Detail from The Conquest of Malacca, 1511 by Ernesto Condeixa.
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It was the summer of 1539, and our traveller Fernao Mendes Pinto had arrived in Malacca, now a Malaysian city, then a Portuguese fortress, and a long-time hub of trade and commercial activity.
Malacca, then as now, sat in the south of the Malay Peninsula, its port opening up onto the Strait of the same name. The waterway is a critical one even today, “critical” perhaps understating its place in linking the Pacific and Indian oceans and playing temporary host to some 90,000 ships each year, and back in the early 16th century, it was also important.
There were the spices passing through from Indonesia, commerce with Bengal, food from Myanmar, textiles from Gujarat, trade from the Coromandel Coast, and goods from China. And with all those wares, all that wealth moving through the port, it was no wonder that it had drawn the attention of the Portuguese king, Manuel I.
A contemporary Portuguese traveller would soon write that, quote:
“...the affairs of Malacca are of great importance, and of much profit and great honour. It is a land that cannot depreciate, on account of its position, but must always grow. No trading port as large as Malacca is known, nor any where they deal in such fine and highly-prized merchandise. Goods from all over the East are found here; goods from all over the West are sold here. It is,” and this part I find especially intriguing, “at the end of the monsoons, where you find what you want, and sometimes more than you are looking for.”
As that same person would also write, and as I think I’ve quoted elsewhere on the podcast, “Whoever is lord of Malacca has his hand on the throat of Venice,” giving an idea not just of that place's importance, to Venice and to others, but also of the general state of globalization at the time.
As for King Manuel, he knew that this place was out there, but not exactly where it was, not at first. When he learned of its location, he sent an expeditionary fleet under the command of Diogo de Sequeira, Ferdinand Magellan incidentally featuring among the men, and his instructions to Sequeira made it clear that the effort was to be diplomatic and economic in nature. He didn’t want war, not yet, but information. Knowledge was needed as to the trading networks running through Malacca, and also as to the Chinese, their business, ships, and movement, their strength, beliefs, and lands.
Sequeira was not out there to be looking for war, but he did announce himself in port with a cannon blast, which was maybe the sort of abrasive greeting you could choose to avoid if peace was what you were after. Despite his loud arrival, matters apparently proceeded well for the Portuguese, at least at first, but the Sultan of Malacca was persuaded to turn against them, and in fairness to him, there was plenty of ammunition to be used against them, much to be said about their actions already in India if one were looking to convince someone that these new arrivals were not to be trusted. Sequeira and most of the others would make it out alive when the unpleasantness started, but there was fighting to be done to do so, and there were men ashore who he abandoned, some to imprisonment, some to death.
Portuguese revenge would come, though not right away. It would wait for the viceroy Afonso de Albuquerque to conquer Goa, using ships and men allotted for Malacca to do so, for he and his men to, quote, “burn[] the city and put everyone to the sword and for four days … [to] shed blood continuously,” the blood of the city’s Muslims to be specific. It would wait, but not indefinitely, for Afonso had other interests there beyond vengeance and the potential of freeing some of his compatriots. Conquering Malacca was not just a matter of gaining what historian C.R. Boxer described as “the major distributing centre for Indonesian spices,” but of denying the same to others. “I am very sure that if this Malacca trade is taken out of their hands,” he wrote, referring to the Muslim merchants whose goods went to Alexandria, then, quote, “Cairo and Mecca will be completely lost and no spices will go to the Venetians except those they go to Portugal to buy.”
So Afonso waited, but only until 1511, only until negotiations with the sultan failed to produce the desired results, and then he attacked, facing wood and earthen fortifications, and fighters employing a range of weaponry from blades, arrows, and poisoned darts, to light artillery and lead shot. One of the latter, fired from a large matchlock, struck one of his captains. It, quote, “struck him on the jaw and carried away many of his teeth and part of his tongue.”
Though there were losses on the Portuguese side, and not just those teeth and that tongue, the assault was successful, the sultan driven to flee for safety, and the Portuguese free to establish a fortress and try to come to grips with the complex networks of trade that they’d settled in amongst. They’d still be there just about 30 years later, when the new captain of the fortress arrived in the person of Pero de Faria, and Fernao Mendes Pinto arrived with him.
Today, we talk about Pinto and what he was up to in Malacca.
Hello, and welcome. My name is Devon, and this is Human Circus: Journeys in the Medieval World, the history podcast that follows many stories, mostly those of travellers, and generally in the medieval period. And it is a history podcast with a Patreon, one you can find at patreon.com/humancircus, where for as little as a dollar a month or as much as makes sense to you, you can enjoy listening earlier, more often, and without any distracting advertising. Thank you very much to all of you who have done so for your support.
