PROVINCE OF PARANNA. 



135 



the fort of St. Anna, and suffered much from the various neighbouring nations 

 of barbarous Indians, principally the Guaycurus and Payagoas, who were as 

 numerous as they were ferocious and brave. It was, however, rendered defen- 

 sible by the augmentation of its settlers. Defective in gold and silver mines, 

 which attracted so many people to Peru and Mexico, this fine country, so ad- 

 vantageously situated, remained for many years after its discovery almost 

 unnoticed. 



The middle and eastern parts were the conquests of the 'Jesuits, by the 

 introduction of Christianity amongst their possessors, the Guaranis. These 

 priests, knowing, from experience, the relaxation of European morals, and 

 how much it prevailed amongst the American colonists, determined to catechize 

 only those Indians who were at a distance from the Europeans, in order that 

 the proselytes should not know practices contrary to the precepts to be taught. 

 The perfection with which they soon spoke the Guaranitic idiom, and the 

 docility of this tribe of Indians, concurred equally to carry into effect this 

 wished-for object. 



In a few years the Jesuits reduced the various hordes of this nation to a 

 settled life, in large aldeias, or villages, denominated redu^des, the number of 

 which, in the year 1630, had arrived at twenty, with seventy thousand inhabit- 

 ants. Those who had advanced to the Upper Paranna, with the intention of 

 extending the spiritual conquest, were obliged, by eight thousand Paulistas, to 

 fall back, in 1631, to the south of the Maracaj6 Serra. The Jesuit, Montoya, 

 relates, that he and his colleagues retired from above to below the seven falls of 

 the Paranna, with two thousand Indians, when the Paulistas invaded the Upper 

 Paranna, and that the latter continued hostilely to visit the redugdes of the 

 Lower Paranna ; and that, in 1637, one hundred and forty Paulistas, with one 

 thousand five hundred Indians, attacked the redugdes of Jesu Maria, St. 

 Christovam, and St. Anna, and retired with seven thousand prisoners. 



The Jesuits next reduced the Tappes to the eastward, and continued to 

 civilize those two nations, by teaching them all the useful arts, thus forming the 

 celebrated Guaranitic empire, which moderate calculators never raised to more 

 than two hundred thousand inhabitants ; and it is said they were able to carry 

 into the field an army of forty thousand men. One authority states that between 

 the rivers Uruguay and Paraguay was established a powerful republic, com- 

 prising thirty-one large villages, inhabited by one hundred thousand souls ; but 

 Guthrie raises the population of these missions to three hundred and forty 



