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Great must have been the disgust of the Governor to find the spoil so paltry,
and not to have the satisfaction even of saying that the Jesuits
had hidden all their gold, as, his own measures having been taken secretly,
they had no knowledge of what was in the wind. In the college of Cordoba,
esteemed to be a mine of wealth, was found only nine thousand dollars,*
which sum Ferando Fabro, the commissioner sent by Bucareli
to take over the effects of the Jesuits at Cordoba, duly chronicles
in his report.

--
* Dean Funes, `Ensayo de la Historia Civil', etc.,
vol. iii., book v., cap. ix.
--

But if the college of Cordoba*1* proved a miserable prey,
there still remained the Jesuit missions on the Uruguay and Parana,
with all the riches of their fertile territory, and the enormous wealth
which every Spaniard firmly believed the Jesuits had acquired.
None of the Jesuits, either in Buenos Ayres, Cordoba, Santa Fe,
Corrientes, or Monte Video having made the least resistance,
but having opened wide their doors to the soldiers, who in all the towns
on the same day at two o'clock in the morning came to signify their expulsion
to them, it was only natural to think that the same conduct
would be observed in Paraguay. But Governors and Governments
never seem in the least accessible to common-sense. Almost a year
had passed before he plucked up courage for his dangerous task.*2*
He set about it with more preparation than either Cortez or Pizarro made
for the conquest of Mexico or of Peru. Having embarked for Spain
in the frigate `La Esmeralda' one hundred and fifty Jesuits
from the towns of Cordoba, Buenos Ayres, Monte Video, and Santa Fe,
he prepared to march upon the missions, when a suspicion of resistance
caused him to take precautions which the result proved quite ridiculous.
He sent two hundred of the best of the militia of Asuncion
to occupy the fords upon the Tebicuari,*3* and a body of equal strength
to occupy the port of San Miguel. All these measures being taken
for his safety, the conqueror embarked upon May 24, taking with him
three companies of grenadiers and sixty dragoons. He disembarked
at the town of Salto on the Uruguay, and from thence despatched
Captain Don Juan Francisco de la Riva Herrera to occupy the towns
upon the Parana. Don Francisco de Zabala was sent to seize six of the towns
upon the Uruguay. Bucareli himself, with several hundred men,
marched upon Yapeyu,*4* the southernmost of all the mission towns.
The Jesuits, however, gave no trouble to any of the troops,
and even stopped the Governor from gathering any laurels, however withered,
with which to crown his arms.

--
*1* The fine library was dispersed, and many priceless MSS. treating of
the discovery and conquest, and of expeditions by the Jesuits
amongst tribes of Indians now extinct, were lost. Nothing seems
to have been preserved except matter which the dispersers thought
might prove incriminating to the Jesuits. It is a well-known principle
to judge and condemn a man, and then to search for evidence against him.
The books were kept in a place known as La Granja de Santa Catalina,
and a man of letters, Dr. Don Antonio Aldao, was charged
to catalogue and remit them to the capital. Dean Funes says
(book v., cap. ix., p. 156) that he complied with his instructions
(`verifico/la felizmente y con arreglo a sus instrucciones'),
but, anyhow, most of the books were lost. It is a common phrase
amongst doctors, `The operation was entirely successful,
but the patient unfortunately succumbed.' Amongst the books
was the celebrated `Monita Secreta', used by Ibanez in his charges
(after the expulsion) against the Jesuits.
*2* Dean Funes (`Ensayo de la Historia Civil', vol. iii., cap. viii.)
seems to have gauged the feelings of the Governor when he says:
`Temblo de susto Bucareli considerando en riesgo una conquista,
que debia aumentar su gloria y su fortuna.' `Su fortuna' is delicious,
and shows your true conqueror's melancholy.
*3* The Tebicuari forms the northern boundary between
the territory of Misiones and the rest of Paraguay. It is a large river,
and in my time (1872-1875) was bridgeless, and had to be crossed
in canoes, whilst the horses swam, or were towed behind the canoes
with ropes.
*4* Yapeyu was the largest of all the missions. The name signifies a chisel
in Guarani.
--

