Book: A Vanished Arcadia,

C >> Cunninghame Graham >> A Vanished Arcadia,




The armies met not far from Luque, in a little plain known
as the Campo Grande. An open plain with sandy soil, which gave the horses
a good footing, with several little stagnant pools in the centre
where the wounded men could drink and wash their wounds,
with a most convenient forest on all sides for the deserters and the cowards
to hide in, made a good battlefield. The village of Luque,
grouped round its church, and with a little plaza in the middle
in which sat Paraguayan women selling mandioca, chipa,*1* and rapadura,*2*
with sacks of maize and of mani,*3* stood on the summit of a little hill.
Upon the plain the earth is red, and looks as if a battle
had been fought upon it and much blood spilt. In all directions
run little paths, worn deep by the feet of mules and horses,
and in which the rider has to lift his feet as if he were going
through a stream. To Asuncion there leads one of the deep-sunk roads
planted with orange and paraiso*4* trees, constructed thus
(as Barco de la Centenera tells us in his `Argentina') so as to be defensible
against the Indians after the country was first conquered by the Spaniards.

--
*1* Chipa is a kind of bread made of mandioca flour.
*2* Rapadura is a kind of coarse sugar, generally sold
in little pyramid-shaped lumps, done up in a banana leaf.
It is strongly flavoured with lye.
*3* Mani is ground-nut. ["Peanut" in American English. -- A. L., 1998.]
*4* The paraiso is one of the Paulinias.
--

On the Bishop's side hardly a soldier but thought himself an emissary of God,
or doubted of the victory for a moment in his heart. Angels themselves
had promised victory to their leader, who, to make all things safe,
had issued a proclamation punishing surrender with the pain of death;
so they stood quietly in array of battle waiting to be attacked.

Upon his side, Don Sebastian Leon, seeing the attitude of the enemy,
immediately ordered an advance, and charged himself, with all his cavalry,
upon the Bishop's men. They, with the firmness that fanatics so often show,
stood firmly in their ranks, thinking themselves invulnerable.
Their valour proved but momentary, for at the second charge
they broke their ranks and fled. Flight turned to rout,
and Don Sebastian having commanded that they should not be pursued,
they still fled on, no man pursuing them.

The Governor then entered the capital without resistance.
On the plaza he stopped, and having gathered up the wounded
without respect of party, he sent them to the hospital.
Then, having seen to the safety of the town, he rode to the Cathedral
to give thanks to God for having preserved him from the dangers of the fight.
Dressed in his robes and seated on his throne was Cardenas. Don Sebastian
entered the church, dismounted, and kissed his hand respectfully,
like a true Spaniard, and asked him ceremoniously to deign to give him
the baton of the civil power. Cardenas answered not a word,
but handed him the baton, and then retired, accompanied by all his priests.

The victory did not terminate the work of Don Sebastian.
After a reasonable interval, and before witnesses, he cited the Bishop
to appear before the court of Charcas. The Bishop promised to obey,
thinking he had another Don Gregorio Hinostrosa to deal with,
but quite determined never to comply, acting according to
the custom of Governors in South America, who, when an order
reached them from Madrid, either absurd or quite impossible to execute,
solemnly answered, `I obey, but I do not comply,'* saving by the phrase
the honour of their sovereigns and themselves. Upon their side
the Jesuits pressed the judge conservator, Father Nolasco,
to issue his sentence, and free them from the charges under which they lay.
This he did, and gave as his opinion they were quite innocent of all
that Cardenas had laid to their account.

--
* `Obedesco, pero no cumplo.'
--

As in a palace,* things go slow in Spain, and it was not till 1654
that a royal decision confirmed the judgment of Nolasco, and freed the Jesuits
from all the charges raised against them.

--
* `Cosas de palacio van despacio.'
--

Order restored, Cardenas deprived of his usurped authority,
and the Jesuits reinstated, the temporary commission of Sebastian Leon
was at an end. Therefore he retired again to plant his mandioca
under his own guayaba-tree. Yet feeling ran so high that he was hardly safe
from the vengeance of the partisans of Cardenas, so that he found himself
once more obliged to summon the militia of the province,
and lead them to a perfunctory campaign against the Payaguas.
These Indians the earlier historians of the conquest,
Barco de la Centenera and Rui Diaz de Guzman, describe as river-pirates,
almost living in canoes, and dashing out on any passing Spanish vessel
that they thought weak enough. The Jesuits Montoya and Dobrizhoffer tell us
that they went naked, painted in many colours, with a hawk's or parrot's wing
passed through the cartilage of their left ear, and that they were,
of all the Indians of Paraguay, the most indomitable. A few,
when I knew Paraguay some twenty years ago, hung round Asuncion,
squalid and miserable, passing their time in fishing in canoes,
and as attached to their own mode of life as when the first discoverers
called them `sweet-water pirates' and the `most pestilent of all the Indians
on the river Paraguay.' The Payaguas chastised, Don Sebastian,
upon one pretext or another, did not disband his troops,
keeping them always by him, and thus making the position of the Bishop
quite untenable, till by degrees his followers fell away and left him
almost deserted and his party all dissolved. Seeing the game was up,
the Bishop, after having named one Don Adrian Cornejo as his suffragan,
took his departure (1650) for Charcas to appear before the court.
For eight tumultuous years he had kept his bishopric in a perpetual turmoil,
having been the evil genius of the land.

