of labour extraction, forcing the Indians in the reductions to labor on Spanish farms. At times, conflict broke out between the religious orders and the state with regard to control over the indigenous population. Thus, the two organizations were allied in complex ways in the western Amazon from the 17th to 19th centuries. The Jesuit missions offered the indigenous people Christianity, iron tools, and a small degree of protection from the slavers and the colonists. In exchange, the indigenous had to submit to Jesuit discipline and adopt, at least superficially, a life style foreign to their experience. The population of the missions was only sustained by frequent expeditions into the jungle by Jesuits, soldiers, and Christian Indians to capture indigenous people and force them to return or to settle in the missions. Knowledge of the Mainas missions derives largely from missionary accounts of their activities. Thus, as Newson notes, a complete account is "difficult to establish in detail". Rebellion The immediate impetus for missionary work in the region was a 1635 (or 1637, or 1640) rebellion by the Maina people against Spanish colonialists. The Maina rebelled against the encomienda system, a system analogous to slavery which 'gave individual Spaniards the right to demand labor and tribute from the Indians assigned to them … and also turned them into de facto administrators, responsible for the control and the welfare of these Indians'. Reeve describes the system, as practised in the early 17th century in Mainas, as 'exceedingly harsh': the vast majority of indigenous peoples co-opted into Mainas encomiendas died, and the colonial government used military force to put down those who had not been brought into the system. The colonial strategy changed around 1636–38, however. According to Clements Markham, Pedro Vaca de Vega (known as Don Pedro Vaca and styled Governador de los Maynas), the colonial governor of Mainas province, had 'despaired of subjugating the Indians by force' and hoped that the Jesuits 'might succeed in tranquillizing them by persuasion'. Accordingly, he hoped to bring Jesuit missionaries to the area. Reeve concurs, suggesting that the governor's change of heart was due to the recent history of violence in the area. 17th century Two missionaries, then at Quito, initially responded to Vaca's request for mission-founders: Father Lucas de la Cueva (known as Father Cueva) and Father Cujia. Fathers Cueva and Cujia arrived at Borja on 6 February 1638, not long after the