Resources:
(online video of Jesus de Tavarangue mission)
(online video of Trinidad mission)
Mission Jesuitica Guarani de la Santisima Trinidad del Parana is the full name of the Jesuit ruins near Encarnacion in southern Paraguay. They are really fantastic to walk around and some of the best ruins I have seen in South America.
Lost Cities of Paraguay, Art and Architecture of the Jesuit Reductions, 1607-1767 by C.J. McNaspy
Lost Cities of Paraguay -- at Amazon.com
The lost paradise: The Jesuit Republic in South America by Philip Caraman
The Lost Paradise -- at Amazon.com
All the reports of riches amassed in Paraguay by the Jesuits, after the expulsion of their order proved to be untrue; nothing of any consequence was found in any of the towns, although the Jesuits had had no warning of their expulsion, and had no time for preparation or for concealment of their gold. Although they stood to the Indians almost in the light of gods, and had control of an armed force larger by far than any which the temporal power could have disposed of, they did not resist, but silently departed from the rich territories which their care and industry had formed.
Rightly or wrongly, but according to their lights, they strove to teach the Indian population all the best part of the European progress of the times in which they lived, shielding them sedulously from all contact with commercialism, and standing between them and the Spanish settlers, who would have treated them as slaves. These were their crimes. For their ambitions, who shall search the human heart, or say what their superiors in Europe may, or perhaps may not, have had in view? When all is said and done, and now their work is over, and all they worked for lost (as happens usually with the efforts of disinterested men), what crime so terrible can men commit as to stand up for near upon two centuries against that slavery which disgraced every American possession of the Spanish crown?
Built round a square, the church and store-houses filled one end, and the dwellings of the Indians, formed of sun-dried bricks or wattled canes in three long pent-houses, completed the three sides. In general, the houses were of enormous length, after the fashion of a St. Simonian phalanstery, or of a `miners' row' in Lanarkshire. Each family had its own apartments, which were but separated from the apartments of the next by a lath-and-plaster wall, called in Spanish tabique; but one veranda and one roof served for a hundred or more families. The space in the middle of the square was carpeted with the finest grass, kept short by being pastured close by sheep. The churches, sometimes built of stone, and sometimes of the hard woods with which the country abounds, were beyond all description splendid, taking into consideration the remoteness of the Jesuit towns from the outside world. Frequently — as, for instance, in the mission of Los Apostoles — the churches had three aisles, and were adorned with lofty towers, rich altars,[161] super-altars, and statuary, brought at great expense from Italy and Spain. Though the churches were often built of stone, it was not usual for the houses of the Indians to be so built; but in situations where stone was plentiful, as at the mission of San Borja, the houses of the Jesuits were of masonry, with verandas held up by columns, and with staircases with balustrades of sculptured stone.[162] The ordinary ground-plan of the priest's house was that of the Spanish Moorish dwelling, so like in all its details to a Roman house at Pompeii or at Herculaneum. Built round a square courtyard, with a fountain in the middle, the Jesuits' house formed but a portion of a sort of inner town, which was surrounded by a wall, in which a gate, closed by a porter's lodge, communicated with the outside world. Within the wall was situated the church (although it had an entrance to the plaza), the rooms of the inferior priest, a garden, a guest-chamber, stables, and a store-house, in which were kept the arms belonging to the town, the corn, flour, and wool, and the provisions necessary for life in a remote and often dangerous place. In every case the houses were of one story; the furniture was modest, and in general home-made; in every room hung images and pious pictures, the latter often painted by the Indians themselves. In the smaller missions two Jesuits managed all the Indians.[163]
Much of the misery of the world has been brought about with good intentions; but of the Jesuits, at least, it can be said that what they did in Paraguay did not spread death and extinction to the tribes with whom they dealt.[166] So to the task of agriculture the Jesuits marshalled their neophytes to the sound of music, and in procession to the fields, with a saint borne high aloft, the community each day at sunrise took its way. Along the paths, at stated intervals, were shrines of saints, and before each of them they prayed, and between each shrine sang hymns.[167] As the procession advanced, it became gradually smaller as groups of Indians dropped off to work the various fields, and finally the priest and acolyte with the musicians returned alone.[168] At mid-day, before eating, they all united and sang hymns, and then, after their meal and siesta, returned to work till sundown, when the procession again re-formed, and the labourers, singing, returned to their abodes. A pleasing and Arcadian style of tillage, and different from the system of the `swinked' labourer in more northern climes. But even then the hymnal day was not concluded; for after a brief rest they all repaired to church to sing the `rosary', and then to sup and bed. On rainy days they worked at other industries in the same half-Arcadian, half-communistic manner, only they sang their hymns in church instead of in the fields. The system was so different to that under which the Indians endured their lives in the encomiendas and the mitas of the Spanish settlements, that the fact alone is sufficient to account for much of the contemporary hatred which the Jesuits incurred.
