It was not long before the coast plantations of the Portuguese were denuded of workers: to get more slaves it was necessary to follow the Indian across the sertões. It was about 1562 that the first slave-hunting expeditions, the “entradas,” began; they were headed by the _mamelucos_, the descendants of Ramalho, who had no hesitation about betraying their native kinsfolk to the white man. Violence was avoided: the preferred plan was to coax any tribe approached “_com muito geito e enganos_” and only when blandishment failed was force resorted to. Tamed natives accompanied the “entries” and when the children of the woods heard tales of waiting pleasures told in their own tongue, whole clans often followed willingly to the coast, never to return. When they retreated more deeply and became more wary, and it was found that the Jesuits were advising them, a grimmer system was planned; it was decided to conduct open warfare against the missions. By this time, in the first part of the seventeenth century, the Jesuits had attained remarkable success with their converts; they were not content with teaching them the Christian faith, but insisted upon the girls learning spinning and weaving while the men planted and reaped. Results were much the same as those desired by the coast settlers, but methods differed. About Ciudad Real, in the Guayará region, fourteen great missions flourished when the Paulistas began to disturb them: by the middle of the sixteen hundreds they were all broken up, the fields waste, the priests fled, and the Indian converts prisoners in S. Paulo or hiding in the forests. To accomplish this, more careful expeditions were arranged than the earlier “entradas,” although the _mamelucos_ had made some wonderful journeys, across the river Paraguay, over the Chaco and into Bolivia, now and again having a brush with the Spanish settlers of the South, who, later on, were expelled from tentative settlements in Rio Grande do Sul: no land was too wide for the Paulistas to hold. But the “bandeiras” were now organized like an army, men enlisted in them regularly and accepted rigorous discipline. Beginning with the deliberate object of uprooting Jesuit control of the Indians, explorations continued in this form for over eighty years with other aims added—conquest of the interior, discovery for its own sake, and search for mines of gold and precious stones, as well as the repression of Spanish entries from the south and from Peru.