Antonio Ruiz de Montoya's Conquista espiritual (Madrid, 1639)
The account the Jesuit superior of the Paraguay missions wrote at court in 1639, best known for the flight of Guairá: seven hundred rafts and canoes carrying more than twelve thousand people down the Paraná away from slave raiders out of São Paulo. The same book indicts Spanish labour demands: a yerba trade that had "consumed many thousands of Indians", tribute discharged in two months of unpaid service, an encomendero taking six months a year of every man he held.
Why this wins its question: In English the Guairá exodus survives mostly as a sentence in accounts of the bandeiras, or as scenery in retellings of the film The Mission, with no figures and no page behind it. Where the book is cited, it is cited for the flight alone. What is quoted here comes off the 1639 sheets and includes the parts that spoil a heroic reading: the tribute arithmetic, the ossuaries in the yerba hills, the encomendero taking six months a year unpaid, the fort the Spaniards of Guairá built to catch the refugees, and a bishop telling his king that armed Spaniards had wrecked the Chaco missions. The achievement and the cost are drawn from one witness, so neither can be cited without the other.
Key takeaways
- The best-known Jesuit account of the Paraguay missions is also one of the sharpest seventeenth-century Spanish indictments of Spanish labour demands, and the two sit in the same volume.
- The flight from Guairá is given precise figures on the page — seven hundred vessels, more than twelve thousand people — and its cost in drownings, hunger and plague is recorded rather than smoothed over.
- The raiders out of São Paulo destroyed a Spanish town and its nine dependent Indian pueblos, so the episode does not reduce to Portuguese against Spaniards or colonists against Indians.
- The refugees also had to get past a stockade built by their own Spanish neighbours, who wanted the people as labour.
- Montoya was an interested party writing at court; the book is advocacy, and its miracles are indexed next to its statistics.
Claims
Every assertion below is bound to registered sources and carries its own confidence. Weight them; do not treat the page as uniformly authoritative.
The book was printed at Madrid in 1639 "en la imprenta del Reyno" under a ten-year privilege granted to "el Padre Antonio Ruiz de Montoya, de la Compañia de Iesus", despatched in the office of Martin de Segura, escriuano de Camara, and dated at Madrid on 5 June 1639; the tassa of 11 July 1639 priced it at five marauedis the pliego.
It was examined for the Crown, not merely for the order. The aprobacion is signed by Doctor don Lorenço de Mendoça, prelate of Rio de Janeiro, who states that the Real y Supremo Consejo commanded him to see and examine the work, and that the same Council had earlier had him examine "los libros del Tesoro, Arte, Vocabulario, y Catecismo de la lengua Guarani del Paraguay" by the same author.
The central episode is an evacuation by water. Montoya writes that in a very short time "700 balsas, y muchas canoas sueltas" were built, "en que se embarcaron mas de doze mil almas, que solas escaparon en este diluuio tan tempestuoso", abandoning churches he calls "tan lindas, y sumptuosas" and a reduction more than a hundred leagues off. The book's own closing index carries the same figures as a heading: "Setecientas embarcaciones salieron con doze mil almas, huyendo de los de san Pablo."
The raiders from São Paulo destroyed a Spanish settlement as well as Indian ones, and Montoya titles the section accordingly: "Como los de san Pablo destruyeron una poblacion de Españoles, y muchos pueblos de Indios que les seruian." Villa Rica, he records, held a hundred and thirty men and had nine pueblos de indios in its jurisdiction; its Spaniards were driven into a stockade, then abandoned the town and moved more than seventy leagues to the pueblo of Maracayú.
The flight was not only from Portuguese raiders. Montoya reports being warned that the Spanish residents of Guairá had built a timber fort on the bank at the falls of the Paraná to block the passage and take the people — the plan being to disable the rafts by cutting down the rowers as they passed — and that he went ahead in a light boat, entered the palisade, was surrounded by men who drew swords and levelled five muskets at his chest, and got out with the help of an overcoat.
He records the cost of the evacuation rather than only its success. Hunger and plague followed the column; rafts were built of canes as thick as a man's thigh and fifty feet long, and some broke up; in one accident a raft carrying about fifty people was caught in a whirlpool and eleven infants drowned, while a woman swam clear carrying twin sons in her arms. Eight days of the journey were made overland after the first river was abandoned.
The same author indicts the Spanish labour economy in the same volume, as an eyewitness. Of the yerba of Paraguay he writes "Tiene la labor de aquesta yerua consumidos muchos millares de Indios", and says he has himself seen large ossuaries of Indians in those hills; loads of a hundred or two hundred quintales were carried by eight or nine men, each with five or six arrobas on his back over ten, fifteen, twenty leagues and more, the carrier weighing much less than his load and given nothing for his sustenance.
His account of tribute and personal service is arithmetical. Instead of relief the Indians were charged a doubled tribute of ten pesos, "pagados en dos meses de seruidumbre personal"; many walked thirty, forty and fifty leagues to this mita, and up to the hundred and sixty that lie between Maracayú and Asunción, then were held a month or two or three more. By ordinance a day-labourer was owed real y medio, forty-five reales in thirty days, against which forty reales of service a month were compelled; the whole burden he reckons at eleven pesos and two reales, "que para tan pobre tierra es intolerable carga". He states that in Guairá the most moderate encomendero used six months a year of every Indian he held without any pay, and that those who kept less to the rule held them ten and twelve months.
This is a running argument of the book rather than an aside: the closing index carries separate entries for Indians coming to personal service from thirty, forty and more leagues, for service of three and four and more months, for service of a whole year, for personal service that ought to be abolished, and for a royal cédula ordering its abolition.
The volume also prints a letter from the bishop of Tucumán to the king, reporting a bishopric of four hundred leagues with eight cities, districts of twelve to fourteen thousand souls and others of more than fifty thousand where Jesuit preaching had begun and then been given up — in the bishop's words "por el mal gouierno de vnos Españoles que entraron con las armas a conquistar aquella parte, que llaman el Chaco, tierra de grandes poblaciones, de gente docil, vestida, y reduzida a pueblos". The bishop adds that many of the baptised had gone back to their older rites for want of instruction.
The book must be read as advocacy as well as testimony, and shows it. Montoya was the Jesuit superior of the missions he describes and wrote at court while petitioning the Crown on their behalf; the narrative is framed providentially throughout, with weeping images, sweating statues and miracles indexed alongside the raids in the same closing table, and the origin of yerba-drinking attributed to a sorcerer in league with the devil.