With varying success the war dragged on for several years, after the style of the Gaucho warfare in the River Plate which was common twenty years ago, or that in Venezuela which obtains to-day. Alternately each party carried off the other’s horses, drove each other’s cattle, or, if they caught a straggler, tied his hands and cut his throat or lanced him, the party who had lost the man protesting he was ‘massacred’—a term in use even to-day when the party to which one’s self belongs sustains reverse. For the first two years—for wars in South America till twenty years ago were to the full as interminable as that of Troy—Father Thadeus Ennis kept his journal, faithfully chronicling all that he saw. Occasionally in a perfunctory way he says his mission with the revolted Indians was as a priest and physician to the souls and bodies of his flock; but now and then he sets down the capture of a convoy of some thirty carts, or the cutting off some messenger carrying despatches from the Generals. In this he sees the hand of God (put forth to help his Jesuits[288]), although he now and then complains the Indians were remiss in following up any success they had. After the first encounter, the Indians seem to have employed the immemorial guerilla tactics which so often waste all the strength of an army which has conquered in the field. Father Cardiel[289] describes the Indian army, quoting from the writing of a Spanish officer who served against them, as quite contemptible. Their cannon were but hollow reeds, bound round with hide, which could only be fired two or three times, and carried balls a pound in weight.[290] Some lances and bows and arrows which they had appeared to him more formidable. Most of them carried banners with the painted figure of a saint, under whose ægis they deemed themselves secure from cannon-balls. Their trenches were but shallow ditches, with a few deeper holes to shelter in, but which, as Cardiel observes, served many of them for graves, as they were open to artillery, having been constructed without ‘an ounce of military art’. The officer adds that no sooner had the Indians heard the cannon than they fled, leaving almost nine hundred on the field and losing one-sixth prisoners.[291] Finally, the officer remarks with disgust that the official chronicler of the affair ‘lies from first to last’[292] when he declares that the Indians could make any resistance against disciplined troops. With varying fortune the campaign dragged on, until in 1756 the diary of Father Ennis, bad Latinity and all, comes to an abrupt conclusion at the taking of San Lorenzo, where the stout-hearted priest was taken prisoner. His papers fell into unfriendly hands, and were made use of by Ibañez, with the context duly distorted in various passages, and served as one of the most formidable indictments against the Jesuits in the expulsion under Charles III.