The Spanish and Portuguese attempt to force new laws on the Indians—The
Indians revolt against them—The hopeless struggle goes on for eight
years—Ruin of the missions
The missions in the Chaco and the Taruma, all founded between 1700 and
1760, the last (Belen) but seven years before the expulsion of the
Jesuits from America, go far towards disproving the allegations of some
writers,[253] that the apostolic energy of the first foundations had
decayed, and that the Jesuits were merely living on the good name of
the first founders in the beginning of the past century. But let the
zeal of any class of men be what it may, if they oppose themselves to
slavery and at the same time are reported to have lands in which is
gold, and resolutely exclude adventurers from them, their doom is
sealed. Both crimes were set down to the Jesuits. Writing in 1784, or
twenty years after the expulsion of his order, Dobrizhoffer refers to
the Indians of the reductions as ‘being in subjection[254] only to the
Catholic King and the royal Governors, not in dreaded slavery amongst
private Spaniards as the other Indians;’ and Montoya, Lozano, and Del
Techo, writing in earlier times, all confirm the statement, which is
also doubly confirmed by the various royal edicts on the subject.[255]
The reports of gold-mines, too, had never ceased, although they had
been repeatedly disproved, and those, together with the stand for
freedom for the Indians, led to the events which finally brought about
the expulsion of the Order from the territories where they had worked
so long.
In 1740, Gomez de Andrade, Governor for the King of Portugal in Rio de
Janeiro, being one of those who was convinced that the reason why the
Jesuits guarded their territories so religiously was that they had
mines, bethought him of a plan. His plan, like most of those conceived
on the fantastic reasons which are called ‘of State’, took no account
of sentiment, and therefore, as mankind are and will ever be a thousand
times more influenced by sentiment than by hard reasoning, was from the
first bound of itself to fail.
The colony of Sacramento upon the river Plate had for a hundred years
been the source of conflict between the Spaniards and the
Portuguese.[256] Situated as it was almost in front of Buenos Ayres, it
served as a depot for smugglers; and, moreover, being fortified,
menaced the navigation both of the Paraná and Paraguay. Slavers from
England, Holland, and the German ports crowded the harbour. Arms of all
kinds were stored there, and were distributed to all adventurers who
meditated assaults against the crown of Spain. Twice or three times it
had been taken and restored, the Indians of the missions always
rendering most efficient help. At the time of which I write (1740) it
had passed again by treaty under the dominion of the Portuguese, but
still remained a standing menace to the Spaniards. Gomez Andrade
advised the court of Lisbon to exchange it against the seven
reductions[257] of the Uruguay, and thus at once to secure a country
rich in gold and to adjust the frontier at the river Uruguay. Nothing
appears so simple to a statesman as to exchange one piece of territory
for another. A parchment signed after some international negotiations,
and the whole thing is done. If, though, as happened in this case, one
of the territories contains a population such as that which inhabited
the seven towns upon the Uruguay, and which has conquered the country
in which it lives from virgin forest, and defended it against all
comers, it sometimes happens that the unreasonable inhabitants, by
clinging to their homes, defeat the statesmen’s plans. Yet statesmen,
once embarked in any plan, do not stick at such trifles as the
affection of a people for its home, but quietly pursue their path,
knowing that that which is conceived by ministers of State must in the
end be beneficial to mankind. Without this patriotic abnegation of
their feelings, no statesmen would be worthy of the name. Indifference
to the feelings of others is perhaps the greatest proof a public man
can give of his attachment to the State. After negotiations, lasting
many years, in 1750 a treaty was signed between Portugal and Spain
agreeing that the former should give up the Colonia del Sacramento to
the Spaniards in exchange for the seven Jesuit towns upon the Uruguay,
and that both nations should furnish a commission to fix the frontiers
of the two nations on the Uruguay.[258] On February 15, 1750, the
Spanish court sent to the Jesuits of the seven towns to prepare their
Indians to leave their homes and march into the forests, and there
found new towns.
