Don José de Antequera—Appoints himself Governor of Asuncion—Unsettled
state of affairs in the town—He is commanded to relinquish his illegal
power—He refuses, and resorts to arms—After some success he is defeated
and condemned to be executed—He is shot on his way to the
scaffold—Renewed hatred against the Jesuits—Their labours among the
Indians of the Chaco
From the departure of Cardenas in 1650, to about 1720, was the halcyon
period of the Jesuit missions in Paraguay. During that time things went
on in the missions after the fashion I have attempted to describe. The
people passed their time in their semi-communistic labour, sweetened by
constant prayer; their pastors may or may not have done all that was
possible to instruct them in the science of the time; but, still, the
Indian population did not decrease, as it was observed to do from year
to year in other countries of America and in the Spanish settlements in
Paraguay.[226] During this period the Jesuits had made repeated
efforts, but without much real success, to establish missions amongst
the wild equestrian tribes in the Gran Chaco upon the western bank of
the river Paraguay. Nothing, apparently, pointed to the events which,
beginning in the year 1721, finally led to their expulsion, or, at
least, furnished additional reasons to King Charles III. to include the
Jesuits in Paraguay in the general expulsion of their order from the
dominions of the Spanish crown.
In that year (1721) Don José de Antequera was appointed to succeed the
Governor of Paraguay, Don Diego de los Reyes Balmaceda, when his term
of office had expired. The situation was, as often happened in the
Spanish colonies, complicated by an inquiry into the conduct of the
Governor (Balmaceda), in progress at the High Court of Charcas, which
court, as in the case of Cardenas, acted most cautiously, both on
account of its position, so far from Paraguay, and on account of the
inordinate procrastination of everything connected with the Spanish
law. If Balmaceda were condemned, then Antequera would step into his
shoes at once. If, on the other hand, he were acquitted, Antequera
would have to wait until the legal time of office had run its course.
So far all was in order, but the High Court, either in doubt of its own
wisdom or of its power to pronounce judgment definitely, had issued a
decree suspending Balmaceda from his functions, but without either
condemning or acquitting him. This, too, they did after having taken
more than three years to sift the evidence and summon witnesses, who
either had to cross the country on a mule at the imminent risk of death
by famine or by Indians, or, having descended the river Plate to Buenos
Ayres (which journey often took a month), wait for a ship to take them
round Cape Horn to Lima, and from thence travel to Charcas on muleback,
following one of the Incas’ roads.
Don José de Antequera y Castro was born at Lima, and being, as Father
Charlevoix[227] says, an able, eloquent, but vain and most ambitious
man, endowed with plenty of imagination, some talent, and but little
ballast, was not content to wait till time should place him in his
governorship. So, hearing that a judge inquisitor was to be sent to
Paraguay to inquire into the case, and having graduated himself and
held the position of procurator fiscal in the Charcas, he solicited the
post, and by some error was appointed.
No sooner was the appointment signed than straight he posted off to
Paraguay. As he had studied in the college of the Jesuits at La Plata,
his first visit was to the reductions of the Jesuits. The missionaries
received him well, and sent a troop of Indians to escort him to the
boundary of their territories, never suspecting what Antequera was
about to do. Having heard that the Governor, Balmaceda, was at a
distant port upon the Paraná, Antequera hastened to Asuncion. Arrived
there, the same madness of authority seems to have come on him which
came fifty or sixty years before his time on Cardenas. Finding no
special seat reserved for him in the Cathedral, he publicly reproved
the dean, to the great scandal of the worshippers. This seems not to
have lost him the respect of the citizens of Asuncion, who were
accustomed to all kinds of vagaries, both of their rulers and their
spiritual guides. No sort of violence to laws and customs seems ever to
affect a people unless the violence is done to benefit them, when
instantly they rise against the breaker of the law, however heavily it
may bear upon themselves.