As he advanced from town to town, the priests, on his arrival at each place,
although living in the midst of Indians, some of whom were armed,
and many of whom had served the King of Spain in various wars,
and all of whom looked on the Jesuits almost as gods,
came out and peacefully gave up the keys of all their houses,
and submitted quietly to be made prisoners and be carried off in chains
from the territories which they and their order had civilized and ruled over
almost two hundred years. Seventy-eight Jesuits and their provincials
were sent prisoners to Buenos Ayres, and their places all filled up
with other priests taken from different Orders, and none of whom
had any experience in mission-work. As Dean Funes tartly writes,
the miracle that Bucareli wished, but scarcely dared to hope for,
had taken place. The Jesuits, in Paraguay, at least, by their conduct
in their last public act, most amply vindicated their loyalty
to the Spanish crown. Nothing would have been easier,
depleted as the viceroyalty was at the time of troops,*
than to have defied the forces which Bucareli had at his disposal,
and to have set up a Jesuit State, which would have taxed
the utmost resources of the Spanish crown to overcome.
No doubt the very facility with which Bucareli carried out his plans
confirmed him in his own mind of their expediency, for men in general
are prone to think that right which they accomplish with success.
However, be that as it may, he returned in triumph to Buenos Ayres
on September 16, having expended in his expedition less than four months.
So in a quarter of a year the Jesuits, after more than two hundred
years of rule, were all expelled from Paraguay.

--
* Bucareli, in a letter to El Conde de Aranda (Brabo, `Coleccion de Documentos
relativos a/ la Expulsion de los Jesuitas', Madrid, 1872),
says in reference to the perils by which he imagined himself surrounded:
`El misero diminuto estado de la tropa, por el atraso
de sus pagas y la falta que encontre/ de caudales en estas cajas,
era una urgencia que me atormentaba.'
--

They made no fight, nor offered any resistance, letting themselves be taken
as a butcher takes a sheep, and that surrounded as they were
by a population of upwards of one hundred and fifty thousand souls,
cut off by countless leagues from the outside world, defended on three sides
by virgin forests and by marshes hardly passable to European troops.
One word from the Provincial would have set the missions in a blaze.
A word would have brought clouds of horsemen -- badly armed, 'tis true,
but knowing every foot of marsh and forest, all the deep-beaten tracks which
wind in the red earth across the lonely plains, the passes of the rivers,
springs, natural fastnesses, and having the varied knowledge of a country
which of old made Border horsemen and Northumbrian prickers formidable
upon the Scottish marches -- into the field.

The dogged Paraguayan Indians, ancestors of the infantry which,
under Lopez,*1* died so bravely under the fire of the Brazilian guns,
would, in their red cloaks and scanty linen clothes,
have marched from `capilla'*2* and from mission against
the enemies of the `father-priests'. Seventy-eight Jesuits
were marched off to Buenos Ayres, and then shipped off to Europe*3*
to join their fellows, who had been brought together
by the ministers of the most liberal King who ever filled the Spanish throne
from every quarter of the world. Having expelled the Jesuits,
Bucareli was bound by the exigencies of his position
to calumniate them. Perhaps, as an official, hidebound in his belief
in the inalterable right of Governments to commit injustices,
he believed all that he wrote. For the welfare of humanity, one could hope
he knew all that he wrote was false. What hope is there left for mankind
as long as addle-headed, honest men see naught but justice
in whatever order they receive? Better a thousand times a rogue
who knows he is a rogue than a good, well-intentioned, blundering man
quite unaware he is a fool.

--
*1* This war, undertaken by a fool (Lopez) against enormous odds,
served to show what a people even when in the wrong, and in a bad cause,
can do when it believes itself to be fighting for national liberty.
As a matter of fact, Paraguayan liberty was not threatened
for an instant, and Lopez declared war against both
Brazil and the Argentine Republic out of mere ambition
to be a second Napoleon. His solitary qualifications for the character
were that, like his prototype, he was fat and loved women.
The war commenced in 1865 and finished in 1870, and left the country
almost a desert. So lonely was it, that I have often in those days
seen tigers calmly walk across a road in mid-day,
and a shout or a pistol-shot but little quickened their movements.
*2* `Capilla' was the name given in Paraguay to some of the smaller villages
which had a chapel, the chapel (`capilla') being more important
than the houses.
*3* El V. P. Jose Pignatelli, in his `La Compan~ia de Jesus
en su Extincion y Restablecimento', says that the Paraguayan Jesuits
were all sent to Faenza.
--

