the towns
thus formed only the men between eighteen and fifty were liable to be
drawn for service in the mines; originally their term of service was
for only two months in the year, and for the remaining ten months they
were in theory as free as were the Spanish settlers. By 1612 the abuses
of their system had so diminished the number of the Indians that Don
Francisco de Alfaro was named by the Spanish Government to report upon
it, and to reform abuses where he found it possible. His report
declared that the Guaranís and Guaycurús should not be made slaves of,
and it abolished in their favour the forced labour which they had
previously endured. The European settlers in Asuncion thought that this
was owing to the influence of the Jesuits, and therefore they expelled
them from the town. Recalled to Santiago, they founded there a college,
and those who remained in Paraguay pushed on the mission-work.
Brabo[60] points out that the first twenty reductions founded by the
Company of Jesus were settled in the first twenty years from their
first appearance in the land,[61] and that from the foundation of the
Mission of St. George (the last established of the first twenty towns)
to that of San Joaquim, in the wild forests of the Tarumá, they
employed a hundred and twelve years. In the interval they chiefly
occupied themselves in the consolidation of their first settlements,
and in various unsuccessful attempts to institute similar reductions
amongst the Indians of the Chaco across the Paraguay.
But whilst the Jesuits were settling their reductions in the province
of Guayrá and those upon the Paraná and Uruguay, a nest of hawks looked
at their neophytes as pigeons ready fattening for their use. Almost
eight hundred miles away, at the city of San Paulo de Piritinanga, in
Brazil, a strange society had come into existence by degrees. Peopled
at first by Portuguese and Dutch adventurers and malefactors, it had
become a nest of pirates and a home for all the desperadoes of Brazil
and Paraguay. This engaging population, being in want of wives whereby
to propagate their virtues, took to themselves Indians and negresses,
and bred a race worse ten times than were themselves, as often happens
both in the cases of Mulattos and Mestizos in America. Under the name
of Mamelucos[62] (given to them no one knows why) they soon became the
terror of the land. Equally at home on horseback, in canoes upon the
rivers, or in schooners on the sea, excellent marksmen and courageous
fighters, they subsisted chiefly by procuring Indians as slaves for the
plantations in Brazil. In a short time they exhausted all the Indians
near San Paulo, and were forced to search far in the depths of the
unknown interior. Little by little, following the course of the great
rivers in their canoes, they reached the Jesuit settlements upon the
upper waters of the Paraná, where they burned the towns and the
churches, made captives of the converts, and killed the priests.
Montoya relates that a Jesuit, having clasped an Indian in his arms to
save him, was deluged with his blood, a Mameluco having crept up behind
him and plunged his lance into the Indian behind the Jesuit’s back. The
Mameluco, on being, as Montoya says, ‘reprehended’ by the Jesuit,
dogmatically remarked, ‘I shall be saved in spite of God, for to be
saved a man has only to believe,’[63] a remark which showed him clearly
an honest opponent of the Jesuits, as they insisted greatly on the
doctrine of good works.
Ruiz Montoya and others tell us that the plan of action of the
Paulistas was either to attack the Jesuit reductions on Sunday, when
the sheep were gathered in the fold listening to Mass, surround the
church, murder the priest, and carry off the neophytes as slaves; or
else, disguised as Jesuits, enter a mission, gain the confidence of the
Indians, and then communicate with their soldiers, who were waiting in
the woods. But not content with this, it seems, so often did they
practise singing Mass to pass as Jesuits, that on returning to San
Paulo, in their orgies, their great diversion was to masquerade as
priests. So that the rascals not only profited by their villainy, but
extracted much amusement from their wicked deeds.[64] This, in
Montoya’s opinion, was even more damnable than the actual crime. And so
no doubt it was, and we in England, by having made our vice as dull as
virtue is in other lands, have gone some way towards morality, for vice
and virtue, both deprived of humour, become not so far separated as
some virtuous dull folk may think.
Quite naturally, these redoubtable land and river pirates saw in the
Jesuit reductions upon the Paranapané, and generally throughout the
district of Guayrá, merely an opportunity of capturing more Indians
than usual at a haul. In 1629 they first appeared before the Mission of
San Antonio and destroyed it utterly, burning the church and houses,
and driving off the Indians to sell as slaves. San Miguel and
Jesus-Maria shortly suffered the same fate. In Concepcion Padre Salazar
was regularly besieged, and he and all the people reduced to eating
dogs, cats, rats, mice, and even snakes. At the last moment, when about
to surrender, Father Cataldino, hastily arming some Indians with any
rude weapons at his command, marched on the place and raised the siege.
A worthy member of the Church militant this exploring, fighting,
intrepid Italian priest, and one the Company of Jesus should honour,
for to him, perhaps as much as to any of these first explorers of the
Upper Paraná, is credit due.
But still the Mamelucos ran their course, destroying town after town,
so that in the short space of a year (1630-31) they destroyed partially
the reductions of San Francisco Xavier, San José, San Pedro, and La
Concepcion; and the two first founded, San Ignacio and Loreto, were
ruined utterly. The wretched Indians, to whom by law the Jesuits were
forbidden to serve out firearms, stood no chance against the
well-trained Paulistas, with their horses, guns, and bloodhounds,
assisted as they were by troops of savage Indians who discharged
poisoned arrows from blowpipes and from bows. Small wonder that, as
Montoya, Charlevoix, Lahier,[65] and Filiberto Monero[66] all agree,
despair took hold of them, so that in many instances they cursed the
Jesuits and fled back to the woods. When one reflects that many of the
Indian tribes looked upon baptism as a poison,[67] it is not strange
that they should have associated effect with cause, and set down all
their sufferings to the influence of the malignant rite to which the
Jesuits had subjected them. The isolated Jesuits ran considerable risk
from their own sheep, and Padre Mola, after the ruin of San Antonio,
was suspected by them of being in league with the Paulistas, and had to
flee for safety to another town; and as a touch of comedy is seldom
wanting to make things bitterer to those in misfortune, a troop of
savage Indians, having arrived to attack the Reduction of San Antonio,
and finding it already burning, instantly thought poor Padre Mola had
been the instigator, and, starting on his trail, almost surprised him
before he reached a refuge from their patriotic rage.
