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--
*1* Most of the dates of the events subsequent to the cession
of the seven reductions on the Uruguay are taken from
`La Causa Jesuitica de Portugal' (Madrid, 1768), written by Ibanez,
a great enemy of the Jesuits. In it is also an account of the events
in Paraguay between 1750 and 1756, called `Relacion de la Guerra
que sustentaron los Jesuitas contra las tropas Espan~olas y Portuguesas
en el Uruguay y Parana/'. No proof has ever been brought forward
that the Jesuits as a body ever incited the revolt of the Indians,
though undoubtedly Father Tadeo Ennis, a hot-headed priest, stirred up
his own particular reduction to resist. It does not seem likely
that the Jesuits could have thought it possible to wage a successful war
against Spain and Portugal. The dates taken from Ibanez
tally with original letters from the Marques de Valdelirios,
the Spanish boundary commissioner, and others, which are preserved
in the Spanish national archives at Simancas.
*2* Vide `Exc. por los cartas que recibi con los avisos,
y llegada del P. Altamirano, entiendo acabara/ de persuadirse
a que los Padres de la Campan~ia son los sublevados,
sino los quitan de las aldeas sus Santos Padres (como ellos los llaman)
no experimentara/n mas que rebeliones insolencias y desprecios. . . .'
-- Letter quoted by Ibanez (`Causa Jesuitica'), and also preserved
at Simancas.
*3* The Marques de Valdelirios, writing to Don Jose de Carvajal
from Monte Video, June 28, 1752 (Simancas, Legajo 7,447), says:
`Estoy cierto de que los padres estan ya en la persuasion
de que el tratado no se ha de dejar de executar.' This being so,
it was evident that the Marquis, at the date of writing, was of opinion
that the Jesuits were not going to oppose the execution of the treaty,
as he goes on to say: `Y es credible que con este desengan~o trabajan
seriamente en la mudanza de sus pueblos.'
*4* The instructions were prepared in 1768 by Bucareli
for the guidance of Don Juan Joseph de Vertiz, his interim successor
in the government of the River Plate, and were delivered to him in 1770
when Bucareli returned to Spain. They are printed by Brabo in his
`Coleccion de Documentos relativos a/ la Expulsion de los Jesuitas',
Madrid, 1872, p. 320.
*5* `Oficiales mecanicos'.
*6* This refers to the same subject, and prohibits any Spaniard
from settling in an Indian town in any part of America.
--

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)*1*
assembled at the Jesuit college in Cordoba, composed of Fathers Masala,
Horos, Caballero, Lopez, and Lozano, sent a memorial*2*
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,*3*
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. Ibanez, 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.*4*
He advised consulting three ex-Governors of Paraguay,
who happened to be in Buenos Ayres,*5* 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,*6* 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.

--
*1* Dean Funes, `Ensayo de la Historia Civil del Paraguay', etc.,
tome iii., p. 45.
*2* Dean Funes says `una difusa memoria'; but, then, even though friendly,
churchmen and cats rarely forego a scratch. The proverb has it,
`Palabras de santo, un~as de gato'.
*3* Though Ibanez (`Republica Jesuitica', tome i., cap. i.) says:
`This treaty caused entire satisfaction to all the world
except the English, who feared their commerce would suffer by it
(i.e., by the closing of the Colonia del Sacramento as an entry
for smuggled goods), and the Jesuits.'

Raynal, also an ex-Jesuit, but a man of far higher character
than Ibanez, says (tome iii., lib. 97): `This treaty
met censure on both sides, the ministers in Lisbon
themselves alleging that it was a false policy to sacrifice
the Colonia del Sacramento, the clandestine commerce of which
amounted to two millions of dollars a year . . . for possessions
whose advantages were uncertain and position remote. The outcries
were even stronger in Madrid. There they imagined that the Portuguese
would soon rule all along the Uruguay . . . and from thence penetrate
up the rivers into Tucuman, Chile, and Potosi.'
*4* Quoting the Pope who advised St. Augustine on his first mission visit
to England, to convert the natives to Christianity, to go slowly.
*5* D. Martin de Echaria, Don Rafael de Menedo, and Don Marcos de Lauazabel.
*6* From a letter preserved at Simancas (Legajo 7,447),
written by P. Diego Palacios to P. Luiz de Altamirano,
dated San Miguel, June 20, 1752, it appears that there were
in the territory of the seven towns plantations of `yerba' trees, cotton,
and valuable woods.
--

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* from the reduction of San Borja
to P. Mathias Stroner,** 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.

--
* Archivo de Simancas, Legajo 7,378, folio 17 -- a long and curious letter.
** `Stroner' may have been `Stoner', in which case he must have been
an Englishman. There were few English names amongst
the Paraguayan Jesuits, if one except Juan Bruno de Yorca
(John Brown of York), Padre Esmid (Smith), the supposititious `Stoner',
and the doubtful Taddeo Ennis, who, though said to be a Bohemian,
was not impossibly a Milesian.
--

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,* 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.** 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.