At that date François Retz was General of the Jesuits, and on him
devolved the duty of communicating the orders of the courts of Spain
and Portugal to the Jesuits in the missions of the Uruguay. Father
Bernard Neyderdorffer was the man on whom the Provincial of Paraguay
(Father Barreda) imposed the task of communicating to the Indians the
wishes of the two courts. Though he had lived already thirty-five years
in the missions, and knew the Indians well, and was respected by them
as a father, he seems at first to have shrunk from such a task. When
the news was brought to the towns upon the Uruguay, none of the Indians
at first would credit it. The _caciques_ (chiefs) of the seven towns
declared that they would rather die than leave their native place.
Nothing was heard but lamentations and expressions of hatred of the
Portuguese, mingled with denunciations of the Jesuits themselves, who
the poor Indians not unnaturally believed were in league with Spain to
sell them to the Portuguese. But in a little the clamours turned to
action, and, not content with refusing to obey the edict of the two
courts, the Indians broke into revolt. Two most important narratives of
this revolt exist, one by Father Cardiel and one by Father Ennis, both
of whom were witnesses of the events. After considerable negotiations,
which lasted till 1753,[259] the united troops of Portugal and Spain
advanced into the mission territory to arrange the occupation of the
ceded towns. The commissioners of the two nations were, for Spain, the
Marques de Valdelirios, and for Portugal General Gomez Freyre de
Andrade, and both of them appear to have come to America already
prejudiced against the Jesuits. On March 24, 1753, Andrade wrote to
Valdelirios, almost before he could have heard anything definite about
the mission territory, to which they both were strangers, telling him
that opposition was to be expected, and that the Jesuits were urging
the Indians to revolt.[260] The opposition that the two commissioners
so confidently hoped to find,[261] and which contemporary writers have
set forth in its true colours as but the revolt of ignorant Indians
rendered desperate by being arbitrarily dispossessed of lands which
they themselves had settled and held for almost a hundred years, was
fraught with serious consequences, not only to the Jesuits in Paraguay,
but to the Order throughout the world at large. For years their enemies
had said the Jesuits were endeavouring to set up in the missions a
State quite independent of the Spanish crown. By their own conduct the
Jesuits to some extent had given colour to the report, for by excluding
(in the interest of the Indians) all Spaniards from the mission
territories, it looked as if they were at work at something which they
wished to keep a secret, as no one at that time deemed it a serious
plea to enter into any line of conduct for the good of Indians, whom in
general the Spanish settlers looked upon as beasts. That it was the
best policy they could have possibly pursued under the circumstances is
proved abundantly by the code of instructions laid down by Don
Francisco Bucareli, the Viceroy of Buenos Ayres, under whose auspices
the expulsion of the Jesuits in 1760 was carried out. In that code
occurs the following article:[262] ‘You will not allow any strangers,
of whatever estate, quality, or condition they may be, to reside in the
town (that is, of the missions), even if they be artisans,[263] and
much less that they deal or take contracts in them either for
themselves or for others, and you shall take especial care that the
Laws of the Indies be executed, and specially those which are contained
in Article 27 of Book IX.;[264] and also if any Portuguese deserters or
other persons of whatever conditions should come to the towns, you will
instantly conduct them to this city, taking every precaution to prevent
their escape.’
Still, though their policy was pursued, it did not stop the opponents
of the Jesuits from denouncing that very policy, both at the cession of
the seven towns and at the expulsion of the Order from America. The
commissioners, after innumerable delays, having found themselves in
1753 at Santa Tecla, a village near the Uruguay, it becomes necessary
to cast a glance at what the Jesuits themselves were doing, and how
they tried to do their duty as they saw it both to their Sovereign,
their Order, and the Indians over whom they ruled. It seems as if,
whilst the superiors of the Order recognised at once the futility of
striving against Portugal and Spain, some of the inferior members
secretly set on the Indians to armed resistance to the impolitic
decree. The council of the province (Paraguay)[265] assembled at the
Jesuit college in Cordoba, composed of Fathers Masala, Horos,
Caballero, Lopez, and Lozano, sent a memorial[266] both to the Viceroy
of Peru and to the High Court of Charcas. In the memorial they first
set forth their loyalty, and then exposed the deceit to which the
ministers of Spain and Portugal had been subjected by their advisers in
America. They pointed out most justly that the treaty was damaging to
both the countries concerned,[267] and that in regard to the Indians of
the seven towns peculiarly unjust. Both at Charcas and at Lima their
memorial (though diffuse) was favourably received, and a copy remitted
to the King and Council at Madrid. Ibañez, in his ‘Republica
Jesuitica’, qualifies the action of the Jesuits in this matter as a
‘great crime’. Dean Funes only sees duplicity of language, but seems to
excuse it in the circumstances in which the Jesuits were placed.