Thus in the greater world reformers of all sorts have not infrequently
in times of scarcity and danger been taken by their protégés for the
authors of their trials and stoned, whilst the smug Government which
caused the ruin, well bolstered up in the affection of its ‘taxables’,
chuckled, serenely confident in the unending folly of mankind. Most
certainly the Jesuits struggled to do their duty to their neophytes in
what they thought they saw was right. On foot and unattended Fathers
Maceta and Mansilla followed the fifteen thousand captives to Brazil,
confessing those who fell upon the road before they died, and instant
in supplication to the Paulistas for the prisoners’ release. Father
Maceta especially behaved heroically, carrying the chains of those who
could hardly drag themselves along, himself half dead with hunger and
his constant toil. Especially he strove to effect the release of a
captive chief called Guiravera, who had been one of his bitterest
enemies, and strove so hard that a Paulista captain, either touched by
his zeal or wearied with his pleading, released the chief, his wife and
family, and six of the Indians of his tribe. The chief returned to
become the Jesuits’ best friend, and the two priests on foot followed
the captives’ train. What they endured on foot without provisions,
tortured by insects, and in danger from wild beasts, as well as
constant perils from the Paulistas, who now and then pricked them with
lances or fired pistols over their heads to frighten them away, none
but those who have journeyed in the forests of that forgotten corner of
the world can estimate. I see them in their torn and sun-browned
cassocks struggling through the _esteros_[68] in water to the knees,
falling and rising oft, after the fashion of the supposititious
Christian on life’s way; pushing along through forest paths across
which darted humming-birds, now coming on a dying man and kneeling by
his side, now gathering the berries of the guavirami[69] to eat upon
the road, and then again catching sight of a jaguar as it slunk beside
the trail, and all the time convinced that all their efforts, like the
efforts of most of those who strive, would be in vain. So stumbling
through the woods, crossing the rivers on inflated ox-skins, baked by
the sun upon the open plains, at length the Jesuits reached San Paulo,
where they had a college, and without resting set at once to work. In
season (and what in cases of the kind is ten times more important), out
of season, they besought, pleaded, and preached, and finding as little
grace from the Paulista chiefs as a transgressor against some fiery
dogma would find from a sour-faced North British dogmatist, they
started for Rio de Janeiro to see the Council-General of Brazil. There
they were told that the right person to address was the Captain-General
of the colony, who had his residence in Bahia, five or six hundred
miles away. Not the least daunted, they set out, and found Don Diego
Luis Oliveira more or less friendly, but as usual fearful of giving
offence to those who had a vested interest in the trade. Then the two
Jesuits, hearing that another invasion of the Paulistas was expected in
Guayrá, started back on their long journey through the woods, over the
plains, across the mountain ranges, and through the dank _esteros_
which lay between them and their missions on the Paraná. The
Captain-General seems to have been roused to a sense of the position by
their words, for on his annual visitation at San Paulo he spoke in
public to the colonists against their slave raids, when a shot fired
from the meeting ended his speech.[70] The inhabitants then signified
to him that, sooner than give up what seemed to them a justifiable and
honest means of life, they would be debaptized. How they proposed to
debaptize themselves is not related, but perhaps after the fashion of
the Guaranís—by sand, hot water, and scraping with a shell; though why
the tongue should be thus scarified seems doubtful, for no sect of
Christians that is known exacts that people at that sacrament should
put out their tongues, and even baptism does little or nothing to
increase the power of scandal inherent both in those who have been and
those who never were baptized.
About this time (1630) the poor Jesuits were much tormented by the
return to paganism of their Indians, and most especially by a hideous
dwarf who set himself up as a god, and found a host of worshippers.
Good Father Charlevoix thinks that _ce petit-monstre_,[71] despairing
of being thought a man, had no resource but to give out he was a god,
and remarks that, as even more hideous gods have been adored, it is not
surprising that the Indians took him at his word. When stripped of the
somewhat strange phraseology of the simple Jesuit, there is nothing
really shocking in the incident. People in general, in making gods,
endue them with their own least admirable attributes, and logically
these poor Indians but followed out the general scheme.
But in the midst of heresies and dwarf-gods, with the Paulistas almost
always in the field, a man arose who was to lead the Jesuits and their
neophytes out of Guayrá and settle them securely below the cataract in
the Misiones of Paraguay. Born probably late in the sixteenth century
in Spain, Antonio Ruiz de Montoya was amongst the first of the Jesuit
Fathers who came to Paraguay. In 1612 we find him recently arrived from
Spain;[72] sent up to the province of Guayrá to the assistance of
Fathers Maceta and Cataldino. For thirty years,[73] as he himself
informs us in his book, he remained in Paraguay, and in his own
pathetic words he tells us how most of his life was spent. ‘I have
lived,’ he says, ‘all through the period of thirty years in Paraguay,
as in the desert searching for wild beasts—that is, for savage
Indians—crossing wild countries, traversing mountain chains, in order
to find Indians and bring them to the true sheepfold of the Holy Church
and to the service of His Majesty.[74] With my companions I established
thirteen reductions or townships in the wilds, and this I did with
great anxiety, in hunger, nakedness, and frequent peril of my life. And
all these years I passed far from my brother Spaniards have made me
almost a rustic and ignorant of the polished language of the Court.’
