Meanwhile population and wealth had been increasing satisfactorily in the older provinces south of Cape St. Roque. By 1626 Pernambuco and Bahia had grown to be towns of something like ten thousand inhabitants, and the people of the respective provinces numbered about a hundred thousand. Ilheos, Porto Seguro, and Espirito Santo had made no progress, but Rio had become a city of six thousand, while the shores of her bay and the adjacent coast were now fairly settled. Rio and Santos really performed the function of ports for the foreign commerce of Paraguay and the Argentine because the Spanish laws did not permit these colonies to have ports of their own. Campos was now settled and its sugar industry was prospering. On the Sao Paulo plains the Paulistas had spread to the north-east to the headwaters of the Parahyba and borders of the present state of Rio, and north-west down the navigable Tiete, along which they found an easy track for their expeditions in search of slaves. The Jesuits had long since been unable to control or check the Paulistas, and had abandoned the missions near the coast. In the remote interior, along the Parana and its great tributaries, the defeated priests thought that they would be safe, and about the end of the sixteenth century they entered that region by way of Paraguay. The Paulistas recked little of the government, especially now that the king was Spanish, and, advancing the claim that Spanish Jesuits had established missions on Portuguese territory, they proceeded to wipe out the new missions. It seems incredible that their little bands could have penetrated such distances and accomplished such results, but it is on record that they tracked nearly to the Andes, and practically exterminated, the aboriginal population of half Brazil. The Jesuits tell us that between 1614 and 1639 four hundred Paulistas with two thousand Indian allies captured and killed three hundred thousand natives. In 1632 they utterly destroyed the great Jesuit settlements on the Upper Parana, though this involved an expedition of fifteen hundred miles, much of which is to this day rarely penetrable. One of their expeditions was like an ambulating village--women, children, and domestic animals accompanying it. They sometimes were obliged to stop, sow a crop, and wait for it to mature before they could proceed. For the time being, these predatory Paulistas almost reverted to the nomadic stage.