little traces of its passage that the Spaniards in the fort were still expecting them when they were far beyond their reach. Each Indian had to take his bundle on his back; even the children carried bundles in proportion to their strength. The missionaries carried what was held most sacred, as altar-plate and images of saints. In front a band of men armed with machétes (cane-knives) opened the way through the dense woods and pathless jungle of the bank; and as they marched along, Montoya says they sang hymns which the Jesuits had taught them, and at the sound of them fugitives who had been hiding in the woods came out and joined their march. Especially those from the out-station of Tayaoba joined them; their priest, Pedro de Espinosa, had met his death ‘with a good chance of his eternal welfare,’ as Montoya says.[98] But after the second day the hymns no longer sounded through the woods, nor did they play upon the harps and other instruments, whose strings being all broken and the wood unglued, ‘they left them on the rocks, being too sad to look at them.’ All through the weary journey Montoya seems never once to have despaired, and sets down in his book the adventures of each separate day, never forgetting to chronicle anything strange or pathetic as it occurred to him. On the fourth day he sent off Fathers Diego, Nicolas Hennerio, and Mansilla into the province of Itatines to found a mission there, acting upon orders which had just reached him from the Provincial of the Order shortly before he had started from Guayrá. They took with them ‘bells, images, and everything suitable for the foundation of a mission’; but the first two were martyred by the wild Indians, and the third just fled in time to save his life. It took the fugitive Indians eight weary days of marching to reach the lower end of the cataract, where once again the Paraná was navigable. On their arrival they hoped to find provisions and more boats; but none were there, their own stores were almost done, and the people too exhausted to march on. Fever broke out, and many of them died; and others, lost in the forests, without a guide, wandered about till death released them from their march. A weaker man than Padre Montoya might have despaired of ever issuing from the woods. However, he set the Indians to work to make canoes, and others[99] to cultivate patches of maize for food, working himself alternately with axe and hoe to give example to the neophytes. Others, again, cut down the enormous canes, which in that region grew to fifty feet in height, to make them into rafts.