Book: A Vanished Arcadia,

C >> Cunninghame Graham >> A Vanished Arcadia,




--
* P. Cardiel (`Declaracion de la Verdad', p. 449), quoting from Xarque
(`La Vida Apostolica del Padre Joseph Cataidino', Zaragoca por
Juan de Ypa, 1664), says, re the diminution of the Indians
under the Spanish rule: `Para que se vea cuanta razon tiene el Juez
reparese que segun los padrones del siglo pasado (vg. 1600-1700)
en la ciudad y jurisdicion de Santiago del Estero habia
80,000 Indios y ahora, apenas hay ochenta. En la jurisdicion
de Cordoba de Tucuman, habia 40,000; hoy no hay 40.
En la jurisdicion y cercanias de la ciudad de Buenos Ayres,
habia 30,000; hoy apenas hay 30.'
--

In that year (1721) Don Jose 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 Jose de Antequera y Castro was born at Lima, and being,
as Father Charlevoix* 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.

--
* Charlevoix, vol. ii., livre xvii.
--

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 Parana, 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* 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,**
and as Ibanez 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.

--
* Funes, `Ensayo de la Historia Civil del Paraguay', etc.,
vol. ii., cap. v., p. 231.
** Del Techo, Lozano, Guevara, Charlevoix, etc., etc.
--

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* 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.

--
* Liberty is commonly only attained by blood. It is, I think,
quite legitimate in playing the liberty game to kill
all who disagree with your party, or to banish them.
In these degenerate times, lovers of liberty have to stop short at calumny,
just as if they were mere tyrants.
--

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 Parana 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,* 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.**
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.

--
* `Guazu' = `great' in Guarani. It is frequent in place-names
both in Paraguay and Corrientes.
** Dean Funes, vol. ii., cap. xii., p. 372, says of Zavala:
`Por caracter era manso, pero uso/ algunas veces de severidad,
porque sabia que para servir bien a los hombres es preciso
de cuando en cuando tener valor de desagradarlos. . . .
La pobreza en que murio despues de tantos an~os de mando,
es una prueba clasica de que no estaba contagiado con esa commun flaqueza
de los que gobieran en America.'
--

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.* 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.

--
* In the long and interesting letter of Jaime Aguilar,
the provincial of the Jesuits in Paraguay, to the King of Spain
(Philip V., 1737), occurs the following passage:

`Y si alguna vez, que no son muchas, se animan los Espan~oles
a perseguir y castigar los Indios, muchos huyen de la tierra,
o se esconden, por no ir a la entrada. . . . Otras (vezes)
quando llegan alla/, el Enemigo les quitan la Cavallada,
dexandolos a pie y se vuelven a casa como pueden.'

This I have seen myself, not thirty years ago, on the frontiers
of the Argentine Republic. The popular Argentine poem,
`La Vuelta de Martin Fierro', by Jose Hernandez (Buenos Ayres, 1880),
has an illustration showing an expedition against the Indians returning.
Some of the men are on foot; others are riding two on the same horse,
and officers are animating their men with the flat of their swords.
--

The Tobas, Mataguayos, Lules, Aguilotas, Abipones, and the rest,
together with the warlike nations of the Vilelas and the Guaycurus,
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* `these are for the most converted by us,
and settled in towns.'

--
* `Account of the Abipones', p. 125.
--

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,*1* 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*2*
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.*3*
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 Tacano',
the poor priest forgot his troubles, and, wandering with Sancho
in La Manchan oak-woods or through Castilian uplands,
thought he was in Spain.*4*

--
*1* Brabo, `Inventarios', p. ix.
*2* Francisco Xavier Brabo, `Inventarios de los bienes hallados
a/ la expulsion de los Jesuitas' (Madrid, 1872).
*3* The lists of cannons, guns, and arms of all kinds
in the inventories of the Chaco towns, preserved by Brabo,
serve to show not only the dangers to which the Jesuits were exposed,
but also how thoroughly the Jesuits understood the fickle nature of those
with whom they lived.
*4* Another priest, the list of whose effects Brabo has preserved
in his `Inventarios', had a book called `El Alivio de Tristes'.
Even a Protestant may be excused for hoping that it merited its title.
--

Throughout the territory of the Gran Chaco there were but seven reductions
established by the Jesuits. These were San Jose 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 Senora del Buen Consejo
de los Omarapas, capital Ortega; Nuestra Senora de Pilar de los Paisanes,
with Macapillo as its centre; Nuestra Senora 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,'*
was slain with twelve companions of the Guaranis of Paraguay.
In 1718 Fathers Arco and Blende, Sylva and Maceo, received their dusted-over
martyrs' crowns.

--
* Cretineau Joly, tome v., chap. ii., p. 95. Your moral force is excellent
in a civilized country; but your modern missionary usually prefers something
more in accordance with the spirit of the times.
--

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 Parana.
Instead of open plains, vast swamps; instead of docile semi-Arcadians
like the Guaranis, 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.*
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.**

--
* The total number of cattle was 78,171, as against
698,353 in the towns of the Guaranis. See Brabo,
`Inventarios de los bienes hallados a/ la expulsion de los Jesuitas',
Appendix, p. 668.
** `History of the Abipones', from the Latin of Martin Dobrizhoffer,
London, 1822.

It is a curious circumstance that in the missions in the Chaco
there were negro slaves, though in the Paraguayan missions
they were unknown. In the inventory of the town of San Lucas
appear the following entries, under the head of `Negros Esclavos':

`Justo, que sirve de capataz en el campo; sera/ de edad
de veinte y siete an~os, mas o/ menos segun su aspecto.'

`Item, Pedro, sera/ de diez y seis an~os y es medio fatuo.'

`Item, Jose/ Felix, sera/ de un mes y medio.'
--

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 Guaranis,
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,* 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 Parana.
The Tobatines Indians** were of a different class to the Guaranis,
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 Senora de Santa Fe, and had hidden in the woods.

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