Detail from Nanban byōbu by Kanō Sanraku, 17th century - (Wikimedia)
YOU CAN LISTEN TO THIS EPISODE HERE OR ON YOUR USUAL PODCAST APP
Sources:
The Travels of Mendes Pinto, edited and translated by Rebecca D. Catz. University of Chicago Press, 1989.
Cooper, Michael. The Southern Barbarians: The First Europeans in Japan. Kodansha, 1971.
Lidin, Olof G. Tanegashima: The Arrival of Europe in Japan. Routledge, 2003.
Perrin, Noel. Giving Up the Gun: Japan's Reversion to the Sword, 1543-1879. David R. Godine, 1979.
Script:
When we last dropped in on Pinto, he and his fellows were extricating themselves from legal troubles in China, or perhaps better to say that the Mongols were appearing from offstage and shepherding them out of trouble, that circumstances arranged to push the Portuguese on from that particular adventure and, most assuredly, onto another one.
There was time among the Mongols in Pinto's narrative for a visit to a wondrous palace, and in its courtyard by the orange grove, all manner of flowers and shrubbery that were unknown in Europe. An ornamented tent sat there, of the sort that Pinto could really linger over in all its gold leaf and silver rod, and later there was to be a prince’s retinue that he would also slather with loving detail.
There were the 120 bodyguards in their leather dyed purple and green, the dozen “mounted mace bearers with silver staffs,” the dozen spare horses, “trimmed all over with laces interwoven with gold and silver threads,” the dozen “gigantic men of the most unaccustomed stature dressed in huge tiger-skin garments, … each with a large greyhound,” the dozen “little boys mounted on white horses, riding in stiff-legged style on green velvet saddles covered with silk netting, all of them dressed alike in short robes of purple satin lined with marten skins, with matching breeches and hats, and very heavy gold chains strung across their chests like baldrics.”
It was all very lovely, all very lush. A lot of dozens.
Interestingly, among the Mongols was the first time in a while that Pinto’s Portuguese would answer honestly as to where they were from, abandoning their usual pretence of being merchants from Siam for the truth, if a truth that was, in their telling, a full three years of travel distant, a claim that amazed their Mongol company. Clearly, they said among themselves, there must be “very little justice and a great deal of greed” among these people for them to come so very far from home for conquest. What else would drive one to journey three years from home?
Eventually, it came to leave, but not all of the Portuguese would be moving on. Jorge Mendes, the man who, in the last episode, had spoken up and claimed he could help the Mongols achieve their aims, he elected to stay, saying that he had, in any case, no wife or child to mourn his absence, no reason to leave, and picturing oneself in the place of one of Pinto’s characters, you can understand why he might have been tired of it all, why he might not have wanted to move on and again throw the dice on one more shipwreck, one more disastrous argument, one more pirate attack, one more arrest in unknown lands, one more chance for his sins to roll up and punch him in the mouth, as they did so very, very often in Pinto’s telling.
As for the rest, they journeyed on, and Pinto wrote of signs of war and passing wagons of its spoils. He wrote of an encounter with a, quote, “heathen pope,” a figure that Catz, among others, has characterized as being “strongly reminiscent of the Dalai Lama.” He wrote of reaching the coast and departing from it, how he and the others fell into one of their typically heated arguments which so disgusted the ship’s captain that he chose to abandon them on Lampacau Island, a place of contested location somewhere west of Macao and a focal point of Portuguese trade there in the mid-1550s, a place Pinto which would later mention in a 1555 letter from Macao, taking us firmly into territory that he was actually confirmed to have visited.
So there they all were, the eight remaining Portuguese, in circumstances every bit as familiar to us in this story as their captivity. They waited, stranded on that island for nearly a month, until a pair of passing pirate ships came by and picked them up, three of them, due to the ferocity of the aforementioned argument and the ill feelings that remained among them, departing that island on the one ship and five on the other. Due to the small fleet that then attacked them while at sea, the one with five Portuguese aboard was set aflame and all on it lost.