What sort of man he really was is hard to-day to judge, for Xarque, Villalon,
Charlevoix, and Dean Funes,* who chronicle his doings, were all,
on one side or the other, partisans. The Jesuits condemn him as a spoliator,
the Franciscans hold him up as one who fought throughout his life
for the honour of the founder of their rule. Tracts, books,
and pamphlets for and against him have been written in numbers,
and in the history of the times in Paraguay his name bulks large.
One thing is certain -- that the Indians loved and revered him,
and followed him up to the end. Even in Charcas, where he lived for years
upon a pension of two thousand crowns allowed him by the King
whilst his case dragged its weary course to Rome, Madrid, back to Peru,
and then to Rome again, the Indians, when he appeared in public,
greeted him with flowers. He may have been a saint: so many men are saints,
and the world knows them not. He may have been a schemer; but he made
nothing by his schemes except the barren honour of his consecration
to the see of Paraguay. A preacher certainly he was, able and willing
to draw crowds, after the fashion of all those who have the gift of words.

--
* Dean Funes, in his `Ensayo de la Historia Civil del Paraguay,
Buenos Ayres y Tucuman' (book ii., cap. i., p. 10), says he was
`Dotado de un temperamento muy facil de inflamarse, de una imaginacion viva,
de una memoria feliz, y de un ingenio no vulgar.'
--

Headstrong and obstinate, through a long life he hated vigorously,
thinking all those who differed from him were accursed of God.
A strenuous member of the Church militant on earth, he was at least
a personality, and those who read the history of his time must reckon with,
and take sides for or against, him after the fashion of the men
with whom he passed his life, who to a man revered him as a saint,
or looked upon him as a devil sent to plague mankind.

Arrived in Charcas, he soon fell on evil times, although at first
he made some partisans. Still looking back to Paraguay, he passed his time
in drawing out petitions to the King; then, one by one, all his friends
fell from him, except some faithful Indians, who considered him a saint.
His dreams of saintship were not fulfilled, for his name never figured
in the calendar. Years did not tame nor yet did hope ever completely
leave him; for in old books I find him always protesting, ever complaining,
and still striving, till, in 1665, Philip IV. in pity made him
Bishop of Santa Cruz. A sentence from the registers of the Consistory at Rome
informs us that, as Bishop of La Paz, in his own province of the Charcas,
he left off troubling, and rested from his agitated life.




Chapter VI

Description of the mission territory and towns founded by the Jesuits --
Their endeavours to attract the Indians -- Religious feasts and processions
-- Agricultural and commercial organizations



With the death of Cardenas the most dangerous enemy the Jesuits
ever had in Paraguay had disappeared. They worsted him, and drove him
from his see; but the movement set on foot by him and the calumnies
he levelled at their Order still remained and flourished,
and in the end prevailed against them and drove them from the land.
A calumny is hard to kill; mankind in general cherish it;
they never let it die, and, if it languishes, resuscitate it
under another form; they hold to it in evil and in good repute,
so that, once fairly rooted, it goes on growing like a forest-tree
throughout the centuries. Therefore, the charges against
the Jesuits in Paraguay, which Cardenas first started,
are with us still, and warp our judgment as to the doings of the Order
in the missions of the Parana and Uruguay even until to-day.

