Читать книгу The South American Republics (Vol. 1&2) - Thomas Cleland Dawson - Страница 27

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The beginnings of the settlements in Paraguay have been sketched in the introductory chapter on the discoveries and conquest. In 1526, Cabot, searching to find a route to the gold and silver mines of the centre of the continent, penetrated as far as the site of the present city of Asuncion. He had already, in the exploration of the Upper Paraná, skirted the southern and eastern boundary of what has since become the country of Paraguay. Ten years later the exhausted and discouraged remnants of Mendoza's great expedition sought rest and refuge among the peaceful agricultural tribes of this region. Under Domingos Irala, these six hundred surviving Spanish adventurers founded Asuncion in 1536, the first settlement of the valley of the Plate. They reduced the Indians to a mild slavery, compelling them to build houses, perform menial services, and cultivate the soil. The country was divided into great tracts called "encomiendas," which, with the Indians that inhabited them, were distributed among the settlers. Few women had been able to follow Mendoza's expedition, so the Spaniards of Asuncion took wives from among the Indians. Subsequent immigration was small, and the proportion of Spanish blood has always been inconsiderable, compared with the number of aborigines. The children of the marriages between the Spanish conquerors and Indian women were proud of their white descent. The superior strain of blood easily dominated, and the mixed Paraguayan Creoles became Spaniards to all intents and purposes. Spaniards and Creoles, however, learned the Indian language; Guarany rather than Spanish became, and has remained, the most usual method of communication.

The Spaniards of Asuncion were turbulent and disinclined to submit to authority. They paid scant respect to the adelantados, whom the Castilian king sent out one after another as feudal proprietors. Until his death Irala was the most influential man in the colony, but his power rested on his own energy and capacity, and on the fear and respect in which he was held by his companions, more than on the royal commission that finally could not be withheld from him.

ASUNCION.

Across the river from Asuncion stretched away to the west the vast and swampy plains of the great Chaco. It was inhabited by wandering tribes of Indians whom the Spaniards could not subdue. They fled before the expeditions like scared wild beasts, only to turn and mercilessly massacre every man when a chance was offered for ambush or surprise. To the east of the Paraguay River the country was dry, rolling, and extremely fertile. Though covered with magnificent forests it was easily penetrable all the way across to the Paraná. Its inhabitants were the docile Guaranies, who knew something of agriculture and in whose villages considerable stores of food were to be found. The population was dense for savages, but they had no political or military organisation. Divided into small tribes which did not co-operate, they rendered little respect or obedience to their chiefs. Under these conditions Spanish authority rapidly spread over central and southern Paraguay. Before Irala died, in 1557, the settlers had reached the Paraná on the western boundary and founded settlements nearly as far north as the Grand Cataract.

Shortly afterwards, the Creoles of Asuncion began their expeditions to the South. By 1580 they controlled the Paraná River from its confluence with the Paraguay to the ocean, had established Santa Fé and Buenos Aires on its right bank, and opened up the southern pampa. The pastoral provinces on the Lower Paraná were slowly peopled. A large proportion of the energetic Paraguayan Creoles preferred the semi-nomadic life of the plains to indolence among their Indian slaves in the tropical forests of Paraguay. The two regions were distinct in climate, habits of life, social and industrial organisation. They became separated in interests and soon were to be divided politically. Though, until 1619, the whole province continued to bear the name of Paraguay, the usual residence of the governor was Buenos Aires. Asuncion was often forced to be content with a lieutenant-governor, and was fast relegated to the position of a neglected and isolated district.

In the days of the Spanish conquest, Franciscan monks were the priests who most often accompanied the expeditions, and they took the most prominent part in the earliest establishment of religion. The members of this Order, however, with a few notable exceptions, took no special interest in the evangelisation of the aborigines. On the contrary, they were as fierce as the soldiers themselves in their cruelties to the poor Indians. The shouts of a Franciscan monk set on Pizarro's ruffians to the slaughter of the Incas that surrounded Atahualpa. Those that came to Paraguay preferred to live in the towns, and their conduct toward the Indians differed little from that of the lay Spaniards. It was the genius of Ignatius Loyola that conceived and perfected a machine able to carry Christianity and civilisation to these remote and inaccessible peoples and regions. Within a few years after its foundation, the Society of Jesus turned its attention to the evangelisation of South America; in 1550 the Jesuit Fathers began their work in Brazil. Their successes and failures in that country had little relation with their work in Spanish South America. It is curious, however, that their most successful early work in Brazil should have been done in São Paulo, on the extreme eastern border of the wide plateau which drains to the west into the Paraná. For a decade or two after 1550, they laboured hard to gather the Indians of that region into villages, to teach them Christianity, and protect them against the tyrannies and exactions of the Portuguese settlers. The contest was unequal; the Jesuits were not long able to prevent the enslavement of their proselytes. The Paulistas destroyed the Jesuit missions in their neighbourhood and became the most expert in Indian warfare and the most terrible foes of the Jesuit system of all the colonists of South America. Their determined opposition was the most potent cause in preventing the subjection of South America to a theocratic system of government.