And now, back to the story, back to the Pinto story for the first time in too long a time. I went into the reasons for that a little on the Patreon, but the short version is that I should be back here more regularly now.
Today, as you just heard, we’ll be talking about Pinto’s time based in Malacca, not exhaustively, but enough to get a sense of that world as he portrayed it, of his misadventures within it, and of a few of the themes that start to emerge.
The arrival of the Pero de Faria there at the fortress of Malacca soon prompted that of envoys from lands nearby, people keen to make the new captain’s acquaintance, to renew lasting agreements of peace and friendship with his king, to bring gifts and congratulations, and of course also, in some cases, to ask favours. So it was with the ambassador from the Sumatran kingdom of Batak, who brought aromatic wood, resin, and a letter inscribed on a palm leaf.
The letter, according to Pinto, opened with the niceties, offering compliments to Pero, and to the Portuguese king offering its writer as loyal subject. There was a profitable partnership to be had there for the Portuguese, the letter read, with the promise of storehouses filled with spices and aromatics. The Batak king just needed a little martial aid first though, just some resources, just, in the words of one contemporary source, “some military supplies that may be lying in some forgotten corner of [the Portuguese] arsenal,” for he had trouble with the, quote, “perfidious Achinese.” It was trouble that should not have been unfamiliar to Pero, nor to the Portuguese in the region more generally for that matter.
The “perfidious” folk in question were those of a sultanate in northwestern Sumatra that was hostile to the Portuguese in the region, one that had clashed with them and would do so again. One that had clashed with the Batak who now came to Pero asking for aid, and the fortress he had newly been made captain of having suffered attack from that same foe, he agreed to provide it. The ambassador went away happily, having received lavish treatment and, more importantly, “powder pans, grapeshot, and firebombs.” Soon after, our Pinto would be following him.
Pinto was sent as a kind of military observer, an ambassador by guise at least, and one with other interests. He was told by Pero that he should visit the Batak ruler and arrange for the sale of his captain's goods. He was also told that he might be able to gather intelligence, that he might hear word of the, quote, “Isle of Gold,” and that he could “make a bit of profit on the side” for himself.
Pinto, for his part, wasn’t entirely enthusiastic, what with the “unknown territory inhabited by treacherous people” that it entailed, what with the fact that he had hardly any money of his own so that the “bit of profit,” as a consequence, could hardly be spectacular. But he didn’t feel that he could say no, and so he went.
He went by sea, of course, and then by river, the animal life along the banks really catching his eyes, the snakes and other creatures, large enough, he said, that you wouldn’t want to mention it for fear of not being believed. There were lizards, he said, though one had better say serpents for those creatures known to upset small boats and devour the occupants, and fair enough, as “lizard” really did an inadequate job of describing an alligator.
There were hooded cobras, “thick as a man’s thigh,” brown apes, “the size of a huge mastiff,” and a quite peculiar sounding creature, indeed a, quote, “very unusual and strange-looking animal,” which he describes in the following way.
It was, quote:
“...about the size of a big duck, deep black in color, covered with scales, a row of spines running down the back for about the length of a quill pen, wings like a bat, the neck of a cobra, a horn on the head like a cockspur, and a very long, greenish-black tail, of the same color as the large lizards that abound here. These creatures, which fly as though leaping through the air, live by hunting monkeys and other animals from the treetops.”
And it’s a little hard to put all the different elements together there, but he was apparently describing a type of huge bat sometimes called a “flying fox,” the whole “hunting monkeys and other animals” thing being a bit misleading, the scales, cobra neck, and lizard tail elements throwing me off a little too.
On they went up the river, to a ruler who had recently lost his sons, the king of the Battak, and Pinto was met by a welcoming party who he described as “an extremely seedy-looking lot,” enough so to wonder if all the talk of riches and profit that he’d heard back in Malacca about this place hadn’t been grossly misleading. He made his way into the king’s compound and was greeted by an elderly woman and her companions, who were, he said, “much more distinguished looking and better dressed” than those he’d first met. On into the king’s presence he went. It was a king who was pleased to see him, and even more so when Pinto said what he’d been told to, which was of course largely lies.
Pinto was there to serve the king in the coming campaign against the Aceh Sultanate, he said. He was there to take the measure of the fortifications with his own eyes, and to assess the depth of the river with an eye toward bringing in the large Portuguese ships. He was there to deliver the news that Pero had decided to bring aid in force, just as soon as more men arrived from India, and the ruler, “the poor king” as Pinto had it, hearing words so in accordance with all that he wished to believe, believed them.
