In this same year the governor Rodrigo Cezar de Menezes arrived at St. Paulo, whose first concern was to exact the payment of the royal fifths upon this metal. With this intention he nominated two brothers, resident at St. Paulo, of distinguished birth and fortune, Lourenço Leme to the situation of Procurador of the Fifths, and John Leme to the post of Master de Campo of the same mines. Those two individuals, in consequence of the liberty with which they had always triumphed over the laws, were imprudently selected; and now considered themselves more than ever authorised to consult with impunity their own caprices. On arriving at the arraial, they adopted the most violent and absurd measures, and wished to expel from the mines all those who were not Paulistas. The chaplain remonstrating against this injustice, they ordered a shot to be fired at him, which, erring in its object, killed one of his friends. Actuated by the same lawless spirit, they ordered one Pedro Leite to be inhumanly insulted at the time he was hearing mass, merely from some feeling of jealousy entertained against him. These and other atrocities, which they committed, induced the governor-general to transmit orders for their being arrested and sent prisoners to St. Paulo. They received intimation of this circumstance from one of their relatives, and on the arrival of the Master de Campo, Balthazar Ribeiro, to execute the commands of the governor, they had already fortified themselves in a remote place, accompanied by their partizans, where an attack was ineffectually made upon them. In a short time, however, after the loss of some lives on both sides, they fled to the interior with a great number of their followers, but were pursued until Lourenço Leme was killed by a shot, and his brother taken prisoner, and subsequently sent, with a summary of his crimes, to the city of Bahia, the relaçam of which city ordered him to be executed in 1724. The prodigious amount of quintos, or fifths, which were received at St. Paulo in the year 1723, and the termination of the jurisdiction of the rapacious Lemes, excited an universal spirit in that city for mining. Every one was desirous of becoming a miner of Cuiaba, notwithstanding the calamities attached to so laborious and prolonged a voyage. Of more than three hundred persons, who in the year 1725 departed from St. Paulo, with upwards of twenty canoes, only two white men, and three negroes escaped. All the rest were killed or made prisoners in an encounter which they had with an Indian armada (the Payagoas) in the river Paraguay, in front of the embouchure of the Harez. Although the Paulistas knew that the Payagoas were celebrated mariners, they were totally ignorant of this nation possessing so numerous a fleet.