Two Ships in Livro das Fortalezas by Duarte de Armas
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Today, we start a new series, on a new traveller and a new text. It’s been a little longer than I’d like getting this one out to you, having had a bit of a personal disruption which you might have seen me mention if you’re on the Patreon, just job related, not life or health, if you’re not, but it’s good to be back. Let’s begin, as we often do, with the beginning, picking up our traveller’s opening statements.
Quote:
“Whenever I look back at all the hardship and misfortune I suffered throughout most of my life, I can’t help thinking I have good reason to complain of my bad luck, which started about the time I was born and continued through the best years of my life. It seems that misfortune had singled me out above all others for no purpose but to hound me and abuse me, as though it were something to be proud of. As I grew up in my native land, my life was a constant struggle against poverty and misery, and not without its moments of terror when we barely escaped with our lives. If that were not enough, Fortune saw fit to carry me off to the Indies, where, instead of my lot improving as I had hoped, the hardship and hazards only increased with the passing years.”
So wrote our author, our traveller, before continuing on that same theme. Quote:
“But on the other hand, when I consider that God always watched over me and brought me safely through all those hazards and hardships, then I find that there is not as much reason to complain about my past misfortune as there is reason to give thanks to the Lord for my present blessings, for he saw fit to preserve my life, so that I could write this awkward, unpolished tale, which I leave as a legacy for my children—because it is intended only for them. I want them to know all about the twenty-one years of difficulty and danger I lived through, in the course of which I was captured thirteen times and sold into slavery seventeen times, in various parts of India, Ethiopia, Arabia Felix, China, Tartary, Macassar, Sumatra, and many other provinces of the archipelago located in the easternmost corner of Asia, which is referred to as “the outer edge of the world” in the geographical works of the Chinese, Siamese, ... and Ryukyu, about which I expect to have a lot more to say later on, and in much greater detail.”
And indeed, he would have much more to say, going on at great length as to his highly eventful life. The result has been read as a kind of harmless adventure tale of questionable veracity, as insight into far-off lands, as searing satirical commentary, and more. As for the writer himself, he would position the matter this way. Quote:
“And this may serve, on the one hand, as an example for all men, not to let the misfortunes of life discourage them from doing what has to be done, for there are no misfortunes so great that human nature, with God’s help, cannot overcome. On the other hand, it may inspire them to join with me in giving thanks to the almighty Lord for the infinite mercy he has shown me, in spite of all my sins, which I confess—and I believe it sincerely—were the source of all my troubles, for his mercy gave me the strength and courage to endure them, and to survive.”
Such was his justification, a common one, but as I said, other purposes have been read into the text he left behind, the text we’ll be talking about today and in the episodes that follow.
Hello, and welcome. My name is Devon, and this is Human Circus: Journeys in the Medieval World, the history podcast that explores that world through the stories of those journeys, from the very much real to material that was clearly not so much, and everywhere in between. Today, and for this series, we’ll be settling comfortably into that place in between, the largely reasonable but reasonably often called into question.
But before we get to all of that, I should first point out that the podcast is supported by a Patreon, a monthly vehicle for support, and that if you would like to do so, you can for as little as a dollar a month or as much as works for you. Episodes appear there before anywhere else, you can listen ad-free, and there are extra mini-episodes too.
That said, let’s get back to the story.
Today, we begin a new series, our subject, the Portuguese adventurer, merchant, wide-travelled writer, and much more than that, the one known as Fernão Mendes Pinto.
Pinto was a man of the 16th century, a little outside of the medieval period strictly speaking, but a period which we’ve explored before. He was born in or around 1510 in the Portuguese district of Coimbra, died in the summer of 1583 in the vicinity of Lisbon, and in the 73 years between those dates, he packed a lot in, really a lot by any measure, and by his own account, perhaps more than could be believed.
He was, he said, “13 times a prisoner and 17 a slave.” As Rebecca Catz writes, he served as a “soldier, merchant, pirate, ambassador, missionary, doctor—the list is not complete.” He ran afoul of pirates, was shipwrecked, and robbed royal tombs. The characters in his story included a saint, an Indonesian ruler, the mother of Prester John, a Japanese lord, and someone who may or may not have been the Dalai Lama. He claimed to be among the very first Europeans to set foot in Japan, but then he claimed to be a lot of things and, in a sense, he did so successfully.