About 1586 the Jesuit Fathers entered Paraguay for the purpose of beginning the evangelisation of the Indians of the Plate valley. They established a school in Asuncion and pushed out on foot into the remoter districts. Their success was phenomenal. They spared no pains to learn the language of the savages so that they might teach them in their own tongue. They approached them with kindness and benevolence showing in every gesture. They availed themselves of the Indians' love of bright colours and showy processions. They went unarmed and alone, offering useful and attractive presents, conforming to savage customs and prejudices, and imposing on the vivid savage imagination with the pomp of Catholic worship. They taught their savage pupils how to cultivate the ground to get greater results, how to save themselves unnecessary labour, and how to live comfortably. They persuaded them to gather into towns, where they built comfortable houses and tight warehouses, while the men cultivated the soil and the women spun and wove cotton.

The Jesuits came almost immediately into conflict with the interests of the Spanish colonists. They were welcomed at first, because they were expected to lend themselves to the enslavement of the Indians. When their real purposes were discovered feeling against them rose high. The Creoles clearly saw that it was going to be far more difficult to extend their power over the Indians gathered together in villages under Jesuit protection than over unorganised and friendless bands of unconverted savages.

Before 1610 the number of Jesuits that had come to Paraguay was very small. Among the first was the Father named Thomas Fields, a Scotchman. As a matter of fact, the Jesuits were recruited from all the nations of Europe and under their military system had to go wherever they might be sent. English, Irish, and German names, as well as Spanish, are to be found in the lists of Jesuits who laboured in Paraguay.

In 1608 Philip III. of Spain attended to the complaints that came to him through the powerful chiefs of the Order of the indifference and opposition shown by the settlers and colonial authorities, and gave his royal and official sanction to the Jesuit conversion of the Indians along the Upper Paraná. By this time the Fathers had penetrated across to the Paraná and had followed up that stream far north of the Grand Cataract in latitude 24°, which marks the northern boundary of Paraguay proper. It is hard to understand how they overcame the difficulties of travelling. To this day it is well-nigh impossible to reach the Grand Cataract, and years pass without that wonder of nature's being seen by the eyes of civilised man. No part of the world, outside the Arctic regions, is less accessible than the Paraná above the Grand Cataract. Yet these heroic priests made that region the principal theatre of their operations in the early years of the seventeenth century. The territory is now all Brazilian—the boundaries of that republic extend on the east bank of the Paraná south nearly to the twenty-sixth degree and on the west bank to the twenty-fourth. The rivers Paranapanema and Ivahy are great tributaries coming down from the east between the twenty-second and twenty-third degrees, and draining a vast extent of the plateau that extends to the Brazilian coast mountains between Curitiba and São Paulo, and on their banks the Jesuits established their principal missions.

In those days there were no clearly defined boundaries between the Portuguese and Spanish dominions. From 1580 to 1640 the king of Spain was also monarch of Portugal. The Jesuits held his royal letters patent for the conversion of the Indians of the province of Guayrá—the name which this remote region bore. They had no reason to anticipate that they would be accused of being invaders of Portuguese territory, or that they would be interfered with by any Portuguese subjects of the Spanish Crown. The nearest Portuguese settlement was at São Paulo, from which Guayrá could be reached only by the long and tedious descent of the Tieté River to its confluence with the Paraná, and thence down that river to the Ivahy. Months would be necessary to make such a journey, great difficulties encountered with waterfalls and rapids, and great privations from want of food in the vast uninhabited regions on the route.

