Image of a galley in 1601 - (Wikimedia)
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It’s episode four of our series, and Fernao Mendes Pinto finds himself a captive once again. Certainly not for the first time, absolutely not for the last.
He had been “rescued,” one would have to say, in the very real sense that his life had been saved from what looked like being imminent death, but he had also been taken into the power of people who then immediately killed his last remaining fellow survivor in their zealous search for valuables, people who badly beat him and brought him back to their village where they soon neglected him. A buyer wasn’t so easily found as they’d hoped, and they saw no reason to feed and maintain such a worthless individual.
Left on his own, Pinto ate whatever he could get from whoever he found who would give it to him, begging from door to door within a context where the people on the other side of the door did not have a whole lot to share. 36 days of this, and he was in extremely rough shape. Who knows how long he had left in this kind of life, how long he might have lasted, if it weren’t for a passing merchant, a Muslim who happened across him lying on the beach, and not the nice kind of lying on the beach.
The man had enough Portuguese to ask about Pinto and his situation and to hear from him of his predicament and the promise of generous repayment if only he could just bring him back to that captain in Malacca, something he agreed to do. He was only a very poor merchant, he said, whose business had not gone as he’d hoped. But he happened to have heard of an opportunity at the fortress anyways, and would not say no to some preferential treatment in dealing with the captain and his customs officers there, or at least fair treatment. They were an unjust lot, if the merchants he’d spoken to who had been there were to be trusted.
It took a matter of days for the man to arrange the purchase of Pinto from his captors—they were likely pleased by this point to be getting anything at all for their prize, though that it took days at all indicates they weren’t exactly letting him go for free—a matter of not many more for the helpful merchant to finish loading his cargo of jarred fish roe and sail for Malacca with Pinto aboard.
There at the fortress, Pinto had to speak aloud in order to make himself recognized, to verify that this was indeed him who stood before them. His captain just could not see him in that face and body worn away by a very difficult couple of months, had by that point not expected to ever see him again at all. But once his identity was confirmed and the merchant who had brought him was appropriately compensated, the people of the fortress streamed in to see this man thought lost to them, thought surely to be dead. They listened with amazement to his stories and they contributed money—traditional then, Pinto wrote—so that he was actually richer than he had been to begin with. These things had a way of happening to him, though such bursts of good fortune simply would not stick.
It will not surprise you to hear that it will not all be peace and prosperity from here on out. Pinto’s story was really not that kind of thing.
He would be relating a little more of the events in the region, tying up his story of Aru and Aceh which we touched on last time, and also heading out to sea once again. A great deal of wealth was being generated all around him, and he still wanted to make some of it for himself, not that such motivations were always the primary driving force behind his narrative, or any idea of motivation at all really. Often, he seemed to characterize himself as more of a witness than a determined participant, a swimmer on the sea of fate who could never really outdo the strength of the current and just had to float along, managing what little he could with wherever the waters would take him.
Today, we’ll float along with him.
Hello, and welcome back to Human Circus: Journeys in the Medieval World, the podcast that is all about medieval travellers and the larger stories they took part in. You can support the podcast, and myself, at patreon.com/humancircus, where you can listen early, ad-free, and more often and do so for as little as a dollar a month. And on that note, I’ve been a little behind on the thank-yous on here, which means that today I have a few people to thank. Today I want to thank Michele Stone, dan mackinlay, German Wegbrait, Janet Ackerman, Steven toth, Bernie Sucher, and David. Thank you all very much for your kind support!
And now, back to the story. Back to the Fernao Mendes Pinto story.
When last we left him, Pinto had been saved from shipwreck, but was not exactly in a good place—he was then, as you just heard, rescued again, this time by the timely intervention of that benevolent roe merchant who brought him back to Malacca. As he had before when returning to the fortress, he related to Pero de Faria all that had happened and all he’d observed, telling of the circumstances of the Aru and the threat of the Achinese.
At this point in the narrative, he paused to tell his reader what had become of Aru in his absence, and as he’d foreshadowed earlier, in observing with distress that final period of preparation before the enemy was expected, it had not been good.