Travelling as he did continually, few knew the country from Guayrá to
Yapeyu[75] so well as he; he tells us that for ‘all travelling
equipment’ he took a hammock, and a little mandioca flour, that he
usually travelled on foot with either sandals or bare feet, and that
for eight or nine years he never once tasted bread.
About the year 1611-12 we find him charged with a mission to the
Provincial at Asuncion to disabuse him of a report which had been
carried there that the Jesuits of Guayrá were garnering in no fruit
from all their labours in the wilds. The rumour had been so much
repeated that the superiors in Asuncion were on the point of calling
back the missionaries and giving up all hope. Montoya, accompanied by
six Indians, set out upon the journey, which by land to-day is enough
to appal the boldest traveller. Walking along, he found himself about
the middle of his way alone, his Indians having loitered in the rear.
Night caught him in the forests, and a storm came on. He passed the
night at the foot of a large tree, hungry and wet, and, waking in the
morning, found himself so crippled with arthritic pains as to be
obliged to continue his journey on his hands and knees. Alone and
helpless, he dragged himself to a place called Maracayu, and, failing
to obtain a canoe, went on another league, and there lay down to die,
his leg being swelled enormously with the rheumatic pains. Then, as he
says himself, he prayed to San Ignacio, telling him that from a
sentiment of obedience he had set out upon the journey through the
waste. Nothing could have been better, for the saint (who must have
seen him all the time), flattered, perhaps, that his own chief virtue
had been the cause of so much pain, promptly healed him and restored
his leg to its usual size, and Montoya went on his way rejoicing to
Asuncion. The Provincial heard and was disabused, but was unable to
send a single man to help, and poor Montoya set off again back to
Guayrá alone, having gained nothing but his sufferings on the road.
Again, in 1614, we find him in Asuncion combating calumnies spread by
the Spanish settlers against the Jesuits. In the same year (as he
informs us[76]) he was witness in the Reduction of Loreto of a strange
circumstance. ‘An Indian,’ he says, ‘of intelligence and pious conduct
called me to administer the last Sacraments, and to confess him before
he died, and this I did. As there seemed little hope of his recovery,
and pressing business called me away, I quitted him after having given
orders for his burial. He died in a short time—at least, all those who
were with him had no doubt of this; on my return I found the man whom I
had charged to stay beside the Indian till his death preparing for his
funeral. Toward mid-day they came to tell me that the dead man had come
to life, and wished to speak to me. I ran there, and found him with a
cheerful face in the middle of a crowd of Indians. I asked him what had
happened since I last saw him, and he answered me that the instant that
I quitted him his soul had taken its departure from his body; then, at
a point which he thought near to his hammock, a devil had appeared, who
said to him, “You are my prey,” and that he answered it could not be,
for he had confessed himself to the best of his ability, and had
received the holy Viaticum before his death; that the devil had
sustained that his confession had been incomplete, and that he had
forgotten to confess that twice he had been drunk, to which he answered
that it was an oversight, and he hoped that God would not remember it.
Then, on the devil sustaining that he had committed a sacrilege, St.
Peter had appeared, followed by angels, and driven off the fiend. I
asked him how he had known St. Peter, and he replied by describing him,
though he had never seen an image of the saint. “The saint,” he said,
“covered me with his mantle, and I felt myself instantly carried
through the air. First I perceived a lovely landscape, and further on a
great city, from which a shining light appeared. Then the Apostle and
the angels stopped, and the first said to me, ‘This is the city of the
Lord; we live here with Him, but the time of your entry is not yet. It
is written that your soul shall once more join your body, and in three
days you must appear in church.’ Then all was dark, and in an instant I
woke up alive and well.”
‘I,’ says Montoya, ‘understood by the last words of St. Peter that the
man had to die in three days, and I asked what he thought himself. “I
think,” said he, “that next Sunday they will carry my body to the
church, and I am certain that I only returned to life in order to
exhort my relatives and my friends to listen to your instructions.” . .
. When Sunday came he made his general confession,[77] admitted the two
sins the devil had reproached him with, exhorted all to live a
Christian life, and a few moments afterwards quietly gave up the
ghost.’
This is the sole occasion on which Padre Ruiz Montoya even remotely
touches the field of miracles, as he in general relies upon himself,
his knowledge of the world, and on his patience, which must have been
almost North British in its quality, if he acted up to his own
favourite maxim of ‘by returning thanks for injuries is how wise men
conduct their business.’[78]
In 1623 we find him praying Father Cataldino to let him accompany the
expedition to Itiranbaru, a mountain wooded to the summit, in which
lived several wild tribes. There he so worked upon the Indians as to
establish them in a reduction under the title of St. Francis
Xavier,[79] and left the mountain, which had been a haunt of savages,
as Padre del Techo says in his curious work on Paraguay, ‘all at the
service of the Lord.’
In 1623, whilst preaching, he was suddenly assailed by hostile Indians,
and seven of his Indians pierced with arrows at his feet. Undoubtedly,
he must have been killed had not an Indian taken his hat and cloak, and
run into the middle of the enemy to distract the fire. In the confusion
both the heroic Indian and Montoya managed to escape, the latter
getting into a canoe which, fortunately, was ready at the river-side.
But in the midst of all his occupations he had time to study natural
history in the spirit of the time, as the following description clearly
shows: ‘Amongst the other rarities of the land is an amphibious animal.
. . . It is like a sheep, with but the difference that its teeth and
nails are like a tiger’s, which animal it equals in ferocity. The
Indians never look on it without terror, and when it sallies from the
marshes where it lives (which it does ordinarily in troops), they have
no other chance of escape but to climb up a tree, and even then
sometimes are not in safety, for this terrible creature sometimes
uproots the tree, or sometimes stays on guard until the Indian falls
into its jaws.’ Thus far Montoya; but Charlevoix informs us that, _en
langue Guaranie_, it is known as the ‘ao’, and rather tamely adds,
‘When one of these animals is slain, the people make a jacket of its
skin.’