Certainly, after efforts extending over almost two hundred years, it
was hard on them to see seven of their most flourishing missions
arbitrarily broken up, the Indians driven from their homes, and their
territory occupied by those very Portuguese who for a hundred years had
been their persecutors. There was much to say in extenuation, even for
‘duplicity of language’, when one remembers that the Jesuits alone (no
matter how mistaken their views of treatment may seem to modern eyes)
stood out against the assumption that the Indians were a mere flock of
sheep, who might be driven from their homes on any pretext, or at the
exigencies of ministers at courts who lived ten thousand miles away,
and were completely ignorant of the local circumstances. Whether the
memorial influenced the court of Spain is hard to say; but it is
certain that when, in 1752, the Marques de Valdelirios arrived in
Buenos Ayres, with him came as a commissioner to fix the boundary
between the two nations of the Uruguay Father Luis de Altamirano,
accompanied by his secretary, Rafael de Cordoba, both members of the
Order, and that the Marquis took up his lodging in the college of the
Jesuits. There papers and memorials rained on him: one came from the
Bishop of Tucuman, and one from Don Jaime de San Just, the Governor of
Paraguay, with many others from people of inferior note, all in the
interest of the Company. It appears as if Valdelirios thought that
these memorials were inspired, for his first action was to publish to
the priests of the seven towns the wishes of his government as to
evacuation by the Indians of the territory. This he did through the
prefect of the missions, who seems to have acted in good faith in his
endeavours to carry out the wishes of the Spanish court. Just at that
moment Barreda, the Provincial of Paraguay, arrived in Buenos Ayres,
and Valdelirios asked him his opinion as to the measures best
calculated to insure the treaty being quietly carried out. Barreda,
though all his interests were against the execution of the treaty,
seems to have acted in good faith. He gave the sensible advice that, as
the treaty had been made entirely without taking into consideration the
difficulties of carrying it out, it could not be held a crime to ask
the King for some delay.[268] He advised consulting three ex-Governors
of Paraguay, who happened to be in Buenos Ayres,[269] and, lastly, that
all hurry, or anything likely to excite the Indians, should be avoided;
for it was possible that they, relying on their numbers and local
knowledge, might be able to give much trouble even to the joint forces
of both crowns. He laid before Valdelirios the condition of the
reductions, telling him that they were fertile and well
cultivated,[270] and that this of itself would incline the Indians
against migrating from their lands. Lastly, he said it was the opinion
of the most experienced of the priests that the Indians would yield
neither to arguments nor reason, for the hatred of the Portuguese had
put them quite beside themselves with fury at the idea of giving up
their lands. Valdelirios must have found himself not in too comfortable
a state. Lodged as he was in the college of the Jesuits, he must have
felt that most of the advice which was so freely tendered him was
biassed, and to relieve his mind he called a council, at which the
Provincial Barreda, Juan Escadon, his secretary, Altamirano, and Rafael
de Cordoba appeared. The council recommended prudence, and, as the
majority were Jesuits, pushed their prudence even beyond Lowland Scotch
or north of Ireland limits, for they proposed to institute a commission
which, after three years’ investigation, should report at Buenos Ayres
on what it had found out. Commissions, royal or otherwise, have always
been a trump-card in the hands of governments, since peddling
democracy, with show of noses and the like, came in and put an end to
those good old methods which are as dear to-day to rulers’ hearts as
they have ever been since the beginning of the world, and will be
whilst election, battle, fitness, talents, wealth, unfitness, or any
other cause, gives power into the hands of anyone to rule.
Valdelirios, who was not a fool, saw their design, and instantly
despatched Altamirano (1752) to Castillos to meet Freire de Andrade and
the Portuguese, and set about drawing the new frontier line at once.
Altamirano, though a Jesuit, appears (at first at any rate) to have
been anxious that the treaty should be carried out. In 1752 (September
22) he wrote[271] from the reduction of San Borja to P. Mathias
Stroner,[272] ordering all the Jesuits to assist in carrying out the
evacuation of the seven towns. By his advice Freire de Andrade and
Valdelirios met at Castillos, and, after having laid off some twenty
leagues of boundary line, returned respectively to the Colonia and to
Buenos Ayres.
