_Portuguese Empire in the East—Discovery of Japan—Galvano’s Account
of it—Fernam Mendez Pinto’s Account of his First Visit to Japan, and
Adventures there—Japanese Account of the First Arrival of Portuguese,
A. D. 1542-1545._
Vasco da Gama, by the route of the Cape of Good Hope, entered the
Indian Ocean in November, 1497, and, after coasting the African
continent as far north as Melinda, arrived in May, 1498, at Calicut,
on the Malabar or southwestern coast of the peninsula of Hindustan,—a
discovery speedily followed, on the part of the Portuguese, by
extensive Eastern explorations, mercantile enterprises, and conquests.
The trade of Europe with the East in silks, spices, and other luxuries,
chiefly carried on for two or three centuries preceding, so far as
related to their distribution through Europe, by the Venetians, aided
in the north by the Hanse towns, and, so far as the collection of the
articles of it throughout the East was concerned, by the Arabs (Cairo,
in Egypt, being the point of exchange), was soon transferred to the
Portuguese; and Lisbon, enriched by this transfer, which the Mahometan
traders and the Venetians struggled in vain to prevent, rose rapidly,
amid the decline of numerous rivals, to great commercial wealth and
prosperity, and the headship of European commerce.
The Portuguese, from the necessity of the case, traded sword in hand;
and their intercourse with the nations of the East was much more
marked by the insolence of conquest, than by the complaisance of
traders. Goa, some three hundred miles to the north of Calicut, which
fell into their power in 1510, became a splendid city, the vice-royal
and archiepiscopal seat, whence were governed a multitude of widespread
dependencies. The rule of the Portuguese viceroy extended on the west
by Diu, Ormus, and Socotra (commanding the entrances into the Gulf of
Cambay, the Persian Gulf, and the Red Sea), along the east coast of
Africa by Melinda to Sofala, opposite the south part of Madagascar.
Malacca, near the extremity of the peninsula of Further India, occupied
in 1511, became the capital of their possessions and conquests in
the far East, and soon rose into a magnificent seat of empire and
commerce, second only to Goa. Among the most valuable dependencies of
Malacca were the Moluccas or Spice Islands. The islands of Sumatra,
Java, and Borneo,—in the occupation of which the Mahometans had
preceded them,—Celebes, Mindanao, and even New Guinea were coasted, and
commercial and political relations established, to a greater or less
degree, with the native chiefs. The coasts of Pegu, Siam, Cambodia,
and the southern parts of China, were visited as early as 1516; but
the usual insolence of the Portuguese, in attempting to establish a
fortified post not far from Canton, resulted in the imprisonment and
miserable death of an ambassador of theirs, then on his way to Pekin,
while it gave a new impulse to the suspicious policy of the Chinese,
which allowed no intercourse with foreigners, and even forbade the
Chinese junks to trade to foreign ports. In spite, however, of this
prohibition, numerous Chinese merchants, self-exiled from home, were
established in the principal trading marts of the southeastern seas;
and with their aid, and sometimes that of the corsairs, by whom the
coasts of China were then, as now, greatly infested, and by bribing
the mandarins, a sort of commerce, a cross between smuggling and
privateering, was carried on along the Chinese coast. The principal
marts of this commerce were Ningpo (known to the Portuguese as Liampo,
on the continent, opposite the isle of Chusan, in the suburbs of which
city the Portuguese managed to establish a trading settlement) and
Sancian, an island near the entrance of the bay of Canton, where the
Chinese merchants from Canton met the Portuguese traders, who, during
a few months in each year, sojourned there in temporary huts while the
trade was going on. Down, however, to the year 1542 nothing had yet
been heard of Japan, beyond Marco Polo’s mention and brief account of
it.