And then there were three.
On that remaining ship, they stumbled on. Pilotless, for he had been killed in the attack. Battered by storms and looking for shelter. Looking for water, for they were running short. By the time they were finally guided into port, it was at the island of Tanegashima, largest of the Ōsumi Islands, south of Kyūshū.
Pinto, and his two surviving comrades, had reached Japan, and that’s what we’ll be talking about today.
Hello, and welcome. My name is Devon, and this is Human Circus: Journeys in the Medieval World, the history podcast that traverses that world in the tracks of its travellers. And it is a podcast with a Patreon, at patreon.com/humancircus, where you can enjoy advanced, extra, and ad-free listening, and you can do so for as little as a dollar a month or as much as makes sense for you. This time, I want to particularly thank Bill Clinton and Patty Dulohery for coming aboard and for helping to keep the ship afloat, never a given, in life as in the Pinto text. Thank you both very much!
And now, back to the story, back to the Pinto story.
As you just heard, we find Pinto having left behind his troubles with the Ming Chinese justice system, a topic which I touched on in the last Patreon bonus episode, and having left behind the Mongols whose arrival had cut him loose from that system. We find him and his few surviving comrades having come to shore in Japan, or so he said. As you might have guessed, some of the details as those claims are contested.
The fact is that three Portuguese men apparently did reach Japan in 1542 or 43. Was he one of them? Or part of a separate group that arrived around the same time? Did he go there at all? Was he just telling their story or some combination of theirs and his own? We’ll get into some of that today, but first, let’s start with what Pinto himself has to tell us.
By Pinto’s account, he and his few remaining fellows were well received in Japan. Very well. They were, after all, novelties in the extreme, with claim to being the very first recorded Europeans to reach Japan, and they provoked immediate curiosity.
“...he could tell from looking at our faces and beards,” said Pinto of a local lord, “that we were not Chinese.” He asked them who they were and where they were from. He invited them to his home, in the particular way that a lord “invites” someone who isn’t one, and he had a boat sent to them with “grapes, pears, melons and all the different vegetables they grow in Japan.”
When they went to visit him, he was highly hospitable and interested in all that they had to say, which, it must be said, included allowing him to believe certain mistruths, namely, one, “that Portugal possessed more territory and wealth than the entire empire of China,” two, that the Portuguese “king had subjugated most of the world by means of maritime conquests,” and three, that said king “was so rich in gold and silver that he had more than two thousand storehouses filled from floor to ceiling.” They could not be exactly certain on the precise number of storehouses, they admitted.
Tall tales aside, the Portuguese found themselves the objects of fascination. This ruler of Tanegashima was delighted to hear all about the world out there beyond his knowledge, and he arranged for them to be housed in the nearby home of a wealthy merchant so that he could hear more, and more. Perhaps, if they’d had a mind to, they might have strung this season of storytelling out indefinitely, like Marco Polo in the Italo Calvino book where he tells Kublai Khan all about the contents of his own empire.
Lacking much else that they needed to do, the three Portuguese were “restful and contented.” They hunted, fished, and played tourist at the local temples, describing them as “very rich and majestic,” so perhaps managing to keep their opinion to themselves about religious beliefs this time—that had been a problem for them in the past. Apparently, they also managed to inadvertently introduce firearms to Japan.
In Pinto’s version of that introduction, it was one of his fellow travellers, a man named Diogo Zeimoto who was responsible. Out hunting ducks in the wetlands, he’d drawn quite a crowd to his display of marksmanship, blasting one bird after another with his musket, with which he was evidently quite skilled. The fascination that he’d inspired included that of the ruler, who now burst with excitement over the musket and celebrated Zeimoto himself with equal gusto, honouring him and, to a lesser extent, the other Portuguese. On the receiving end of all of this enthusiasm, Zeimoto decided that he really should offer the musket as a gift, something the ruler gratefully accepted and then more than repaid.