Again, Montoya tells us of the horse on which the venerable Padre Roque
used to ride, which, when he died, refused all food, and wept
perpetually, two streams of water running from its eyes. It never
allowed an Indian to mount it after its master’s death, and finally
expired, close to his grave, of grief. A kindly, scholarly, intrepid
priest, well skilled in knowledge of the world, and not without some
tincture of studies in science, as the above-related anecdotes reveal
to us. No doubt the Indians loved him far and wide, and his superiors
stood in some little awe of him, as those in office often do of their
subordinates when they show that capacity for action which is a sure
bar to advancement either in Church or State.
In 1627 Montoya was made head of the missions in Guayrá, which opened
up to him the opportunity of showing what kind of man he was. In this
year the Spaniards of Villa Rica, the nearest town in Paraguay to the
reductions in Guayrá, sent out an expedition to chastize some Indians
who had insulted a chief called Tayaoba, whom Montoya had baptized.
This was the pretext for the expedition, but Montoya knew well that the
real object was to hunt for slaves. He brought before the Governor the
edict of the King of Spain forbidding any war to be made upon the
Indians without sufficient cause. All was in vain, and the expedition
left Villa Rica and plunged into the wilds. Montoya, sore against the
Governor’s desire, went with the expedition, taking with him Padre
Salazar and some well-armed Indians. It was lucky for the Spaniards
that he was there, for on the second day a flight of arrows burst from
a wood and wounded many of them. The captain of the expedition ordered
a retreat, which, situated as they were, exposed on all sides to the
fire of an enemy whom they could not see, must have proved fatal.
Montoya counselled throwing up earthworks before some huts which stood
upon the edge of the woods in which the Indians were; this done, he
sent a messenger to Villa Rica for reinforcements. Even behind the
earthworks the Spaniards were hard pressed; no one could show himself
without being pierced by an arrow. The number of the Indians daily
increased, till on the third day they numbered about four thousand, and
seemed likely to advance upon the huts. The Spanish captain ordered a
rally, and the neophytes wished to decamp, taking Montoya with them,
and then gain the shelter of the woods. This he would not allow, and,
charging with the soldiers, put the Indians to flight. The Spaniards,
far from being grateful for their lives, seeing their hopes of making
prisoners had vanished, wished to lay hands upon the Indians whom
Montoya had brought, and who had fought beside them in the recent fray.
Hearing that in the morning the Spanish soldiers would attack his
neophytes, Montoya sent them off by night, and in the morning, when the
Spanish captain found him and the other priest alone, he said,
‘Thinking you had no other use for the Indians, I advised them to
return.’ The captain had the grace to say nothing but, ‘Then, you gave
them good advice, my father.’ The two priests waited patiently till the
soldiers had retired, and then sent for their Indians and quietly went
home. Thus it appears that at necessity Padre Montoya was a true son of
San Ignacio.
In 1628 Montoya seems to have met for the first time Padre Diaz Taño,
who afterwards was his companion both in the retreat from Guayrá down
the Paraná and in his mission to the King. No matter whether a man make
his career with Indians in the wilds of Paraguay or amongst the
so-called reasoning people in more sophisticated lands, if he once show
himself superior to the ordinary run of men, there is something of an
invidious character certain to be attributed to him by those who think
that genius is the worst attribute that man can have. This, Montoya did
not escape from amongst the Spaniards, but the Indians, at least, were
less envious, being perhaps less educated, for they believed that the
soul of one of their _caciques_,[80] known in his life as Quaratici,
had entered into him. The rumour reached at last a chief called
Guiravera, known to the Spaniards as the ‘Exterminator’ from his
cruelty, who, hearing that the soul of his late rival had entered into
Montoya, came to see him at the head of a large retinue of people of
his tribe. Montoya and Maceta were at Villa Rica, and on the chief’s
approach they happened to be seated in the plaza of the town. As he
approached them, followed by his men, and with a threatening air, they
remained seated, merely motioning him to take a seat upon a bench. This
he did, after making one of his men cover the seat with a tiger-skin
and stand behind on guard. What passed between them, most unluckily,
Montoya has not set down. What he has told us only makes us wish for
more, for it appears that after the usual salutations Guiravera refused
to speak, and getting up walked about the town, silently looking at
everything. But, as it ever happens, even Montoya was no exception to
the general run of history-writers, who usually are occupied alone with
facts which seem to them important at the time, forgetting that
posterity (for whom they write) can judge of the result as well as they
themselves, but thirst for details to complete the chain betwixt them
and their predecessors. One thing is set down _in extenso_—not by
Montoya, but by another Jesuit—that is, the sermon which Montoya
preached to bring the chief into the fold. Considered as a sermon it
does not seem out of the common way, and judged by its results was
futile at the time, for the chief answered coldly that he would think
the matter over, and then retired into the woods. But the seed thus
sown in Villa Rica was to bear fruit, for in a year the chief, either
tired of his ancestral gods or having pondered on the sermon, came into
the fold and was baptized as Paul.