Imagine a semi-communistic settlement set close to the borders of Rhodesia, in which thousands of Kaffirs passed a life analogous to that passed by the Indians of the missions — cared for and fed by the community, looked after in every smallest particular of their lives — and what a flood of calumny would be let loose upon the unfortunate devisers of the scheme! Firstly, to withdraw thousands of `natives' from the labour market would be a crime against all progress, and then to treat them kindly would be heresy, and to seclude them from the contamination of the scum of Europe in the settlements would be termed unnatural; for we know that native races derive most benefit from free competition with the least fitted of our population to instruct. But besides agriculture the enormous cattle-farms[169] of the mission territory gave occupation to many of the neophytes. The life on cattle-farms gave less scope for supervision, and we may suppose that the herders and the cattlemen were more like Gauchos; but Gauchos under religious discipline, half-centaurs in the field, sitting a plunging half-wild colt as if they were part of him, and when on foot at home submissive to the Jesuits, constant in church, but not so fierce and bloodthirsty as their descendants soon became after the withdrawal of the mission rule.
As well as agriculture and estancia life, the Jesuits had introduced amongst the Indians most of the arts and trades of Europe. By the inventories taken by Bucareli, Viceroy of Buenos Ayres, at the expulsion of the Order, we find that they wove cotton largely; sometimes they made as much as eight thousand five hundred yards of cloth in a single town in the space of two or three months.[170] And, in addition to weaving, they had tanneries, carpenters' shops, tailors, hat-makers, coopers, cordage-makers, boat-builders, cartwrights, joiners, and almost every industryuseful and necessary to life. They also made arms and powder, musical instruments, and had silversmiths, musicians, painters, turners, and printers to work their printing-presses: for many books were printed at the missions,[171] and they produced manuscripts as finely executed as those made by the monks in European monasteries.
All the estancias, the agricultural lands and workshops were, so to speak, the property of the community; that is to say, the community worked them in common, was fed and maintained by their productions, the whole under the direction of the two Jesuits who lived in every town. A portion called tupinambal in Guaraní was set aside especially for the maintenance of orphans and of widows. The cattle and the horses, with the exception of `los caballos del santo', destined for show at feasts, were also used in common. The surplus of the capital was reserved to purchase necessary commodities from Buenos Ayres and from Spain.[172] Each family received from the common stock sufficient for its maintenance during good conduct, for the Jesuits held in its entirety the Pauline dictum that if a man will not work, then neither shall he eat. But as they held it, so they practised it themselves, for their lives were most laborious — teaching and preaching, and acting as overseers to the Indians in their labours continually, from the first moment of their arrival at the missions till their death. Thus, if the mayor of the township complained of any man for remissness at his work, he received no rations till he had improved.
To inculcate habits of providence amongst the Indians, always inclined to consume whatever was given to them and go fasting afterwards, they issued the provisions but once a week, and when they killed their oxen forced the Indians to `jerk'[173] a certain quantity of beef to last throughout the week. Vegetables each family was obliged to plant both in their gardens and in the common fields; and all that were not actually consumed were dealt out to the workers in the common workshops or preserved for sale.