In Pinto’s depiction, Aru’s defence is characterized as a brave one. They were bombarded by artillery pieces, besieged but then rushing out to capture some of that artillery, ultimately betrayed, their king left exposed after one of his leading men had been successfully bribed. That ruler, the one who had so recently hosted Pinto, who had warmly welcomed him in and expressed some harsh truths to him, was then shot with an arquebus. His city fell in the chaos that followed, and his body was soon stripped, disembowelled, and salted. It would apparently later be delivered to the Achinese king who would order it sawed apart and boiled in tar and oil, really making certain that all citizens and other witnesses were on the same page. “Small punishment for so great a crime!” the Achinese people apparently roared with approval, though what Pinto’s source for saying such a thing might be, it’s a little hard to say.
“That is exactly how the kingdom of Aru was lost,” wrote Pinto, “with the death of this poor king, who was such a good friend of ours and who, I believe, could have been saved with very little cost and effort on our part if … we had given him the help he sought … . But who was to blame for it,” he continued, “if blame there was—is not for me to judge. Let Him—who has the right to do so—be the judge.”
That was a capital H, “Him,” in case that wasn’t clear. Pinto himself wouldn’t judge, or so he said, but there seemed to be a fair bit of judgement in his words, and there would be more in his book, though not always, as we saw last time, spoken through his mouth, voiced by his narrator. Here, he picked up a thread that was left unfinished in our last episode, following on from the collapse of Aru’s defences and its king to see what became of its queen.
Pinto tells of the Queen of Aru’s desire for revenge against the Achinese, how that desire was the only thing that kept her from self-immolation, how she vowed vengeance at absolutely any cost. The forces that she gathered killed the enemy soldiers who they found busy at plunder in their lands, 400 of them apparently. She then carried out 20 days of guerrilla warfare, working in traps and ambushes, killing those who came out of their city for water or firewood until they feared to do so, and until the conditions of the rainy season made such activities impossible and forced her to go looking for outside help. As her husband had previously, via his envoy, she looked for that help in Malacca.
Pinto’s telling has her warmly welcomed, escorted into port by a fleet under the command of the captain’s own son, the son, as a side note, of Pero de Faria and an Asian woman, something that the captain worried, in one of his letters, would disadvantage his child, particularly if he had not managed sufficient wealth to leave behind for him. I gather that families of this sort were encouraged at times, building a population that was expected to be in service to the cause though it was not always rewarded as such.
At the fortress, the queen was brought in and given the grand tour, shown, quote, “the arsenal, the waterfront, the fleet, the trading station, the customs house, the powder factory, and a few other things that had been prepared in advance for that purpose,” with the purpose being to impress. Maybe not the best idea if you were not willing to put that arsenal, fleet, and powder factory to use. Here are all our most wonderful toys, the queen was, in effect, told, and here are our instruments of power. But no you can’t actually have them, and no we won’t soon be sending them to your aid. It was strictly a look but don’t touch type of situation. An art gallery, or a Garden of Eden.
For four or five months, the queen remained there at the fortress, treated very well but not getting her hands on those resources or soldiers which she needed, receiving nothing to assist her against the Achinese, nothing save for kind words and vague promises. Finally, she confronted the captain on the way to mass, catching him in the crowded outer courtyard. This time, she told him, she would not be put off, not by promises to write to the viceroy on her behalf. She had no need of the viceroy’s help, for the captain himself had enough men and munitions right there, easily enough when combined with her own people who waited for her, to reconquer her land and avenge her dead husband. She demanded that he tell her now once and for all, in front of all those people, many of whom had already witnessed his vows to help, if he was really and truly going to do anything useful.
“If not,” she said, “tell me the truth, for either way you do me as much harm by making me wait without helping me and wasting my time, as you do by denying me outright the help I have so urgently sought from you—the help which, by your Christian faith, you owe me, as the almighty Lord, God of heaven and earth, on whom I call as my judge in this instance, well knows!”
Put on the spot like that, the captain insisted again that he had written to the viceroy and had no doubt that soldiers and ships would be sent, barring new trouble in India, of course. Which was all very well, but the queen still had doubts, and considering the Portuguese history of quote/unquote “trouble in India,” such scepticism was entirely understandable.
The conversation escalated, with voices raised and “a few words that were unduly sharp” let slip by an impatient Pero de Faria, who felt his word and honour were being called into question, until eventually the queen threw up her hands, exclaiming that the God worshipped in that house might be a crystal fountain from which only flowed the truth, but the people who lived there were, quote, “like pools of stagnant water, whose foul depths provide a natural breeding ground for vice and folly, and he who places his trust in the words that issue from their mouths is as good as damned.”
“Ever since I can remember,” she told the captain, “everything I have ever seen or heard points to but one thing—that the more unfortunate people like my husband and [I] do for you Portuguese, the less you do for them, and the more you owe, the less you repay.”