But in the missions things were in a state bordering on revolution.
When the letter from the prefect of the missions reached San Miguel,
the Indians assembled outside the church,[273] and having learned the
situation of the lands to which they were to move, their fury knew no
bounds. They all refused to stir, saying they had inherited their lands
from their forefathers and by the grace of God.[274] Their example was
at once followed by three more of the towns, and virtually a state of
absolute defiance to the orders of the Spanish crown ensued.
Just at this moment Altamirano, the commissary, arrived, and found the
state of things most serious.[275] The commissary Altamirano set to
work at once to place before the Jesuits of the seven towns the danger
they exposed themselves to if they refused to help him to carry out the
orders of the crown. Almost immediately on his arrival he wrote[276] to
Don José de Caruajal y Lancastre to send more troops, and to the
various priests[277] to destroy their powder, and cease to manufacture
any more.[278] It is most likely that, if Altamirano had no secret
understanding with his brother Jesuits, his letters must have
considerably amazed them, and certainly they gave offence to the
Indians, who declared he could not be a Jesuit at all. Six hundred
Indians, under a chief called Sepe Tyaragu, marched upon Santo Thomé,
where Altamirano had taken up his residence, with the avowed purpose of
discussing whether he was a Jesuit or not, and, if the latter
supposition proved correct, of throwing him into the river
Uruguay;[279] but Altamirano did not wait their coming, and returned
precipitately to Buenos Ayres. The commission which had set out to mark
the limits between the countries,[280] buried in the woods, or marching
along the river, was absolutely unaware of what was going on amongst
the Indians till they arrived in Santa Tecla on February 26, 1753. The
first notice that they had of it was when they found themselves
surrounded by a strong force of Indians. One of the commissaries, Don
Juan de Echevarria, is known to have left a curious account of the
proceedings, from which Dean Funes, Ibañez, and most of the writers on
the subject must have copied.[281]
Historians, like lawyers in conveyancing, catch errors one from
another, and transmit them as truths or titles to posterity. Certain it
is that Echevarria sent for the nearest Jesuit priest to mediate, and
he luckily, or unluckily, proved to be that Father Thadeus Ennis, who
played so prominent a part in the futile rising which the enemies of
the Jesuits have chosen to dignify with the high-sounding title of the
‘Jesuit War’.
If Father Ennis really thought the Indians could hold head to both the
Spaniards and the Portuguese, or if he thought that the rising would
draw attention to the injustice of the treaty, is difficult to say.
Whether, indeed, he headed it himself, or if he merely accompanied the
Indians as their spiritual guide, giving them now and then the benefit
of his advice on matters temporal, after the fashion of the ambitious
churchman of all time,[282] is now unknown. Whatever his opinions were
upon this matter, Father Ennis showed himself almost from the first
irreconcilable. He refused to meet the commissioners, and in his place
sent a _cacique_ (chief) of the Indians, one Sepe Tyaragu, an official
of the reduction of San Miguel. This chief, seeing the escort of the
commission was but small, ‘put on his boots’,[283] and took high
ground, daring to talk about the rights of man, of the love of country,
and said that liberty consisted in being allowed to enjoy his property
in peace, sentiments which, though admirable enough in a white man’s
mouth, for men of colour are but fit for copy-books.
The _cacique_ firmly refused to vacate his lands, and said the King of
Spain, as he lived far away, could not have understood the bearing of
affairs in Paraguay. Such arguments as these, together with the perhaps
offensive tone of the _cacique_, had such effect on the commissioners
that, after having threatened him with vengeance, which at the time
they had no power to carry out, they both withdrew out of the
territory.
