Chap. III. A LOYAL NEGRO. 189 



having been founded in 1688 by Father Samuel Fritz, 

 a Bohemian Jesuit, who induced several of the docile 

 tribes of Indians, then scattered over the neigh- 

 bouring region, to settle on the site. From 100 to 200 

 acres of sloping ground around the place, were after- 

 wards cleared of timber ; but such is the encroaching 

 vigour of vegetation in this country, that the site would 

 quickly relapse into jungle if the inhabitants neglected 

 to pull up the young shoots as they arose. There is a 

 stringent municipal law which compels each resident 

 to weed a given space around his dwelling. Every 

 month, whilst I resided here, an inspector came round 

 with his wand of authority, and fined every one who 

 had not complied with the regulation. The Indians of 

 the surrounding country have never been hostile to the 

 European settlers. The rebels of Para and the Lower 

 Amazons, in 1835-6, did not succeed in rousing the 

 natives of the Solimoens against the whites. A ]3arty 

 of forty of them ascended the river for that purpose, 

 but on arriving at Ega, instead of meeting with sympa- 

 thisers as in other places, they were surrounded by a 

 small body of armed residents, and shot down without 

 mercy. The military commandant at the time, who 

 was the prime mover in this orderly resistance to 

 anarchy, was a courageous and loyal negro, named Jose 

 Patricio, an officer known throughout the Upper 

 Amazons for his unflinching honesty and love of order, 

 whose acquaintance I had the pleasure of making at St. 

 Paulo in 1858. Ega was the head-quarters of the great 

 scientific commission, which met in the years from 1781 

 to 1791, to settle the boundaries between the Spanish 