An irruption[81] of the Mamelucos called Father Montoya from baptizing
Indians and recovering their souls to the more prosaic, if as useful,
task of saving their bodies, which he did at the immediate peril of his
own. The Mamelucos had appeared (1628) before the Reduction of
Encarnacion, and many of the Indians had already taken refuge in the
woods. Those who remained were like a flock of sheep without a
shepherd, and knew not what to do. Padre Montoya hastened to the spot,
and called on every Christian to take up arms. Under the circumstances
he undoubtedly was right; still, in reading history one is puzzled to
observe how often and in how many different countries Christians have
to resort to arms. But before proceeding to extremities, Montoya sent
out Fathers Mendoza and Domenecchi with some of the principal
inhabitants of the reduction to parley with the Mamelucos, who, under
their celebrated leader Antonio Raposo, were encamped outside the
place. Upon arriving within range of the Paulista camp they were
greeted with a shower of balls and arrows, which killed several of the
Indians and wounded Father Mendoza in the foot. But when, in spite of
his wound, the Jesuit advanced towards the camp and insisted on
speaking with the leader, the Mamelucos were so struck with his courage
that they gave up to him several of the Indians whom they had taken
prisoners upon the previous day. Next day Father Montoya, encouraged by
the unhoped-for success of Father Mendoza, went out himself, and,
facing the Paulistas, somewhat imprudently threatened them with the
wrath of Heaven and the King if they did not retire. The wrath of
Heaven is often somewhat capricious in its action, and the King of
Spain, although as wrathful as he had been an Emperor, was too far away
to inspire much terror in his subjects on the Paraná. So that the
Paulista treated the wrath of both their Majesties as qualities which
he could well neglect, and for sole answer ordered his men to march
upon the town. But, whether owing to their hard hearts having been
touched by the good Father’s eloquence, or the fact that the neophytes
were under arms, when the Paulistas arrived close to the town they
altered their intentions and filed off into the woods. Profiting by the
respite from hostilities, Montoya, in conjunction with Padre Diaz Taño
and a Father bearing the somewhat curious name of Padre Justo Vansurk
Mansilla,[82] devoted all his attention for the time to the Mission of
Santa Maria la Mayor, which was the most flourishing of all the
missions of the time, and which to-day still shows the greatest
remnants of the Jesuits’ work, both in regard to architecture and the
remains of Indian population still settled on the old mission lands.
But even there the Jesuits did not escape without their trials, for it
appears[83] that a quantity of new proselytes arrived with women, whom
the good Fathers stigmatized as ‘concubines’, and whom the ignorant
Indians in the innocence of their hearts looked on as wives. The order
being given to dismiss these concubines (or wives), a few submitted;
but the rest, leaving the mission, started cultivating a tract of land
in the vicinity.
Then the good Fathers, with Montoya at their head, hit on a stroke of
genius. Taking the opportunity when the seceding Indians were away
gathering their crops, they set fire to their houses and carried off
the children and the women,[84] back to the mission. The recalcitrants
appeared next day at Santa Maria la Mayor, and were received again into
the bosom of the Church. Heresy, also, now and then made its
appearance, for two rascals, having built two temples upon two hills,
transported to them the skeletons of two magicians long since dead, and
the fickle people left the churches empty, and went to worship at the
magicians’ shrines. But in this season of sorrow and of care, and
whilst the churches in the Mission of Encarnacion were left deserted,
Montoya once again showed his determination, and put things right. Not
being able to cope alone with the heathen, Father Diaz Taño went to
Guayrá, and induced Montoya (still the superior of the reductions in
that province) to give his aid. He came, and, having armed some of the
faithful, at dead of night attacked the temples and razed them to the
ground.
In 1631 Montoya and others came in the forests of Guayrá upon the wild
Caaguas. These they strove hard to civilize, but, after labouring long,
with all their eloquence were able to induce only eighteen to return
with them to the Encarnacion. It was ‘with difficulty that they were
able to give them a sufficient knowledge of the mysteries of our faith
to be able to bestow the rite of baptism.’ It may be that the Caaguas,
not having much to occupy their minds, approached the mysteries of our
faith in more receptive attitudes than is attained by those whose minds
are full. But, anyhow, Montoya, with true prudence, deferred their
baptism till just before their death, for a few months of life outside
the forests proved fatal to them all. Faith is a wondrous thing, and
able to move most things, even common-sense. One wonders, though, why,
when the Jesuits learned from experience that the poor Indians
invariably died when exposed to the burning sun upon the plains, they
continued in their fatal efforts to inflict baptism on the unoffending
people of the woods. If it were necessary, it surely might have taken
place in their own homes, and the patients then might have been left to
chance, to see how the reception of the holy rite acted upon their
lives.
In 1631 the Mamelucos broke into the province of Guayrá. All was
confusion, and Montoya sent Father Diaz Taño to Asuncion to beg the
Governor, Don Luis de Cespedes, to send them help. He answered that he
could do nothing, and thus by leaving the whole territory of Guayrá
without defence lost a rich province to the Crown of Spain. Though at
the time (1631) Portugal and Spain were united, yet in the Indies their
subjects were at war, and though in Europe Spain was the stronger of
the two, in America the Portuguese conquered about that time rich
provinces, which to-day form part of the quondam Empire of Brazil.
