After having consulted with the clergy to find if they thought it lawful to attack the Guaycurús who had assailed the newly-founded town, he received the opinion ‘that it was not only lawful, but expedient.’ Therefore he sent off an expedition against them, to which was joined a priest to require the Guaycurús to become Christians and to acknowledge the King of Spain. The propositions, not unnaturally, did not seem reasonable to the Indians, who most likely were unaware of the benefits which Christianity confers, and probably heard for the first time of the King of Spain. The Governor, who seems to have doubted of the humanity of the clergy, called another council, which confirmed the previous opinion. Strangely enough, this seems to have surprised him, for he probably did not reflect that the clergy would not have to fight themselves, and that the first blood ever spilt on earth was on account of a religious difference. Just before the expedition started it was found that the two Franciscan friars who had come with him from Santa Catalina could not be found. It then appeared they had started back to the coast accompanied by a bevy of Indian damsels, thirty-five in all. They were followed and brought back, and then explained that they were on their way to Spain to complain against the Governor. The five-and-thirty dusky catechumens remained without an explanation, and the people were once more ‘scandalized’. The Governor then started out against the Guaycurús. Only those who know the Chaco, or western bank of the river Paraguay, can form the least idea of what such an expedition must have been. Even to-day in the Chaco the change since the beginning of the world can be but slight. As a steamer slips along the bank, nothing for miles and miles is seen but swamp, intersected with backwaters,[41] in which lie alligators, electric eels, and stinging rays. Far as the eye can reach are swamps, swamps, and more swamps, a sea of waving pampa-grass. After the swamps thickets of tacuaras (canes), forests of thorny trees, chañares, ñandubay, jacarandas, urundey, talas, and quebrachos, each one hard enough to split an axe, some, like the black canela, almost like iron; the inhabitants ferocious and intractable as when the Governor himself first saw them; the climate heavy and humid, the air dank with vinchucas[42] and mosquitoes and the little black infernal midget called the jejen; no roads, no paths, no landmarks, but here and there at intervals of many leagues a clearing in the forest where some straggling settlement exists, more rarely still the walls of a deserted Jesuit mission-house or church. Ostriches and deer, tigers,[43] capibaras and tapirs, and now and then a herd of cattle as wild as buffaloes, are seen. Sometimes an Indian with his lance sits motionless upon his horse to watch the vessel pass—a sentinel to guard the wilderness from encroachments from without. So Alvar Nuñez, as he tells