The scene concluded with the ruler offering a grateful display of prayer, bringing himself to tears with its intensity, and then promising to “arrange for the profitable sale of [Pero’s] merchandise.” That, Pinto wrote, was mostly what he was interested in at the time.
Nine days later, they were off to war.
War, in Pinto’s account, began by following 15,000 men, 40 elephants, and 12 wagons of ordinance, including one cannon stamped with the French coat of arms. It followed an open battle on the rice fields, a chase, and a state of siege. It followed the appearance of enemy reinforcements, coming in the form of a, quote, “gaily bedecked armada of eighty-six sail, covered with silken banners and bunting, joyfully announcing its arrival with a lot of fanfare and merrymaking, all of which spread confusion.”
Faced with these increased enemy numbers and the threat of more to come, the king was forced to withdraw.
Once back home, the king sent for Pinto, inquiring as to whether his visitor’s business had gone well, whether his visitor was still owed money. No, Pinto assured him, it had all gone well, primarily because of the king’s interest in the matter, and furthermore, Pinto promised, the Portuguese captain in Malacca would surely soon repay the favour by taking vengeance on the enemy that had just driven him off.
At this, the king paused, pondered, and then he spoke:
“Ah, Portuguese, Portuguese!” the king exclaimed, after a moment of reflection. “How do you expect me to answer you? Please, don’t think me foolish enough to believe that someone who has not been able to avenge himself in thirty years can possibly help me.”
The Portuguese had not avenged the loss of their fortress at Pasay, south of Manila, the king reminded Pinto. They had not achieved vengeance for this galleon or that ship, listing off various specifics before he concluded.
“...how can I place any hope in what you say? No, there’s nothing left for me to do but remain where I am, the way I am now, with three sons dead and most of my kingdom gone, and for you Portuguese to hang on in Malacca, in a none-too-secure position.”
Pinto, for his part, wrote of embarrassment before the king’s rebuke, of feeling ill at ease, for he knew the truth of the king’s speech and the emptiness of his own. “I never said another word to him about our coming to his aid,” he wrote, “nor did I dare to repeat the promises I had made him before, for the sake of our honor.”
It’s an incredibly striking scene, and is one that is really undiminished by the possibility—likelihood one might say, with some even stretching to certainty—that it didn’t happen this way at all.
There is the question of how to read this book, as the memoir it’s presented as, as a novel, as satire? As Catz writes, “[Pinto] is extremely critical—though never openly—of the overseas action of the Portuguese, whose self-proclaimed mission to conquer and convert all non-Christian peoples with whom they come in contact, was viewed, within the fiction of the work, as a false and corrupt ideal.”
It’s that “never openly” bit that’s crucial here. Maybe the king of the Battak never said these words that shamed the Portuguese so effectively, but his was certainly a useful mouth through which to speak them.
Either way, the usefulness of Pinto’s embassy had reached its end, diplomatically, commercially, and rhetorically. He would now be travelling on, and after this short break, we’ll be following him.
…
Pinto’s time among the Battak was nearing its end, his diplomatic business, or excuses, now exhausted, his commercial tasks now ticked off with the loading of some last cargo in tin and tree resin. He would make one last appearance before the king to announce his departure, would depart on good terms with the king making every effort to show that at least from his side, there would be honour in relations between them. He gifted Pinto with gold, a dagger trimmed in the same, and the advice to make haste in his departure.
It would not do for him to delay and have his ship becalmed in the doldrums, or to allow it to wash into a harbour controlled by the king’s enemies, the Achinese. Their ruler there had many titles, but he was particularly proud of being known as the, quote, “drinker of the impure blood of the cursed foreign [unbelievers].” He thought of nothing night and day but how best to drive out the Portuguese, and so the king said, the captain of Malacca should be warned.
Pinto was headed back to Malacca, with only one little mishap on the way, at a place where the local ruler had very recently knifed his father in order to take power.
All the rituals and ceremonies of the transfer of power were taking place, all under the order and expectation that there be no unsightly gossiping, no spreading of distasteful rumours as to why that transfer was happening in the first place. It was already tense, with a noticeable atmosphere of terror, and for Pinto, it was extremely tense when he was dragged from his sleep and brought to the palace, unaware of why.
In the outer courtyard, there was a suspiciously large number of armed guards, and a nervous Pinto tried to bribe his way out of there. His nearly equally nervous guards protested that it wasn’t worth their heads to let him go. New guards arrived, and fencing the increasingly distraught Pinto in, they kept him that way and in that state for hours, before moving him on.