As Funes[284] well observes, the Spaniards had established themselves
in these parts (the River Plate and Paraguay) to obtain a limitless
submission from the Indians. Any resistance drove them to fury, and
excited them to take revenge. As all the Indians’ crime was their
unwillingness to quit the lands on which they had been born, it seemed
a little hard to slaughter them, even before their petition to the King
had been refused. Most probably all had been prepared before, for
Valdelirios at once issued an order, which he had the power to do under
a sealed letter from the King, to the Governor of Buenos Ayres,
Andonaegui, to prepare for war. Active hostilities broke out in 1754,
and Father Ennis has preserved a day-by-day account, written in
priestly Latin,[285] of what took place. After some skirmishes, which
at the first were favourable to the Indians, who took great courage
from them,[286] the first encounter of a serious nature occurred on
February 24, 1754. Quite naturally, the victory was on the side of the
best-armed battalions, and the Indians lost many of their best men, and
their largest piece of ordnance.[287]
With varying success the war dragged on for several years, after the
style of the Gaucho warfare in the River Plate which was common twenty
years ago, or that in Venezuela which obtains to-day. Alternately each
party carried off the other’s horses, drove each other’s cattle, or, if
they caught a straggler, tied his hands and cut his throat or lanced
him, the party who had lost the man protesting he was ‘massacred’—a
term in use even to-day when the party to which one’s self belongs
sustains reverse. For the first two years—for wars in South America
till twenty years ago were to the full as interminable as that of
Troy—Father Thadeus Ennis kept his journal, faithfully chronicling all
that he saw. Occasionally in a perfunctory way he says his mission with
the revolted Indians was as a priest and physician to the souls and
bodies of his flock; but now and then he sets down the capture of a
convoy of some thirty carts, or the cutting off some messenger carrying
despatches from the Generals. In this he sees the hand of God (put
forth to help his Jesuits[288]), although he now and then complains the
Indians were remiss in following up any success they had. After the
first encounter, the Indians seem to have employed the immemorial
guerilla tactics which so often waste all the strength of an army which
has conquered in the field. Father Cardiel[289] describes the Indian
army, quoting from the writing of a Spanish officer who served against
them, as quite contemptible. Their cannon were but hollow reeds, bound
round with hide, which could only be fired two or three times, and
carried balls a pound in weight.[290] Some lances and bows and arrows
which they had appeared to him more formidable. Most of them carried
banners with the painted figure of a saint, under whose ægis they
deemed themselves secure from cannon-balls. Their trenches were but
shallow ditches, with a few deeper holes to shelter in, but which, as
Cardiel observes, served many of them for graves, as they were open to
artillery, having been constructed without ‘an ounce of military art’.
The officer adds that no sooner had the Indians heard the cannon than
they fled, leaving almost nine hundred on the field and losing
one-sixth prisoners.[291] Finally, the officer remarks with disgust
that the official chronicler of the affair ‘lies from first to
last’[292] when he declares that the Indians could make any resistance
against disciplined troops. With varying fortune the campaign dragged
on, until in 1756 the diary of Father Ennis, bad Latinity and all,
comes to an abrupt conclusion at the taking of San Lorenzo, where the
stout-hearted priest was taken prisoner. His papers fell into
unfriendly hands, and were made use of by Ibañez, with the context duly
distorted in various passages, and served as one of the most formidable
indictments against the Jesuits in the expulsion under Charles III.
Although Thadeus Ennis and other Jesuits accompanied the troops, and no
doubt aided much by their advice, the Indians had as a general one
Nicolas Ñeenguiru, styled in the Gazettes of the time the King of
Paraguay. About this man all kinds of monstrous legends soon sprang up.
One little lying book, entitled ‘Histoire de Nicolas I., Roy du
Paraguai et Empereur des Mamalus’,[293] which bears upon its title-page
‘Saint Paul’,[294] 1756, especially excels. In that brief work of but
one hundred and seventeen pages, printed on yellowish paper, and with
one of the finest little vignettes of a basket of fruit and flowers
upon its title-page that one could wish to see, a sort of parody of a
Spanish picaresque novel in duodecimo is set forth with circumstance.
