Indians to leave their homes and march into the forests, and there found new towns. At that date François Retz was General of the Jesuits, and on him devolved the duty of communicating the orders of the courts of Spain and Portugal to the Jesuits in the missions of the Uruguay. Father Bernard Neyderdorffer was the man on whom the Provincial of Paraguay (Father Barreda) imposed the task of communicating to the Indians the wishes of the two courts. Though he had lived already thirty-five years in the missions, and knew the Indians well, and was respected by them as a father, he seems at first to have shrunk from such a task. When the news was brought to the towns upon the Uruguay, none of the Indians at first would credit it. The _caciques_ (chiefs) of the seven towns declared that they would rather die than leave their native place. Nothing was heard but lamentations and expressions of hatred of the Portuguese, mingled with denunciations of the Jesuits themselves, who the poor Indians not unnaturally believed were in league with Spain to sell them to the Portuguese. But in a little the clamours turned to action, and, not content with refusing to obey the edict of the two courts, the Indians broke into revolt. Two most important narratives of this revolt exist, one by Father Cardiel and one by Father Ennis, both of whom were witnesses of the events. After considerable negotiations, which lasted till 1753,[259] the united troops of Portugal and Spain advanced into the mission territory to arrange the occupation of the ceded towns. The commissioners of the two nations were, for Spain, the Marques de Valdelirios, and for Portugal General Gomez Freyre de Andrade, and both of them appear to have come to America already prejudiced against the Jesuits. On March 24, 1753, Andrade wrote to Valdelirios, almost before he could have heard anything definite about the mission territory, to which they both were strangers, telling him that opposition was to be expected, and that the Jesuits were urging the Indians to revolt.[260] The opposition that the two commissioners so confidently hoped to find,[261] and which contemporary writers have set forth in its true colours as but the revolt of ignorant Indians rendered desperate by being arbitrarily dispossessed of lands which they themselves had settled and held for almost a hundred years, was fraught with serious consequences, not only to the Jesuits in Paraguay, but to the Order throughout the world at large. For years their enemies had said the Jesuits were endeavouring to set up in the missions a State quite independent of the Spanish crown. By their own conduct the Jesuits to some extent had given colour to the report, for by excluding (in the interest of the Indians) all Spaniards from the mission territories, it looked as if they were at work at something which they wished to keep a secret, as no one at that time deemed it a serious plea to enter into any line of conduct for the good of Indians, whom in