A few miles away from the mission was the town of João Ramalho, who had been tactfully confirmed in his possession of lands, the “Borda do Campo,” by Portugal, while his settlement was formally named a township with the title of Santo André in 1533. Its site was near the present São Bernardo, an open sunny region of prairie with woods on the horizon. With this tribe of Ramalho’s making the Jesuits sought no connection; they could not convert those half-breeds any more than they could make the hardy impenitents on the coast give up stealing Indians. Better and more pliable material was to hand in the pure Indian tribes; two groups, one under Tibiriça and the other under chief Cai-Uby, built their cabins in new S. Paulo, Tibiriça’s people forming a line which is now the Rua São Bento, while the other converts guarded the road that led over the hills to S. Vicente.[2] It was not long before trouble came. João Ramalho’s children plagued the priests: the priests retaliated by getting an order from the then Captain-General, Mem de Sá, by which Santo André was razed to the ground and its inhabitants forcibly incorporated in São Paulo. The latter soon changed its character as a peaceful mission settlement, the Indians suffered from aggressions by the whites who now came up from S. Vicente or their own half-white kin, and in the end a concerted attack was made by the natives upon the town, only old Tibiriça remaining loyal. The Indians were beaten, but the Jesuits saw that the mission could not be restored; they determined to carry the cross farther afield. With indomitable energy and indifference to suffering the band of priests made their way across the interior plains and woodlands, until they founded a new city (Ciudad Real) at the junction of the Paraná and Piquery, and began to gather the Indians together in new settlements. For a time they were undisturbed. But the life of the new Portuguese colonies depended upon agriculture; the white men were neither many enough nor sufficiently acclimated to till the fields themselves, and they seized the unfortunate natives and forced them to field labour. It was unsatisfactory work, as a rule: the native of the eastern coasts of South America was not a cultivator of the soil by habit, but rather a hunter and fisher, as he is still in his interior retreats. They were too on the whole a gentle as well as an idle race, and they died like flies under the whip.