But the devoted citizens of Asuncion were so accustomed to perpetual
turmoil that, as Dean Funes[228] says, ‘they only stopped when it was
absolutely necessary for them to breathe.’ Even the overpraised
citizens of Athens at the time of Pericles, who must have been in all
their ways so like the Athenians of to-day, were not more instant in
the Agora or diligent in writing patriots’ names on oyster-shells than
the noisy mob of half-breed patriots who in the sandy streets of
Asuncion were ever agitating, always assembling, and doing everything
within their power to show the world the perfect picture of a
democratic State. Strange that such turbulent and patriotic people
should have been ancestors of those whom I, after the termination of
the war with Buenos Ayres and Brazil in 1870, knew as lethargic and
downtrodden, as if the great dictator, Dr. Francia, whom the country
people, speaking in bated breath, called ‘El Difunto’, had still
oppressed the land. Into the turbulent hotbed of Asuncion fell
Antequera, one of those Creoles of Peru who, born with talent and well
educated, seemed, either from the circumstances of their birth or the
surroundings amongst which they passed their youth, to differ as
entirely from the Spaniards as if they had been Indians and not Creoles
of white blood. Like Cardenas, Antequera was endowed with eloquence;
but, unlike Cardenas, he set no store on eloquence upon its own
account, but only used it for his own advancement in the world. Finding
the Governor absent from Asuncion and lying under a decree suspending
him from all his functions, it seems at once to have occurred to
Antequera to seize his place. On this account, having ingratiated
himself with some of those opposed to Balmaceda, he raised an army, and
sent to seize him; but the Governor, having notice of the plot, escaped
to Corrientes, and Antequera instantly assumed his post. This was too
much for the Viceroy of Peru, who, though he had befriended Antequera
in the past, had some respect for law. Immediately he issued a decree
replacing Balmaceda in the governorship, and ordering Antequera to give
him back the power he had usurped. This Antequera had no thought of
doing, and he embarked on a career of violence which induced some to
believe he intended to proclaim himself an independent king. Whether
this was or was not the case, a state of things arose in Paraguay more
pandemonic even than in the good old times of Cardenas. The Jesuits,
not having seen their way to sustain the cause of their ex-pupil, were
expelled once more (1725), and as before took ship for Corrientes
amongst the tears of the people, their historians say,[229] and as
Ibañez and those who have written against them affirm as strongly,
amongst universal joy. Certain it is that in Asuncion they played a
different part from that played by them in the mission territory, and
no doubt mixed, as did the other Orders of religion, in the intrigues
which never seemed to cease in the restless capital of Paraguay.
Not being content with the expulsion of the Jesuits, Antequera defeated
several generals sent against him by the Viceroy of Peru, and by a
_coup de main_ took prisoner the ex-Governor Balmaceda, having
surprised him in his house in Corrientes, and carried him back to
Asuncion under a close guard. The usual reign of terror then began, and
everything fell into confusion, till at last the King (Philip V.) in
1726 commanded that the Jesuits should be reinstated in their college
in Asuncion, and that the missions should be taken from the
jurisdiction of the Governors of Paraguay and placed under the control
of the Governor of the River Plate, as had been previously done in the
case of the other Jesuit missions beyond the Uruguay. But Spain was far
away, and on one pretext or another so much delay occurred that it was
not till March 18, 1728, that the Jesuits were reinstated in the
college in Asuncion, which they were now fated to hold but for a little
space. At last the Viceroy of Peru, the Marquess of Castel Fuerte, sent
Don Bruno de Zavala with a sufficient army and six thousand Indians
from the missions against the usurper Antequera, who fled for refuge to
the Franciscan convent in Cordoba, where he remained, till, finding his
position quite untenable, he fled to Charcas, where he was arrested,
and sent to Lima to await his trial. Four years he waited in perfect
liberty, going and coming about the town as it best pleased him, whilst
the High Court heard evidence, wrote to Madrid, received instructions
from the King, and generally displayed the incapacity which in all ages
has been the chief distinctive features of every court of law.
