ceaseless throughout the eastern part of South America. The Jesuits pushed out their spiritual frontiers, advancing on the north amongst the Tobatines of the woods, and on the west endeavouring to spread their colonies amongst the Chiriguanas and other of the Chaco tribes. From the conquest of Peru, when those Indians who had been but recently brought under the empire of the Incas retreated into the Chaco, it had been the refuge of the fiercest and most indomitable tribes. The Spanish colonists, the ardour of the first conquest spent, had settled down mainly to agricultural pursuits. Few had efficient firearms, and on the whole, though turbulent amongst themselves, they had become unwarlike.[233] The very name of the wild Indians (Los Indios Bravos) spread terror up and down the frontiers. This terror, which I remember still prevalent both in Mexico and on the pampas of the Argentine Republic, not more than five-and-twenty years ago, was keener upon the confines of the Chaco than anywhere in South America, except, perhaps, in Chile, upon the frontiers of Araucania. The Tobas, Mataguayos, Lules, Aguilotas, Abipones, and the rest, together with the warlike nations of the Vilelas and the Guaycurús, had from the first rejected Christianity. Attempts had several times been made to establish settlements amongst them, but the ferocity of all the tribes, their nomad habits—for many of them passed their lives on horseback—and the peculiar nature of their country, a vast domain of swamp, pierced by great rivers quite unknown to the Spanish settlers, had hitherto combined to render every effort vain. But, notwithstanding this, the Jesuits laboured incessantly, and not without success, amongst the wildest of the Chaco tribes. The gentle and eccentric Father Martin Dobrizhoffer passed many years amongst the Abipones, of whom he wrote his charming book. He enumerates many tribes, of whom he says[234] ‘these are for the most converted by us, and settled in towns.’