16th-century Flemish painting of the Santa Catarina de Monte Sinai and other Portuguese ships - (Wikimedia)
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We begin, as we invariably must, with our Pinto having narrowly survived another calamity on the waves, his ship sunk by a hostile vessel and his comrades slaughtered, all but the last three who now huddled with him in misery in their new, swampy surroundings. If the reptiles didn’t get them, then there was every chance that the elements would.
They cried, Pinto wrote, they struck at themselves in horror. But they didn’t go anywhere. They couldn’t, for fear of those “lizards” that swarmed in the relatively shallow water. Days passed, and one of the survivors died, leaving the other two weeping over his half-buried body. Death seemed very near for both, but on the 7th day, help arrived. A salt barge was rowed up the river, and a woman on it had them brought aboard, had them washed, their wounds treated, and sarongs given to them as well as food, before she told them a little about herself.
They should not despair at their circumstances, she told them. She herself had lost everything only six years earlier. A personal fortune, but also her husband, her three sons, and more members of her family, the men torn apart by the trunks of royal elephants, the women burned alive in flaming ovens. She had, in a very Pinto turn of thought, committed too many sins for God to hear the screams for mercy, and they told her that they also had sinned too greatly. That this was how they had come to sit before her in such a pitiable state. And how had that happened, she asked. And they related their story to her, sparking new interest among the men on the boat.
They knew who it was who had assaulted the Portuguese vessel and left so few survivors. They knew it, for by Pinto’s description it must be the Gujarati captain named Hassim. He’d sailed off just that morning with a cargo of brazilwood, and he was infamous for his hatred of the Portuguese. He boasted of how many of the men of Malacca he had slain, and vowed to kill at least as many more. It was said that he had lost his father and brothers to a certain Portuguese captain, a man whose name did indeed match with one who had fought on those seas, and that he had sworn vengeance ever since.
For the rest of their time on the boat together, they talked of little else but this Hassim, hearing more and more of his deep hatred for them, probably feeling a little reciprocal hatred themselves, and such is the abiding emotion that will push the narrative forward for this episode, a story of buccaneering revenge.
“Thirsting for vengeance,” as Rebecca Catz describes it, “the Portuguese set out in search of the pirate who victimized them and in the process become pirates themselves.”
Hello, and welcome. My name is Devon, and this is Human Circus: Journeys in the Medieval World, the history podcast that covers the stories of medieval travellers and their roles in medieval history or in material that veers closer to the early modern and occasionally wanders into the world of fiction. And it is a podcast that is supported by a Patreon, a place where you can give myself and the podcast a bit of a boost, particularly during my current period of precarious/sporadic employment, and enjoy listening early, ad-free, and with extra material for the ears. You can do so for as little as a dollar a month, or as much as makes sense to you, and you can do so at Patreon.com/humancircus. Thank you everyone who has already done so, whether you’re listening on Patreon right now or you’ve chipped in at some time in the past. I really do appreciate it.
And now, back to the story. Back to the Pinto story, for what is going to be the payback and piracy episode of the series.
Pinto and the other survivor were housed and healed for a time by that woman who had rescued them, were transported by her kinsman, a merchant who brought them back to Patani, where they had embarked from. The place where Captain Antonio de Faria now waited for them, the captain whose merchandise they had carried, and lost with the ship, not to be confused with the de Faria who captained Malacca itself.
As you might expect, this de Faria was not pleased to learn of what he had lost—it was half an hour before he could even speak—and he was not alone in this reaction. As soon as Pinto and his fellow survivor were lodged, others came crowding in who had also suffered financial setbacks, others who had a stake in that sunken ship. Many had lost something, but de Faria, leaving aside those who’d died, had lost the most. He could not return to Malacca, he stated, could not go and face his creditors there with nothing in hand. He would instead press on and find the thief who had taken his things, find him, and make him pay by fair means or foul, preferably the latter as the former was more good than the man deserved. All of this, he swore to, much to the admiration of all present, many of whom offered their help—soldiers their service, and others their money to outfit the expedition. Within three weeks, de Faria had taken advantage of this enthusiasm and mustered a company of 45 soldiers.
“As for poor me,” wrote Pinto, “I was forced to join him too, because I had not a [coin] to my name, nor anyone who would so much as give me or lend me one.” Besides, thanks to what Hassim had taken from him, he owed money himself, less than de Faria certainly, but then he had fewer resources than de Faria to do anything about it. He’d barely managed to save himself from the attack, having taken three spear wounds and a stone to the head, and he’d needed to have a bone removed to allow him to recover, though which bone that was, he doesn’t say.