The first visit of the Portuguese to Japan is ascribed to that year,
1542, by Antonio Galvano, in his little book, first published, after
his death, in 1557, containing a brief chronological recital of
discoveries by sea and land, from the flood to the year of grace
1555, particularly the recent ones of the Spanish and Portuguese,
in which Galvano had been an active participator, having greatly
distinguished himself as the Portuguese governor of the Moluccas. With
a disinterestedness as uncommon then as now, more intent upon the
public service than his own enrichment, after repeatedly refusing the
regency of the Moluccas tendered to him by the natives, and putting
into the public treasury the rich presents of spices which were made to
him, he had returned to Portugal, in 1540, a poor man; and so vain was
his reliance on the gratitude of the court that he was obliged to pass
the last seventeen years of his life as the inmate of a charitable
foundation, solacing his leisure by composing the history of exploits
in which he no longer participated. His account of the discovery of
Japan, which he must have obtained at second hand, as it happened after
he had left the Indies, is thus given in Hackluyt’s translation[10]:
“In the year of our Lord 1542, one Diego de Freitas being in the realm
of Siam, and in the city of Dodra, as captain of a ship, there fled
from him three Portuguese in a junco (which is a kind of ship) towards
China. Their names were Antony de Moto, Francis Zimoro, and Antonio
Perota. Directing their course to the city of Liampo [Ningpo], standing
in 30° odd of latitude, there fell upon their stern such a storm, that
it set them off the land; and in a few days they saw an island towards
the east, standing in 32°, which they do name Japan, which seemeth to
be the isle of Zipangry whereof Paulus Venetus [Marco Polo] maketh
mention, and of the riches thereof. And this island of Japan hath gold,
silver, and other riches.”
Upon the strength of this statement of Galvano’s, Maffei in his elegant
Latin “Indian History,” first printed in 1589, and whom subsequent
writers have generally followed, ascribes to the three Portuguese above
mentioned the honor of the discovery of Japan, though it was claimed,
he says, by several others. Of these others the only one known to
us is Fernam Mendez Pinto, who in his “Peregrinations in the East,”
first published in 1614, about thirty-six years after his death, seems
to represent himself and two companions as the original Portuguese
discoverers.
Pinto’s veracity has been very sharply called in question[11]; but
the main facts of his residence in the East and early visits to Japan
are amply established by contemporary letters, written from Malacca
as early as 1564, and published at Rome as early as 1566, including
one from Pinto himself. In the introduction to his “Peregrinations” he
describes himself as the child of poor parents, born in the city of
old Montemayor, in Portugal, but placed in the year 1521, when he was
about ten or twelve years old,—he fixes the year by the breaking of the
escutcheons on the death of King Manuel, a ceremony which he witnessed,
and the oldest historical fact he could remember,—through the interest
of an uncle, in the service of a noble lady of Lisbon. Having been with
her for a year and a half, some catastrophe occurred—he does not tell
what—which led him to fly in terror for his life; and, finding himself
upon a pier, he embarked on a vessel just about to leave it. That
vessel was taken by French pirates, who threatened at first to sell
him and the other captives to the Moors of Barbary; but having taken
another richer prize, after much ill treatment they put him and several
others ashore on the Portuguese coast. After this he passed into the
service successively of two noblemen; but finding their pay very small,
he was prompted to embark to seek his fortune in the East, and, in
pursuit of that object, landed at Diu in 1537.
It was by the daring and enterprise of just such adventurers as Pinto
that the Portuguese, who, up to this time, had few regular troops
in the East, had already acquired so extensive an empire there; just
as a similar set of Spanish adventurers had acquired, and still were
extending, a vast Spanish empire in America; the two nations, in their
circuit round the globe, meeting at the Moluccas, the possession of
which, though about this very time, as we shall see, contested by the
Spaniards, the Portuguese succeeded in maintaining, as indeed they had
been the first to visit and occupy them.