But neither calumny nor the raids of the Paulistas, nor yet
the jealousy of the Spanish settlers in Paraguay, deterred the Jesuits
from the prosecution of their task. The missions gradually extended,
till they ranged from Santa Maria la Mayor, in Paraguay,
to San Miguel, in what is now Brazil; and from Jesus, upon the Parana,
to Yapeyu, upon the Uruguay. Most of the country, with the exception of
the missions of Jesus and Trinidad, upon the Parana, which to-day, at least,
are only clearings in the primeval forest, is composed of open rolling plains,
with wood upon the banks of all the streams. Covered as it was and is
with fine, short grass, it formed excellent cattle-breeding country,
and hence the great industry of the Indians was to look after stock.
The country being so favourable for cattle, they multiplied immoderately,
so that in the various establishments (`estancias'), according to
the inventories published by Brabo, their numbers were immense.*

--
* At the date of the expulsion the number of the cattle
was 719,761; oxen, 44,183; horses, 27,204; sheep, 138,827
(`Inventarios de los bienes hallados a/ la expulsion de los Jesuitas',
Francisco Javier Brabo, Madrid, 1872).
--

These open rolling plains, called by the natives `campos quebrantados',
are generally studded thickly with stunted palms called yatais,*1*
but not so thickly as to spoil the grass which covers them
in spring and early summer, and even in winter they remain
good feeding ground. Thick clumps of hard-wood trees*2*
break up the prairie here and there into peninsulas and islands,
and in the hollows and rocky valleys bushy palmetto rises above
a horse's knees. In general the soil is of a rich bright red, which,
gleaming through the trees, gives a peculiarly warm colour to the land.
All the French Jesuit writers refer to it as `la terre rouge des missions'.
The Jesuits used it and another earth of a yellow shade for painting
their churches and their houses in the mission territory. Its composition
is rather sandy, though after rain it makes thick mud, and renders travelling
most laborious. The flowers and shrubs of the territory
are quite as interesting and still more varied than are the trees.
Many of the Jesuits were botanists, and the works of Fathers Montenegro,*3*
Sigismund Asperger and Lozano are most curious, and give
descriptions and lists of many of the plants unclassified even to-day.
The celebrated Bonpland, so long detained by Dr. Francia in Paraguay,
unfortunately never published anything; but modern writers*4* have done much,
though still the flora of the whole country is but most imperfectly known,
and much remains to do before it is all classified. The `Croton succirubrus'
(from which a resin known as `sangre-de-drago' is extracted),
the sumaha (bombax -- the fruit of which yields a fine vegetable silk),
the erythroxylon or coca of Paraguay, the incienso or incense-tree
of the Jesuits, are some of the most remarkable of the myriad shrubs.
But if the shrubs are myriad, the flowers are past the power of man to count.
Lianas, with their yellow and red and purple clusters of blossoms,
like enormous bunches of grapes, hang from the forest-trees.
In the open glades upon the nandubays,*5* the algarrobos,
and the espinillos, hang various Orchidaceae,*6* called by the natives
`flores del aire', covering the trees with their aerial roots,
their hanging blossoms, and their foliage of tender green.
The Labiatae, Compositae, Daturae, Umbelliferae, Convolvulaceae,
and many other species, cover the ground in spring or run up trees and bushes
after the fashion of our honeysuckle and the traveller's joy.

--
*1* `Cocos yatais'.
*2* Urunday (`Astrenium fraxinifolium: Terebinthaceae'),
curapay (`Piptadenia communis: Leguminaceae'),
lapacho (`Tecoma curialis' and `varia: Begoniaceae'),
taruma (`Vitex Taruma: Verbenaceae'), tatane (`Acacia maleolens:
Leguminaceae'), and cupai (`Copaifera Langsdorfii').
These and many other woods, such as the Palo Santo
(`Guaiacum officinalis'), butacae, and the `Cedrela Braziliensis',
known to the Jesuits as `cedar', and much used by them in their churches,
comprise the chief varieties.
*3* `Libro compuesto por el Hermano Pedro de Montenegro de la C. de J.,
Ano 1711', MS. folio, with pen-and-ink sketches, formerly belonged
to the Dukes of Osuna, and was in their library. Padre Sigismundi
also wrote a herbal in Guarani, and a Portuguese Jesuit, Vasconellos,
has left a curious book upon the flora of Brazil.
*4* Domingo Parodi, in his `Notas sobre algunas plantas usuales del Paraguay'
(Buenos Ayres, 1886), has done much good work.
*5* `Acacia Cavenia'.
*6* `Prosopis dulcis'. The famous `balm of the missions',
known by the vulgar name of `curalo todo' (all-heal),
was made from the gum of the tree called aguacciba,
one of the Terebinthaceae. It was sold by the Jesuits in Europe.
It was so highly esteemed that the inhabitants of the villages
near to which the tree was found were specially enjoined
to send a certain quantity of the balsam every year
to the King's pharmacy in Madrid.
--