Upon the failure of Don Luis de Cespedes to render help, Padre Diaz
Taño was despatched to Charcas[85] to lay the matter before the
Audiencia Real (the High Court of the Indies). The frequent journeys
and diplomatic negotiations in which the Jesuits of Paraguay were
engaged rendered them far more apt to manage business than members of
the other Orders in America. Whilst in Guayrá all was confusion, and
the Paulistas swept through the land ruining everything, upon the
Uruguay things prospered, and Padre Romero founded two new reductions
(1631), known as San Carlos and Apostoles; he also laid the foundation
of that territory in which the persecuted neophytes of Guayrá were soon
to find a safe retreat. Father Diaz Taño by this time had returned from
Charcas with a decree of the High Court, declaring the action of Don
Luis de Cespedes in failing to protect Guayrá against the Mamelucos
prejudicial to the interests of the King; but as neither he nor the
High Court of Charcas possessed any power by means of which to
stimulate the Governor to greater zeal, the decree was useless, and
Taño and Ruiz Montoya found themselves summoned hastily to meet a new
attack. But before they arrived the missions, both of San Francisco
Xavier and of San José, had been destroyed. As there were still three
reductions undestroyed, Montoya, as Provincial of Guayrá, called all
the Jesuits of the province to deliberate as to their chance of making
a defence. The debate ran high; some of the priests wished that the
neophytes should fight to the end; others, more sensible, pointed out
that the ill-armed and quite untrained militia of the missions could do
nothing with their bows and arrows against the well-led and
well-disciplined Paulistas all armed with guns.[86] Padre Truxillo gave
it as his opinion that it would be more prudent to transport the
Indians to a place of safety, and pointed out that near the cataract of
Guayrá they would be able to cross the river and place it between
themselves and the Paulistas in case of an attack. This advice seemed
prudent to the rest, and Father Truxillo set out to make his
preparation for the march. Few European travellers even to-day have
visited the great cataract known as El Salto de Guayrá, or in
Portuguese As sete Quedas. Bourgade la Dardye[87] has described it in
his book on Paraguay. Situated as it is in the midst of almost
impenetrable forests, it has not even now been properly placed upon the
map. Bourgade la Dardye inclines to think he was the first to visit it
since the expedition sent by the elder Lopez, President of Paraguay,
under Lieutenant Patiño in 1861. Before that time it had been left
unvisited since 1788, when the Boundary Commissioners sent to determine
the dividing line between the Spanish and Portuguese possessions camped
near it for a week. Felix de Azara writes about it in his ‘Historia del
Paraguay’,[88] but he does little more than reproduce the account given
by the Boundary Commissioners. He places it in 24° 4′ 27″ lat., and
refers to it as ‘a tremendous precipice of water[89] worthy of Homer or
of Virgil’s pen.’ He says the waters do not fall vertically as from a
balcony or window (_como por un balcon ó ventana_), but by an inclined
plane at an inclination of about fifty degrees. The river close to the
top of the falls is about four thousand nine hundred Castilian yards in
breadth, and suddenly narrows to about seventy yards, and rushes over
the fall with such terrific violence as if it wished to ‘displace the
centre of the earth, and cause thus the nutation which astronomers have
observed in the earth’s axis.’ The dew or vapour which rises from the
fall is seen in the shape of a column from many miles away, and on it
hangs a perpetual rainbow, which trembles as the earth seems to tremble
under one’s feet. ‘The noise,’ he says, ‘is heard full six leagues off,
and in the neighbourhood neither bird nor beast is found.’ In Azara’s
time the journey was not too pleasant, for he says: ‘He who wishes to
see this fall must cross the desert for thirty leagues from the town of
Curuguaty to the river Guatimi. There he must choose trees to construct
canoes. In these he must embark all those who go with him, arms and
provisions, and besides, where he embarks, leave an armed escort to
secure his base of supplies from the wild Indians’ attack. In the
canoes he then must navigate the Guatimi for thirty leagues until it
joins the Paraná, and always with much care, for in the woods upon its
banks are Indians who give no quarter.[90] . . . Then there remain
three leagues to sail upon the Paraná, then one can reach the falls
either in the canoes or struggling along the woods which fringe the
river’s bank.’
Azara was, perhaps, of all the travellers of the last century, the man
who above all things shines in accuracy, and in point of fact his
description of the cataract is the best we have up to the present time.
Bourgade la Dardye tells us that not far above the cataract the Paraná
expands into a lake almost five miles in breadth, and from the lake the
river issues in two great arms, which have forced their way through the
mountains known as the Sierra de Mbaracyu.
Dr. Bourgade la Dardye seems to think the circular eddies found in the
whirls are the most curious features of the falls. He describes them
thus: ‘They flow in falls varying from fifty to sixty feet in depth;
these circular eddies, which are quite independent of one another,
range along an arc of about two miles in its stretch. They are detached
like giant caldrons yawning unexpectedly at one’s feet, in which the
flood seethes with incredible fury; every one of these has opened for
itself a narrow orifice in the rock, through which like a stone from a
sling the water is hurled into the central whirlpool. The width of
these outlets rarely exceeds fifteen yards, but their depth cannot be
estimated. They all empty themselves into one immense central chamber
about two hundred feet wide, rushing into it with astounding velocity.
. . . A more imposing spectacle can scarcely be conceived, and I doubt
whether abysses such as these exist elsewhere in the world.’ He places
the falls in latitude 24° 2′ 59″, but corrects the longitude given by
Azara as 56° 55′ west of Paris to 58° 18′ 8″—that is, 53° 57′ 53″ west
from Greenwich, which certainly has some importance in fixing the
breadth of the territory of Paraguay.
But neither Azara nor the French traveller, with their yards and feet,
their longitude and latitude, and the rest, give an idea of the
grandeur of the place. Buried in the primeval forests, forgotten by the
world, known to the wandering Indians who give no quarter (any more
to-day than in Azara’s time), the giant cataract is a lost wonder of
the world. In the ruined missions on the Paraná, two hundred miles
away, I have heard the Indians talk of it with awe. They told how
through the woods tangled with undergrowth, matted together with
lianas, they had hewed a path. Monkeys and parrots chattered at them,
and a white miasmatic vapour hung over trees and lakes, burying the
clearings in its wreaths, and lifting only at mid-day, to close again
upon the woods at night. They talked of alligators, jaguars, the giant
ant-eater, and the mysterious bird known to them as the ‘ipetatá’,
which in its tail carries a burning fire. In the recesses of the
thickets demons lurked, and wild Caaguas, who with a blowpipe and a
poisoned arrow slew you and your horse, themselves unseen. Pools
covered with Victoria regia; masses of red and yellow flowers upon the
trees, the trees themselves gigantic, and the moss which floated from
their branches long as a spear; the voyage in canoes, whirled like a
cork upon the rapids; lastly the falls themselves, and how they,
awestricken at the sight, fell prostrate and promised many candles to
the Virgin and the saints on their return, they talked of into the
watches of the night.