But, still, he had to justify himself either upon his own account
or for the benefit of that posterity to conciliate which
so many public men have paltered with the truth. So his first care
was to extract a letter from thirty Indians whom he chose to dignify
with the title of the mayors of the thirty towns, first having,
as he says himself in a letter to the Conde de Aranda,
the minister of Charles III., dressed them in the Spanish fashion,
and treated them in such a way that they might know how much
their lot had been improved.* The letter, written originally in Guarani,**
bears upon every line of it the dictation of the Governor.
After a fine paragraph of salutations, it goes on to give the King
many and repeated thanks (`muchas y repetidas gracias') for having sent
his Excellency Captain-General Don Francisco Bucareli, `who has fulfilled,
for the love of God and for the love of your Majesty, all the just orders
which your Majesty laid to his charge, aiding our poverty,
and clothing us like gentlemen.' Most people, even the heathen,
like those who help their poverty and clothe them in the garb of gentlemen.
It had not occurred to the poor Indians that the fine clothes
might turn out liveries. The mayors all sign their Indian names,
which seems to give the lie to the accusation that the Jesuits
kept them ignorant. The letter, dated Buenos Ayres, March 10, 1768,
seems to show that the Indians, be they who they might have been,
were not free agents at the time they wrote. The Indians' letter
duly despatched, the Governor indited a report, in which
he fairly and with circumstance reiterates all the old charges
against the Jesuits in Paraguay which the inventive brain of Cardenas
had first conceived; but to them he adds several little touches of his own,
which show he had some observation and an imaginative mind.

--
* `Carta del Gobernador de Buenos Ayres (Bucareli) al Comte de Aranda'.
Brabo, `Coleccion de Documentos Relativos a la Expulsion de los Jesuitos',
p. 8, Madrid, 1872: `Les hice vestir a la Espan~ola
asistiendolos y tratandolos de modo que conozcan la mejora
de su suerte. . . .'
** Brabo, `Coleccion de Documentos', etc., p. 101. The letter is headed
`I. H. T., Ore Rey Nitu Don Carlos Tercero'.
--

Amongst his numerous letters to Aranda and to the King,
one dated Buenos Ayres, October 14, 1768,* contains the fullest account
of his proceedings in the missions and of his views (or of what he thought
to be his views) about the work in which he was engaged.
Time was of small account in 1768 either in Paraguay or in Madrid,
so Bucareli relates with some prolixity all that he did,
with comments, movements of troops, regrettable occurrences
-- as when his soldiers let themselves be surprised and lost their horses --
and now and then scraps of morality and theology, which shows quite plainly
that the art of writing maundering despatches is not so new as optimists
may have supposed. Quite in the manner of a modern special correspondent,
he sets down all that he suffered from the weather; that it
rained incessantly, and, marvellous to tell, that after rain the rivers rose,
and gave him difficulty to cross. The roads were bad,
provisions scarce and dear, and now and then wild Indians `massacred'
an outpost of his men, whilst his brave fellows, when God willed it,
occasionally `chastised' the infidel, and by the grace of Heaven
slew no small number of them. Still, in the monstrous farrago of words,
extending to some sixteen pages of close print, he lets us see
he was a man of some capacity, but leaves it doubtful whether
he really thought he was engaged upon a noble work, or if he wrote ironically,
or if his only object was to satisfy his conscience and his King.
But making much of little difficulties is but to be expected
from a leader of an expedition or from a General in the field. Without it,
how could they justify their existence, or prove to the world at large
that they were needed, or but more important than a mere ceremony?**

--
* Brabo, `Coleccion de Documentos', etc., p. 185.
** Ceremonies, no doubt, have their uses in enslaving mankind. A courtier
once said to a Spanish King, `Your Majesty is but a ceremony yourself.'
--

When the land troubles were got over, and Bucareli, having arrived at Yapeyu,
embarked upon the river, the very winds proved contrary,
so that it took him many days to arrive at Candelaria, which port he reached
upon August 27, 1768. But before quitting Yapeyu the Governor made
a solemn feast, riding himself before his grenadiers, whose caps, he says,
caused much amazement, the Indians never having seen such headgear
in their lives. The difficulties of his journey over, the Jesuits
dispossessed and sent down-stream to be remitted home, Bucareli in his letter
next deals with questions of religion, about which he shows himself
as well informed as all the Spanish conquerors seem to have been
in the New World. If for the dogma of the faith he was a bar of iron,
for `cold morality', as Scottish preachers of the perfervid type
used to refer to it, he was most keen. The Indians' clothes,
especially the graceful `tupoi' worn by the women, shocked him exceedingly.
It was impossible to touch upon it without an outrage upon modesty.*
Masculine virtue is a most precarious thing, but little, if at all,
more stable than its female counterpart; therefore perhaps the Governor
was right not to expose his soldiers to temptation, so he did well,
as he informs us, in serving out clothes which obscured their charms,
or perhaps hid them quite from view. `Such tyrannies,'**
says the modest Governor, `occasioned many offences against God,
and frequent illnesses and epidemics.' The sentence is a little doubtful
in its meaning, for if a scantiness of women's dress occasioned
illnesses and epidemics amongst the population of a town,
Belgravia and Mayfair should surely be the most unhealthy spots on earth;
though even there, I verily believe, no more offences against God occur
than amongst the Moors, whose women show only their eyes
to the shrinking gaze of easily offended men.

