Baucke (Paucke), Florian

BAUCKE (PAUCKE), FLORIAN. - Jesuit missionary and writer, b. at Witzingen (Silesia), 24 Dec. 1719, d. at Hradec Jindřichův (or Neuhaus, in Bohemia), 13 Apr. 1780. Having entered the novitiate of the province of Bohemia in 1736, he embarked in 1748 for Paraguay, where he especially distinguished himself among the Mocobí Indians through his great skill in music and in many arts and crafts. In 1768 he shared the fate of his confreres, driven from the Spanish missions by order of Charles III, and withdrew to Bohemia, where he occupied himself with drafting his mission memoirs.

A thick manuscript of more than a thousand pages, which he left to the prior of the Cistercians of Zwettl, first furnished the material for several publications and fragmentary adaptations, by the Cistercian G. Frast (Vienna 1829), and by the Jesuits A. Kobler (P. Fl. B., ein Jesuit in Paraguay, Regensburg 1870), J. Svoboda (Prague 1874), A. Brinckmann (Freiburg im Breisgau 1908), J. Auweiler (Buenos Aires 1900), etc. But the interest it presents, not only for history, but also for the ethnography, zoology and botany of America, on account of the numerous and curious drawings with which it is furnished, brought the work back into favor among scholars of Argentina, who have recently produced sumptuous editions of it: G. Furlong, P. Fl. B., Iconografia colonial rioplatense 1749-67. Costumbre y trajes de Españoles, Criollos e Indios (ibid. 1935); P. Fl. B., Hacia allá y para acá. Una estada entre los Indios Mocobies 1749-1767 (3 vols., Spanish translation by E. Wernicke, Tucumán-Buenos Aires 1942-44).

Edmondo Lamalle