This first musket in Japan would not be the last. This first one had created such a demand, Pinto says, that in only six months there were more than 600 with still more on the way, and when he returned a few years later it was to find that there were over 30,000 in one city alone. “From this alone,” he wrote, “it is easy to understand what kind of people they are and how naturally they take to military exercise, which they enjoy more than any other nation that is known to date.”
As his narrative went on, he emphasized the musket’s introduction with a kind of echo to it, a second telling of the weapon’s Japanese arrival. This time, he went off from the others, chosen, he claimed, for his cheerful manner as opposed to that of his dour companion—there were serious remarks and then joking asides about how his colleague’s excessively serious demeanour would not do well for the constitution of the ailing ruler they were to visit.
Pinto went to eastern Kyūshū and was entertained by that recovering ruler or daimyo, and this man also was fascinated by Pinto’s musket, and his son even more so, to tragic effect. In this version, the son attempted to use the musket while Pinto slept and was badly injured in the accident that followed, leading to Pinto very nearly being held responsible and put to death. Having helped nurse that son back to health, putting stitches into his head and hand after the manner he’d seen done in India, Pinto was more than forgiven and, when word came that the other two Portuguese were ready to depart, was conveyed back to them, ready to leave with them when they departed for the Chinese coast.
And with that he was gone, his stay there in Japan having, for now, ended. But he would be going back.
His way would take him first to Ningbo, where a Portuguese community of, it has generally been felt, unlikely size welcomed them, where they welcomed the news of trading possibilities to be found in Japan, where they were swiftly stirred into action to follow up on the news. Where they were stirred along a little too quickly.
Driven by greed, Pinto says, they went poorly prepared to the water, never a good idea and least of all in Pinto’s world, where sinkings and other seaborne disasters were ever knocking at the door, eager to get inside. They went ill-equipped and without proper pilots. In nine ships, they went, quote, “on a Sunday morning, against the wind, against the monsoon, against the tide, and against all reason, without a moment’s thought for the perils of the sea, but so blind and obstinate in their determination to leave that none of these drawbacks were considered. And I too,” wrote Pinto, “went along [with] them.”
So it always was for him, in his own telling, backseat in a kind of constantly unfolding car crash, never to be expected to be responsible for the wheel, and so it was this time, as seven of the nine ships were soon lost on the shoals and the surviving two ran aground, most of their occupants drowned or else crushed beneath their own keel.
It was, Pinto says, “a tragedy as painful and heartrending as anyone of sound judgement can imagine,” and he was speaking as one who had imagined or experienced quite a few.
We’ll get to what followed this particular tragedy after this quick break.
…
Pinto’s most recent shipwreck had seen him washed up on a reef off of the Ryukyu Islands, the chain which trails from Kyushu to Taiwan, though on exactly which link of that chain he doesn’t say. “...Only twenty four of us” survived the shipwreck, he wrote, “besides some women,” the first mention of its sort that I remember, albeit a very vague one. How many women constituted “some women,” one wonders. I suppose we’ll never know, though four of them would die in the ensuing days and another would soon have a larger role to play.
This party of indeterminate size wandered lost for a time, gaining the shore but little else, managing to forage some sorrel on which they subsisted for days. When they were finally found, they were treated with great compassion, typical it seems Pinto would say, of the kindness of the island’s people. The survivors were swiftly fed with boiled fish and rice, and a collection was taken up to see to their clothes and other immediate needs. But they were also tied up, again in groups of three, and on the second night locked up in a place pooling with water, Pinto’s old friends, the leeches, again bloodying them in the night. He was, once more, in legal trouble.
The issue at hand seems to have been the obscene bulk of goods that had washed ashore from their ruined ships, decidedly too much, it was thought, for any honest merchant to have accrued. Surely, the thinking went, Pinto and the others must have engaged in piracy.
