Whoever, therefore, sought to seize upon any unauthorized power in the colony, began to flatter these lazy people, by representing the Jesuits as their greatest enemies, who were seeking to undermine their fortunes, and deprive them of the services of the Indians. Such men were, Cardenas the bishop of Assumpcion, and Antequera;—Cardenas, entering irregularly into his office in 1640, and Antequera who was sent as judge to Assumpcion in 1721, more than eighty years afterwards, and who seized on the government itself. Both attacked the Jesuits as the surest means of winning the popular favour. They knew the jealousy with which their civilization of the Indians was regarded, and they had only to thunder accusations in the public ears calculated to foment that jealousy, in order to secure the favour of the people. Accordingly, these ambitious, intriguing, and turbulent persons, made not only South America, but Europe itself ring with alarms of the Jesuits. They contended that they were ruining the growing fortunes of the Spanish states,—that they were aiming at an independent power, and were training the Indians for the purpose of effecting it. They talked loudly of wealthy mines, which the Jesuits worked while they kept their location strictly secret. These mines could never be found. They represented that they dwelt in wealthy cities, adorned with the most magnificent churches and palaces, and lived in a condition the most sensual with the Indians. These calumnies, only too well relished by the lazy and rapacious Spaniards, did not fail of their effect—the Jesuits were attacked in their Reductions, harassed in a variety of modes, and eventually driven out of the country; where circumstances connected with the less worthy members of their order in Europe, added their fatal influence to the odium already existing here. But of that anon. During their existence in this country, the greatest curse and scourge of their Reductions were the Paulistas, or Man-hunters, of Santo Paulo in Brazil. These people were a colony of Mamelucoes, or descendants of Portuguese and Indians; and a more dreadful set of men are not upon record. Their great business was to hunt for mines, and for Indians. For this purpose they ranged through the interior, sometimes in large troops, armed and capable of reducing a strong town, at others, they were scattered into smaller parties prowling through the woods, and pouncing on all that fell into their clutches. They were fierce, savage, and merciless. They seemed to take a wild delight in the destruction of human settlements, and in the blaze of human abodes. They maintained themselves in the wilds by hunting, fishing, the plunder of the natives; and when that failed, they could subsist on the pine-nuts, and the flour prepared from the carob, or locust-tree, termed by them war-meal.