Samuel Fritz SJ (9 April 1654 – 20 March 1725, 1728 or 1730) 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. In 1707 he produced the first accurate map of the Amazon River, establishing as its source the Marañón. Adept in technical arts and handicrafts, he also was a physician, a painter, a carpenter, a joiner and a linguist skilled at interacting with the Indians. He was effective and respected, and helpful to the Viceroyalty of Peru in its boundary dispute with the State of Brazil. Between 1686 and 1715, he founded thirty-eight missions along the length of the Amazon River, in the country between the Rio Napo and Rio Negro, that were called the Omagua Missions. The most important of these were Nuestra Señora de las Nieves de Yurimaguas, and San Joaquín de Omaguas, which was founded in the first years of Fritz's missionary activities and then moved in January 1695 to the mouth of the Ampiyacu river, near the modern-day town of Pebas in the Peruvian Department of Loreto. These missions were continually attacked by the Brazilian Bandeirantes beginning in the 1690s. Fritz detailed his early missionary activity among the Omagua people in a set of personal diaries written between 1689 and 1723. 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.
Early life Fritz was born at Trautenau, Bohemia. After studying for a year at the Charles University in Prague, he entered the Society of Jesus as a novice in 1673, and studied mathematics, geodesy and surveying. 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 was ordained as a priest on 4 February 1683. In September 1684 he was sent to Quito as a missionary, arriving in Cartagena, Colombia and journeying overland. In 1686 he was assigned to work among the Indians of the Upper Marañon.
Work with the Omagua people Fritz established himself among the Omaguas (Omayas or Cambebas) and within a few years had developed his own Omagua catechism in the Omagua language. The Omagua people had requested protection from Portuguese slavers who had begun raiding their communities by the 1680s. When Fritz arrived in their territory in 1686, the Omagua inhabited the islands in the middle of the Amazon River, in a region stretching approximately from the confluence of the Amazon and Napo River to the Juruá River. Towards the end of his first year among the Omaguas, he began a lengthy journey downriver to visit all thirty-eight existing villages, spending two months at each one. 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. He later concentrated indigenous peoples from different communities into so-called "Jesuit reductions." He also preached intermittently to the Yurimagua, the Aisuare, the Ibanoma and the Ticunas.
Charting the Amazon At the request of the Real Audiencia of Quito he began in 1687 to delineate the disputed missionary territory on the Upper Marañon between Peru and Quito. In 1689 he undertook, in a primitive pirogue, a daring journey of over 6,000 kilometers down the Amazon to Pará, where he went for medical treatment, probably for malaria. "I fell sick of the most violent attacks of fever and dropsy that began in my feet, and other complaints," he later wrote in an account of his journey. Fritz set off downstream "in the hope of getting some remedy for my sufferings," reaching the mouth of the Rio Negro after three weeks.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. In fact, the Portuguese were concerned that Spanish missions on the Upper Solimões River would lead indigenous communities to support Spain against Portugal. Fritz made use of this time to prepare a map of the river. In 1691, after a complaint was made before the Council of the Indies, his release was authorized by the King of Portugal, who also reprimanded and dismissed the governor. Fritz was accompanied for part of his return journey by a contingent of Portuguese soldiers, with whom he visited fortresses at Gurupá and Tapajós. After leaving Fritz at the mouth of the Coari River in October 1691, the soldiers "cruelly killed very many people and took the rest away as slaves," as Fritz later learned. Fritz then continued up the Huallaga River to Huánuco, and thence to Lima, returning by way of Jaén to the missions of the Marañón River in February 1692. In Lima he presented his report to the Viceroy Conde de la Monclova Melchor Portocarrero Lasso de la Vega, including a detailed map that he had made of the Amazon region. The Viceroy was so impressed with Fritz's work that he gave him a thousand silver pesos from the treasury and another thousand out of his own pocket for the purchase of "bells, ornaments and other costly articles conducive to the adornment and decent furnishing of his new churches." 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.
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