And with those last biting lines, she turned her back on de Faria in anger, leaving her condemnation in his ears, and in ours.
As I’ve said, the fiercest criticism in the book was often not voiced by Pinto himself, or at least not by his character within it.
The queen would go away from Malacca and find a more willing helper in the sultan of what is now the Malaysian state of Johor, a man whose father had been sultan of Malacca until the Portuguese showed up. Speaking of which, I’ve read that he, the father, was probably shocked to see them stay after he withdrew from Malacca in what was, for the region, the customary fashion. Fortifications were light, buildings could be rebuilt, and both wealth and sultan were easily taken to safety from the coast.
There was no reason to engage in grinding attritional war, spilling the blood of one’s people who, after all, could not be so easily replaced. Better, went the thinking, to let the enemy have their bit of plunder that you’d left behind then get bogged down in costly fighting and risk your dependents being killed or captured. Imagine your surprise then, when you waited for the invaders to leave, and they simply… didn’t. You were just starting to think that they were really taking their time about it all—they surely couldn’t expect to find anything else to take—and then, to your initial bemusement followed by growing dismay, they began constructing a full-on fortress. It was not ideal.
Back in Johor, the queen agreed to marry the sultan so long as he swore to avenge her dead husband, something that he vowed to do. The Aceh Sultanate were no friends of his, but it was also no small thing that he was signing on for, not an insignificant act to stand against the Achinese in the region, as Pinto’s own window on events has consistently been demonstrating.
This sultan would fulfil his promise by claiming his new queen’s old home of Aru and he would even hold it for a time, but Pinto has him also eventually falling to the Achinese, brutally executed with a club in 1564, and his children and wives also killed. There is no mention as to whether Aru’s queen was among them, but at the very least she already had to contend with losing a second husband to the same bitter enemy.
And I feel like I should say a little more about that “bitter enemy” here, just so I’m not characterizing them here purely as some kind of murderous nation of nothing but killers, terrorizing one Portuguese acquaintance after another like some barely understood whisper of horror beyond the walls that occasionally swept in with irresistible force. They were more than just that.
“They” were a sultanate that was, about this time, building toward the peak of its powers. The Portuguese conquest of Malacca had opened up the possibility of another location becoming the centre of Muslim trade in the region, necessitated it really, and the Aceh Sultanate, known also as the Kingdom of Aceh Darussalam, stepped into that opening, uniting by conquest the north Sumatran coast.
Aceh became part of a triangle of Muslim powers to rival the new Portuguese grip on the regional trade of pepper and other spices. There was Aceh, there were the Gujarati merchants, and there were the Ottomans, who had defeated the Mamluk Sultanate not many years earlier and now held sway over Syria, Egypt, locations along the coast of the Red Sea, and, critically, Aden.
Direct trade from Aceh grew through the first half of the 16th century, the failure of Portuguese efforts to prevent the flow of ships from Aceh indicated by the 1550s drop in price of eastern commodities in Yemen, owing to the sheer quantity that was brought there. Ottoman military assistance flowed in the other direction from the 30s through the 60s, and by the next century, a writer from Aceh would refer to it as “the verandah of Mecca,” indicative of its status as a convenient point of departure for Muslim scholars and pilgrims. By that point, Aceh’s most famous and powerful sultan, Iskandar Muda, would have ruled for three decades, the sultanate’s might in commerce and conquest also making it a centre of culture and learning, after which his daughter would govern, kicking off a run of four sultanas who would rule Aceh for the rest of the 17th century.
His time was still a little down the road, but not so very far from Pinto’s, well within a human lifetime.
We’ll return to Pinto’s story after this quick break.
…
Back in Pinto’s more immediate narrative, our protagonist was once again sailing forth from Malacca. One would not blame him if he didn’t want to, if he’d rather just stick around for a little bit, maybe let someone else take up those opportunities his captain had to offer, let them risk shipwreck, piracy, and any number of other open paths to captivity. But that was not the sort of book this was. It was also not the sort of attitude that made you any money, something Pinto was still driven by, for the donations of his countrymen were not without limit and could only support him for so long.
So off he went. Off he headed to Pahang, on the east coast of the Malay peninsula. The sultanate there had once been a dependent of Malacca’s, before the Portuguese had come along. Their relationship with the new arrivals had, for a time, been a friendly one, but when it had turned in the early 1520s, it had really turned. Captains were killed, along with their men, some of whom were reported to have been strapped to cannon mouths and blown apart, hostilities to which the Portuguese responded in kind. In less than ten years from our timeline, Pahang would be allying with Johor in a combined attempt to oust the Portuguese from their place on the Peninsula.
