Samuel Fritz

Samuel Fritz SJ (9 April 1654 – 20 March 1725, 1728 or 1730)[1][2] was a Bohemian Jesuit missionary, noted for his exploration of the Amazon River and its basin.

He spent most of his life preaching to Indigenous communities in the western Amazon region, including the Omaguas, the Yurimaguas, the Aisuare, the Ibanomas, and the Ticunas.

Lengthy passages from these diaries were compiled and interspersed with commentary by an anonymous author in the time between Fritz's death and 1738, when they appear in the collection of Pablo Maroni.

He taught for several years at the Jesuit seminaries in Uherské Hradiště and Březnice, eventually becoming deputy rector at Brno where he also conducted the student orchestra.

He renamed them using the names of patron saints, constructed several rudimentary chapels and baptized mainly children because he found most adults to be insufficiently indoctrinated, as well as "reluctant to give up entirely certain heathen abuses."

At the conclusion of this journey, which lasted about three years, he conducted a baptismal ceremony over the entire tribe before returning to San Joaquín de Omaguas.

[13][Note 2]There he met a group of Tupinambarana warriors who escorted him to the Mercedarian mission, where he was treated with bloodletting and therapeutic fumigation, "but instead of being benefitted, I was made worse than before."

Fritz was taken by some Portuguese missionaries to the Jesuit College in the city of Pará, but when he felt well enough to return to his mission, he was detained and imprisoned for eighteen months by Artur de Sá Meneses, the Governor of the State of Maranhão, on the accusation of being a Spanish spy.

[4] In fact, the Portuguese were concerned that Spanish missions on the Upper Solimões River would lead indigenous communities to support Spain against Portugal.

Nonetheless, the Viceroy told Fritz that he seriously doubted that the production potential of the Amazon forests was sufficient to justify fighting the Portuguese to gain control of it, or even defending any particular outpost.

Fritz's maps were the first approximately correct charts of the Marañón territory, and are noteworthy for their relatively precise delineation of the contours and proportions of the South American continent.

During his imprisonment, he created a second draft of this map on four adjoining sheets of paper, which included the names of indigenous communities, Jesuit reductions, missionary settlements and ethnic groups.

[23] One prominent error in the map is the inclusion of Lake Parime, of which Fritz knew only through hearsay, and which had been sought unsuccessfully since Sir Walter Raleigh had surmised its existence in 1595.

[9] On a more practical note, many of the Indians viewed the presence of Spanish missionaries as protection against the Portuguese, who were subjecting indigenous communities to forced labor.

I formed a large part of these heathen Indians into mission settlements, when some were wandering through the forest as fugitives and others living in concealment near the lagoons because of the murders and enslavements they formerly suffered from the men of Pará.

Pimentel discovered quickly that the Amazonians were interested in metal tools and other trade goods and that they could be persuaded to abandon the Jesuits by offerings of "hatchets, sickles, knives, fishhooks, pins, needles, ribbons, mirrors, reliquaries, rings and pieces of wire for their earrings.

"[9] In 1704 Fritz succeeded Gaspar Vidal as Jesuit Superior relocating to Santiago de la Laguna on the Huallaga River.

In February 1709, the new king of Portugal, João V, sent a large contingent of Portuguese soldiers to raid the Upper Solimões and to demand the withdrawal of all Spanish missionaries from the region.

[8] The fighting dispersed nearly all the Yurimagua and Omagua communities, and the survivors were devastated by a smallpox epidemic which began in April 1710 and left the formerly populous region of the Upper Solimões uninhabited.

Fritz was replaced as Superior by Gregorio Bobadilla in December 1712, and in January 1714 he began missionary work in Limpia Concepción de Jeberos, where he would live until his death.

He died some time between 1725 and 1730 (the date is disputed)[29] in a mission village of the Jivaro Indians, attended by a priest named Wilhelm de Tres.

[30] In 1870, Johann Eduard Wappäus (1813–1879) wrote of Fritz: His Amazon map was reprinted in Madrid in 1892, on the occasion of the fourth centenary of the discovery of America.