Somehow, I like those countries which, as the province of Guayrá and
Paraguay, appear to have no future, and of which the charm is in the
past. It pleases me to think that the sharp business men of times gone
by, patting their stomachs (the prison of their brain), predicted great
advancement, and were all deceived. For then it seems as if the
prognostications of to-day’s schemes may also fail, and countries which
they have doomed to progress still remain as is Guayrá, their towns
deserted, with but the broken spire of some old church emerging from
the verdure of the tropics, as the St. Paul’s Rocks rise sheer out of
the sea. If there is charm in the unknown, there is at least as great a
charm in the forgotten, and the Salto de Guayrá is one of the most
forgotten corners of the earth. To this wild place Father Mendoza
proposed to lead the Indians from the Reductions of San José and San
Francisco Xavier, and then unite with them any of the fugitives he
could assemble from those reductions which had been destroyed. But even
the doglike patience of the Indians was at an end, and they preferred
to die or be led captives rather than run the chances of escape in such
a solitary place. In their despair, and placed between the Paulistas
and the fear of emigration, the neophytes turned, as even more
civilized people than themselves will turn, on their best friends, and
held the Jesuits responsible for all their woes. Two Indian women,
wives of _caciques_, having been taken by the Paulistas, the Indians
broke into the church where a Jesuit (Padre Salazar) was officiating,
and interrupted him during the Mass with the most bitter insults. One
of the Indians menaced him with a lance, another with an arrow, whilst
a third tried to snatch the chalice from his hands. He escaped, and
ran, holding the chalice, out into the woods, followed by two little
Indian boys. Wandering about, he fell in with the other Jesuits, all
like himself outcasts, without a church, and almost deserted by the
Indians. Padre Ruiz Montoya alone possessed a shadow of authority, and
he advised the outcasts with the remnant of their flocks to retire into
the woods, and sow a crop of maize for food, whilst he endeavoured to
get help from Paraguay. Hardly was this done, when news was brought him
which made him alter all his plans. Two messengers came to inform him
that an army of Paulistas was marching on Villa Rica, and that a strong
detachment of them was advancing from the south. Then Padre Montoya
took a supreme resolve, and ordered the evacuation of the two principal
reductions (San Ignacio and Loreto) which yet remained intact. They
were the first which had been founded in Guayrá, and were as important
as any of the Spanish towns in Paraguay. The churches, all the Jesuit
writers, as Montoya, Charlevoix, Mastrilli, and Lozano, are agreed,
were finer than any in the land. The Indians were, according to
Montoya, far better Christians than the inhabitants of the Spanish
settlements, and their faith and innocence were above all praise. They
cultivated cotton and had large herds of cattle, so that the most
bitter enemies of the Jesuits must allow that much had been
accomplished in the short space of two-and-twenty years. In 1609 the
Jesuits came to Guayrá, and found it absolutely untouched; and when in
1631 they left it, it was upon the road to become one of the most
flourishing American provinces of the Spanish throne. The other
missionaries imagined that nothing would persuade the Indians to depart
from their homes, where for so many years they had been happy; but
after Montoya explained to them his plans, they all assented to them as
with a single voice.
The plan by means of which the Jesuit Moses led his sheep out of the
wilderness of Guayrá was most remarkable. The river Paraná forms a
great artery between Brazil and Paraguay; upon each side of it a
network of rivers disembogue. The Paranapané, on which most of the
missions of Guayrá were situated, flows from the east, and falls into
the Paraná, not much more than fifty miles above the cataract. After
the last of the once-flourishing six Jesuit reductions had been
evacuated at the orders of Montoya, he collected all the boats, rafts,
and canoes, and after much persuasion got all the Indians persuaded to
follow him to seek for safer habitations lower down the Paraná. The
population of the six reductions has been estimated at about one
hundred thousand souls; but of these, during the years of 1629 and
1630, thousands had been led captive to San Paulo, and thousands had
dispersed into the woods. Still, assembled on the banks of the
Paranapané, there was a multitude of Indians of every sex and age.
Fortunately or unfortunately, no record by an eye-witness exists,[91]
except that written by Montoya, and he is modest to a fault about all
details, and absolutely silent as to the part he played himself. He
tells us that at the starting-point were gathered two thousand five
hundred families, and this in spite of the dispersions and the efforts
made by the Spanish settlers in the town of Ciudad Real,[92] who
feared, with cause, to be exposed to the full fury of the Paulistas
without allies. It appears the Indians were in a state of spiritual
exaltation, for some young men having remarked the Jesuits were packing
up a Christ and an image of the Blessed Virgin, which in happier times
had been miraculous, they declared that to affront exile, and even
death, in such good company was a foretaste of heaven.
Montoya, in opposition to the modern style, tries to shift the burden
of the praise on to the shoulders of the Provincial, Padre Francisco
Lopez Truxillo,[93] but with indifferent success. This matter of
bearing your own praise will require regulation in the future, when an
advance of civilization has opened people’s eyes to the perception that
praise is just as disagreeable to the sufferer as is blame. The
sentinel whom they had placed to warn them of the enemy’s approach gave
the alarm. Montoya sent at once to Ciudad Real for help, but the
Spanish settlers were too hard pressed themselves to give assistance.
Nothing remained but to make a portage of all their rafts, boats, and
canoes, and then to re-embark and sail down the Paraná out of the reach
of the Paulistas. Montoya passed in review his boats, and found he had
seven hundred, and that twelve thousand people had embarked with him on
leaving the Paranapané. When the Paulistas found the Jesuits had
evacuated all their towns, they burnt the churches, on the principle,
perhaps, that, the nests once pulled down, the rooks would not return.