Certain of the Indians owned their own cows and horses, and had gardens in which they worked; but all the product was obliged to be disposed of to the Jesuits for the common good, and in exchange for them they gave knives, scissors, cloth, and looking-glasses, and other articles made in the outside world. Clothes were served out to every Indian, and consisted for the men of trousers, coarse ponchos, straw hats or caps, and shirts; but neither men nor women ever wore shoes, and the sole costume of the latter was the Guaraní tipoi,[174] a long and sleeveless shift cut rather high, and with coarse embroidery round the shoulders, and made of a rough cotton cloth. For ornaments they had glass beads and rosaries of brass or silver, with silver rings, and necklaces of glass or horn, from which hung crucifixes. Thus food and clothing cost the Jesuits[175] (or the community) but little, and a rude plenty was the order of the land. The greatest luxury of the Indians was maté, and to produce it they worked in the yerbales in the same way in which they worked their fields — in bands and with processions, to the sound of hymns and headed by a priest.
This, then, was the system by means of which the Jesuits succeeded, without employing force of any kind, which in their case would have been quite impossible, lost as they were amongst the crowd of Indians, in making the Guaranís endure the yoke of toil. The semi-communal character of their rule accounts for the hostility of Liberals who, like Azara, saw in competition the best road to progress, but who, like him, in their consuming thirst for progress lost sight of happiness.
The church, all hung with velvet and brocade, was all ablaze with lights, and fumes of incense (no doubt necessary) almost obscured the nave. Upon the right and left hand of the choir (which, as is usual in Spain, was in the middle of the church) the younger Indians were seated all in rows, the boys and girls being separated, as was the custom in all the missions of the Jesuits, who, no doubt, were convinced of the advisability of the saying that `entre santa y santo, pared de cal y canto.'[184] The Indians who had some office, and who wore the clothes[185] I have described, were seated or knelt in rows, and at the outside stood the people of the town dressed in white cotton, their simple clothes, no doubt, forming an effective background to their more parti-coloured brethren kneeling in the front.
Throughout the church the men and women were separated, and if a rumour of an incursion of Paulistas was in the air, the Indians carried arms even in the sacred buildings and at the solemn feasts. Mass was celebrated with a full band, the oboe, fagot, lute, harp, cornet, clarinet, violin, viola, and all other kinds of music, figuring in the inventories of the thirty towns. Indeed, in two of the inventories[186] an opera called `Santiago' is mentioned, which had special costumes and properties to put it on the stage. Mass over, the procession was reconstituted outside the church, and after parading once more through the town broke up, and the Indians devoted the night to feasting, and not infrequently danced till break of day.
Such were the outward arts with which the Jesuits sought to attach the simple people, to whom they stood in the position not only of pastors and masters both in one, but also as protectors from the Paulistas on one side, and on the other from the Spaniards of the settlements, who, with their encomiendas and their European system of free competition between man and man, were perhaps unknowingly the direst enemies of the whole Indian race. There is, as it would seem, implanted in the minds of almost all primitive peoples, such as the Guaranís, a solidarity, a clinging kinship, which if once broken down by competition, unrestrained after our modern fashion, inevitably leads to their decay. Hence the keen hatred to the Chinese in California and in Australia. Naturally, those whom we hate, and in a measure fear, we also vilify, and this has given rise to all those accusations of Oriental vice (as if the vice of any Oriental, however much depraved, was comparable to that of citizens of Paris or of London), of barbarism, and the like, so freely levelled against the unfortunate Chinese.