--
* Dean Funes, `Ensayo de la Historia Civil de Paraguay', etc., book v., p. 52.
** They also said, in a memorial presented to the Marquis of Valdelirios
by the Provincial Barreda, preserved at Simancas (Legajo 7,447),
`That they had voluntarily made themselves vassals of the King of Spain --
despues de Christianarnos, nos hizimos voluntariamente vasallos
de nuestro Catholico Rey de Espan~a para que amparandonos con su poder
fomentase nuestra devota Christiandad.' It was not likely, therefore,
that they would voluntarily become subject to the Portuguese,
their most bitter persecutors.
--

Just at this moment Altamirano, the commissary, arrived,
and found the state of things most serious.*1* 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*2* to Don Jose de Caruajal y Lancastre to send more troops,
and to the various priests*3* to destroy their powder,
and cease to manufacture any more.*4* 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 Thome, 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;*5* 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,*6*
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, Ibanez,
and most of the writers on the subject must have copied.*7*

--
*1* Jose Barreda, the Father Provincial of the missions,
in a curious letter under date of August 2nd, 1753,
tells the Marquis of Valdelirios that he fears not only
that the 30,000 Indians resident in the seven towns may rebel,
but that they may be joined by the Indians of the other reductions,
and that it is possible they may all apostatize and return to the woods.
Brabo, in the notes to his `Atlas de Cartas Geograficas
de los Paises de la America Meridianal' (Madrid, 1872),
gives a synopsis of this letter, which formed part of his collection,
and contained the greatest quantity of interesting papers
on the Jesuits in Paraguay and Bolivia which has ever been
brought together. In 1872, after publishing his `Atlas',
his `Coleccion de Documentos', and his `Inventarios',
he presented his papers (more than 30,000 in number)
to the Archivo Historico Nacional of Madrid. There they remain,
and form a rich mine for dogged scholars who have not passed their youth
on horseback with the lazo in their hands.
*2* Archivo de Simancas, Legajo 7,378, folio 146.
*3* Ibid.: `Que toda la polvora que tengan los curas y misioneros
se queme o se inutilize y pierda hechandola al rio, y que en los pueblos
donde se fabrica, cese luego este labor.'
*4* In another letter, also preserved at Simancas, and dated at Yapeyu,
he complains bitterly of his own suffering on the journey:
`Me moli tanto con el traqueo violento del carreton que no he podido
volver sobre mi.' The roads to the missions seem to have been
as bad as those which produced the historical exclamation,
`O dura tellus Hispaniae!' It is certainly the case that Ibanez,
in his `Republica Jesuitica' (Madrid, 1768), gives a very different
version of the doings of Altamirano; for he says that Rafael de Cordoba,
Altamirano's secretary, `embarked in a schooner called `La Real'
a great quantity of guns and lead for balls, packing them all in boxes,
which, he said, were full of objects of a pious nature. . . .
This,' says Ibanez, `was told me by the master of the schooner
`Jose el Ingles', a man worthy of credence.' This is pleasing to one's
national pride, but, still, one seems to want a little better authority
even than that of `Bardolph, the Englishman'.
*5* Dean Funes, book v., cap. iii., p. 54.
*6* In a most curious letter (preserved at Simancas, Legajo 7,447),
the mayor and council of the reduction of San Juan write to Altamirano
upbraiding him with being their enemy, and tell him that
`St. Michael sent by God showed their poor grandfathers
(`sus pobres abuelos') where to plant a cross, and afterwards
to march due south from the cross and they would find
a holy father of the Company.' This, of course, turned out
as the saint had foretold, and after a long day's march
they encountered the Jesuit and became Christians.
*7* This account seems to have been lost, and a careful search
has not disinterred it from the Maelstrom of Simancas,
that prison-house of so many documents, without whose aid
so much of Spanish history cannot be written.
--

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,*
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',**
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.

--
* His `Efemerides', or Journal, printed and mutilated by Ibanez
in his `Republica de Paraguay', gives the best account of the brief `war'
which has come down to us; it is supplemented by
the `Declaracion de la Verdad' of Father Cardiel, which deals with
the misstatements of Ibanez and others against the Jesuits.
In regard to his own share in the war, Padre Ennis says:
`Atque in exercitas curatorem, spiritualem medicum secum ire postulat.'
** `Se puso las botas'.
--

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*1* 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,*2*
of what took place. After some skirmishes, which at the first
were favourable to the Indians, who took great courage from them,*3*
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.*4*

--
*1* Dean Funes, `Ensayo de la Historia Civil del Paraguay',
Buenos Ayres, etc., book v., cap. iv., p. 58.
*2* Luckily Ibanez (`Republica Jesuitica de Paraguay') has not corrected
the many faults of spelling and Latinity into which Padre Ennis fell.
Those, though left in from malice, as Ibanez was a bitter enemy
of the Jesuits, serve to present the man in his habit as he wrote.
However, Ibanez has so much mutilated the text of the journal
that occasionally the sense is left obscure.
*3* `Hoc itaque nuncio laeti altero ac incensi . . . Sacramento expiationis
et pane fortim roborati' (Ennis, `Efemerides').
*4* Cardiel, in his `Declaracion de la Verdad', p. 426, says:
`Lo mismo es 28,000 mil Indios que igual numero de muchachos.'
--

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*1*),
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*2* 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.*3* 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 aegis 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.*4*
Finally, the officer remarks with disgust that the official
chronicler of the affair `lies from first to last'*5* 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 Ibanez, 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.

--
*1* `Nec tamen resipiscebat et Divinam Nemesim quamquam clare experiebatur
pro causa^ Societatis.'
*2* `Declaracion de la Verdad', p. 404.
*3* In fact, they much resembled those `crakys of warre' which,
with the `tymmeris for helmys', Barbour, in the `Bruce',
takes notice of as the two noteworthy events of a battle
that he chronicles:

`Twa noweltyis that day thai saw,
That forouth in Scotland had bene nane.
Tymmeris for helmys war the tane,
That thaim thoucht thane off gret bewte
And alsua wondyr for to se.
The tothyr, crakys war, off wer,
That thai befor herd neuir er.'
`The Bruce', Booke Fourteene, p. 392.
*4* This was in an action in the year 1756.
*5* `Miente de la cruz a la fecha'.
--

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