Whatever Pinto now lacked, he was going back out. The voyage in search of vengeance, in search of Hassim, began. It was, by Pinto’s account, May of 1540.
Their first destination was to be Champa, the ports and inlets of what is now the Vietnamese coast. They had their eyes on the possibility of a little plunder there, for the ship was, quote, “not well outfitted enough to get by without replenishing a lot of stores, mainly in the way of provisions, munitions, and gunpowder.” It was going to take quite a bit of piracy if they were to succeed in catching that wicked pirate Hassim, but not all that they needed had to come by violence.
Pinto has them fishing extensively, taking in some of the seemingly endless sea bream and croakers of the area and then friendly trade at a town thought to have been on the Bassac River. He has de Faria hearing very tempting tales there of a rich gold mine whose four owners were forever fighting with one another, and quarry from which huge numbers of diamonds were taken. All of this, just further up the river, could be easily taken by determined men, he was apparently told, as story after story painted the inland as a kind of paradise of easy pickings, stories which they did not pursue.
Their path instead took them further along the coast, past many villages and at least one good-sized town, surrounded by forest and streams. And at the mouth of another river, where they argued over whether it was deep enough for them to enter, it brought them to their first bit of adventure.
A ship was coming, and, in the spirit of friendliness at sea, the Portuguese waited for it, raising their merchant flag in what the text terms a salute in the Chinese fashion, but those aboard the approaching vessel did not reciprocate. They offered no flag, friendly or otherwise. Instead, Pinto and the others were greeted with the display of a bare ass from the deckhouse, this unexpected mooning accompanied by a, quote, “terrible racket, banging drums, tooting horns, clanging bells, shouting, and jeering in what was a general demonstration of scorn and contempt, obviously,” Pinto wrote, “intended for us.”
De Faria ordered a cannon fired, a terrible racket of their own to teach these rude men a lesson, but the rude men in question simply answered with five cannon shots themselves. Lesson evidently not received. In an unusual display of caution, the Portuguese agreed to just wait and see, to hold on until morning and not rush in right away. It was all surprisingly reasonable.
As it happened, they would not be allowed to wait for that long. At some point in the night, those on watch spotted dark shapes drifting toward them across the water, and it quickly became apparent that an attack was imminent. They kept themselves hidden until the men in the three boats, for that is what they were, had climbed aboard. Then they rushed out, surprise now on their side, and slaughtered all except a few who they captured and interrogated with the rack. Presumably a kind of jury-rigged version of the torture device, not necessarily a dedicated object kept on deck for that sort of circumstance.
Most of the captives wouldn’t speak at all, but one, once hoisted onto the rack and then eased off with the offer of a little wine, had quite a story to share. He had previously sailed with a Portuguese captain until their ship had been attacked by—and here he gestured to one of his fellow captives—by that fellow over there, who had tied up 27 Portuguese and killed them. In at least some of the cases he had squeezed out their brains with a crossbar, apparently an act of tying something around the head and then rotating a bar to tighten it until, to quote the endnotes, “the skull split and the grey matter burst out.”
Hearing that the fiend responsible for this was, again, that man tied up over there, they squeezed out his brains with a crossbar and then seized his ship, taking a hearty prize in Japanese silver along with it before the sounds of alarm from the shore and the sight of rafts full of combustibles sent drifting their way, let them know that it was time to leave. They were easing their way into it, but this whole piracy thing seemed to be working out.
They sailed on, hugging the coast of Champa for fear of being taken off course by violent winds, and coming to another river, they entered it. They thought to ask after news of Hassim, for some of the men who were with them told of how this was a regular stop for the many junks that moved through the area and traded their merchandise for gold, fragrant wood, and ivory.
The ship anchored near a village and was soon approached by “refreshment prows,” a very appealing prospect. Pinto has those aboard the prow worrying—in their own language, and unaware of the Portuguese translators—that these were, quote, “that notorious race of bearded men who enrich themselves by spying out the land, acting like merchants, but returning later to attack and plunder like thieves.” He has them calmed by de Faria’s easy acceptance of their price for refreshments, has them calmed a little easily, I have to say, given that just a moment before they’d been talking of flight for the trees and the fear that these newcomers would torch their houses and fields.
But once those aboard the boats were calm and had been told that the Portuguese were actually from somewhere else entirely, they had a great deal to say, and even if you take this encounter to have never actually happened, it functions as an intriguing look into Portuguese/Pinto’s knowledge and thought regarding what is now Vietnam in the early to mid-16th century.
