Note 278 — Chapter IX

In another letter, also preserved at Simancas, and dated at Yapeyu, he complains bitterly of his own suffering on the journey: ‘Me moli tanto con el traqueo violento del carreton que no he podido volver sobre mi.’ The roads to the missions seem to have been as bad as those which produced the historical exclamation, ‘O dura tellus Hispaniæ!’ It is certainly the case that Ibañez, in his ‘Republica Jesuitica’ (Madrid, 1768), gives a very different version of the doings of Altamirano; for he says that Rafael de Cordoba, Altamirano’s secretary, ‘embarked in a schooner called La Real a great quantity of guns and lead for balls, packing them all in boxes, which, he said, were full of objects of a pious nature. . . . This,’ says Ibañez, ‘was told me by the master of the schooner José el Ingles, a man worthy of credence.’ This is pleasing to one’s national pride, but, still, one seems to want a little better authority even than that of ‘Bardolph, the Englishman’.