Page:Catholic Encyclopedia, volume 7.djvu/74

 GUARANI

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GUARANI

to be the capital of Paraguay, and made first ac- quaintance with tlie Guarani. Under the very first governor was inaugurated the policy of intermarriage with the Indian women, from which the present mixed Paraguayan race derives its origin, and also of the enslavement of the native tribes who found no pro- tector until the arrival of the Jesuits, the first two of whom. Fathers Barcena and Angulo, coming overland from Bolivia, reached the Guarani territory of GuajT^, in what is now the Province of Parana, Southern Brazil, in 1586. Others soon followed, a Jesuit college was established at Asuncion, a provin- cial named for Paraguay and Chile, and in 1608, in consequence of their strong protests against the en- slavement of the Indians, King Philip III of Spain issued royal authority to the Jesuits for the conver- sion and colonization of the Indians of Guayra. It should be noted that in the earlier period the name Paraguay was loosely used to designate all the basin of the river, including besides the present Paraguay, parts of Uruguay, Argentina, Bolivia, and Brazil.

As usual in the Spanish colonies the first exploring expeditions were accompanied by Franciscan friars. At an early period in the history of Asuncion, Father Luis de Bolanos of that order translated the cate- chism into the language of the Guaranf, in order to preach to those of that trilje in the neighbourhood of the settlement. In 15SS-9 the celebrated Saint Francis Solanus crossed the Chaco wilderness from Peru, preaching to the wild tribes, and stopped for some time at Asuncion, but without giving attention to the Guarani. His recall left the Indian field clear to the Jesuits, who assumed the double duty of civil- izing and Christianizing the Indians and defending them against the merciless cruelties and butcheries of the slave-dealers and their employers, including practically the whole white population, lay, clerical, and official. "The larger portion of the population regarded it as a right, a privilege in virtue of con- quest, that they should enslave the Indians" (Page, 470). The Jesuit provincial, Torres, however, on his arrival in 1607, "immediately placed him.self at the head of those who had opposed the cruelties at all times exercised over the natives" (Ibid.).

The great centre and depot of the Indian .slave trade was the town of Sao Paulo, below Rio Janeiro in the south of Brazil. Originally a rendezvous of Portuguese, Dutch, and Spanish pirates, it had become a refuge for the desperate criminals of all nations, who, finding a lack of wives of their own class and colour, had intermixed with Inilian and negro women, producing a mongrel and bloodthirsty breed, without law, religion, mercy, or good faith. "Slave dealers of profession, they speedily overrode the influence and power of the Church and drove out its ministers. Their town became the great slave mart whence issued thousands and thousands of Indians to be bartered away on the pulilic squares of the Atlantic cities. Here they assembled day after day, as party after party returned from its inhuman expedition, the crowds of trembling, bleeding wretches that had been hunted and captured in some distant wilds. . . . These well-trained, well-armed, roaming, pillaging Paulistas or Mamelucos, as they were popularly called, became the dread and scourge of this beau- tiful land" (Page, 476). To oppose these armed and organized robbers the naked tribes had only their bows, the Spanish government strictly prohibiting fire-arms even to the civilized Indians. It is esti- mated that in the space of l.'^O years 2,000,000 Indians were slain or carried into captivity by those Brazilian slave-hunters. With the royal authority as a guaran- tee of protection the first of the Guayrd missions, Loreto, was established on the Paranapan(5 by Fathers Cataldino and Marcerata (or Maceta?) in 1610. The Guarani flocked to them in such numbers, and listened BO gladly and obediently to these the first white meji

who had evercome to them asfriends and helpers, that twelve missions rose in rapid succession, containing in all some 40,000 Indians. Stimulated by this suc- cess, Father Gonzales with two companions in 1627 journeyed to the Uruguay and established two or three small missions, with good promise for the future, until the wild triljes murdered the priests, massacred the neophytes, and burneil the missions.

But while the Guayra missions grew and multiplied the slave raiders were on the watch and saw in them "merely an opportunity of capturing more Indians than usual at a haul ", and, as"a nest of hawks, looked at their neophytes as pigeons ready fattening for their use" (Graham). In 1629 the storm broke. An army of Paidistas with horses, guns, and blood- hounds together with a horde of wild Indians shooting poisoned arrows, suddenly emerged from the forest, surrounded the mission of San .Antonio, set fire to the church and other I)uildings, liutchcretl the neophytes who resisted and all who were too young or too old to travel, and carried the rest into slavery. San Miguel and Jesu Maria quickly met the same fate. In Con- cepcion Father Salazar defended his flock through a regular siege even when reduced to eating snakes and rats, until reinforcements gathered by Father Catal- dino, though armed only with bows, drove oft' the enemy. No other mission was so fortunate. Within the space of two years all but two of the fiouri.'^hing establishments were destroyed, the houses plundered, the churches pillaged of their rich belongings upon which almost the whole surplus of the mission rev- enues had been lavished, the altars polluted with blood in sacrilegious frenzy and 60,000 Christian and civil- ized converts carried off for sale in the slave markets of Sao Paulo and Rio Janeiro. To insvu'e the larger result, the time chosen for attack was usually on Sunday, when the whole mission population was gathered at the church for Mass. As a rule the priests were spared — probably from fear of govern- mental reprisals — although several lost their lives while mini.stering to the wounded or pleading with the murderers. Fathers Maceta and Mansilla even followed one captive train on foot through the swamps and forests, confessing the dying who fell by the road and carrying the chains of the weakest, despite threats and pricks of lances, to plead with the Paidi.sta chiefs in their very city, and then to Bahia, five hundred miles beyond, to ask the mediation of the governor-general himself, but all in vain, and they returned as they had come.

It was now evident that the Guayr^i missions were doomed. The few thousand Indians left of nearly 100,000 just before the Pauli^ta invasion had scat- tered to the forests, and could hardly be made to lielieve that the missionaries were not in league with the enemy. Father .Vntonio Ruiz de Montoya, the superior, determined to abandon the Guayra province and remove the neophytes ami the missions to a far southern territory out of reach of the slavt^himters. Twelve thousand Indians were gathered together, rafts and canoes built, and with infinite labour and danger by land and water, with famine, fever, and death always following their march, they descended the Parana five hundred miles and re-established Loreto and San Ignacio near its banks in what is now Missiones Territory of the Province of Corrientes in Eastern Argentina. Two priests had been killed on the way by the wild tribes. By the side of all that had been saved from the wreck I'ather Montoya was able to buy 10,000 cattle and thus transform his Indians from farmers to stock raisers. Soon again the work was on a prosperous basis, and under Fathers Ran^onier and Romero the Uruguay missions were re-established, only to be again flestroved (1632) by the old enemy, the Mamelucos, who had discovered a new line of attack from the south. This time the neophytes made some successful resistance, but in