In Paraguay nothing is more remarkable in a market in the country than the way in which the people will not undersell each other, even refusing to part with goods a fraction lower than the price which they consider fair.[187] It may be that the Jesuits would have done better to endeavour to equip their neophytes more fully, so as to take their place in the battle of the world. It may be that the simple, happy lives they led were too opposed to the general scheme of outside human life to find acceptance or a place in our cosmogony. But one thing I am sure of — that the innocent delight of the poor Indian Alferez Real, mounted upon his horse, dressed in his motley, barefooted, and overshadowed by his gold-laced hat, was as entire as if he had eaten of all the fruits of all the trees of knowledge of his time, and so perhaps the Jesuits were wise.
Strangely enough — but, then, how strangely all extremes meet in humanity! — the Jesuits alone (at least, in Paraguay) seem to have apprehended, as the Arabs certainly have done from immemorial time, that the first duty of a man is to enjoy his life. Art, science, literature, ambition — all the frivolities with which men occupy themselves — have their due place; but life is first, and in some strange, mysterious way the Jesuits felt it, though, no doubt, they would have been the first to deny it with a thousand oaths. But in a Jesuit mission all was not feasting or processioning, for with such neighbours as the Mamelucos they had to keep themselves prepared.[188] As for their better government in home affairs each mission had its police, with officers[189] chosen by the Jesuits amongst the Indians, so for exterior defence they had militia, and in it the caciques[190] of the different tribes held principal command. Most likely over them, or at their elbows, were set priests who before entering the Company of Jesus had been soldiers: for there were many such amongst the Jesuits. As their own founder once had been a soldier, so the Company was popular amongst those soldiers who from some cause or other had changed their swords to crucifixes, and taken service in the ranks of Christ.[191] As it was most important, both for defence and policy, to keep the caciques content, they were distinguished by better treatment than the others in many different ways.
Their food was more abundant, and a guard of Indians was on perpetual duty round the houses where they lived; these they employed as servants and as messengers to summon distant companies of Indians to the field. Their method of organization must have been like that of the Boers or of the Arabs; for every Indian belonged to a company, which now and then was brought together for evolutions in the field or for a period of training, after the fashion of our militia or the German Landwehr. Perhaps this system of an armed militia, always ready for the field, was what, above all other reasons, enabled their detractors to represent the Jesuits as feared and unpopular.
Why, it was asked, does this community of priests maintain an army in its territories? No one remembered that if such were not the case the missions could not have existed for a year without a force to defend their borders from the Paulistas. Everyone forgot that Fathers Montoya and Del Taño had obtained special permission from the King for the Indians of the missions to bear arms; and, as no human being is grateful for anything but contumelious treatment, the Spanish settlers conveniently forgot how many times a Jesuit army had saved their territories. The body of three thousand Guaranís sent at the expense of the Company to assist the Spaniards against the Portuguese at the attack upon the Colonia del Sacramento[192] on the river Plate, in 1678, was quite forgotten, together with the innumerable contingents sent by the Jesuits at the demand of Spanish governors against the Chaco Indians, the Payaguás, and even against the distant Calchaquis, in what is now the province of Jujuy. Even when an English pirate, called in the Spanish histories Roque Barloque (explained by some to be plain Richard Barlow), appeared off Buenos Ayres, the undaunted neophytes shrank not a moment from going to the assistance of their co-religionists against the `Lutheran dog'.[193]
Lastly, all Spanish governors and writers, both contemporaneous and at the end of the eighteenth century, seem to forget that if the Jesuits had an army of neophytes within their territory the fact was known and approved of at the court of Spain.[194] But it appears that Calvin had many coadjutors in his policy of `Jesuitas aut necandi aut calumniis opponendi sunt.'[195] When a Jesuit army took the field, driving before it sufficient cattle to subsist upon, and with its caballada of spare horses upon its flank, it must have resembled many a Gaucho army I have seen in Entre Rios five-and-twenty years ago. The only difference seems to have been that the Gauchos of yesterday did not use bows and arrows, although they might have done so with as much benefit to themselves, and no more danger to their enemies, than was occasioned by the rusty, ill-conditioned guns they used to bear. The Indians were armed with bows, and in their expeditions each Indian carried one hundred and fifty arrows tipped with iron. Others had firearms, but all bore bolas on their saddles, and carried lazos and long lances,[196]which, like the Pampa Indians, they used in mounting their horses, placing one hand upon the mane, and vaulting into the saddles with the other leaning on the lance. The infantry were armed with lances and a few guns; they also carried bolas, but they trusted most to slings, for which they carried bags of hide, with a provision of smooth round stones, and used them dexterously. On several occasions their rude militia gave proofs of stubborn valour, and, as they fought under the Jesuits' eyes, no doubt acquitted themselves as men would who looked upon their priests almost in the light of gods.