The lakes and backwaters of rivers are covered with
myriads of water-lilies (all lumped together by the natives as `camalote'),
whilst in the woodland pools the Victoria Regis carpets the water
with its giant leaves. In every wood the orange and the lemon
with the sweet lime have become wild, and form great thickets.
Each farm and `rancho' has its orange-grove, beneath the shade of which
I have so often camped, that the scent of orange-blossom
always brings back to me the dense primeval woods, the silent plains,
the quiet Indians, and the unnavigated waterways, in which
the alligators basked. Except the Sierra de Mbaracayu,*1*
on the north-east, throughout the mission territory there are
no mountains of considerable height; and through the middle of the country
run the rivers Parana and Uruguay, the latter forming the boundary
on the south-east. The rolling plains and woods alternate
with great marshes called `esteros', which in some districts,
as of that of Neembucu, cover large tracts of land, forming in winter
an almost impenetrable morass, and in the spring and early summer
excellent feeding-ground for sheep. Throughout the territory
the climate is healthy, except towards the woody northern hills.
With this rich territory and the false reports of mines,
which even unsuccessful exploration could not dispel, it is but natural
that the Jesuits were hated far and wide. It must have been annoying
to a society composed, as were the greater portion of the Spanish settlements
in Paraguay, of adventurers, who treated the Indians as brute beasts,*2*
to see a preserve of Indians separated from their territory
by no great barrier of Nature, and still beyond their power.*3*
Bonpland, in speaking of the country, says: `The whole of the land
exceeds description; at every step one meets with things useful and new
in natural history.' Such also was the opinion of the French travellers
Demersay and D'Orbigny; of Colonel du Graty, whose interesting work
(`La Re/publique du Paraguay', Brussels, 1862) is one of the best
on the country; the recent French explorer Bourgade la Dardye,
and of all those who have ever visited the missions of Paraguay.*4*

--
*1* It was from those mountains that the Jesuits procured
the seed of the `Ilex Paraguayensis' to plant in their reductions.
The leaves beaten into a finish powder furnished the `Paraguayan tea',
called `yerba-mate' by the Spaniards and `caa' by the Indians,
from which the Jesuits derived a handsome revenue.
After the expulsion of the Order all the `yerba' in Paraguay was procured,
till a few years ago, from forests in the north of Paraguay,
in which the tree grew wild.
*2* It was by the Bull of Paul III. -- given at the demand of two monks,
Fray Domingo de Betanzos and Fray Domingo de Minaya -- that the Indians
were first considered as reasoning men (`gente de razon'),
and not as unreasonable beings (`gente sin razon'), as Juan Ortiz,
Bishop of Santa Marta, wished.
*3* Ibanez (`Histoire du Paraguay sous les Je/suites M.D.CCIXXX.'),
a great opponent of the Jesuits, says that European offenders
and recalcitrant Indians in the missions were sent as a last resource
to the Spanish settlements. This is not astonishing when we remember
the curious letter of Don Pedro Faxardo, Bishop of Buenos Ayres
(preserved by Charlevoix), written in 1721 to the King of Spain,
in which he says he thinks `that not a mortal crime is committed
in the missions in a year.' He adds that, `if the Jesuits were so rich,
why are their colleges so poor?'
*4* It is to be remembered that, of the thirty Jesuit missions,
only eight were in Paraguay; the rest were in what to-day is Brazil
and the Argentine provinces of Entre Rios, Corrientes, and Misiones.
--

In this rich territory the Jesuits, when, after infinite trouble,
they had united a sufficient* quantity of Indians, formed them into townships,
almost all of which were built upon one plan. In Paraguay itself
only some three or four remain; but they remain so well preserved that,
by the help of contemporary accounts, it is easy to reconstruct almost exactly
what the missions must have been like during the Jesuits' rule.**

--
* Sometimes, when they had been assembled, they all deserted suddenly,
as did the Tobatines, who in 1740 suddenly left the reduction of Santa Fe,
and for eleven years were lost in the forests, till Father Yegros
found them, and, as they would not return, established himself amongst them
(Cretineau Joly, `Histoire de la Compagnie de Je/sus', vol. v., cap. ii.).
** P. Cardiel, `Declaracion de la Verdad', p. 282: `Todos los pueblos
estan bien formados con calles a/ cordel. Las casas de los Indios
son en algunos pueblos de piedras cuadradas pero sin cal
. . . otras de palos y barro todas cubiertas de teja,
y todas tienen soportales o/ corredores, unas con pilares de piedras,
otras de madera.'
--