His written work was not released right away, not at all while he still lived, but when it finally was, some 30 years after his death, it was well received. Its status was akin to a kind of bestseller, its 1614 Portuguese printing followed six years later by two Spanish editions, that translation repeatedly reprinted through the years that followed, in 1627, 1628, 1645, 1664, and 1666, before the Portuguese again went to print in 1678. That 17th century alone saw editions besides these in French, German, Dutch, and English, all of this talk of printing a gentle reminder that we are outside of our usual period, all of these different editions, according to Maurice Collis, not quite capturing just how popular this book was, by the measure of its times.
“In the seventeenth century,” wrote Collis, “the reading public was small and confined to the top. The figures, in fact, indicate that most educated people in Europe had read [Pinto’s tales] before 1700. By that date [he] had as many readers as Cervantes, whose Don Quixote was published in 1604 (first part) and 1615 (second part).”
Those claims of Pinto’s really went a long way, but that’s not to say that they were entirely believed. Indeed, his name for some was absolutely synonymous with the act of lying.
So we see in the 17th-century correspondence of Dorothy Osborne, writing here to her husband:
“Have you read the Story of China written by a Portuguese, Fernando Mendez Pinto I think his name is?” she wrote. “if you have not, take it with you, tis as diverting a book of the kinde as ever I read, and is as handsomly written, you must allow him the Priviledge of a Travellour and he dos not abuse it, his lyes are as pleasant harmlesse on’s as lyes can bee, and in noe great number considering the scope hee has for them; there is one in Dublin now that ne’re saw much further, tolde mee twice as many (I dare swear) of Ireland.”
And I’m not sure who it was in Dublin that she had felt the need to single out, but as to Pinto, Osborne was not alone in her assessment.
A late 17th-century playwright, looking for a suitable way to speak of falsehoods, would have one of his characters say accusingly to the other that, quote, “Ferdinand Mendez Pinto was but a type of thee, thou liar of the first magnitude.” It was something his audience might be expected to understand and really quite a statement as to Pinto’s duplicitous standing. This was someone who Cervantes was said to have called a liar. This was a Portuguese Marco Polo, in the breadth of his travels, in the degree of disbelief which he inspired. This, actor Richard Burton was said to have written in his footnotes to Sindbad the Sailor, was, quote, “the Sindbad of Portugal, though not so respectable.”
But it wasn’t all lies. Indeed, Pinto’s book seems now to have been based in no small part in history, which is not to say that he did everything that he wrote or that all he wrote of was otherwise true. But we’ll get to all of that later. We’ll get to the purpose of it all, not just, it has been argued, adventures at sea, good times with pirates, and a glimpse, for the readers of the time, of the exotic east. First, let’s look at the world in which he lived.
Pinto’s world was one distinctly removed from that in which most of our stories have taken place. The Portugal he was born into had been navigating, exploring, and expanding. It had, in its “age of discovery,” been colonizing. The 15th century had seen its conquest of Ceuta, its ships down the West African coast, on Madeira, among the Azores, and driven from the Canaries by the Spanish who’d come before them. They were going ever further down coastal Africa, reaching present-day Ghana, the Congo River, and then the Cape of Good Hope in the latter half of the century, offering monopolies in exchange for 100s of leagues of exploration down the coast. They were establishing trading posts and forts as they went, and they were establishing themselves in the trade of gold, and that of slaves.
In the mid-century observations of one Portuguese chronicler, the victims of this trade were brought to land in Lagos, Portugal. The chronicler described 235 of them taken to a field to be divided. “What heart,” wrote the chronicler, “however hard it might be, would not be pierced with a feeling of pity to see that company?” He described people with “faces bathed in tears,” others groaning aloud, eyes fixed on the skies. Some “struck their faces with the palms of their hands, throwing themselves at full length upon the ground. Others,” he wrote, “made their lamentations in the manner of a song after the custom of their country, and, though we could not understand the words of their language, it seemed to reflect the extent of their sorrow.”
He described their division with no regard for friends or families, child and parent, husband and wife, torn apart to five separate groups, rushing to rejoin one another despite the blows they received. He described Prince Henry, “The Navigator,” choosing the fifth that was his share, “reflect[ing],” quote, “with great pleasure upon the salvation of those souls that otherwise would have been lost,” the enslaved, in case that wasn’t clear, for though this chronicler seems to have had some sympathy for them here, something that was not all that commonly expressed, he did work himself back to the position that this was all allowing souls to be saved through Christianity.