But agriculture and cattle-breeding were not all the resources of the missions; for the Jesuits engaged in commerce largely, both with the outer world and by the intricate and curious barter system which they had set on foot for the mutual convenience of the different mission towns. In many of the inventories printed by Brabo, one comes across the entry `Deudas', showing a sort of account current between the towns for various articles. Thus, they exchanged cattle for cotton, sugar for rice, wheat for pig-iron or tools from Europe; as no account of interest ever appears in any inventory as between town and town, it seems the Jesuits anticipated Socialism — at least, so far as that they bought and sold for use, and not for gain. Although between the towns of their own territory all was arranged for mutual convenience, yet in their dealings with the outside world the Jesuits adhered to what are known as `business principles'. These principles, if I mistake not, have been deified by politicians with their `Buy in the cheapest, sell in the dearest' tag, and therefore even the sternest Protestant or Jansenist (if such there still exist) can have no stone to throw at the Company of Jesus for its participation in that system which has made the whole world glad.
Cotton and linen cloth, tobacco, hides, woods of the various hard-wood forests of the country, and, above all, yerba-maté, were their chief articles of export to the outside world. Their nearest market was in Buenos Ayres, and to that port they sent their yerba in boats made at their own yards, of which they had several, but notably at Yapeyú upon the Uruguay. The money that was made was sent to the Superior of the missions, who had the disposition of the way in which it was dispensed, either for use at home or to be sent to Europe for necessary goods. As well as yerba-maté, they sent great quantities of hides. The inventories of the towns taken at the expulsion state that the number of green hides[197] exported annually was fifty thousand, together with six thousand cured; in addition they sold from three to four arrobas[198] of horse-hair, and wood to the value of twenty-five to thirty thousand dollars every year. The total export of their yerba ranged between eighty and one hundred thousand arrobas, which at the lowest price could not have been sold at a profit under seven dollars an arroba,[199] so that the income[200] of the thirty towns must have been relatively large.[201] Two or three hundred barrels of honey[202] and some three or four thousand arrobas of tobacco made up the sum total of their exports, though, had they needed money, it might have been increased in such a country, and with so many willing labourers, almost indefinitely.
Thus it will be seen that the missions were organized both agriculturally and commercially so as to be almost self-supporting, and that of the mere necessaries of life they had sufficient for exportation, no small achievement when we consider how averse from labour were the Indians with whom they had to deal. But that nothing should be wanting that a civilized community could possibly desire, they had their prisons, with good store of chains, fetters, whips, and all the other instruments with which the moral code is generally enforced. The most usual punishment was whipping;[203] and the crimes most frequent were drunkenness, neglect of work, and bigamy, which latter lapse from virtue the Jesuits chastised severely, not thinking, being celibates themselves, that not unlikely it was apt to turn into its own punishment without the aid of stripes.
IN CONCLUSION:
Thus the Arcadian life, which had subsisted more than two hundred years, in the brief space of two short years was lost.
