| Notes: Born in Sweden of a Neapolitan father he spent most of his early life in Zeren, Duchy of Bremen, Germany. He had fair skin with blond hair and a beard and blue eyes. He was a real individualist with very much of an international background. He joined the Jesuits in the lower Rhineland on October 14, 1724 and was classed as a "German." He was in a Jesuit college there when he left on April 14, 1735. He came to New Spain on November 22, 1735. Placed in charge of Guevavi on 1 June 1737, he learned the Piman language well, but nothing is known of his first two years as most of the pages in the Guevavi register written by him are missing. He professed his final vows on May 1, 1740 at San Ignacio. He left there for the Seri missions at Pópulo on the Río San Miguel after August 27, 1740. One year after leaving Guevavi he was at Batuc, an Opata mission. He started the mission church there and was there when the expulsion caught up to him. Of the seven priests whose names appear in the Guevavi and Suamca mission records (Nicolás Perera, Alexandro Rapicani, Francisco Hlava, Juan Nentvig, Pedro Díaz, Manuel Aguirre, and Bartolomé Saenz), he was the second to die during the forced march through the coastal jungles between Tepic, Nayarit, and Guadalajara, Jalisco. He was sixty-five years and ten months old when he died at Ixtlán. |