In 1731 an order came from Madrid to execute him, and without loss of
time he was placed on a horse draped all in black, and, preceded by a
herald and guarded by a troop of guards, taken out to the public square
to be beheaded. But the good people of the capital, who, in the fashion
of the world, would not most probably have stirred a step to save a
saint, were mightily concerned to see a rogue receive his due deserts.
The streets were filled with thousands crying out ‘Pardon!’ stones
flew, and the affair looked so threatening that the Viceroy had to get
on horseback and ride amongst the crowd to calm the tumult. The people
met him with a shower of stones, and he, fearing the prisoner would
escape, called on his guards to fire upon him. Four balls pierced
Antequera, who fell dying from his horse into the arms of two
accompanying priests. Thus the most turbulent of all the Governors of
Paraguay ceased troubling, and the executioner, after having cut off
his head, exhibited it to the people from the scaffold, with the usual
moral aphorism as to the traitor’s fate.
The triumph of the Jesuits in Asuncion was but momentary, following the
general rule of triumphs, which take their way along the street with
trumpets and with drums amid the acclamations of the crowd, and then,
the pageant over, the chief actors fall back again into the struggles
and the commonplace of ordinary life.
Between the years 1728 and 1730 the people of Asuncion had been more
eager in pursuit of liberty[230] than was their usual wont. The
citizens were divided into camps, and daily fought amongst the sandy
streets and shady orange-bordered lanes which radiate from almost every
quarter of the town. The rival bands of madmen were styled respectively
the ‘Communeros’ and the ‘Contrabandos’, and to the first Antequera
throughout his residence in Lima gave all the assistance in his power.
Neither of the two seems to have had the most elementary idea of real
patriotism, or any wish for anything beyond the momentary triumph of
the miserable party to which each belonged. One doctrine they held in
common—a hatred of the Jesuits, and of the influence they exercised
against the enslaving of the Indians, which was the aim of
‘Contrabandos’ and of ‘Communeros’ alike. One of the rival chieftains
of the factions having fled for refuge to the missions, the people of
Asuncion assembled troops to take him from his sanctuary by force.
Arrived upon the frontier of the Jesuit territory, they found
themselves opposed by an army of the Indians, who looked so formidable
that the troops retired to Asuncion, and the leaders, foiled in the
field, and not having force to attack the Jesuits in their own
territory, set vigorously to inflame the minds of the people against
them.
They worked with such success that when, in 1732, the news of
Antequera’s death reached Paraguay, the people, inflamed with the idea
that he was sacrificed to the hatred of the Jesuits, rose and expelled
them once again. The constant expulsions of the Jesuits from Asuncion,
the turmoils in the State, and the fact that every now and then the
Indians had to take arms to defend their territory, acted most
mischievously on the reductions, both in Paraguay and in those between
the Paraná and Uruguay. Whole tribes of Indians, recently converted,
went back to the woods; land was left quite untilled, and on the
outskirts of the mission territory the warlike tribes of Indians, still
unsubdued, raided the cattle, killed the neophytes, and carried off
their wives as slaves. But still, in spite of all, the Indians clung to
their priests—as they said, from affection for the religious care they
had bestowed, but quite as possibly from the instinctive knowledge
that, between the raiding Portuguese and the maddening patriots in
Asuncion, their only safeguard against slavery lay in the Jesuits. Most
fortunately for Paraguay at the time (1734), Don Bruno de Zavala,
perhaps the most energetic of the Spaniards in the King’s service in
America, was Viceroy in the River Plate. Having received orders to
quiet the dissensions in Asuncion, in spite of being nearly seventy
years of age, and having lost an arm in the Italian wars, he marched at
once, taking but forty soldiers in his train, as, war being imminent
with Portugal, it was not safe to deplete the slender forces in the
River Plate. Arrived in Paraguay, he entered the Jesuit missions at the
Reduction of San Ignacio Guazu,[231] and, having appealed to the
provincial of the Order for his aid, speedily found himself at the head
of a large army of the Indians. After some skirmishes he was in a
position to enter Asuncion and force the people to receive him as their
Governor. By one of those revulsions so frequent in a crowd of
reasonable men, the people begged him to invite the Jesuits to return.