They turned the Jesuit cells into barracks for themselves, taking, as
Montoya says with horror, ‘infamous women’ into those chaste abodes,
where never woman had passed through the doors. The Paulistas then
entered into a rigorous examination[94] of the Jesuits’ private lives,
hoping to find some scandal to bring against them. Especially they
questioned the Indian women, giving them presents to discover
everything they knew. All was in vain, the discipline of the Order, or
the strict conscientiousness of the individual members of it, not
having given scandal any hold.[95] The most difficult part of the great
exodus was now to come. The rapids and the cataracts of the Paraná
extend to nearly ninety miles, and the whole country is a maze of
tangled forest interspersed with rocks. No paths exist, the place is
desert, and over the dank mass of vegetation the moisture from the
clouds of vapour thrown up by the falling water descends in
never-ending rain.[96] In order to endeavour to save the trouble of
reconstructing new rafts and canoes at the bottom of the cataract,
Montoya launched three hundred empty boats (sending an Indian in
advance) to see if any of them would arrive safely at the bottom of the
falls. Not one escaped; and so the pilgrimage began, almost without
provisions and without arms, in the middle of a country quite
uncultivated, and where game was scarce.[97] To make things worse,
intelligence was brought that, a few miles below the beginning of the
falls, the Spaniards of Guayrá had built a wooden fort, surrounded with
a strong stockade, hoping to intercept the retreating Indians, and make
slaves of any who might fall into their hands. Montoya himself, dressed
as an Indian, went out to observe the enemy, and on his return the
whole immense assemblage silently plunged into the woods, leaving so
little traces of its passage that the Spaniards in the fort were still
expecting them when they were far beyond their reach.
Each Indian had to take his bundle on his back; even the children
carried bundles in proportion to their strength. The missionaries
carried what was held most sacred, as altar-plate and images of saints.
In front a band of men armed with machétes (cane-knives) opened the way
through the dense woods and pathless jungle of the bank; and as they
marched along, Montoya says they sang hymns which the Jesuits had
taught them, and at the sound of them fugitives who had been hiding in
the woods came out and joined their march. Especially those from the
out-station of Tayaoba joined them; their priest, Pedro de Espinosa,
had met his death ‘with a good chance of his eternal welfare,’ as
Montoya says.[98] But after the second day the hymns no longer sounded
through the woods, nor did they play upon the harps and other
instruments, whose strings being all broken and the wood unglued, ‘they
left them on the rocks, being too sad to look at them.’ All through the
weary journey Montoya seems never once to have despaired, and sets down
in his book the adventures of each separate day, never forgetting to
chronicle anything strange or pathetic as it occurred to him. On the
fourth day he sent off Fathers Diego, Nicolas Hennerio, and Mansilla
into the province of Itatines to found a mission there, acting upon
orders which had just reached him from the Provincial of the Order
shortly before he had started from Guayrá. They took with them ‘bells,
images, and everything suitable for the foundation of a mission’; but
the first two were martyred by the wild Indians, and the third just
fled in time to save his life. It took the fugitive Indians eight weary
days of marching to reach the lower end of the cataract, where once
again the Paraná was navigable. On their arrival they hoped to find
provisions and more boats; but none were there, their own stores were
almost done, and the people too exhausted to march on. Fever broke out,
and many of them died; and others, lost in the forests, without a
guide, wandered about till death released them from their march. A
weaker man than Padre Montoya might have despaired of ever issuing from
the woods. However, he set the Indians to work to make canoes, and
others[99] to cultivate patches of maize for food, working himself
alternately with axe and hoe to give example to the neophytes. Others,
again, cut down the enormous canes, which in that region grew to fifty
feet in height, to make them into rafts.
So, after a considerable time, all was in readiness for a new start,
and luckily provisions from the reductions on the Paraná arrived. So
they embarked again, and on the journey a raft in which a woman and two
children were sitting upset, to Montoya’s agony, as he knew that ‘in
that river there are fish that the people call culebras,[100] which
have been seen to swallow men entire, and throw them out again with all
their bones broken as if it had been done with stones.’ He says: ‘I
confess I suffered infinitely, and, turning my eyes to heaven, I blamed
my sins as having been the cause of so much misery, and said, “O Lord,
is it possible that for this Thou hast brought these people out of
their country, that my eyes should endure the spectacle of so much
misery, and my heart break at so much suffering, and then to let them
die devoured by savage fish!”’ As the good man was praying, the Indian
woman’s head appeared above the water, and Montoya himself, aided by
Indians, drew her and the children in safety to the land. But his
trials were not at an end, for many of the hastily constructed rafts
and canoes sank before his eyes, and the mortality of Indians was
great. Eventually they found a temporary refuge in the Reduction of the
Nativity upon the Acaray, and at Santa Maria la Mayor upon the Iguazú.
Then famine raged, and the arrival of so many people increased the
scarcity, so that six hundred of the new arrivals died in one
reduction, and five hundred in the next. At last the scarcity became so
great that the poor Indians had to roam about the forests to gather
fruit, and many of them died in the recesses of the woods.
Seeing no hopes of saving the remainder, Montoya led them further on to
the banks of a little river called the Jubaburrús,[101] and there he
once again founded two reductions, which he named Loreto and San
Ignacio, after the two the Mamelucos had destroyed. He bought ten
thousand head of cattle out of the money the King allowed to the
Jesuits of Guayrá, and from the sale of some few objects saved from the
general destruction of the towns, and settled down his Indians, who in
Guayrá had been all agriculturists, to a pastoral life. Thus did he
bring successfully nearly twelve thousand people a distance of about
five hundred miles through desert country, and down a river broken in
all its course by rapids, landing them far from their enemies in a safe
haven at the last. Most commonly the world forgets or never knows its
greatest men, while its lard-headed fools, who in their lives perhaps
have been the toys of fortune, sleep in their honoured graves, their
memory living in the page of history, preserved like grapes in aspic by
writers suet-headed as themselves. But though this Hegira was the most
stirring episode of Montoya’s life, he yet had work to do, and in the
province of diplomacy rendered as great, or even greater, services to
the Indians, whom he loved better than himself, as in the memorable
journey when he led them down the Paraná.