--
* Letter to Aranda: Brabo, `Coleccion de Documentos', p. 196:
`Y las mujeres en tal extremo, que es impossible demostralo
sin faltar a la modestia.'
** `Semejantes tiranias'.
--

As in duty bound, Bucareli kept for the end of his despatch
a rehash of all the old charges made against the Jesuits.
They kept the Indians in slavery, would never let them learn Spanish,
and were themselves inordinately rich. The first two accusations
Father Jose Cardiel, in his `Declaracion de la Verdad',
abundantly disproves.* The last the Governor disproves himself;
for had he found much treasure he most assuredly would have made haste
to send it to the King. What he did find, a reference later
to Brabo's inventories will show, and the same source discloses all the wealth
the richest Order in the world, according to their enemies,
took with them in their involuntary journey back to Spain.
All being finished in the missions and the Jesuits expelled,
Bucareli found himself obliged to institute some system
for the government of the Indian population, which he had deprived
both of its spiritual and of its temporal guides.

--
* P. 222: `Y teniendo presente que por lo que mira a este punto resulta
de los informes que solo hablan estos Indios su idioma natural,
pero que no es prohibicion de los PP. Jesuitos, sino por el amor
que tienen a su nativo lenguage pues en cada uno de los pueblos
han establecido esculas de leer y escriber en lengua espan~ola,
y que por este motivo se encuentra un numero grande de Indios
muy habiles en escribir (dos de ellos etan copiando hora esto
que yo escribo y de mejor letra que la mia).' Also pp. 223-225, etc.
--

The Jesuits' government having been so bad, according to his own despatch,
the Indians having been kept in such a miserable state, their education
having been so neglected, and, above all, their women having been dressed
in such light attire that Bucareli could not with modesty
even describe their dress, it might have seemed but natural that
he should have evolved some system of government differing in all respects
from that he had destroyed. So far from that, in his instructions
to his interim successor, dated at Candelaria,* August 23, 1768,
he practically followed slavishly all the policy which the Jesuits
had pursued. He ordered Captains Riva Herrera and Bruno de Zavala, to whom
the arrangements were committed, to see that the Indians were instructed
`in the true knowledge of our holy faith', a work which the Jesuits,
whatever might be their faults, had not neglected to insure.
After some platitudes as to the vivifying effects of free and open trade,
and an injunction to his captains to take care the Indian girls
were decorously and virtuously dressed, he launched into a sermon
about honest work, which, as he said, would make the Indians rich,
happy, and virtuous, and alone could ever make a kingdom prosper;
in fact, he used almost precisely similar language to that to-day used
by a European Governor in Africa when about to make a people slaves.
On the whole, however, his instructions were wise and liberal,
and had they been carried out in the same spirit, and with fidelity,
the Indians might have long continued in the same half-Arcadian,
half-Christian state in which the Jesuits left them, and to which
it seems they could attain, but not go farther without exposure
to that vivifying commerce without which nations cannot prosper,
but with which the greater portion of their citizens must remain ever slaves.