They did so (1735), and were received in state, the Governor, the
Bishop, and the chief clergy and officials of the place attending Mass
in the Cathedral with lighted candles in their hands. His duty over,
Don Bruno de Zavala set off for Chile, where he had been appointed
Governor, and on his journey, at the town of Santa Fe, died suddenly,
exhausted with the battles, marchings and countermarchings, rebellions,
Indian incursions, the turbulence of the people in the towns, and the
other cares which formed the daily duties of a Spanish officer in South
America at the middle of the eighteenth century.[232] The next ten
years were on the whole peaceful and profitable for the Indians of the
missions and for the Jesuits. The Indians followed quietly their
Arcadian lives, except when now and then a contingent of them was
required to assist in any of the wars, which at that time were
ceaseless throughout the eastern part of South America. The Jesuits
pushed out their spiritual frontiers, advancing on the north amongst
the Tobatines of the woods, and on the west endeavouring to spread
their colonies amongst the Chiriguanas and other of the Chaco tribes.
From the conquest of Peru, when those Indians who had been but recently
brought under the empire of the Incas retreated into the Chaco, it had
been the refuge of the fiercest and most indomitable tribes. The
Spanish colonists, the ardour of the first conquest spent, had settled
down mainly to agricultural pursuits. Few had efficient firearms, and
on the whole, though turbulent amongst themselves, they had become
unwarlike.[233] The very name of the wild Indians (Los Indios Bravos)
spread terror up and down the frontiers. This terror, which I remember
still prevalent both in Mexico and on the pampas of the Argentine
Republic, not more than five-and-twenty years ago, was keener upon the
confines of the Chaco than anywhere in South America, except, perhaps,
in Chile, upon the frontiers of Araucania.
The Tobas, Mataguayos, Lules, Aguilotas, Abipones, and the rest,
together with the warlike nations of the Vilelas and the Guaycurús, had
from the first rejected Christianity. Attempts had several times been
made to establish settlements amongst them, but the ferocity of all the
tribes, their nomad habits—for many of them passed their lives on
horseback—and the peculiar nature of their country, a vast domain of
swamp, pierced by great rivers quite unknown to the Spanish settlers,
had hitherto combined to render every effort vain. But, notwithstanding
this, the Jesuits laboured incessantly, and not without success,
amongst the wildest of the Chaco tribes. The gentle and eccentric
Father Martin Dobrizhoffer passed many years amongst the Abipones, of
whom he wrote his charming book. He enumerates many tribes, of whom he
says[234] ‘these are for the most converted by us, and settled in
towns.’