The Turks at this time were the terror and dread of all the Christian
nations. In the West they had lately occupied Hungary, laid siege to
Vienna, and possessed themselves of all the fortresses hitherto held
by the Venetians in the Archipelago and the Morea. Having acquired
the superiority over Egypt by dethroning the Mameluke sultans, and
by the renunciation of the caliphs of Bagdad (long exiles in Egypt),
the headship of the Mahometan church, they were now carrying on,
with renewed energy, by way of the Red Sea, the perpetual war waged
in the East, as well as in the West, by the Mussulmans against the
infidels; and had, indeed, just before Pinto’s arrival at Diu, besieged
that city in great force. Going to cruise against these Mussulman
enemies, after various adventures and a visit to Abyssinia,—with
which secluded Christian or semi-Christian kingdom the Portuguese had
opened a communication,—Pinto was captured at the entrance of the Red
Sea, carried to Mocha, and there sold to a Greek renegado, and by
him to a Jew, from whom he was redeemed by the Portuguese governor
of Ormus, who furnished him with the means of reaching Goa. At this
centre of Portuguese enterprise and adventure Pinto entered into the
service of Dom Pedro de Faria, captain-general of Malacca. Perceiving
his superior intelligence and adroitness, Faria sent him on numerous
missions to the native princes of those parts, by intermeddling in
whose domestic affairs the Portuguese generally contrived to find a
foothold for themselves. Despatched on one of these missions, he was
shipwrecked, made a slave of, and sold to a Mussulman, who carried
him to Malacca, whence he was again sent on a new mission, provided
with money to redeem certain Portuguese captives, and taking with him
also a small sum, which he had borrowed at Malacca, to trade upon
for himself. While occupied with this mission, Pinto met, at Patana
[present Patany] (on the east shore of the Malay peninsula, and some
four hundred miles to the north of Malacca), with Antonio de Faria, a
kinsman of his patron’s, sent thither on a political mission, but who
had also improved the opportunity for trade, by borrowing at Malacca
twelve thousand crusados,[12] which he had invested in cloths. Finding
no market there for these goods, Faria was induced to despatch them
to Lugor, on the same coast, further north; and Pinto, with his small
adventure, was led by the hope of a profitable trade to embark in the
same vessel. He arrived safely near Lugor; but the vessel, while lying
in the river below that city, was boarded by a Saracen corsair. Pinto
with two others plunged into the water and escaped, wounded, to the
shore; and having succeeded in reaching Patana, he communicated to
Antonio de Faria information of their mutual loss.
Overwhelmed by this news, and afraid to face his creditors at Malacca,
Faria, with the remnant of his fortune and the assistance of his
friends, fitted out a small cruiser, in which he embarked in May,
1540, with several Portuguese, and Pinto among the rest, nominally to
seek out the pirate who had robbed him, but in fact to recruit his
fortune as he might. After many adventures—the acquisition of great
wealth by numerous captures of richly laden corsairs and others, its
loss by shipwreck, the getting of a new vessel, the meeting with
the corsair who had robbed them at Lugor, the taking of his vessel,
another shipwreck, and the sack of a Chinese town, where some of their
shipwrecked companions were detained as prisoners—they put into Liampo
(Ningpo), finding on some islands at no great distance from that city,
and known as the Gates of Liampo, a Portuguese settlement of a thousand
houses, with six or seven churches, and with regular Portuguese
officers and laws—as much so, says Pinto, as if the place had been
situated between Lisbon and Santarem.[13] Here they met with a Chinese
corsair, who told them a marvellous story of the island of Calempui,
not far from Pekin, in which lay buried seventeen Chinese kings, and
whose tombs, guarded and watched over by priests, contained vast
treasures. Under the pilotage of this corsair, Faria set out in May,
1542, to rob these tombs. Pinto’s account of the voyage thither, and
of the tombs themselves, from which, terrified by the alarm that was
raised, they fled away, with their object only partially accomplished,
forms one of the most questionable, and at all events the most
distorted, portions of his narrative.
Shortly after, they were shipwrecked again on the Chinese coast. Faria
with most of his countrymen were drowned; but Pinto with thirteen
others escaped to the shore, where they lived a while by begging,
but were presently taken up as vagabonds, harshly treated, sent to
Nankin, and there, on suspicion of being thieves, condemned to lose
their thumbs. They appealed from this sentence by the aid of certain
officers appointed to look after the poor, and were taken to Pekin,
where, after a residence of two months and a half, the charge of theft
was dismissed for want of proof, the prosecutors being obliged to pay
them damages; but still they were sent in confinement to the frontier
town of Quansi for eight months, there to work in the maintenance of
the great wall. From this imprisonment they were delivered by an inroad
of Tartars, who laid siege to Pekin, and to whom one of the Portuguese,
the party reduced by this time to nine, rendered essential military
service. Accompanying these invaders back to Tartary, they were sent,
except one, who remained behind, as attendants upon the train of an
ambassador to Cochin China, by whose procurement they were conveyed to
the island of Sancian, in hopes of finding a passage thence to Malacca.