Nicolas Roubioni is duly born in 1710, in a small ‘bourgade de
l’Andalousie’ bearing the name of Taratos. The name carries conviction
from the start, and pronounced à la française, with the accent equal
upon all the syllables, is quite as Spanish as the most exigent of
comic operas could possibly desire. His father, ‘ancien militaire’,
left him alone to educate himself as he best liked. Arrived at eighteen
years of age he runs away to Seville, and after several adventures in
the style of those of Rinconete and Cortadillo, seen through French
spectacles, enters the service of a lady bearing the well-known Spanish
name of Donna Maria della Cupidità. Under the unnecessary alias of
Medelino, and in the capacity of cook, he becomes the lady’s lover as
in duty bound. ‘Chassé’ from Seville by a jealous brother of his love,
he flies for refuge to a ‘bourgade’ (name not chronicled) some seven
leagues away. He then becomes a muleteer, and at Medina Sidonia kills a
man, and, forced to flee, repairs to Malaga, where he lives peacefully
ten years. Finding life dull there, he journeys to Aragon and joins the
Jesuits, and from henceforth his future is assured. After an interval
he reappears at Huesca, and at once falls in love with ‘une belle
espagnole’, Donna Victoria Fortini, whom he courts under the guise of a
gentleman of Seville, returning every night to the convent of the
Jesuits to change his clothes. So great becomes his effrontery that
under the style and title of ‘Comte de la Emmandés’, he publicly
marries ‘sa belle’, the Jesuits either consenting, or too astounded at
the fact to intervene. Things getting hot in Huesca, he embarks for
Buenos Ayres as a missionary, leaving poor Donna de la Victoria ‘dans
une inquiétude mortelle’, as she might well have been. Arrived in
Buenos Ayres just at the moment of the cession of the seven Jesuit
towns, he sees his opportunity, learns Guaraní in the brief space of
six or seven weeks, and joins the Indians. They naturally, having been
trained to look on every foreigner outside the Order of the Jesuits as
an enemy, receive him as their King. Under the title of the ‘Son of the
Sun and Star of Liberty’ he rules them, looked on as a God. The brief
mendacious chronicle leaves him on the throne, just after having joined
the empire of the Mamalucos to that of Paraguay, and promising to give
the world more of his history when it comes to hand.
By stories such as those contained in the mendacious little book
imprinted at St. Paul, the easy-minded public—then, as now, always more
easily impressed with lies than with the truth—was biassed against the
Jesuits in Paraguay. Father Dobrizhoffer,[295] who knew ‘King’ Nicolas
from his youth up, has left a very different version of his history, in
which no Donna della Cupidità or de la Victoria even remotely
flourishes. Nicolas Ñeenguiru was born in the township of La
Concepcion, of which in after-life he rose to be the mayor. He married
an Indian woman, not ‘une belle Andalouse’, and Dobrizhoffer says a
friend of his, one Father Zierheim, had him whipped publicly for petty
theft when a young man. At the time (1753) when, in company with
another Indian, one José, mayor of San Miguel, he headed the Indian
revolt, he was a man of middle age, tall, taciturn and grave, and not
ill-looking, though marked across the cheek with a disfiguring scar. At
no time was he even a lay brother of the Jesuit Order, as by their
rules in Paraguay no Indians were ever taken either as lay brothers or
as priests. So little was the man feared by the authorities that, once
the Indians’ resistance was over, Nicolas went to the Spanish camp, was
quietly heard, dismissed, and then continued in his office as the mayor
of his native place. The legend sprang from a mistake in Guaraní, to
which perhaps a little malice gave its artful charm. In Guaraní the
word ‘Rubicha’ signifies a chief, whereas ‘Nfurabicha’ means king. The
two, pronounced by one but ill acquainted with the language sound
identical. Nothing was more likely than that the Indians should call
their general their chief; had they thought really of settling upon a
king, it is certain that they would have chosen one of the family of
some well-known chief, and not an Indian merely appointed mayor by the
Jesuits. But be that as it may, General Ñeenguiru, though he has left
some interesting letters, which are preserved in the archives of
Simancas, showed no capacity for generalship.[296] Throughout the
course of the campaign he endeavoured to replace his want of skill by
tricks and by intrigues, but of so futile a nature that they were
frustrated and rendered useless at once. His first endeavour was to
gain time, when he found himself with seventeen hundred men opposed to
Andonaegui, Governor of Buenos Ayres, who had an army well equipped
with guns, of about two thousand men. Ñeenguiru wrote to Andonaegui,
telling him that the Indians were ready to submit, and then, whilst
waiting for an answer, set about fortifying the position which he held.
Warned by a spy, Andonaegui attacked at once, and drove the Indians
from their trenches like a flock of sheep, taking their wooden cannon,
lances, and banners, and killing thirteen hundred of them.
