Chap. III. 
A LOYAL NEGEO. 
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 party 
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 