But the Portuguese ships had departed five days before; and so they
proceeded on some leagues further to the island of Lampacau (the same
upon which the Portuguese town of Macao was not long afterwards built,
and already a resort for merchants and rovers). Here they found no
other resource except to enlist in the service of a Chinese corsair,
who arrived shortly after they did, with two ships, of which the crews
were mostly wounded, having just escaped, with the loss of many other
ships, from a recent engagement with a Chinese fleet off Chincheo,
a great city, about half-way from Canton to Ningpo. The Portuguese
had got into a quarrel among themselves, which they carried out, as
Pinto says, with true Portuguese obstinacy. Five of them embarked in
one of the corsair’s ships, and Pinto, with two companions, named
Diego Zeimoto and Christopher Borello, in the other. The five, with
the vessel in which they sailed, were soon after lost in a desperate
naval engagement, which lasted a whole day, with seven large corsair
junks, in which that vessel was burnt. The other, in which Pinto was,
escaped with the greatest difficulty, by favor of the breeze, which
freshened at night. This breeze changed soon into a gale, before which
the corsair ran for the Lew Chew islands (Riū-Kiū), with which he was
familiar; but being without a pilot, and the wind shifting to the
northeast, they had to beat against it for twenty-three days before
they made land. After running along the coast for some distance they
anchored off an island in seventy fathoms.[14] “Immediately,” says
Pinto, “two little skiffs put off the shore to meet us, in which were
six men, who, on coming on board, after having saluted us courteously,
asked us whence our junk came; and being answered that it came from
China, with merchandise to trade there, if permission should be
obtained, one of the six said to us that the Nantaquim (?), the lord
of that island, which was called Tanegashima, would willingly permit
us to trade if we would pay the duties customarily paid in Japan;
‘which,’said he, ‘is that great island which you see there over against
us.’” Whereupon the ship was piloted into a good harbor, on which
was situated a considerable town, and was soon surrounded with boats
bringing provisions to sell.
In a short time they were visited by the Nantaquim (?) himself,
accompanied by many gentlemen and merchants, with chests of silver. As
he approached the ship, the first persons who attracted his attention
were Pinto and his companions. Perceiving how different they were in
complexion, features, and beard from the others, he eagerly inquired
who they were. “The corsair captain made answer to him,” says Pinto,
“that we were from a land called Malacca, to which many years before we
had gone from another very distant country, called Portugal; at which
the prince, greatly astonished, turning to those about him, said, ‘May
I die, if these be not the Chenchicogins,[15] of whom it is written in
our ancient books, that, flying on the tops of the waves, they will
subdue all the lands about them until they become masters of all the
countries in which God has placed the riches of the world! Wherefore
we should esteem it a great piece of good fortune if they come to
us with offers of friendship and good will.’[16]” And then calling
in the aid of a woman of Lew Chew, whom he employed as interpreter,
he proceeded to make very particular inquiries of the captain as to
where he had found these men, and why he had brought them thither. “To
whom,” says Pinto, “our captain replied, that without doubt we were
merchants and trusty people, whom, having found shipwrecked on the
island of Lampacau, he had received on board his junk, as it was his
custom to do by all whom he found in such case, having himself been
saved in the same way from the like disaster, to which all were liable
who ventured their lives and property against the impetuous fury of the
waves.” Satisfied with this answer, the prince came on board; not with
his whole retinue, though they were all eager for it, but with only a
select few. After examining the ship very curiously, he seated himself
under an awning, and asked the Portuguese many questions about their
country, and what they had seen in their travels. Highly delighted
with their answers and the new information they were able to give him,
he invited them to visit him on shore the next day, assuring them
that this curious information was the merchandise he most wished for,
and of which he never could have enough. The next morning he sent to
the junk a large boat loaded with grapes, pears, melons, and a great
variety of vegetables, for which the captain returned a present of
cloths and Chinese jewels. The next day, having first moored the ship
securely, the captain went on shore with samples of his goods, taking
with him the three Portuguese and ten or twelve of the best-looking of
the Chinese. Their reception was very gracious, and the prince having
called together the principal merchants, the samples were exhibited,
and a tariff of prices agreed upon.
This matter arranged, the prince began to requestion the Portuguese; to
which inquiries Pinto, who acted as spokesman, made answers dictated,
as he confesses, less by strict regard to the truth than by his desire
to satisfy the prince’s appetite for wonders, and to magnify the
king and country of Portugal in his eyes. The prince wished to know
whether it were true, as the Chinese and Lew Chewans had told him, that
Portugal was larger and richer than China? Whether (a matter as to
which he seemed very certain) the king of Portugal had really conquered
the greater part of the world? And whether he actually had more than
two thousand houses full of gold and silver? All which questions Pinto
answered in the affirmative; though, as to the two thousand houses, he
confessed that he had never actually counted them—a thing by no means
easy in a kingdom so vast.