In the inner courtyard, there were even more armed men, along with the patricidal ruler himself, mounted on an elephant. There was also a pile of dismembered bodies, among which Pinto recognized that of the man his captain had sent along to assist with matters of trade. He’d been distraught before, but now he was hysterical.
Fortunately for Pinto, the ruler wasn’t interested in adding his body to the pile. He waved away Pinto’s frantic offers of servitude, ransom money, and the boat that the Portuguese had arrived in. He urged Pinto to rest and had water brought to help him calm down. He explained that the dead man had spoken loudly of things he should not, and Pinto in turn, gratefully babbled that the dead man had wronged him also, that he was a poisoner, an evil dog, and a drunk. He babbled along until he was unsure what exactly he was saying, only that he was thanking the ruler for the good service he’d done him by having the man killed, the good turn he’d done for the king of Portugal himself.
They parted on good terms, with Pinto promising he’d stay for some ten days still, and then promptly disembarking as soon as humanly possible when he reached his ship. He wrote that he felt “that the entire country was coming after [him],” understandably enough, but he reached Malacca without much else in the way of incident.
The whole trip, as an information gathering venture, had been a success, and Pinto informed his captain of all he’d learned, of rivers, ports, and bays that he’d passed through, of trading practices along the way, of pearl fisheries, and of a place that had supplied the Queen of Sheba with her gold. He also provided Pero with a location for the “Isle of Gold,” which, quote, “ they all say lies on the ocean side of the Calandor River at five degrees south, surrounded by numerous reefs and swift currents, at a distance of about 160 leagues from the northern tip of the island of Sumatra.”
As Pinto has it, this last bit of information was passed along to the Portuguese king, but then the first captain assigned to follow up on it fell victim to a fever and the second, indulging in a bit of piracy along the way and ungenerous in sharing the spoils, to a mutiny. There had not, he wrote, been any effort to discover the island since.
Pinto was back in Malacca for about a month when his next diplomatic adventure presented itself in the form of yet another call for help against the threat of the Achinese, this time on the behalf of the kingdom of Aru in northeast Sumatra. Their envoy came not looking for charity for their own sake, but selling the Portuguese on Aru’s value in keeping the Achinese from achieving dominance over the Malacca Straits and cutting Malacca off from much of its most important trade.
In Pinto’s depiction, the envoy was at first sent away empty handed, very loudly and publicly shaming the Portuguese captain as he went. And perhaps because of that shame, the captain changed his mind. He had a ship loaded and asked Pinto to go with it, “And I,” wrote Pinto, “sinner that I was—accepted gladly, and I say this because of what happened afterwards.” Sin, and its punishment, weighed heavily on his narrative.
When Pinto departed with a load of powder, munitions, muskets, and fuses, it was something, but not nearly so substantial a something as the king of Aru would have liked to have in fending off his more powerful opponent. It was early October of 1539 when he left, not a year in which the chronicles record the visit of an envoy from Aru, but it was, rather ominously, the year in which that kingdom’s coastal capital is thought to have fallen.
Pinto was welcomed by the king of Aru—he was very welcome, was walked to the king’s residence and sat as a guest at his banquet. He was shown a great deal of hospitality, and then, after that, he was shown the king’s arsenal where it was stored in thatched huts. He was told that the king was distressed and why.
“I have known about the Achinese king’s treachery for a long time,” says the king in Pinto’s depiction, “and have taken the full measure of his power. Actually, his only strength lies in the huge sums of money at his command, which he uses to mask the cowardice of his people by hiring hordes of foreign mercenaries to fight for him. To give you a better idea of how vile and degrading this miserable and hateful thing called poverty is, and of how detrimental it can be to kings who are as poor as I am, come with me and I will show you how little I have to my name and how shabbily Fortune has treated me.”
The rich king had all the wealth of his extensive trade with India, while the good king, in this depiction, well he did not have nearly enough.
What did his Portuguese guest think, asked the king, having detailed his people’s military capacity. Was it enough for the hostile visitors who were on their way? Pinto, speaking diplomatically, said that it was more than enough for whatever visitors might come, but his host would not have it. Once again in Pinto’s telling, a foreign king would speak into the record what he perhaps could not give voice to himself.
