Company of Jesus were settled in the first twenty years from their first appearance in the land,[61] and that from the foundation of the Mission of St. George (the last established of the first twenty towns) to that of San Joaquim, in the wild forests of the Tarumá, they employed a hundred and twelve years. In the interval they chiefly occupied themselves in the consolidation of their first settlements, and in various unsuccessful attempts to institute similar reductions amongst the Indians of the Chaco across the Paraguay. But whilst the Jesuits were settling their reductions in the province of Guayrá and those upon the Paraná and Uruguay, a nest of hawks looked at their neophytes as pigeons ready fattening for their use. Almost eight hundred miles away, at the city of San Paulo de Piritinanga, in Brazil, a strange society had come into existence by degrees. Peopled at first by Portuguese and Dutch adventurers and malefactors, it had become a nest of pirates and a home for all the desperadoes of Brazil and Paraguay. This engaging population, being in want of wives whereby to propagate their virtues, took to themselves Indians and negresses, and bred a race worse ten times than were themselves, as often happens both in the cases of Mulattos and Mestizos in America. Under the name of Mamelucos[62] (given to them no one knows why) they soon became the terror of the land. Equally at home on horseback, in canoes upon the rivers, or in schooners on the sea, excellent marksmen and courageous fighters, they subsisted chiefly by procuring Indians as slaves for the plantations in Brazil. In a short time they exhausted all the Indians near San Paulo, and were forced to search far in the depths of the unknown interior. Little by little, following the course of the great rivers in their canoes, they reached the Jesuit settlements upon the upper waters of the Paraná, where they burned the towns and the churches, made captives of the converts, and killed the priests. Montoya relates that a Jesuit, having clasped an Indian in his arms to save him, was deluged with his blood, a Mameluco having crept up behind him and plunged his lance into the Indian behind the Jesuit’s back. The Mameluco, on being, as Montoya says, ‘reprehended’ by the Jesuit, dogmatically remarked, ‘I shall be saved in spite of God, for to be saved a man has only to believe,’[63] a remark which showed him clearly an honest opponent of the Jesuits, as they insisted greatly on the doctrine of good works.