For now, it was apparently perfectly safe for Pinto to visit and was indeed home to a resident Portuguese commercial agent, a man named Tomé Lobo, perhaps the same Tomé Lobo who had survived an attack on his ship 20 years earlier, and was said to been the only one aboard to swim ashore and make his way home to Malacca.
Pinto had a rich cargo of merchandise to be delivered to the agent in question, and, following that delivery, had instructions to journey on to Patani and negotiate the release of some Portuguese prisoners there. As ever, it was going to be eventful.
Pinto never simply travelled anywhere in uninterrupted peace and without disruption. Six nights of sailing might be entirely alright, as in this case they were. But on the seventh night of the voyage, there was heard the sound of loud cries, potentially alarming in any situation but especially so when you were out on the open water and couldn’t really see anything, little better an hour later, when a low shapeless lump was spotted in the water. Pinto seems to have been in charge of the expedition at this point, for he says here that there were some aboard who wanted him to carry on without further investigation.
I was told to “mind my own business,” he wrote, “and go on my way to where Pero de Faria had sent me instead of wasting time … when I knew full well that the loss of even so much as an hour in that latitude could affect the entire outcome of the voyage, placing the cargo at risk, and leaving me to give a poor account of myself in the event of a disaster.”
There were those concerns, and there were also the inherent dangers of involving yourself in anything unexpected when out on the water, dangers which Pinto was by now pretty familiar with, but he was not convinced and the arguments over what to do went back and forth. They went on long enough for the sun to rise a little and to reveal that “low shapeless lump” to be a group of shipwreck victims clinging to planks who were then quickly pulled aboard to safety to tell their story.
Their leader tearfully related how he had lost one of his eyes in fighting against the Achinese, how due to his service and destitution, he had been thanked with an opportunity at sea, a voyage on which he wished he had never gone. There had been misfortune, punishment, the man said, for his many sins against God. It was the sort of the story that Pinto could very much relate to, another iteration on his own really.
Their ship had gone down in a gale, the man said, and they’d had nothing to eat in their 14 days since save for one of their number who had died and been divvied up among them. Or not really “one of their number” as they counted it, for the dead man had been a Black slave. Two Portuguese had died since, and they rather tellingly had not eaten them, for they said that they expected to die soon enough anyways themselves. Given their dire situation, that last bit was not a totally unreasonable conclusion.
This encounter aside, Pinto reached Pahang alright. He went upriver to his destination, located the captain’s commercial agent, and delivered his cargo to Tomé Lobo, everything going perfectly smoothly. But then, when he made ready to depart for Patani, Lobo pulled him aside and begged him not to go, insisted rather that he absolutely must not go, for it would not be in his captain’s interests if he did. Lobo’s life was in danger, the agent told Pinto, his life and the merchandise in his warehouse, in which Pero de Faria had invested 30,000 cruzados.
There were men in the town who were not at all pleased with the Portuguese. Men who had reason to feel hard done by in their trade with Malacca, having received rotten dry goods in return for their silk and eaglewood and seen their profits disappear. They’d already tried to draw Lobo out and expose him to violence more than once, creating the sort of circumstances in which a person such as him might reasonably die in the street. He needed Pinto to stay, really needed it, and Pinto, though he really did not want to, agreed to remain for two weeks so that Lobo could conclude his business, convert his wares into the more portable form of gold and precious stones, and then come away with Pinto when he left.
The first part went well enough, as Lobo, likely driven by an incredible sense of urgency to sell a little low, moved the dry goods out of his warehouse and moved in the more easily mobile diamonds, gold, and pearls. But this was Pinto’s story. Pinto never just sailed safely off in a ship full of such treasure, not without something going terribly awry.
What happened in this case was that the ruler was slain, apparently murdered by a visiting envoy. It was said to have been a personal matter, not one of state, not one that had anything to do with Lobo or the rest of the Portuguese, but it made little difference for our purposes. In the disturbance that followed, the agent’s warehouse was stormed and 11 men killed. Lobo himself barely made it out alive, taking six sword wounds, one of which cut his face open down to the neck, and there was nothing at all to be done about the diamonds and gold. They all spent an anxious night onboard the ship, already longer than I would have stayed around, and then, seeing that the general state of unrest and disorder appeared even worse in the morning, they fled. In Pinto’s story, freedom is quickly gained and lost, wealth is taken, then taken away, and so it would soon play out again.