Nothing, perhaps, displays the Jesuits at their best, more than their
efforts in the Chaco. The enormous territory was sparsely peopled by
about seventy tribes,[235] whereof there were fifteen or sixteen of
considerable size. Hardly two tribes spoke dialects by which they could
communicate with one another, and almost every one of them lived in a
state of warfare, not only with the Spaniards, but with the
neighbouring tribes. The inventories preserved by Brabo[236] show us
the town of Paisanes in the Chaco, with its rough wooden houses, and
the Jesuits’ habitation in the middle of the place, stockaded, and
without doors, and with but narrow openings in the wall, through which
the missionaries crept. The inside of the house contained five or six
rough rooms, almost unfurnished, but for a few religious books and a
plentiful supply of guns.[237] Their beds were of unvarnished wood,
with curtains of rough cotton spun by the Indians. Sometimes they had a
sofa of leather slung between four stakes, a rack for medicine bottles,
and for the wine for Mass. Lastly, one priest, in the settlement
amongst the Toquitistines, had among his books copies of Cervantes and
Quevedo; one hopes he read them half smiling, half with a tear in his
eye, for your true humour is akin to tears. Perhaps, reading ‘Don
Quixote’ or ‘El Gran Tacaño’, the poor priest forgot his troubles, and,
wandering with Sancho in La Manchan oak-woods or through Castilian
uplands, thought he was in Spain.[238]
Throughout the territory of the Gran Chaco there were but seven
reductions established by the Jesuits. These were San José de Bilelas,
with its little town Petacas; San Juan Bautista de los Iristines, with
its townlet of the same name; San Esteban de los Lules, with the town
of Miraflores; Nuestra Señora del Buen Consejo de los Omarapas, capital
Ortega; Nuestra Señora de Pilar de los Paisanes, with Macapillo as its
centre; Nuestra Señora del Rosario de los Tobas, with its chief place
called San Lucas; and, lastly, the establishment amongst the Abipones,
known as La Concepcion. In all these missions the Jesuits lived in
constant peril of their lives. In reading their old chronicles one
finds the records of their obscure and half-forgotten martyrdoms, their
sufferings, and the brief record of their deaths by an arrow or a club.
In 1711 Father Cavallero, with all his following, was slain by the
savage Pinzocas. In 1717 Father Romero, having, as a Jesuit writer
says, ‘nothing but moral force behind him,’[239] was slain with twelve
companions of the Guaranís of Paraguay. In 1718 Fathers Arco and
Blende, Sylva and Maceo, received their dusted-over martyrs’ crowns.
Right up the western bank of the river Paraguay, in the old maps, the
crosses mark the sites where Jesuits were slain. That they all died to
further crafty schemes, or for some hidden purpose of a Machiavelian
nature, even a Dominican will scarcely urge. That they did good—more or
less good than Protestant fanatics of the same kidney might have
achieved—it were invidious to inquire. That which is certain is that
they were single-hearted men, faithful unto the end to what they
thought was right, faithful even to the shedding of their own blood,
which is, one may believe, the way in which the scriptural injunction
should be rightly read.
In the dim future, when some shadow of common-sense dawns on the world,
and when men recognise that it is better to let others follow their
destiny as it best pleases them, without the officious interference of
their fellows, it may be that they will say all missionaries of
whatsoever sect or congregation should have stayed at home, and not
gone gadding to the desert places of the earth seeking to remedy the
errors of their God by their exertions; but whilst the ideal still
remains of sacrifice (which may, for all I know, be useless in itself,
or even harmful), they must perforce allow the Jesuits in Paraguay high
rank, or else be stultified.
But in the Chaco the Jesuits found conditions most different from those
prevailing in their missions between the Uruguay and Paraná. Instead of
open plains, vast swamps; instead of docile semi-Arcadians like the
Guaranís, who almost worshipped them, fierce nomad horsemen, broken
into a hundred little tribes, always at war, and caring little for
religion of any sort or kind. Again, there seems in the Chaco to have
been no means of amassing any kind of wealth, as all the territory was
quite uncultivated and in a virgin state; but, still, the settlements
had existed long enough for cattle to increase.[240] Lastly, the
incursions of the barbarous tribes were a constant menace both to the
Jesuits and their neophytes. Yet in their indefatigable way the Jesuits
made considerable progress amongst the Chaco tribes, as both the
curious ‘History of the Abipones’ by Father Dobrizhoffer and the
inventories preserved by Brabo prove.[241]
Besides their seven establishments in the Gran Chaco, they had three
establishments in the north of Paraguay in the great woods which fringe
the central mountain range of the country, known as the Cordillera de
M’baracayu. These missions, called San Joaquin del Taruma, San
Estanislao, and Belen, were quite apart from all the other missions of
the Guaranís, far distant from the Chaco, and removed by an enormous
distance from those of the Order in the Moxos and amongst the
Chiquitos, forming, as it were, an oasis in the recesses of the
Tarumensian woods. These three reductions, founded respectively in
1747,[242] 1747, and 1760, were, as their dates indicate, the swansong
of the Jesuits in Paraguay. Founded as they were far from the Spanish
settlements, they were quite removed from the intrigues and
interferences of the Spanish settlers, which were the curse of the
other missions on the Paraná. The Tobatines Indians[243] were of a
different class to the Guaranís, though possibly of the same stock
originally. Not having come in contact until recent years with the
Spaniards, and having had two fierce and prolonged wars with the
nearest settlements, they had remained more in their primitive
condition than any of the Indians with whom the Jesuits had come in
contact in Paraguay. During the short period of Jesuit rule amongst
them (1746-1767) things seem to have gone on in a half-Arcadian way. In
San Joaquin, Dobrizhoffer, as he says himself, devoted eight years of
unregretted labour to the Indians. Most certainly he was one of the
Jesuits who understood the Indians best, and his descriptions of them
and their life are among the most delightful which have been preserved.