The vast estancias, in which at the expulsion more than a million head of cattle pastured,[347] were but bare plains, in which the cattle that were left had all run wild or perished from neglect. Wild beasts roamed round the outskirts of the half-deserted towns. A dense low scrub of yatais and of palmettos invaded all the pasture-lands, and in the erstwhile cultivated fields rank weeds sprang up, and choked the crops which in the Jesuits' times had made the mission territories the most productive of the American possessions of the Spanish crown. The churches were unserved, and in the evening air no more the hymns resounded, nor did the long white-robed processions headed by a cross pass to the fields to peaceful labour, marshalled by their priests. The fruit-trees round the missions were either all cut down for firewood or had degenerated, and the plantations of the Ilex Paraguayensis,[348] from which they made their yerba, which had been brought from the up-country forests with vast pains, were in decay, and quite uncultivated.
The Indian population had almost disappeared within the space of eight-and-twenty years.[349] The Guaranís collected from the woods with so much effort to the missionary, then guided down the Paraná by the most noble and self-sacrificing of their priests, Ruiz Montoya, and after that redeemed with blood from the fierce Mameluco bands, had shrunk away before the baneful breath of unaccustomed contact with the civilizing whites.
The simple ceremonious, if perhaps futile, mission-life had withered up at the first touch of vivifying competition — that competition which has made the whole world gray, reducing everything and everyone to the most base and commonest denominator.
The self-created goddess Progress was justified by works, and all the land left barren, waiting the time when factories shall pollute its sky, and render miserable the European emigrants, who, flying from their slavery at home, shall have found it waiting for them in their new paradise beyond the seas.
The world, it would appear, is a vast class-room, and its Creator but a professor of political economy, apparently unable to carry out his theories with effect. Therefore, to us, the Western Europeans, he has turned for help, and upon us devolved the task of extirpating all those peoples upon whom he tried his 'prentice hand. On us he laid injunctions to increase at home, and to the happier portions of the world to carry death under the guise of life unsuitable to those into whose lands we spread.
Let those made cruel by the want of sympathy with men that the mere poring over books so often superinduces in the mind protest when judging of the Jesuits in Paraguay against the outrage done to their theories by the scheme the Jesuits pursued.
It has been nobly said[350] `that the extinction of the smallest animal is a far greater loss than if the works of all the Greeks had perished.' How much the greater loss that of a type of man such as the Indians, whom the semi-communistic Jesuit government successfully preserved, sheltering them from the death-dealing breath of our cold northern life and its full, fell effects!
There are those, no doubt, who think that a tree brought from the tropics should be planted out at home, to take its chance of life in the keen winter of the north, in holy competition with the ash and oak; and if it dies, there are still pines enough, with stores of dogwood, thickets of elder, and a wilderness of junipers. They may be right; but, after all, that which has felt the tropic sun is for the tropics, and to grow under the tantalizing sunshine of the north, which lights but does not warm, it must have glass, and shelter from the cold.
But of aforethought to deliberately transplant our fogs and chilling atmosphere, and so to nip and kill plants which crave only the sun to live, that is a crime against humanity; a crime posterity with execration will one day taunt us with, and hold us up to execration, as we to-day in our hypocrisy piously curse the memories of Pizarro and Cortés.
In the eternal warfare between those who think that progress — which to them means tramways and electric light — is preferable to a quiet life of futile happiness of mind there is scant truce, so that my readers have to take their choice whether to side with Funes or Azara in judging of the Jesuits' rule in Paraguay. There is no middle course between the old and new; no halting-place; no chink in which imagination can drive in its nail to stop the wheels of time; therefore, no doubt, the Jesuit commonwealth was doomed to disappear. But for myself, I am glad that five-and-twenty years ago I saw the Indians who still lingered about the ruined mission towns, mumbling their maiméd rites when the Angelus at eventide awoke the echoes of the encroaching woods, whilst screeching crowds of parrots and macaws hovered around the date-palms which in the plaza reared their slender heads, silent memorials of the departed Jesuits' rule.
Indians and Jesuits are gone from Paraguay, the Indians to that Trapalanda which is their appointed place; and for the Jesuits, they are forgotten, except by those who dive into old chronicles, or who write books, proposing something and concluding nothing, or by travellers, who, wandering in the Tarumensian woods, come on a clump of orange-trees run wild amongst the urundéys.