The world was being chopped up and drawn off, this for the Spanish, that for the Portuguese. In 1494, the year after Columbus’s return from his first voyage and the papal Bulls of Donation that followed, the Treaty of Tordesillas saw the line drawn in such a way that when Pedro Cabral reached Brazil in 1500, that was to be Portugal’s.
That turn of the century saw Cabral and also Vasco da Gama rounding the southern cape of Africa, sailing up its eastern coast, and making their way to India. Others followed them, carrying the Portuguese crusade over from the Mediterranean and against the Ottomans and other Muslims in a new theatre. Others went beyond them, into Southeast Asia and China.
There were profitable spices in abundance, more forts and more trading posts, more slaves, the nation’s ships estimated to have transported more enslaved people than any other. There was the pivotal Portuguese victory at the 1509 naval Battle of Diu that cemented their grasp on the Indian Ocean. There was the establishment of the Portuguese Empire as a naval power, a commercial power, and colonial one, for the three were intertwined, and in a number of cases the territories in question would only be relinquished in the late 20th century. But that last part is looking some way down the road.
As for Pinto, he would depart for India in 1537, when all of this was well underway. The Portuguese had carved out a well-established place for themselves there, along with a bloody reputation.
On the throne at that time, sat João III, at 16 years in, still not yet halfway through his long reign, having been made king at 20 years old but not necessarily enjoying the success that this stability implied.
“Though the golden age apparently continued,” Catz writes, “Portugal began to decline in the reign of [Joao] III. Emigration drained the best blood of the country; the East corrupted while it enriched its conquerors; the cultivation of the soil was either abandoned or left to slaves; and the government could not make both ends meet. Taking advantage of the predispositions of his mind, the advocates of persecution continually urged the monarch to establish a tribunal of faith identical with that of Spain.”
João had overseen the Treaty of Zaragoza which had built on that of Tordesillas by securing the Indonesian Spice Islands while recognizing the Spanish hold on the Philippines, establishing a division between the two powers in the east as the previous treaty had in the west. He had set in motion the colonization of Brazil through appointed captaincies, only a few of which were successful. He had attempted to offset the crushingly expensive operations in India by withdrawing from some of Portugal’s north African positions. He had presided over the introduction of the inquisition in Portugal, its main target the New Christians, Jews who had been forcibly baptized under his father Manuel. This was just one year before Pinto would leave for India.
After this quick break, we’ll go with him, following his departure from home and his stumbling start into the wider world of the Portuguese empire.
…
As you heard at the beginning, Pinto did not have happy memories of his upbringing in Portugal. He made vague mention of struggles, of an unhappy and impoverished life, of moments of danger and terror that seemed to predate his more obviously perilous adventures abroad
“I'll begin this tale of my wanderings,” he wrote, “with what happened to me during my early years in Portugal, where I lived in abject misery and poverty until the age of ten or twelve, in my father’s humble house in the village of Montemor-o-Velho. An uncle of mine, apparently anxious to see me get a good start in life, brought me to the city of Lisbon and placed me in the service of a lady of very high birth, who was related to some of the noblest families in the kingdom, hoping that her influence as well as the connections of her powerful relatives would help me reach the goals he had set for me.”
He did not remember much of life before then, he says, but he did remember being brought to Lisbon. He remembered it was during the funeral of King Manuel, Joao’s father, an easy “where were you when…” to hitch that memory to, taking place in mid-December of 1521. He remembered that the best intentions of that uncle, who had looked to see him set up for a better future, had not borne fruit.
Pinto was only a year and half in the service of that noblewoman when it happened, and we do not know what “it” was, for he would only say that, quote, “something happened that placed me in such great jeopardy that I was forced to leave the house at a moment’s notice and run for my life.” And whatever it was that sent him rushing from the house, it was bad enough so as to not let him rest. “I kept on running,” he wrote, “so crazed with fear that I didn’t know where I was going, for I thought I saw death staring me in the eyes, keeping pace with me every step of the way.”