He tells of the romantic but fruitless search during eighteen months
throughout the forests of the Taruma by Fathers Yegros, Escandon,
Villagarcia, and Rodriguez, for the Itatines who had left the reduction
of Nuestra Señora de Santa Fe, and had hidden in the woods.
Then, commenting upon the strangeness of all affairs sublunary, he
relates that accident at length effected what labour could not do. In
1746 Father Sebastian de Yegros, after a search of forty days, came on
the Indians—as it were, directed by Providence, or, as we now say,
accident. He built a town for them, and, as Dobrizhoffer says,
‘assembled them in Christian polity.’ To the new-founded village cattle
of every kind were sent, with clothes—useful, of course, to those who
had never worn them—axes, and furniture, and lastly a few music
masters,[244] without whose help those who build cities spend their
toil in vain.
To the new town (in which the simple-hearted priest remained eight
years), in 1753, came Don Carlos Morphi, an Irishman, and Governor of
Paraguay; and, having stayed five days with Dobrizhoffer, departed,
marvelling at the accuracy with which the new-made Christians
(_Cristianos nuevos_) managed their double-basses, their flageolets,
their violins, and, in general, all their instruments, whether of music
or of war.
Modestly, but with prolixity, as befits a virtuous, God-fearing man,
the simple Jesuit relates a special instance of the way in which he was
enabled to work both for his own glory and for the profit of the Lord.
Not far from San Estanislao was situate the forest of M’baevera, in
which grew quantities of trees from which the _yerba-maté_ (Paraguayan
tea) was made. To reach it was a work of pain and trouble, for through
the woods a track called a _picada_ had to be cut; the rivers were
deep, bridgeless, and had to have branches strewed along the track to
give a footing to the struggling mules.[245]
An expedition having been sent under a certain Spaniard called Villalba
to collect _yerba_, came suddenly upon a deserted Indian hut. As they
had started quite unarmed, except with knives and axes to cut down the
boughs, a panic seized them, and, instead of collecting any
leaves,[246] they hurried back to San Estanislao. No sooner did
Dobrizhoffer hear the news than he set out to find the Indians, with a
few neophytes, upon his own account. Having travelled the ‘mournful
solitudes’ for eighteen days, they came upon no sign of Indians, and
returned footsore and hungry, ‘the improvement of our patience being
our sole recompense.’
He himself walked all the way, and ‘often barefoot’, suffering ‘what
neither I can describe nor yet my reader credit.’ The missionary
calling has undergone considerable change since 1750. Hardships which
the greater faith or stronger constitutions of the missionaries of the
last century rendered endurable are now largely fallen out of fashion,
and your missionary seldom walks barefoot, even in a wood, because to
do so would give offence, and bring discredit on the society for which
he works.