Well pleased with his guests, the king caused the Portuguese to be
entertained, by a wealthy merchant, in a house near his own; and he
assigned also warehouses to the Chinese captain to facilitate his
trade, which proved so successful that a cargo, which had cost him in
China twenty-five hundred taels[17] of silver, brought him in twelve
times as much in Japan; thus reimbursing all the loss he had lately
suffered by the capture of his vessels.
“Meanwhile we three Portuguese,” says Pinto, “as we had no merchandise
to occupy ourselves about, enjoyed our time in fishing, hunting,
and visiting the temples, where the priests, or bonzes, as they are
called, gave us a very good reception, the Japanese being naturally
well disposed and very conversable.” Diego Zeimoto went often forth to
shoot with an espingarda [a large hand-gun or musket], which he had
brought from Tartary, and in the use of which he was very dexterous.
One day, at a lake where were many kinds of birds, he killed at various
shots six-and-twenty ducks. Some Japanese, observing this new method
of shooting, which they had never seen before, reported it to the
prince, who was busy at the moment in observing the running of some
horses, which had been brought to him from a distance. Zeimoto, being
called, came into his presence, with the gun on his shoulder, and two
Chinamen loaded with the game; and as the thing was entirely novel in
this country, and as the Japanese knew nothing of the secret of the
powder, they all ascribed it to enchantment,—an astonishment which
Zeimoto increased by shooting on the spot a kite and two doves. The
prince caused Zeimoto to be mounted on a horse, himself sitting behind
him, and to be conducted through the town, followed by a great crowd,
preceded by a herald, who proclaimed him an adopted kinsman of the
prince, to be treated by all as such; and having taken him to his own
palace, he assigned him an apartment there next his own, doing many
favors also to the other Portuguese for his sake. Zeimoto responded by
making the prince a present of the gun, who sent him, in return, a
thousand taels of silver, beseeching him much to teach him how to make
the powder; with which request Zeimoto complied. The prince, greatly
delighted with his acquisition, caused other guns to be made like it;
“so that,” says Pinto, “when we left, which was in five months and
a half, there were more than six hundred; and when I visited Japan,
in 1556, as ambassador from the Portuguese viceroy, Don Alonzo de
Noronha, to the king of Bungo, the Japanese told me that in the city
of Fuchū [or Funni], the capital of that kingdom, there were more than
thirty thousand guns. And when I expressed my astonishment at this as
incredible, some very respectable merchants positively assured me that
in the whole land of Japan there were more than three hundred thousand,
and that they themselves, in six voyages to Lew Chew, had carried
thither five-and-twenty thousand. From which it may be known what this
nation is, and how naturally inclined to military exercises, in which
it delights itself more than any other of these distant nations yet
discovered.”[18]
At the end of three-and-twenty days, a ship arrived from the kingdom
of Bungo, in which came many merchants, who, as soon as they had
landed, waited on the prince with presents, as was customary. Among
them was an old man, very well attended, and to whom all the rest paid
great respect. He made prostrations before the prince, presenting him
a letter, and a rich sword garnished with gold, and a box of fans,
which the prince received with great ceremony. The reading of this
letter seemed to disturb the prince, and, having sent the messengers
away to refresh themselves, he informed the Portuguese, through the
interpreter, that it came from the king of Bungo and Hakata, his
uncle, father-in-law, and liege lord, as he was also the superior of
several other principalities. This letter—which, as is usual with him
in such cases, Pinto, by a marvellous stretch of memory, undertakes to
give in precise words—declared that the writer had heard by persons
from Satsuma that the prince had in his city “three Chenchicogins
[_Tenjikujin_], from the end of the world, very like the Japanese,
clothed in silk and girded with swords; not like merchants, whose
business it is to trade, but like lovers of honor, seeking to gild
their names therewith, and who had given great information, affirming,
on their veracity, that there is another world, much larger than this
of ours, and peopled with men of various complexions”; and the letter
ended with begging that, by Hizen dono, his ambassador, the prince
would send back one of these men, the king promising to return him safe
and soon. It appeared from this letter, and from the explanations which
the prince added to it, that the king of Bungo was a severe sufferer
from a gouty affection and from fits of melancholy, from which he
hoped, by the aid of these foreigners, to obtain some diversion, if not
relief. The prince, anxious and bound as he was to oblige his relative
and superior, was yet unwilling to send Zeimoto, his adopted kinsman,
but one of the others he begged to consent to go; and when both
volunteered, he chose Pinto, as he seemed the more gay and cheerful
of the two, and so best fitted to divert the sick man’s melancholy;
whereas the solemn gravity of the other, though of great account in
more weighty matters, might, in the case of a sick man, rather tend
to increase his ennui. And so, with many compliments, to which, says
Pinto, the Japanese are much inclined, he was given in charge to the
ambassador, with many injunctions for his good treatment, having first,
however, received two hundred taels with which to equip himself.