That phantom, the fear brought on by whatever it was that had happened at the noblewoman’s house, stayed with him all the way to the stone wharf in the Alfama district, all the way to the caravel he found loading a nobleman’s horses and household goods, all of it bound for Setubal, where Joao’s court had fled to escape an epidemic. Finding a way aboard, Pinto made his own escape, though from exactly what, it’s hard to say. That very same epidemic, or maybe trouble in the household. He’d been caught in some misdeed or else he’d witnessed that of someone powerful. He’d perhaps simply fabricated the entire episode—who can say.
Whatever unpleasantness drove him to board the caravel, matters were not to immediately improve for him. The ship sailed the next morning, but it would not complete the short journey to Setubal untroubled. Indeed, at about 6 miles short of its destination, it would be boarded, plundered, and sunk by a French pirate vessel, those who survived taken prisoner in the first of a claimed 13 such occurrences for Pinto, if we’re keeping track.
He and the others had a hard couple of weeks then, 13 days spent bound and periodically lashed, all with the prospect of being sold into slavery on the Moroccan coast in their future, but then they had a bit of luck, for another’s poor fortune would bring a beneficial turn in theirs.
The pirates sighted another potential victim now, a much richer possibility, and they gave chase, following a full night before they caught and engaged the vessel, and Pinto, somewhat strangely, spoke highly of how they handled themselves. “Like old hands at the game,” he enthused, looking on as they fired a series of broadsides and then secured the grappling hooks with a, quote, “fine show of bravery.” They faced resistance, but his favourite French pirates were resolute, storming aboard and killing 16 or 18 on the large merchant vessel before they’d secured it. Pinto was oddly excited by the operation, at least in retrospect, but then he had been all of somewhere in the 11-14 year old range and furthermore had concrete and immediate reason to feel good about the whole thing.
The pirates now had an entire other ship worth keeping, one which they now used some of their captives to crew, but they didn’t want to be trekking all the way to Morocco with it. The ship had been chartered at the equatorial African island of São Tomé, Pinto heard from its unhappy merchants, and it carried a valuable cargo of sugar and the enslaved, valuable enough that the pirates wanted to hustle it right back to France. Those captives who they didn’t need as crew were set ashore in the night at Melides. They were barefoot, naked, some suffering from whipping injuries, but they were free to go where they would. Pinto and the rest found a place to recover, to receive aid, and then went their separate ways. With half a dozen others, “equally forlorn,” he made his way to Setubal, finally reaching the caravel’s destination which misadventure had kept him from, not all that far south from Lisbon, where he’d started.
That was to be his home now for a period, for four years in the service of a nobleman named Francisco de Faria, then for another year and a half in that of the Order of Santiago’s grandmaster, the illegitimate son, as it happened, of the former king, Joao II. It sounds like success and stability of a sort, given what had come before for the unfortunate Pinto, but he soon wasn’t satisfied. “The salary paid by princes,” he explained, “was not enough for [him] to live on,” and he made up his mind to leave, and to set out for India. I suppose that’s where you’d go as a young Portuguese man of the period, one without prospects for advancement at home. Brazil was not yet anywhere near as enticing a possibility.
It was the 11th of March 1537, when Pinto left Portugal aboard a large ship that was part of a squadron of five. He named the captains in turn, one of them, nicknamed “the rooster,” the son of Vasco da Gama, captaining “the same ship on which he had brought his [renowned] father’s remains back to Lisbon.” Another, Fernando de Lima, heading off to take up captaincy of the fortress at Hormuz, where fevers would take him after only 3 months. A third, Martim de Freitas, heading for death later that year himself, slain ashore in a Portuguese Indian port, but under contested circumstances.
He and others had been trading with some Muslim merchants, went one telling, and the rudeness of some on the Portuguese side had provoked a fight in which he and 13 more were killed, 20 captured, and the rest forced to flee for their ship and promptly put to sea. By another account they were ambushed. By a third, they went trading in port only to vanish. One telling had it simply that they had been killed and in an unknown manner.
The voyage took the five ships south, south round the Cape of Good Hope, and then north, with a stop at Mozambique, reprovisioning there and encountering a Portuguese ship that had disappeared at sea, no one having heard of it until they found it now, laid up for the winter. Such disappearances were a frequent risk, “the same fate that befell a number of other ships on the East India run,” wrote Pinto, and then he wrote something else. It was, quote, “a price we paid for our sins,” an interesting reflection, and one which he would not at this point expand on.
