A LOYAL NEGRO 



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endless rivers and labyrinths of channels teem with fish 

 and turtle ; a fleet of steamers might anchor at any season 

 of the year in the lake, which has uninterrupted water 

 communication straight to the Atlantic. What a future 

 is in store for the sleepy little tropical village ! 



After speaking of Ega as a city, it will have a ludicrous 

 effect to mention that the total number of its inhabitants 

 is only about 1200, It contains just 107 houses, about 

 half of which are miserably built mud-walled cottages, 

 thatched with palm-leaves. A fourth of the population 

 are almost always absent, trading or collecting produce on 

 the rivers. The neighbourhood within a radius of thirty 

 miles, and including two other small villages, contains 

 probably 2000 more people. The settlement is one of 

 the oldest in the country, 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 neighbouring 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 com- 

 plied with the regulation. The Indians of the surrounding 

 country have never been hostile to the European settlers. 

 The rebels of Pard and the Lower Amazons, in 1835-6, 

 did not succeed in rousing the natives of the Solimoens 

 against the whites. A party of forty of them ascended 

 the river for that purpose, but on arriving at Ega, instead 

 of meeting with sympathisers 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 headquarters of the great scientific 

 commission, which met in the years from 1781 to 1791, 

 to settle the boundaries between the Spanish and Portu- 



