Page:The naturalist on the River Amazons 1863 v2.djvu/203

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 afterwards 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 Pará 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 José 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