The Portuguese at Patani, their next destination, were outraged to hear of what had happened and their petitions found a sympathetic ear with the ruler there. “By all means!” he was said to have replied. “It is only fair that you should do unto others as they do unto you, and steal from others who steal from you.” They were told they may take what they must from any Pahang-based ships until they had recovered what they’d lost. And so they did, a bit of seaborne piracy paying back what had been left behind on land.
It was all very tidy the way the losses were so quickly erased and the books balanced, but of course the events were not nearly so neat as they seemed. Unknown individuals in Pahang had killed 11 and taken much from the Portuguese. Now the wronged parties would in turn seize three ships coming from Pahang, with no reason to think anyone aboard had been involved at the warehouse, killing 74 in the process. Negotiations would see the ships returned to their owners, only lighter in cargo by the amount that had been lost at Pahang, but that would have done very little for the 74, assuming, I suppose, that Pinto’s report here was remotely accurate, something which is of course ever in question.
Pinto was 26 days in Patani when another Portuguese ship arrived with a mission to quote, “build up friendly relations that were of vital importance to our trade, which, frankly speaking, was our chief concern at the time. However, our real intentions were masked by a letter, delivered under the guise of an embassy, along with a costly gift.”
The captain of that ship had brought fabrics for trade, ones he’d borrowed heavily to buy in the first place, but he wasn’t having much luck in Patani. He was informed that the fabrics needed to be taken elsewhere, to find their market, and when an eager crew was assembled to do so, “both merchants and soldiers, who had goods to sell” and high expectations for profits, you knew that of course Pinto would be part of it, just as you knew when he wrote “And poor me, I happened to be one of them,” that some form of disaster was not so far away. It never was, even when things began optimistically enough.
The city they were headed for was indeed highly promising. It was said to offer “ample security,” and, at just the time of year they were arriving, “free port privileges and customs exemptions” that drew in a great many interested visitors. It was, quote, “so crowded with merchants from everywhere that it was said that well over fifteen hundred richly laden vessels had entered the harbour with an enormous variety of cargo from many different places. That,” Pinto wrote, “was the news we heard when we anchored in the mouth of the river, and we were all so happy and excited about it that we decided to enter the river as soon as the sea breeze shifted.”
But they did not enter that river. As they waited, and ate dinner, they saw a ship emerge, saw its occupants drop anchor and then, as they seemed to take notice of the Portuguese, raise it and approach them. There was little they could do to escape the grappling hooks of the larger vessel or the 70 or 80 men who then burst out onto its deck “hurling stones, javelins, lances, and spears in such profusion that it looked like rain from heaven.”
Only four escaped by diving into the water, one of them promptly drowning. The other three could only watch as their ship was efficiently emptied of cargo and then holed and sunk.
It was another low moment for Pinto, extremely low.
“Finding ourselves wounded and destitute,” wrote Pinto, “the three of us who survived the disaster suddenly broke down and cried; and we began hitting ourselves like madmen, for we nearly went out of our minds at the thought of what we had witnessed less than half an hour before. We carried on that way for the rest of the day, and having noticed that the terrain all around us was swampy and teeming with lizards and snakes, we decided that we had better stay there for the night also, which we spent almost shoulder deep in the slime.”
It was indeed yet another dire situation for our deeply unfortunate friend, truly, or at least truly within his own narrative, a person who absolutely could not walk out the door in the morning without having his leg gouged by the neighbour’s dog and his car hijacked at the lights. There’s a bit of a Jobian element about it all. Not so many boils admittedly, but certainly a more than healthy portion of trials, tests, and suffering.
In Pinto’s story, as Northrop Frye once said of the Greek romances, “the normal mode of transportation [was] by shipwreck.” Whether sunk, stranded, or sold into slavery, it was a way of moving on, to the next location and also to the next chapter, the next phase of the tale. As we pick up his story next time, we’ll see him carrying on into that next phase.
We’ll see him operating in and around the Vietnamese coast, experiencing all the ups and downs of a life of piracy. We’ll see the story bring aboard a new villain, and with him, a driving desire for revenge that would bob up and down along the surface of the narrative, occasionally obscured by a little opportunistic plundering here and there but eventually making itself known again.
We’ll see all of that next time, and I’ll talk to you then.