Though unsuccessful in his search that year, Dobrizhoffer, not daunted
by his barefoot marching, set out again upon the Gospel trail next
spring. After another journey of some twenty days, during the whole
course of which it rained incessantly, he came on a community of
seemingly quite happy sylvans, whom he proceeded to convert. In the
first hut he met with there were eight doors, and in it dwelt some
sixty Indians—a palm-built, grass-thatched phalanstery, with hammocks
slung from the rude beams, in which ‘these heathen’ used to sleep. Each
separate family had its own fire, on the hearth of which stood mugs and
gourds and pots of rudely-fashioned earthenware. Naked and not ashamed
‘these savages’, and the men wore upon their heads high crowns of
parrot feathers. For arms they carried bows and arrows, and the first
man Dobrizhoffer saw was holding a dead pheasant in one hand, and in
the other a short bow. In the woods around the phalanstery was an
‘amazing’ quantity of maize, of fruits of divers sorts, and of tobacco.
From the hives which the wild bees make in hollow trees, they collected
honey in large quantities, which served them (at least so Dobrizhoffer
says) for meat and drink alike.
Their name for the god they worshipped was Tupá, but ‘of that God and
his commandments they care to know but little.’ This sounds ambiguous,
and would appear at first sight as if the confidence betwixt the
creators and their God had been but slight. Perhaps the ambiguity may
be set down to the translator[247] who turned the Latin in which the
memoirs first were formed into the vulgar tongue.
A thing remarkable enough when one considers how prone mankind is to
act differently was that, although the Itatines knew an evil spirit
under the name of Aná, yet they paid little adoration to him,
apparently content to know as little of him and his laws as they did of
their God.
Those hapless, harmless folk, as innocent of God and devil, right and
wrong, and all the other things which by all rights they should have
known, as they are said to be implanted in the mind of man, no matter
what his state, seem to have lived quite happily in their involuntary
sin.[248] But Dobrizhoffer, in his simple faith and zeal for what he
thought was right, wept bitter tears when he thought upon their
unregenerate state.
A sycophantic Guaraní from the reductions then took up his parable, and
said: ‘God save ye, brothers; we are come to visit you as friends. This
father-priest is God’s own minister, and comes to visit you, and pray
for your estate.’ An aged Indian interrupted him, saying he did not
want a father-priest, and that St. Thomas in the past had prayed
sufficiently, as fruits of every sort abounded in the land. The Indian,
in his unsophisticated way, seems to have thought the presence of a
priest acted but as manure on the ground where he abode; but the
Jesuit, almost as simple-minded as himself, took it in kindliness, and
journeyed with the Indian to a large village about three days away.
Arrived there, all the inhabitants of the place sat in a circle round
the missionary. They appeared (he says) in so much modesty and silence
‘that I seemed to behold statues, and not live Indians.’ To awaken
their attention he played upon the viol d’amore, and, having thus
captured their ears, began to preach to them. The good priest probably
believed all that he said, for, after dwelling on the perils of the
road, he said: ‘My friends, my errand is to make you happy.’ It did not
seem to him that their free life in woods, in which abounded maize,
fruits, and tobacco, with game of every kind, could possibly have
induced content. Content, as Christians know, comes but with faith, and
a true knowledge of the dogma is above liberty. Kindly, but
muddle-headedly, he deplored their lot, their want of clothes, their
want of interest in their God, their lack of knowledge of that God’s
commands. Then, coming to the point, he spoke of hell, and told the
astonished Indians that it was quite impossible for them to avoid its
flames, unless, taught by a priest, they came to know God’s law. He
then briefly (as he says) explained the mysteries of our faith. They
listened rapt, except that ‘the boys laughed a little’ when he spoke of
hell.[249] Nothing more painful than to see a child laughing
unconscious of its peril in the traffic of a crowded street, and we may
well believe that the kind-hearted Dobrizhoffer shuddered at the
laughter of these children when he reflected that had he taken the
wrong path, crossing the marshes or in the woods, the laughers had been
damned. Much more he said to them after exhausting hell, and, to ‘add
weight’ to his oration, presented each of them with scissors, knives,
glass beads, axes, small looking-glasses, and fishing-hooks, for he
knew well that sermons which end in ‘give me’ have but a small effect.