--
* Brabo, `Coleccion de Documentos', etc., p. 200.
--

The instructions given, he left the missions never to return,
leaving behind him the reputation of an honest man, having made,
as it would appear, no money during his sojourn in their territories.
On October 20, 1768, he wrote from Buenos Ayres to Aranda, telling him that
his work was done, and asking him as a particular favour to implore the King
to give him some employment `out of America, and particularly
not under either the secretaryship or the Council of the Indies.'*1*
Thus it appears that either the work in which he had been engaged
was uncongenial to him, or he mistrusted the future and the Indians
when the Jesuits' sheltering hands had been withdrawn,
and thought the King might blame him for what was sure to come.
One passage in his letter of instructions shows that the antique,
but still current, fashion of going to any length to obtain a country
in which are situated even supposititious gold-mines had its influence
even with such an honest man as Bucareli was. He specially enjoins
upon the officials left in charge `to find out from what quarter
the Indians of those towns extract those pieces of the precious metals which
they sometimes bring to their priests.' So that the fable of the false mines
started by Cardenas, although a thousand times disproved,
still lingered in the minds of those who could not understand
what motive except that of growing rich could cause the Jesuits
to bury themselves in the recesses of the Paraguayan woods. The release
from things American and under the jurisdiction of the Council of the Indies
did not come to Bucareli for almost two more years, during which time
he struggled manfully with the affairs of the Jesuit missions,
repelled the Chaco Indians on one side, and on the other implored for troops
to defend the island of Chiloe against the heretic English, who at that time
appear to have been meditating the advancement of their empire
in the extremest south. One curious letter was reserved
for Bucareli to indite before he quitted Buenos Ayres for the last time.
On January 15, 1770, he sent a long declaration signed by
the celebrated Nicolas Neenguiru and other Indians,
giving an account of the part played by him in the abortive resistance
which he made against the cession of the seven towns. This is the last time
that Nicolas, the `King' of Paraguay and `Emperor of the Mamelucos',
appears in any document as far as I can find. His name at one time
was well known in Paraguay, the River Plate and Spain, and served to father
many lies upon; and at the last, the Jesuits gone, he seems to have turned
against them, and said all that was required by Bucareli to get up his case.
It appears from Bucareli's letter that the family of the Neenguiru
had been well known in the missions from the time of Cardenas.
In 1770*2* we find him shorn of his kingly and imperial dignities,
the mayor of Concepcion in Paraguay, tall, taciturn, with long, lank hair,
and much respected by his brother Indians, who held his stirrup for him
when he got upon his horse. To find him in the humour
to give tongue about the Jesuits was a trump-card in Bucareli's hand,
for if it could be proved that in 1750 they had resisted
the forces of the crown of Spain, the public, always anxious to believe a lie,
would naturally applaud the action of the King in their expulsion
from his territories. Nicolas, who seems to have been but a poor creature
at the best, testified that everything which he had done
as General of the Indians was by the order of Fathers Limp and Ennis,
and that he was a poor Indian who did but that which he was told.
He finished up his testimony with thanks to the good King
for having taken him out of the power of the Jesuits, and kept him
in his post of mayor at Concepcion. In fact, all was the same to him
as long as he was left with his alcalde's staff.*3*

--
*1* `Y sobre todo, fuera de la America y libre de Secretaria y Consejo
de Indias.' Brabo, `Coleccion de Documentos', etc.:
Letter of Bucareli to Aranda, p. 231.
*2* Brabo, `Coleccion de Documentos', etc., p. 280.
*3* The alcaldes of Indian villages usually have a long cane
with a silver head, like those formerly carried by footmen,
as a badge of their office. In remote places I have seen them,
with their canes in their hands, a battered tall hat upon their heads,
a linen jacket and trousers, and barefooted, riding on an ox,
and thought that they served to maintain the majesty of the law
quite as well as if they had had stuff gowns, horsehair wigs,
and had been seated on a sack of wool.
--

Upon August 14, 1778, Bucareli sailed for Spain, leaving Don Juan Jose Vertiz
as his successor in the viceroyalty of the provinces of the River Plate.
The missions were all placed under the care of friars of the begging Orders,
chiefly Franciscans, and the system of the Jesuit government
was left unchanged. In 1771, writing from San Lorenzo (el Escorial) in Spain,
Bucareli, who seemed fated never to escape from the affairs of Paraguay,
sends a long constitution for the thirty towns which follows all the Jesuits'
rules of government to the last tittle of their policy. Brabo has preserved
the document, which runs to forty-seven pages of close print in its entirety.
A carefully thought-out and well-conceived digest of a constitution
it most certainly is, and yet it follows to the most minute particular
the policy the Jesuits laid down.

Dean Funes* seemed to see that the flattering of Nicolas Neenguiru
and the other Indian chiefs was an entire affair of artifice,
and that it was but a mere crowning of the victims who were destined
to be sacrificed. It may be that the constitution made by Bucareli
at the Escorial was similarly but a blind to keep the Indians quiet
till the Government had time to exploit them at its ease.
Still, Bucareli in all his actions seems to have been an honest man;
one of those honest, narrow-minded men who have sown more misery in the world
than all the rogues and scoundrels since the flood. Be all that as it may,
his constitution in a thousand ways recalled the Jesuits' polity
in their days of rule. In a former chapter** I have pointed out
a curious instance in which this constitution traverses entirely
statements made by the Jesuits' enemies that their exclusive policy was for
their own ends, and not, as they alleged, for the protection of the Indians.
But there are other instances quite as remarkable which show that the Jesuits
not only had grasped perfectly what the best course of treatment was
for their subjects, but that the official mind of Bucareli,
trained as he was, so to speak, in the strictest sect of Pharisees,
and prejudiced against the Jesuits in every way, yet discerned clearly
as an honest man that the plan they had laid down was the most suitable
for future rulers to pursue.

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