A Vanished Arcadia | Page 9

Patagonia. As an Englishman and a Jesuit (a somewhat rare combination in the eighteenth century), and as one who doubtless knew many of the Paraguayan priests, his testimony would have been most important, especially as he was a man of great information, much education, an intrepid traveller, and, moreover, only entered the Company of Jesus at a comparatively advanced age.
It is in Spanish, or in Latin by Spanish authors, that the greater portion of the contemporary histories and accounts are to be found.* Literatures, like other things, have their times of fashion. At one time a knowledge of Spanish was as requisite as some tincture of French is at present, and almost as universal. Men from Germany, England, and Holland who met in a foreign country communicated in that language. In the early portion of the century Ticknor, Prescott, and Washington Irving rendered Spanish literature fashionable to some degree.
-- * It is to be remembered that the Spanish colonists were as a rule antagonistic to the Jesuits, and that, therefore, Spanish writers do not of necessity hold a brief for the Jesuits in Paraguay. Moreover, the names of Esmid (Smith), Fildo (Fields), Dobrizhoffer, Cataldini and Tomas Bruno (Brown, who is mentioned as being `natural de Yorca'), Filge, Limp, Pifereti, Enis, and Asperger, the quaint medical writer on the virtues of plants found in the mission territory, show how many foreign Jesuits were actually to be found in the reductions of Paraguay. For more information on this matter see the `Coleccion de Documentos relativos a/ la Expulsion de los Jesuitas de la Republica Argentina y Paraguay', published and collected by Francisco Javier Brabo, Madrid, 1872. --
Later the historical researches of Sir William Stirling Maxwell drew some attention to it. To-day hardly any literature of Europe is so little studied in England. Still leaving apart the purely literary treasures of the language, it is in Spanish, and almost alone in Spanish, that the early history of America is to be found.
After the struggle for independence which finished about 1825, some interest was excited in the Spanish-American countries, stimulated by the writings of Humboldt; but when it became apparent that on the whole those countries could never be occupied by Northern Europeans, interest in them died out except for purposes connected with the Stock Exchange. Yet there is a charm which attaches to them which attaches to no other countries in the world. It was there that one of the greatest dramas, and certainly the greatest adventure in which the human race has engaged, took place. What Africa has been for the last twenty years, Spanish America was three hundred years ago, the difference being that, whereas modern adventure in Africa goes on under full observation, and deals in the main with absolutely uncivilized peoples, the conquest of South America was invested with all the charm of novelty, and brought the conquerors into contact with at least two peoples almost as advanced in most of the arts of civilization as they were themselves.
When first Sebastian Cabot and Solis ascended the Parana, they found that the Guaranis of Paraguay had extended in no instance to the western shore of either of those rivers. The western banks were inhabited then, as now, by the wandering Indians of the still not entirely explored territory of the Gran Chaco. Chaco* is a Quichua Indian word meaning `hunting' or `hunting-ground', and it is said that after the conquest of Peru the Indian tribes which had been recently subjugated by the Incas took refuge in this huge domain of forest and of swamp.
-- * The Inca Garcilaso de la Vega, in his `Commentarios Reales' (en Madrid 1723, en la oficina Real y a/ costa de Nicholas Rodriguez Franco, Impressor de libros, se hallaran en su casa en la calle de el Poc,o y en Palacio), derives the word from the Quichua `Chacu/' = a surrounding. If he is right, it would then be equivalent to the Gaelic `tinchel'. Taylor, the Water-poet, has left a curious description of one of these tinchels. It was at a tinchel that the rising under the Earl of Mar in the '15 was concocted. --
Be that as it may, the Chaco Indians of to-day, comprising the remnants of the Lulis, Tobas, Lenguas, Mocobios, and others, are almost as savage as when first we hear of them in the pages of Alvar Nunez and Hulderico Schmidel. These tribes the Jesuits on many occasions attempted to civilize, but almost entirely without success, as the long record of the martyrdom of Jesuit missionaries in the Chaco proves, as well as the gradual abandonment of their missions there, towards the second half of the eighteenth century.
Certain it is that at various places in the Chaco, in the quaint old maps the Jesuits have left us, one reads `Mission