But in the midst of heresies and dwarf-gods, with the Paulistas almost always in the field, a man arose who was to lead the Jesuits and their neophytes out of Guayrá and settle them securely below the cataract in the Misiones of Paraguay. Born probably late in the sixteenth century in Spain, Antonio Ruiz de Montoya was amongst the first of the Jesuit Fathers who came to Paraguay. In 1612 we find him recently arrived from Spain;[72] sent up to the province of Guayrá to the assistance of Fathers Maceta and Cataldino. For thirty years,[73] as he himself informs us in his book, he remained in Paraguay, and in his own pathetic words he tells us how most of his life was spent. ‘I have lived,’ he says, ‘all through the period of thirty years in Paraguay, as in the desert searching for wild beasts—that is, for savage Indians—crossing wild countries, traversing mountain chains, in order to find Indians and bring them to the true sheepfold of the Holy Church and to the service of His Majesty.[74] With my companions I established thirteen reductions or townships in the wilds, and this I did with great anxiety, in hunger, nakedness, and frequent peril of my life. And all these years I passed far from my brother Spaniards have made me almost a rustic and ignorant of the polished language of the Court.’ Travelling as he did continually, few knew the country from Guayrá to Yapeyu[75] so well as he; he tells us that for ‘all travelling equipment’ he took a hammock, and a little mandioca flour, that he usually travelled on foot with either sandals or bare feet, and that for eight or nine years he never once tasted bread.