They departed in a sort of galley; and stopping in various places,
arrived in four or five days at Usuki, a fortress of the king of
Bungo,[19] seven leagues distant from his capital of Fuchū (present
Ōita), to which they proceeded by land. Arriving there in the middle
of the day (not a proper time to wait upon the king), the ambassador
took him to his own house, where they were joyfully met, and Pinto was
well entertained by the ambassador’s wife and two sons. Proceeding to
the palace on horseback, they were very graciously received by a son
of the king, some nine or ten years old, who came forth richly dressed
and with many attendants. After many ceremonies between the young
prince and the ambassador, they were taken to the king, who, though
sick abed, received the ambassador with many formalities. Presently
Pinto was introduced, and by some well-turned compliments made a
favorable impression, leading the courtiers to conclude—and so they
told the king—that he could not be a merchant, who had passed his life
in the low business of buying and selling, but rather some learned
bonze, or at least some brave corsair of the seas. In this opinion the
king coincided; and, being already somewhat relieved from his pains,
proceeded to question the stranger as to the cure of the gout, which he
suffered from, or at least some remedy for the total want of appetite
by which he was afflicted. Pinto professed himself no doctor, but
nevertheless undertook to cure the king by means of a sovereign herb
which he had brought with him from China (ginseng, probably); and this
drug he tried on the patient with such good effect that in thirty days
he was up and walking, which he had not done for two years before.
The next twenty days Pinto passed in answering an infinite number of
questions, many of them very frivolous, put to him by the king and
his courtiers, and in entertaining himself in observing their feasts,
worship, martial exercises, ships of war, fisheries, and hunting, to
which they were much given, and especially their hunting with hawks and
falcons, quite after the European fashion.
A gun, which Pinto had taken with him, excited as much curiosity as it
had done at Tanegashima, especially on the part of a second son of the
king, named Arichandono (?), about seventeen or eighteen years old,
who was very pressing to be allowed to shoot it. This Pinto declined to
permit, as being dangerous for a person without experience; but, at the
intercession of the king, he appointed a time at which the experiment
should be made. The young prince, however, contrived beforehand to
get possession of the gun while Pinto was asleep, and having greatly
overloaded it, it burst, severely wounding his hand and greatly
disabling one of his thumbs. Hearing the explosion, and running out to
see what might be the matter, Pinto found the young prince abandoned
by his frightened companions, and lying on the ground bleeding and
insensible; and by the crowd who rushed in he was immediately accused
of having murdered the king’s son, hired to do so, as was suspected, by
the relations of two noblemen executed the day before as traitors. His
life seemed to be in the most imminent danger; he was so frightened as
not to be able to speak, and so beside himself that if they had killed
him he hardly thinks he would have known it; when, fortunately, the
young prince coming to, relieved him from all blame by telling how the
accident had happened. The prince’s wounds, however, seemed so severe,
that none of the bonzes called in dared to undertake the cure; and it
was recommended, as a last resource, to send to Hakata, seventy leagues
off, for another bonze, of great reputation, and ninety-two years old.
But the young prince, who declared that he should die while waiting,
preferred to entrust himself to the hands of Pinto, who, following the
methods which he had seen adopted by Portuguese surgeons in India, in
twenty days had the young prince able to walk about again; for which
he received so many presents that the cure was worth to him more than
fifteen hundred crusados. Information coming from Tanegashima that the
Chinese corsair was ready to sail, Pinto was sent back by the king in a
galley, manned by twenty rowers, commanded by a gentleman of the royal
household, and provided with abundant supplies.
