In the case of another youth (one Gato) things did not go so smoothly, for though he, too, by his conduct obtained both baptism and Christian wedlock, Dobrizhoffer adds without comment, ‘not many months after he died of a slow disease.’[251] The slow disease was not improbably the nostalgia of the woods, from which the efforts of the good missionary had so successfully withdrawn him. The labours of the Jesuits in the three isolated missions in the north of Paraguay[252] seem to have been as successful as those in the Chaco were unfortunate. In dealing with the wild equestrian tribes of the Gran Chaco, the system of the Jesuits was not so likely to achieve success as amongst the peaceful Guaranís. That of the Spanish settlers was entirely ineffectual, and has remained so down to the present day, when still the shattered remnants of the Lules, Lenguas, Mocobios, and the rest, roam on their horses or in their canoes about the Chaco and its rivers, having received no other benefits from contact with the European races but gunpowder and gin. Chapter IX The Spanish and Portuguese attempt to force new laws on the Indians—The Indians revolt against them—The hopeless struggle goes on for eight years—Ruin of the missions The missions in the Chaco and the Taruma, all founded between 1700 and 1760, the last (Belen) but seven years before the expulsion of the Jesuits from America, go far towards disproving the allegations of some writers,[253] that the apostolic energy of the first foundations had decayed, and that the Jesuits were merely living on the good name of the first founders in the beginning of the past century. But let the zeal of any class of men be what it may, if they oppose themselves to slavery and at the same time are reported to have lands in which is gold, and resolutely exclude adventurers from them, their doom is sealed. Both crimes were set down to the Jesuits. Writing in 1784, or twenty years after the expulsion of his order, Dobrizhoffer refers to the Indians of the reductions as ‘being in subjection[254] only to the Catholic King and the royal Governors, not in dreaded slavery amongst private Spaniards as the other Indians;’ and Montoya, Lozano, and Del Techo, writing in earlier times, all confirm the statement, which is also doubly confirmed by the various royal edicts on the subject.[255] The reports of gold-mines, too, had never ceased, although they had been repeatedly disproved, and those, together with the stand for freedom for the Indians, led to the events which finally brought about the expulsion of the Order from the territories where they had worked so long.