He says himself quite frankly, ‘I seemed to have borne down all before
me because I had mingled my oration with a copious largess.’[250] Glass
beads and looking-glasses have from the time when the first Christian
missionary preached to the Indians been potent factors in conversion,
and still to-day do yeoman service in the great work of bringing souls
to God.
Seated around the fire ‘smoking tobacco through a reed’, and pondering
perchance over the mysteries of the new expounded faith, the _cacique_
of the Itatines took up his parable.
‘I have’ (said he) ‘conceived an affection for the father-priest, and
hope to enjoy his company throughout my life. My daughter is the
prettiest girl in the whole world, and I am now resolved to give her to
the father-priest, that he may always stay with me, and with my family,
here in the woods.’
The Indians from the missions broke into laughter, after the fashion of
all those who, knowing but a little, think that they are wise. The
_cacique_, who knew nothing, was astounded that any man, no matter what
his calling, could live without a wife, and asked the Jesuit if the
strange thing was true. His doubts being satisfied, they fell
discoursing on the nature of the Deity, a subject not easy of
exhaustion, and difficult to treat of through the medium of an
interpreter. ‘We know’ (the _cacique_ said) ‘that there is someone who
dwells in heaven.’ This vagueness put the missionary upon his mettle,
and he set out at once to expatiate upon the attributes of God. They
seemed to please the _cacique_, who inquired, ‘What is it that
displeases, then, the dweller in the skies?’
Lies, calumnies, adulteries, thefts, all were enumerated, and received
the Indian’s assent; but the injunction not to kill provoked a
bystander to ask if it was not permitted to a man to slay those who
attacked his life. He added, ‘I have endeavoured so to do since the
first day I carried arms.’
‘Fanatical casuist’ is a stout argument in the mouth of a man nurtured
upon Suarez and Molina, but no doubt it did good service, and
Dobrizhoffer uses it when speaking of the chief. But Dobrizhoffer did
better work than mere theological disputation, for he prevailed upon
eighteen of the Indians to accompany him to the settlement of San
Joaquin; and after having ‘for some months tried the constancy’ of a
youth called Arapotiyu, he admitted him to the sacrament of baptism,
and ‘not long afterwards united him in marriage according to the
Christian rites.’ It is evident that baptism should precede marriage;
but it is an open question as to the duration of the interval between
the two ceremonies, and we may be permitted to wonder whether, after
all, both might not be advantageously dispensed at the same time. In
the case of Arapotiyu the system worked satisfactorily, for he
‘surpassed in every kind of virtue, and might have been taken for an
old disciple of Christianity.’ Even ‘old Christians’ occasionally,
despite their more laborious induction into the rites and customs of
their faith, have fallen from grace, perhaps from the undue
prolongation of the term between the ceremonies.
In the case of another youth (one Gato) things did not go so smoothly,
for though he, too, by his conduct obtained both baptism and Christian
wedlock, Dobrizhoffer adds without comment, ‘not many months after he
died of a slow disease.’[251] The slow disease was not improbably the
nostalgia of the woods, from which the efforts of the good missionary
had so successfully withdrawn him.
The labours of the Jesuits in the three isolated missions in the north
of Paraguay[252] seem to have been as successful as those in the Chaco
were unfortunate. In dealing with the wild equestrian tribes of the
Gran Chaco, the system of the Jesuits was not so likely to achieve
success as amongst the peaceful Guaranís. That of the Spanish settlers
was entirely ineffectual, and has remained so down to the present day,
when still the shattered remnants of the Lules, Lenguas, Mocobios, and
the rest, roam on their horses or in their canoes about the Chaco and
its rivers, having received no other benefits from contact with the
European races but gunpowder and gin.