The corsair having taken him on board, they sailed for Liampo (Ningpo),
where they arrived in safety. The three survivors of Antonio de Faria’s
ship were received at that Portuguese settlement with the greatest
astonishment, and many congratulations for their return; and the
discovery they had made of the rich lands of Japan was celebrated by a
religious procession, high mass, and a sermon.
These pious services over, all hastened with the greatest zeal and
contention to get the start of the rest in fitting out ships for this
new traffic, the Chinese taking advantage of this rivalry to put up
the prices of their goods to the highest rates. In fifteen days nine
junks, not half provided for the voyage, put to sea, Pinto himself
being on board one of them. Overtaken on their passage by a terrible
storm, seven of them foundered, with the loss of seven hundred men,
of whom a hundred and forty were Portuguese, and cargoes to the value
of three hundred thousand crusados. Two others, on board one of which
was Pinto, escaped, and arrived near the Lew Chew Islands; where, in
another storm, that in which Pinto was, lost sight of the other, nor
was it ever afterwards heard of. “Towards evening,” says Pinto, “the
wind coming east-northeast, the waves ran so boisterous, wild, and
high, that it was most frightful to see. Our captain, Gaspar de Melo,
an hidalgo and very brave, seeing that the junk had sprung a leak
in her poop, and that the water stood already nine palms deep on the
lower deck, ordered, with the advice of his officers, to cut away both
masts, as, with their weight and the rolling, the junk was opening very
fast. Yet, in spite of all care he could not prevent the mainmast from
carrying away with it fourteen men, among whom were five Portuguese,
crushed in the ruins,—a most mournful spectacle, which took away
from us survivors all the little spirits we had left. So we suffered
ourselves to be drifted along before the increasing tempest, which we
had no means to resist, until about sunset, when the junk began to open
at every seam. Then the captain and all of us, seeing the miserable
condition in which we were, betook ourselves for succor to an image of
our Lady, whom we besought with tears and groans to intercede for us
with her blessed Son to forgive our sins.”
The night having passed in this manner, about dawn the junk struck
a shoal and went to pieces, most of the crew being drowned. A few,
however, escaped to the shore of what proved to be the Lew Chew
Islands, now first made known to the Portuguese. Here happened many
new dangers and adventures; but at last, by female aid, always a great
resource with Pinto, he found his way back in a Chinese junk to Liampo,
whence, after various other adventures, he again reached Malacca.
To these Portuguese accounts of the European discovery of Japan may
be added the following, which Siebold gives as an extract from a
Japanese book of annals: “Under the Mikado Go-Nara and the Shōgun
Yoshiharu, in the twelfth year of the _Nengō_ [era] Tembun,[20] on
the twenty-second day of the eighth month [October, 1543], a strange
ship made the island Tanegashima, near Koura, in the remote province
Nishimura.[21] The crew, about two hundred in number, had a singular
appearance; their language was unintelligible, their native land
unknown. On board was a Chinese, named Gohow [Gobō], who understood
writing. From him it was gathered that this was a _nam-ban_ (Japanese
form of the Chinese _nan-man_), that is, ‘southern barbarian,’ship.
On the twenty-sixth this vessel was taken to Akuopi harbor on the
northwest side of the island, and Tokitaka, governor of Tanegashima,
instituted a strict investigation concerning her, the Japanese bonze,
Tsyn-sigu-zu, acting as interpreter by means of Chinese characters.
On board the _nam-ban_ ship were two commanders, Mura-synkya and
Krista-muta. They had fire-arms, and first made the Japanese acquainted
with shooting arms and the preparation of shooting powder.” It is added
that the Japanese have preserved portraits of these two distinguished
strangers[22]; but, if so, it is much to be feared that the likenesses
cannot be relied upon, as Fischer, one of the most recent writers on
Japan, and who has himself published the finest specimens which have
yet appeared of Japanese graphic art, says he never knew nor heard of a
tolerable Japanese portrait-painter; while Golownin declares that the
portraits taken of himself and his companions, prisoners on the island
of Matsumai, in 1812, to be forwarded to Yedo, bore not the least
resemblance to the originals.[23]