“...when I tried to respond to what he was saying with such deep sadness in his voice,” related Pinto, “he destroyed all my arguments with a few remarks that were so obviously true, that I no longer dared utter a single word in reply. I knew all too well that his charges could not be denied because he pointed to a few rather ugly, criminal deeds committed by certain individuals which I don’t care to dwell on since it is not my purpose here to expose the wrongdoings of others. And he culminated the conversation by taunting me about the light punishment meted out to the ones who were guilty of these crimes and the high honors he had seen conferred on people who did not deserve them… .”
It was not, he said, his purpose to expose the wrongdoings of others, but there are certainly times in the book when you would think otherwise.
Pinto did not remain to see how matters played out in Aru—as soon as possible, is what he responded when asked when he wished to leave. But his brief time there is steeped in a sense of imminent disaster and for modern readers feels like an anticipation of other scenes then still to come, of the representatives of other colonial powers scuttling away just in advance of suffering.
Pinto was housed with a Hindu merchant, and he ate splendidly. But he said that he would, quote:
“...rather have eaten any kind of unsavory food any place but there, where I could feel more secure, far from the many alarms and warning bells that sounded every hour; for the day after I arrived the king was reliably informed that the Achinese fleet had already left its home port and was due to arrive within a week.
The moment he received this news he redoubled his efforts and rushed about attending to what was still undone as well as giving orders for the evacuation of all the women and other noncombatants who were being sent into the forest about four or five leagues from the city, whose misery and helplessness, owing to the disorderly and undisciplined manner in which it was carried out, was such a pitiful sight to see that I was utterly dismayed, and God knows how much I regretted ever having come there. The queen went off on a female elephant, accompanied by only forty or fifty old men, all of whom were so thoroughly frightened that I was convinced, without any doubt, that the enemy would have no trouble conquering that country.”
Pinto, as I said, would not be around to see it, which is not to say that he would return safely from this diplomatic mission, for again there was that arc of sin and punishment which he had raised.
His way home went down the river by oar with a stop for the night by a village whose people were apparently known to make poison from the livers of reptiles, a poison for which there was said to be no antidote. By the next night, disaster had struck.
In the violence of a sudden thunderstorm, Pinto’s ship plunged to the bottom, taking most of the crew with it and sparing only Pinto and four others, left clinging in desperation to a reef through the dark hours. With the arrival of morning, they saw a shore of “swampland covered by jungle growth so thick that not even the smallest bird could have flown between the thorns on the tightly laced branches of the mangrove trees.” Not knowing what else to do, they remained there for three days, eating nothing but seaweed, but eventually they had to move.
The march along the shoreline was brutal. Pinto and the others were tired, underfed, up to their necks in the swamp at times, bloodied and exposed to mosquitoes and other insects at others. When they came to a river mouth at sunset, they felt as though they could go no further. They could offer one another no hope.
Did they know of any town or village nearby, asked Pinto, and one the sailors replied that the nearest place, if God did not save them, was the one where painful death would take them and they would be called to account for their sins. Soon after, the speaker died, succumbing to what sounds like a horrendous head wound. He had wanted to be made Christian, Pinto wrote, but had passed away before Pinto could help him. It had happened too quickly, and Pinto, quote, “for his sins,” was too weak. The four survivors buried the man as best they could, and discussed what they should do next.
They would cross the river, they decided, exhausted as they were, for there were tall trees on the other side to give them shelter. They feared the tigers. They feared the green and black speckled snakes said to be able to kill with their venomous breath, a specter also referenced by other writers of the period. They feared the, quote, “infinite number of hooded cobras,” which was fair enough really.
Two sailors went ahead into the water first. They left another to help Pinto follow behind, left the two of them waist-deep in water to watch, horrified, as the two who led the way were promptly ripped apart by a pair of alligators, quote, “reddening the river with their blood and dragging them down to the bottom.”
Pinto writes of being too frightened to scream, too scared to later remember how he and the only other survivor had gotten out of the water. He only knew that they somehow staggered back to relative safety, and that in the morning they caught the attention of a passing boat.
The men aboard did not want to take them, did not see any value in rescuing the two unfortunates, but Pinto stressed that he was Christian, Portuguese, and related to the captain of Malacca. He had no money on him, no matter how much they demanded it and threatened to leave him where he was, but he would surely be worth their while in ransom money if they would just take him with them. And they did.
Pinto was, once again, a prisoner. He was beaten, and he saw his sole co-survivor from the shipwreck die under a combination of violent beatings and a mixture forced down his throat to make him vomit up any valuables he might have kept hidden. Circumstances, though more fortunate than those of everyone else he had sailed with, were not ideal for Pinto, but he was alive.
His story would continue, and next episode, we’ll continue it with him.