Built round a square, the church and store-houses filled one end,
and the dwellings of the Indians, formed of sun-dried bricks or wattled canes
in three long pent-houses, completed the three sides. In general, the houses
were of enormous length, after the fashion of a St. Simonian phalanstery,
or of a `miners' row' in Lanarkshire. Each family had its own apartments,
which were but separated from the apartments of the next
by a lath-and-plaster wall, called in Spanish `tabique''
but one veranda and one roof served for a hundred or more families.
The space in the middle of the square was carpeted with the finest grass,
kept short by being pastured close by sheep. The churches,
sometimes built of stone, and sometimes of the hard woods
with which the country abounds, were beyond all description splendid,
taking into consideration the remoteness of the Jesuit towns
from the outside world. Frequently -- as, for instance,
in the mission of Los Apostoles -- the churches had three aisles,
and were adorned with lofty towers, rich altars,*1* super-altars,
and statuary, brought at great expense from Italy and Spain.
Though the churches were often built of stone, it was not usual
for the houses of the Indians to be so built; but in situations
where stone was plentiful, as at the mission of San Borja,
the houses of the Jesuits were of masonry, with verandas held up by columns,
and with staircases with balustrades of sculptured stone.*2*
The ordinary ground-plan of the priest's house was that
of the Spanish Moorish dwelling, so like in all its details to a Roman house
at Pompeii or at Herculaneum. Built round a square courtyard,
with a fountain in the middle, the Jesuits' house formed
but a portion of a sort of inner town, which was surrounded by a wall,
in which a gate, closed by a porter's lodge, communicated with
the outside world. Within the wall was situated the church
(although it had an entrance to the plaza), the rooms of the inferior priest,
a garden, a guest-chamber, stables, and a store-house, in which were kept
the arms belonging to the town, the corn, flour, and wool,
and the provisions necessary for life in a remote and often dangerous place.
In every case the houses were of one story; the furniture was modest,
and in general home-made; in every room hung images and pious pictures,
the latter often painted by the Indians themselves. In the smaller missions
two Jesuits managed all the Indians.*3*

--
*1* Don Francisco Graell, an officer of dragoons in service
during the War of the Seven Towns in 1750, gives the following description
of the church of the mission of San Miguel: `La iglesia es muy capaz,
toda de piedra de silleria con tres naves y media naranja. Muy bien
pintada y dorada con un portico magnifico y de bellisima arquitectura,
bovedas y media naranja son de madera, el altar mayor de talla,
sin dorar y le falta el ultimo cuerpo.'
*2* `Galerias con columnas, barandillas y escaleras de piedra entallada'
(Don Francisco Graell). See also P. Cardiel (`Declaracion de la Verdad',
p. 247), `En todos los pueblos hay reloj de sol y de ruedas,' etc.
The work of Padre Cardiel was written in 1750 in the missions of Paraguay,
but remained unpublished till 1800, when it appeared in Buenos Ayres
from the press of Juan A. Alsina, Calle de Mexico 1422. It is, perhaps,
after the `Conquista Espiritual' of Father Ruiz Montoya,
the most powerful contemporary justification of the policy of the Jesuits
in Paraguay. It is powerfully but simply written, and contains withal
that saving grace of humour which has, from the beginning of the world,
been a stumbling-block to fools.
*3* The mission of San Miguel had 1,353 families in it, or say 6,635 souls.
San Francisco de Borja contained 650 families, or 2,793 souls
(Report by Manuel Querini to the King, dated Cordoba de Tucuman,
y Agosto 1o, 1750).
--

The greatest difficulty which the Jesuits had to face
was the natural indolence of their neophytes. Quite unaccustomed as they were
to regular work of any kind, the ordinary European system,
as practised in the Spanish settlements, promptly reduced them to despair,
and often killed them off in hundreds. Therefore the Jesuits instituted
the semi-communal system of agriculture and of public works with which
their name will be associated for ever in America.*

--
* In their extensive missions in the provinces of Chiquitos and Moxos
they pursued the same system. As they were much more isolated
in those provinces than in Paraguay, and consequently much less
interfered with, it was there that their peculiar system most flourished.
After the expulsion of the Jesuits from America in 1767,
the Spaniards in Alta Peru, and subsequently the Bolivians,
had the sense to follow the Jesuit plan in its entirety; whereas Bucareli,
the Viceroy of Buenos Ayres, entirely changed the Jesuits' rule in Paraguay.
The consequence was that in Bolivia the Indians, instead of dispersing
as they did in Paraguay, remained in the missions, and D'Orbigny
(`Fragment d'un Voyage au Centre de l'Ame/rique Me/ridianale')
saw at the missions of Santiago and El Santo Corazon,
in the province of Chiquitos, the remains of the Jesuits' polity.
There were ten missions in Chiquitos, and fifteen in Moxos.
At the present time the Franciscans have some small establishments
in Bolivia.
--

Copyright (c) 2007. knowncrafts.net. All rights reserved.