The locals first made it plain that there was nothing to be gained from their village, nothing to be taken, save for “fishnets and fishing prows.” But just up the river, about five days or so, was a place frequented by merchants who traded in “elephant, ox, and camel caravans, from all over the land.”
The area around that river, they said, had once been known as the “Land of Plenty,” and indeed that was what the elders still called it. The river stretched all the way to a mountain range, and then widened, shallowing out into marshes which were populated by so many birds that a kingdom had been forced to abandon them 42 years earlier, an intriguing, if not entirely understandable, idea.
Continuing, one would come to a, quote:
“...entirely different region that is much more forbidding, with large mountain ranges, inhabited by many other animals far worse than the birds, such as elephants, yak, lions, boar, buffalo, and other wild herds of cattle roaming around in such huge numbers, that it is impossible for a man to grow anything there to feed himself, and there is nothing that can be done about it.”
There was a large lake surrounded by mines of silver, copper, tin, and lead, the product transported away by caravans of elephant and yak that returned with diamonds, rubies, and gold, and the people there were armed with charred spears and short blades.
Aside from this, Antonio de Faria, quote:
“...learned many other interesting things about that country that are worthy of the attention of some high-minded individual capable of acting on them, for then perhaps we would derive far greater benefits from them, at less cost in blood and all that goes with it, than we do from all of India on which to this day we have expended so much of our energy and resources.”
It was a recurring idea, and in this case, I suppose Pinto meant that the lake and its surrounding mines sounded very much like easy pickings, not to mention profitable ones, but he would not be going there himself.
The ships, plural, for they still had the one they’d captured from those who’d wanted to squeeze out their brains, were headed for Hainan next, the large island forming the southernmost point in present-day China. There, Pinto wrote, de Faria thought that he might find Hassim, though he does not say why this was.
One boat went ahead to scout out a nearby river, returning to report an armada of 40 ships and then, a little further, an estimated 2,000 sails both large and small, and no matter how small the sails were, that was too many for a river, I’m pretty sure. They also reported the brick walls and towers of a good-sized town of some 30,000 people and a large junk that, “they repeated several times, probably belonged to that dog … Hassim.”
The text doesn’t say what brought on such certainty, but de Faria was unhesitant. He immediately stirred his crew to action, declaring his own total lack of doubt and his premonition that it was so. His enemy was not far away.
The two ships circled their suspect in the dark, not firing any shot that might bring other vessels rushing to the scene, but coming alongside and grappling it, putting fighters swiftly aboard. With surprise on their side, they quickly cut down everyone who did not leap for safety into the water, and then they fished the survivors out for questioning, which again meant torture.
Two of them died rather than give anything up, but when the Portuguese started in on a third, the fourth, his father, spoke up, telling them there was no need for this, pleading with them to just ask him what they wanted to know rather than harming his boy. De Faria agreed, threatening to pitch both of them into the sea if he caught him in a lie, promising to leave both of them safely ashore with all their goods if he told the truth.
“I will take your word for it,” the man said, “even though the occupation you are presently engaged in is not much in keeping with the Christian faith you professed at your baptism.”
Pinto’s de Faria was left speechless, there not being much he could say to that.
The story the man told was that he was an Armenian named Thomas, that he was a Christian and, quote, “a native of Mount Sinai, where the body of the blessed Saint Catherine was buried.” Thomas, as his story went, had quite a tale to tell.
His ship had been seized in Jeddah by the Ottomans, and he had been forced to work in driving the Portuguese from India. He had been badly abused in that time, and his wife and daughter had died under that abuse. He and his son had eventually leapt into the water out of pure desperation, but that had not brought him immediately there to Hainan. They had come ashore in Gujarat and made their way to Malacca aboard the ship of Garcia de Sá, a very real historical figure with a tumultuous career abroad, one of many with which Pinto seasoned his text. Thomas had been sailing for China next, when his ship had been attacked one night off the coast of Singapore, and its captain and the other Portuguese aboard slaughtered. The man responsible had been the very same person who owned this junk on which de Faria had found him.
And who was that man, this scourge of the Portuguese at sea? Well, it actually wasn’t Hassim, but when de Faria heard his name, he responded with violent astonishment nonetheless, for he knew of him by reputation, “affirm[ed] that [the man] had on several occasions killed over a hundred Portuguese on ships that he had found lost at sea and undermanned.” And where was this villain, de Faria demanded to know. Why, Thomas said, he was right over there in the rope locker, wounded and hiding with six or seven others. And indeed he was.