A glorious victory, and, as Father Ennis says, ‘to be expected, and
which, had it chanced otherwise, must have covered the Spaniards and
the Portuguese with shame.’ In fact, a victory of the same kind as
those which since that time have been most usual when well-armed
European troops have faced half-naked, ill-armed savages, but which, of
course, reflect no credit on the victor, or, at best, just as much
credit as a butcher rightfully receives when he defeats a calf.
But even after the victory over the Indians of Nicolas Ñeenguiru the
troubles of the allies were not quite at an end. The usual dissensions
between allies who mutually detest each other soon broke out, and Gomez
Freire, the General of the Portuguese, only prevented a collision with
the Spaniards by considerable tact. After a short campaign of a few
months, the allies entered the rebellious towns and took possession of
them all, with the exception of San Lorenzo, which continued to hold
out. A month or two served to reduce it, too, and the whole territory
of the seven towns submitted to the power of the joint forces of
Portugal and Spain. The struggle over, Ñeenguiru was quietly again
reinstated mayor of Concepcion, the bruised wooden cannon duly set up
as monuments, the dead left on the plains and the _esteros_ for the
chimangos[297] and the caranchos[298] to gorge upon, and, law’s due
majesty once more vindicated, the conquerors set about, in 1757, to
trace the limits between the territories of the two Christian Kings.
Most of the seven towns were half deserted, the Indians having fled for
refuge to the woods,[299] and the commission set to work upon its
labours in a desert which it itself had made. Out of the fourteen
thousand Indians who had inhabited the seven flourishing towns upon the
Uruguay but few remained; yet still the work of pacification and
working at the boundary went on slowly, for from 1753 to 1759 nothing
of consequence was done. In 1760 Ferdinand VI. died, and his son
Charles III. succeeded him, and still the boundary commission worked on
hopelessly in Paraguay. The Jesuits, who had worked unceasingly during
the last eight years to annul the treaty handing the seven missions
over to the Portuguese, at length, in 1761, obtained from Charles III.
a treaty annulling all that had been done, and providing that the seven
towns should remain part of the dominions of the Spanish crown.
They triumphed; but their triumph added another step towards their
ruin, for the jealousy which they evoked by their persistent fight
raised up much animosity towards themselves in Spain. How great a share
they had in the resistance of the Indians cannot be known with
certainty. Papers preserved in the archives of Simancas charge them
with stirring up the Indians to resist;[300] but they are chiefly from
Valdelirios and others, who, naturally finding resistance, put it down
at once to the Jesuits, whom then, as now, it was the fashion to abuse.
The Indians themselves seem to have been perplexed, no doubt encouraged
by their priests on one hand, and on the other seeing the commissary
Altamirano, himself a Jesuit, calling upon them to submit. In a
pathetic letter written to the Governor of Buenos Ayres, and dated ‘en
la estancia de San Luis, Feb. 28 de 1756’, Primo Ibarrenda, of San
Miguel, says:[301] ‘This our writing I send to you that you may tell us
finally what is to be our lot, and that you take a resolution what it
is that you shall do. You see how that last year the father
commissary[302] came to this our land to bother us to leave it: to
leave our towns and all our territories, saying it was the will of our
lord the King: besides this you yourself sent us a rigorous letter
telling us to burn our towns, destroy the fields, even pull down our
church, which is so beautiful (_tan lindo_), and saying also that you
would kill us. You also say, and therefore we ask you if it is the
truth, for if it is, we will all die before the Holy Sacrament; but
spare the church, for it is God’s, and even the infidels would not do
it any harm.’ They go on to say they have always been obedient subjects
of the King, and that it is impossible that his wish could be to injure
them—in fact, the letter of innocent men, half civilized, and thinking
justice, mercy, and right-doing were to be found with Governors and
Kings. Had many of the Jesuits chosen to take the field, their
knowledge of the country and the vast influence that they had upon the
Indians would have made the campaign perilous enough even for the
united military power of Portugal and Spain. As it was, the miserable
war dragged on for eight long years, and for result ruined seven
missions where before the Indians lived happily. Then, when the fields
were desolate, the villages deserted, and the Indian population half
dispersed, statesmen in Spain and Portugal saw fit to change their
minds, to annul the treaty, and to pass a diplomatic sponge over the
ruin and the misery they had caused.