From Mozambique, the fleet was to be divided. The commander of the fortress there relayed orders to the effect that all ships arriving that year were to go straight to Diu in Gujarat and leave men there to reinforce its fortress against an anticipated attack in revenge for the death of a sultan, an attack that would indeed be coming in the form of a 1538 siege, one supported by Ottoman Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent no less. The little fleet divided in response to the orders, two merchant vessels, loaded with goods, going first to Goa, there having been complaints already about recent appropriations of such private property, the three other ships going straight to Diu to offload their own cargo and men, the soldiers pleased with the generous offers they received so, quote, “there was no need to apply any pressure or coercion, as was always the practice when a fortress was under threat of siege.” The fleet’s work done, it returned safely to Portugal.
Pinto, meanwhile, did not hang around at Diu. He took a place on one of two smaller ships making a reconnaissance mission to the Red Sea to scout out the Ottoman armada there and maybe plunder some Muslim shipping on the way. “The captain was a friend of mine,” he wrote, “who led me to believe, by promising to look out for my interests on the voyage, that I would soon be rich, which was all that I cared about at the time.” Pinto admitted to letting his greed and imagination run a little wild, never, quote, “stopping to consider that most get-rich schemes end up costing dearly, or that I was risking my life by venturing out to sea at the wrong time of year, or that we might run into the things that actually happened to us later—because of my sins and those of my companions,” a repetition on that earlier theme, and one that we’ll see again.
Pinto had thought his friend, the captain, had his best interests at heart, but that captain does not even seem to have acted in accordance with his own. It was the whole “wrong time of year” element that would cause trouble first.
The two little ships laboured under, quote, “a hard gale, at the end of winter, in a heavy downpour, [and] against the monsoon,” none of it ideal in the slightest. There was near “total disaster” and loss of life around the islands off the coast of Oman before managing to safely anchor at Socotra and take on water and provisions. There, on that island east of Cape Guardafui, the northeasternmost point of what is now Somalia, they traded, Pinto said, with the descendants of the early Christians who had been converted by Saint Thomas, who was often, at the time, thought to have stopped there on the way to India.
As for Pinto and his friend the captain, they were heading the other way, sailing for the Red Sea in search of information, and they found it in the form of a ship that they sighted before sunset and then pursued. They chased it down and then, quote, “tried to engage [its] captain in a friendly conversation.” Where was the armada of the “Grand Turk,” they wished to know, but those aboard the other vessel were in no mood for such talk, offering instead a round of cannonballs and arquebus shot. They may have doubted the friendliness of the two Portuguese vessels that had pursued them so relentlessly, and fair enough.
By the next morning, they were mostly dead, their captain, captured and tortured, revealing that the armada was even then on its way to take Aden and build a fortress there before attacking the Portuguese in India. The captain also revealed himself to be a convert to Islam, to have been a Christian until only four years earlier when he had married “a Greek Muslim girl.” For his refusal to reverse that decision, he would be tied, hands and feet, and thrown over with a rock at his neck, his ship following him down. For his refusal, and for the lost tempers of two ships’ captains, their, quote, “fit of holy zeal for the honour of God.”
Was Pinto intending some sort of statement as to the danger of such zeal in fuelling the Portuguese global venture, as to its ugliness and cruelty? That is how the book as a whole has sometimes been read, but maybe there was no such thought behind his description of this particular scene.
As for the dangers which Pinto himself would face, the ones which he alluded to in joining this reconnaissance, that appeared to be on hold as the two ships turned from the wreckage, very little enriched by the “bolts of camel’s-hair cloth that the soldiers saved [from the cargo] to make clothes for themselves.” They did not head to Aden to provide warning, nor back to India, having heard word of impending threat. They were to have gathered information as to that fleet, but they also had another purpose, the delivery of a message to a trading factor in “the Land of Prester John,” in Ethiopia, in other words, or thereabouts.
For how Pinto and the others fared there, for the various misadventures that followed and the place Pinto found for himself in the Portuguese Indian world, we’ll get into that next time. Thank you for listening. I’ll talk to you then.
Sources:
The Travels of Mendes Pinto, edited and translated by Rebecca D. Catz. University of Chicago Press, 1989.
The Portuguese in West Africa, 1415–1670: A Documentary History, edited by Malyn Newitt. Cambridge University Press, 2010.
Pearson, N.M. The Portuguese in India. Cambridge University Press, 2006.