[192] Dean Funes (‘Ensayo de la Historia de Paraguay’, etc.) says: ‘These Indians went under the command of Don Antonio de Vera Moxica; their sergeants were Guaranís and their captains Spaniards. Their _cacique_ was Ignacio Amandaá, who commanded in chief under Vera Moxica.’ They fought bravely, and returned again and again to the assault of the town after several repulses, manifesting the same dogged courage and indifference to death which their descendants showed in the war against Brazil in 1866-70. In that war bodies of Paraguayans frequently attacked strong positions defended by artillery, and allowed themselves to be shot down to the last man rather than retire. At other times, concealed behind masses of floating herbage, from their canoes they sprang on board Brazilian ironclads, and were all killed in the vain endeavour to capture the vessels. I knew a little pettifogging lawyer, one Izquierdo, who, with ten companions, attempted in a canoe to take the Brazilian flagship (an ironclad); left alone on her deck, after the death of his companions, he sprang into the water under a shower of bullets, and, badly wounded, swam over to the Chaco, the desert side of the river. There for three days he remained, subsisting on wild oranges, and then swam across again on a raft of sticks, in spite of the alligators and many fierce fish which abound in Paraguay. He got well, and, though lame, was, when I knew him, as arrant a little scrivening knave as you could hope to meet in either hemisphere. On many other occasions the mission Indians performed notable services for the Spanish Government. In 1681, when the French attacked Buenos Ayres, a detachment of two thousand Indians was sent to its assistance. Philip V. himself wrote to the Provincial of Paraguay on this occasion asking him to send troops to the defence of the city. In 1785 four thousand Guaranís, commanded by Don Baltazar Garcia, were at the second siege of the Colonia del Sacramento. Funes says of them: ‘A juicio de un testigo ocular, no es menos admirable la sangre fria de sus capellanes.’ [193] ‘Perro Luterano’. It is astonishing how in Spain the comparatively innocuous Luther has fallen heir to the heritage of hatred that should more properly have belonged to the inhuman and treacherous Calvin. [194] Philip V. in 1745, after an examination which lasted six years, approved of all the actions of the Jesuits in Paraguay (Cretineau Joly, ‘Histoire de la Compagnie de Jésus’, vol. v., p. 103). So that a curious letter of a Jeronimite friar (one Padre Cevallos), written in 1774, is well within due limits when it says that all the Jesuits did in Paraguay was ‘todo probado por reales cedulas ó procedia de ordenes expresas.’ [195] One is obliged to allow, in common fairness, that Calvin carried out in his own practice what he advocated—as witness his conduct with Servetus, whom he first calumniated, then entrapped, and lastly murdered in cold blood.