In the fighting that followed, de Faria was wounded in the head and arm, and nine alongside him were killed. There was little motivation to surrender for those who’d surely been able to hear two of their number dying under torture and possibly also Thomas’s rather damning story.
The Portuguese hustled off after that, leaving before any other ships could show themselves to intervene. Only when they had travelled a good safe distance did they stop to take stock of their prize, of the cargo that they’d just won in combat. They found spices—pepper, nutmeg, and mace—along with ivory, sandalwood, and eaglewood. They found cannons, mostly ones of Portuguese make.
Rebecca Catz describes this portion of the book as “a swashbuckling episode that functions within the work as a parody of the overseas action of the Portuguese,” as de Faria’s mission to bring Hassim to justice seemed more and more a campaign of plunder and profit. So far, that was all working out pretty well for Pinto and the rest.
After this quick break, we’ll see if that luck of theirs would continue to hold.
…
In the aftermath of their latest encounter, Pinto, de Faria, and the rest of the Portuguese followed the coast of Hainan, coming eventually to a bay where a number of boats were busy hunting for pearls. They seriously considered a bit more piracy, but eventually they opted for trade, running up the appropriate flag and soon met by two boats, and men who came aboard from them with refreshments.
As they had done before, the Portuguese told a little lie about who they were—they were merchants from Siam there to do business, if there were willing partners to be found. But for those, they were informed, they would need to go elsewhere. Foreign navigators all needed to go to the official trading stations. In fact, these men continued, de Faria was currently in restricted fishing waters and there were standing orders to burn any such trespassing ships with all aboard, but since he didn’t know the local customs and the governing authority was away, well they could skip over that just this once.
So that was a positive, but despite their willingness not to burn them alive, the locals weren’t so sure about their visitors. They cast meaningful glances at the men openly gambling silks on the deck and commented that they had never seen such materials treated so cheaply, almost as if the silks had been obtained at a cost significantly below their market price, by piracy say. De Faria laughed it off as just young merchants’ sons who hadn’t yet learned the value of things, but he also directed the gamblers to stop their dicing.
Once de Faria showed his hosts the holds full of pepper, which the Portuguese had indeed stolen, they were convinced he was truly a merchant and talked openly, answering his questions as to Hainan’s earnings, amazing him with the astronomical numbers and then laughing at his amazement, telling him he should see the Chinese capital itself if Hainan’s “meagre sum” impressed him. Warning him, in parting, to be wary of the greed the sight of his goods might inspire in, quote, “the breast of even a decent, law-abiding citizen, let alone an unruly person with no conscience who is inclined by nature to take what does not belong to him, rather than share what he has with the poor and needy.”
One pictures de Faria and the others nodding along in sage agreement, Pinto perhaps again presenting an at least somewhat subtle critique of their doings at sea.
For a while, it seemed like nothing could go wrong, like if two ships attacked them, they’d win the battle and take one, sinking the other as there simply weren’t enough hands to manage it, as indeed happened at the next river where they put in. The only little hiccup was that they still couldn’t offload their goods, for they were warned that the nearest port was readying flammable rafts to greet them, but they did eventually find somewhere that would accept their stolen goods. They converted their cargo to silver, concluding the deal just before word arrived in port of their most recent bit of piracy and forced them to depart.
Things went so well that it often seemed that de Faria and the others had forgotten all about his vows of vengeance. Pinto would write of asking after Hassim somewhere and, failing to find any information, changing course and taking a few “good prizes,” that the rewards were, quote, “from our way of looking at it, … fairly come by; for it was never [de Faria’s] intention to steal from anyone but the pirates who had murdered and robbed the many Christians frequenting the gulf and coast of Hainan.”
And so it went.
It went well enough that the quantity of back patting in the text swelled to talk of de Faria being honoured as “King of the Sea” and thanked by many merchants who paid him for safe-conduct passes, of him being offered a position by the governor of Hainan, one which he had to turn down in the most flowery language possible. Yet still, Pinto insists, de Faria had not lost sight of his original goal, and thought of little else but Hassim, at night and in the day.
For months on end he searched, anchoring here in a pleasant harbour of “many sumptuous buildings and temples,” there passing along a coast of fertile land, wide farming fields, and forests enough to produce limitless ships, not to mention the rich mines that they heard about. Again, Pinto wrote with regret that the Portuguese had troubled themselves in India instead of here.