The first Jesuits to arrive after the granting of formal authorisation by the Spanish king were two Italians. They left Asuncion October 10, 1609, and it took them five months of incessant travelling to reach the Paranapanema. The work already done there by the earlier Fathers had borne some fruit. The Indians were prepared for the coming of the new missionaries and readily gathered into the towns which they founded in rapid succession. For the first few years all went well, and within a very short time they claimed to have at least forty thousand souls under their guidance. In 1614 there were 119 Jesuits in Paraguay and Guayrá, and the work of evangelising and reducing to obedience the whole Guarany population of the Paraná valley went on apace. For twenty years these Guayrá missions spread and prospered, while to the east and south the Jesuits acquired more and more influence with the Indians in Paraguay proper, and more and more hemmed in the Creoles of Asuncion.

In 1629 a thunderbolt burst upon Guayrá out of a clear sky. The Portuguese from São Paulo appeared before the Mission of San Antonio and destroyed it utterly, burning the church and houses and driving off the Indians as slaves. Other missions shortly suffered the same fate, and within the short space of three years the towns had been sacked, most of the inhabitants of the region carried off or killed, and the remnants had fled down the river under the leadership of the Fathers. The Paulistas were animated by motives, some good, some bad. Primarily they wished to capture slaves. They hated the Jesuits and had themselves suffered from the latter's system of segregating the aborigines. Only a few decades before, their fathers had destroyed the Jesuit missions near São Paulo, and they were determined not to permit themselves to be hemmed in and crowded out by Indians ruled and protected by Jesuits. They believed in the doctrine of "Brazil for the White Brazilians," and they regarded the Jesuits and their neophytes as natural enemies and fair prey. The sentiment of nationality also animated them. As descendants of Portuguese they hated the Spaniards and their rule. Their allegiance to the Spanish dynasty that had usurped the crown of Portugal sat lightly. The Jesuits came by way of Asuncion, their communications were with the Spanish authorities, and most of them were Spaniards. The Paulistas, as Portuguese, viewed with alarm a rapid spread of Spanish ecclesiastics up the Paraná valley, which threatened soon to reach their own neighbourhood. Avarice, love of adventure, race pride, patriotism, hatred of priestly domination, all co-operated to push them on to undertaking these memorable expeditions.

The great extension of the Jesuits over the northern and eastern regions of the Paraná valley occurred during the period when Hernandarias was the dominant figure of the Plate. Creole though he was, this remarkable man was a friend to the Indian and to the missionary work of the Jesuits. His aid and encouragement in 1609 were essential to the latter's success, for he might easily have nullified the effect of the royal permission to evangelise Guayrá, a formal document that would have been of little value against the delays and excuses of an unwilling governor aided by the jealous people. After his first term as governor at Buenos Aires, the Spanish government determined to put a stop to the more flagrant of the abuses practised against the savages and created the office of "Protector of the Indians." Hernandarias was named to fill it, and carried out his instructions in a moderate spirit. He understood the country and the situation of the colony well, and did not undertake to abolish Indian slavery. In that tropical climate the whites will not labour in the fields so long as there are Indians who can be forced to work, and the Spaniards still regarded the Indian as little better than an animal.

On the other hand, Hernandarias was too intelligent not to see that there must be restraints on the cruelties and exactions of the Creoles if the Indians of Paraguay were to be saved from the extermination that had been the fate of the Haytians a century before. The outcome was, that though a new code of laws was promulgated by the impracticable Spanish king, which forbade any further enslavement of the aborigines, its provisions were largely disregarded. At the same time, however, the Indians acquired a legal status, and their condition was gradually improved until it became not much worse than that of the contemporaneous European peasantry. The Jesuits were guaranteed against interference and allowed to go out into the remoter wilderness and give to the yet unslaved inhabitants the invaluable protection of membership in their missions.

In 1619 the natural and commercial division between Paraguay proper and the rest of the province was officially recognised. The region between the Paraguay and the Paraná rivers was made a separate province, directly dependent upon the Viceroy at Lima and the Audiencia at Charcas in Bolivia. It included officially the Jesuit missions south-east of the Paraná as well as the present territory of Paraguay.

When the Paulistas began their terrible attacks on the Guayrá missions in 1629, the governor of Paraguay refused to send any assistance to the Jesuits. The latter charged him with a corrupt understanding with the invaders, by which he was to share in the profits of the slaves sold. The Order had agreed with the Spanish government not to put any arms into the hands of the Indians, so the latter were defenceless against the Paulistas, who attacked musket in hand. The Creoles and Spaniards in Asuncion resented more and more the presence and power of the Jesuits, and viewed with ill-concealed satisfaction the misfortunes that now overwhelmed the priests. The governor, in declining to send help, was only carrying out the wishes of the people around him. Had the number of whites in Paraguay not been so very small the Jesuits might have been expelled as they were in São Paulo.