The search went on long enough, with nothing of Hassim to show for it, that there were many on board who tired of it, despairing of these efforts ever achieving their goal and insisting that the spoils that they’d taken now be divided. Surely, de Faria was not intending to go on like this forever, so let those who wished to take their share, do so, they urged him, and let them leave. It was eventually agreed that they would find a port where they could convert what they had to gold, so that this could be done. They signed to it, swore to it, and waited just off an island known as “The Isle of Thieves” for the first breezes of the monsoon to push them on the return leg of their journey. It was an ominous sounding place to wait with all those riches aboard and that agreement made, the kind of place where something bad might happen to you, as indeed it did.
The problem, in the end, was not thieves. The issue was of a more natural sort than that, though Pinto would describe the winds as being so fierce that “it could not be attributed to natural causes.”
They had been nervously waiting for 12 days when the storm struck, and it sounds like they did absolutely everything they could. They cut away the masts, cut down the deckhouses, and cleared the decks. They offloaded the cargo, underlining the seriousness of the situation, and they used anchors improvised from heavy artillery, but none of that, no frantic labours at the pump, could save them. For all their success on the seas in this portion of the book, all they had to show for it here was that four ships were shattered on the coast instead of one.
586 people died, Pinto wrote, including 28 Portuguese, an interesting set of numbers, indicative of something of a reality for Portuguese in the region. Portuguese activity in Asia did not necessarily indicate a great many Portuguese aboard, often relying on others for crew members and sometimes captains. The first Portuguese merchants/diplomats travelling from Malacca to China, for example, did so on ships that were not actually Portuguese captained or owned.
But back on “The Isle of Thieves,” 22 Portuguese and 31 others survived to crawl “bleeding and naked” for shelter, to pass a very difficult night as best as they could, and in the morning to see a beach strewn with corpses. What was ever the case for Pinto now proved true for this company he kept. What had been won with great difficulty and bloodshed at sea, was now very swiftly wrenched away.
Of course, there was another side to that topsy-turvy coin, and if Pinto’s protagonists—himself, de Faria, and the rest—were suffering, and they were, having only managed to salvage provisions for five days, then at least they would not need to suffer for very long. They had been 15 days in their unfortunate predicament when they saw a small ship approaching.
In movies, this scene would be one of rushing down to the beach, shouting and leaping, doing anything possible to gain the attention of those aboard the ship, maybe lighting that signal beacon which they’d painstakingly prepared at some earlier point in the film. But Pinto, de Faria, and the others did none of that. Instead, they hid in the trees. This was, after all, the piracy section of the text. It was quite a different movie genre. The ship was small, likely not large enough for all of them.
The castaways waited out of sight, and they watched as the ship pulled in, watched its crew come ashore and generally behave like people unaware that they were being watched: setting about their chores of collecting water and firewood, cooking, and entertaining themselves with wrestling and other sport, laughing in their role as unsuspecting victims in what was really a deeply creepy little scene.
When the timing seemed best, when it seemed nobody was paying attention, the castaways rushed across the beach and swarmed the ship, casting off the lines and pulling away into the water before anyone had noticed. Only when it was too late did anyone look their way, and when a small cannon had been fired in their direction, they fled. “They all ran off to the woods where they remained,” wrote Pinto, “crying over their misfortune, just as we, up until then, had cried over ours.”
Pinto’s fortunes were, once again, reversed. He and the others settled into a hearty meal of rice, salt pork, and duck that had been left out, and they looked with delight at the supplies of rice, sugar, and ham, along with hens and a cargo of silk. Of the ship’s previous occupants, Pinto placed only the child of the previous captain aboard—he had the Portuguese explaining Christianity to him. And when the child had heard about this Christianity, he threw his arms toward the heavens and cried out, quote:
“Blessed art thou, O Lord, for thy patience, which suffers the presence of people on earth who speak so well of thee and observe so little of thy divine Law as these blind, wretched creatures who think that robbing and preaching can satisfy thee, as they do the tyrant princes that reign on earth!”
Having played his part, the child then retired from Pinto’s story, and having been reduced in circumstance to that one little ship, de Faria and the rest returned to their previous ways, unmoved in the slightest by the child’s words or their near miss, though Pinto wrote that they worried that, quote, “[their] sins might bring [them] here some misfortune similar to the ones [they] had experienced in the past.”
They had need of new and larger boats again, and crew, and they scooped up a fishing vessel, helping themselves to its catch along with 8 of the men aboard. They seized a prow, interrogating those aboard for intelligence as to any nearby junks in the river. They found a small junk and hijacked it in the night, mostly disposing of its cargo of rice. And somehow, among all of this, they found a partner.
It was a Chinese pirate with some Portuguese crew whose ship they initially duelled with at sea, but exchanges of cannon fire turned to greetings as they saw and hailed the Portuguese on the opposing deck. Soon, visits were being made, presents being given, and that other pirate was signing on to join them for another sweep of the Hainan coast in exchange for a third of their takings. They went on, strengthened by his presence, and closer than ever, they didn’t know it yet, to their goal.
They were dealing with “foul winds” one night when they came upon a small boat and eight wounded Portuguese, “their bodies mangled, naked, barefooted, and bathed in their own blood.” They brought them aboard, and heard that these eight were all that remained after an assault and slaughter carried out by none other than that vile thief Hassim. It was useful that he seemed to spread his name about like this, useful too, to hear that some of his ships had suffered damage in the fighting and the eight survivors could tearfully inform de Faria of which river Hassim was to be found in, taking on resupply and repairs.
Now the tears that had first greeted the survivors' appearance turned to a frenzy of shouting and screaming. De Faria prayed for satisfaction against this, quote, “cold-blooded killer of countless Portuguese,” and they headed in his direction.
There was a stop first for “all the necessary supplies, items such as saltpetre and sulphur for making gunpowder, lead, cannonballs, … cordage, oil, tar, wadding, wooden beams, planks, weapons, javelins, charred stakes, spars, shields, yards, rock fragments, tackle, halyards, and anchors.” There was time to take on extra crew and water, and to upgrade the ships themselves. The final roll call was around 500 between sailors and soldiers, some 95 of them Portuguese, and in three days from departure, they were at the location where those eight they’d rescued had been attacked by Hassim. A scouting mission confirmed that the enemy was two leagues upriver and readying to depart in the coming days.
De Faria’s little fleet sailed late at night, or very early in the morning, and Hassim and his men had no warning of their coming, but still the alarm rang out quickly and de Faria, abandoning their silent approach, bellowed his side on, in the name of Santiago. The battle was afoot.
In Pinto’s depiction, Hassim’s two ships are bombarded with a round of cannon fire and then an arquebus salvo.
“Next,” he wrote, “our two junks sank the grappling hooks into the two enemy junks right where they lay, and the fighting broke out on all sides with such fury that, to tell the truth, I could not possibly describe in detail what went on at the time even though I was there, because it was still not daylight, and the battle raging between the enemy forces and ours was so fierce, and it was accompanied by the noise of drums, gongs, and bells, mixed on both sides with shouts and screams, to say nothing of the frequent bursts of fire from the artillery and the arquebuses, and the echoes rumbling through the hills and valleys, that it was enough to make the flesh quiver with fear.”
Hassim’s reinforcements set out from the shore in smaller boats, but they were driven back by artillery and by fire pots. At this point, his men shaken, Pinto has Hassim make his appearance, armoured in a Portuguese breastplate fringed with crimson satin, has him rouse his men with the Muslim declaration of faith, and a short speech after which, quote, “it was indeed amazing to see how courageously [his men] threw themselves in the path of [their enemies’] swords.” Pinto has de Faria delivering a speech to match, with similar results.
At the end, Pinto of course has the two rushing upon one another, de Faria at last face to face with the man who had taken everything from him and apparently sent him on this course of wild piracy and obsessive searching, Hassim, not given in this depiction any idea of why this man hated him so but said to style himself the, quote, “shedder and drinker of Portuguese blood.”
The finale ends quickly, with two swings of a two-handed sword, one through Hassim’s helm and the other through both his legs. His men rush forward at first, toward their fallen commander, but then they fall back and are hunted by de Faria’s soldiers in a frenzy of violence that leaves few survivors and those only briefly, the captured taking their own lives rather than dying under the torture that is to come.
“Regarding the events of this cruel, ruthless battle, which ended with the glorious victory I have just described,” wrote Pinto, “I must say that I have deliberately chosen to present them in a brief and concise manner, for if I were to dwell at length on every little detail, not only about our men and how well they carried themselves but also about our enemies and the courage they displayed in defending themselves, apart from the fact that I do not possess the ability required for such a task, it would entail far too much and my story would be even longer than it is.”
And with that closing statement, that is where we will leave Pinto’s revenge tour, or else this episode will also be even longer than it is. We’ll pick his story back up next episode, with an arrest in China, and I’ll talk to you then.