This is not to say the local authorities were unreasonable in his depiction. Indeed, they were quite the opposite, suspicious, certainly, but also quite willing to listen and be convinced, asking questions and giving them time for them to speak for themselves, stern and even wrathful, but without any mention of torture. It was all you could ask for, really, and though Pinto and the others were held for a couple of months, the matter did seem on the cusp of tipping their way, seemed, until a certain Chinese pirate who did regular business in those waters happened into port, heard of the Portuguese and their present situation, and decided to intervene.
“This pirate,” wrote Pinto, “for our sins, was the greatest enemy the Portuguese had in those days because of a battle our men had engaged him in the year before … in which they had set fire to three of his junks and killed two hundred of his men.
…
…this dog,” he continued, “so embroiled matters and told the king so many lies about us, that he almost made him believe that very soon he would undoubtedly lose his kingdom because of us, for he told him that it was our custom to spy out a country in the guise of merchants and to return later to conquer it like thieves, killing and destroying everything in our path.”
Sin, as I’ve said, was very much a theme here, and Pinto and the others were going to pay for national ones. Yesterday’s promise of freedom was gone, replaced by today’s orders that they be drawn and quartered for public exhibition within a four-day window.
It all looked rather bad for Pinto and his comrades, but then those unnumbered women who he had mentioned really entered the story and made clear their role within his narrative, or at least one of them. The wife of the pilot, he said, though I believe he’d previously said that the rush of greed in which they’d left had precluded any proper pilots coming along. Perhaps her husband just wasn’t a particularly good one.
But whatever her husband might have lacked in navigational skill, that wasn’t going to be the thing that got them out of this mess. It was going to be her own extraordinary reaction to being told about the death sentence.
She dropped to the floor as if dead, Pinto wrote, and when she recovered, it was only to dig at her face with her nails so fiercely that blood soon ran down both her cheeks. It was enough to draw the attention, and sympathy, of those around her. It was the women of that city who then intervened on the behalf of this stranger, so clearly suffering, and petitioned the ruler’s mother to have him reverse his decision.
There was a bit of luck, in the form of a fortuitous connection to a lady-in-waiting to the mother in question. There was a pleasingly persuasive dream experienced by the ruler himself, in which he saw himself standing as prisoner before an angry judge, so that he was primed to agree when his mother came asking for mercy on behalf of that Portuguese woman and her people. They were to be set free, he ordered, and all their needs provided for. It was all a very pleasant turnaround from having your insides demonstratively removed for public display, and those good feelings seem to have carried on.
For 46 days Pinto says they stayed there, divvied up and billeted among the locals, who treated them with great hospitality, and he was not alone in that period of speaking highly of their character. “They are very truthful men,” a near contemporary had written. “They do not buy slaves, nor would they sell one of their own men for the whole world, and they would die over this.” They were, Pinto added, “overly fond of food, given to the pleasures of the flesh, and [had] little inclination for bearing arms.” He perhaps did not intend this as an endorsement, but it does rather sound like one.
As for the land itself, it was, Pinto wrote, “more or less on the order of Japan.” It was “a little mountainous in some parts, but it [became] more level in the interior, where many of its lush, fertile fields [were] irrigated by freshwater streams which produce[d] an endless number of fresh crops, especially wheat and rice.”
With some small number of determined men, one could quite easily conquer such a place, to higher benefit and at lesser cost than the Portuguese were constantly expending in India, Pinto claimed, but then he said that of many places.
They stayed 46 days there, “very restful days,” and then they left, their way taking them back to the Chinese coast and eventually, at long last, back to Malacca. Pinto would be returning to Japan, in circumstances and in a new portion of his life that I’ll cover next time, but I want to return to that initial journey here first. That story of arriving in Japan in the early 1540s, of being the very first Europeans to do so, and of introducing the musket there in the process. What are we to make of all of this? How does this line up with other sources? Can we trust our Pinto on this one, or was he just spinning us a bit of a story here? I should say first of all that certain elements of the story really do line up.
According to Francis Xavier, or Francisco Javier, a saint and one of the original Jesuits, quote, “While I was in the city of Malacca, some Portuguese merchants of much credit told me the great news of some very large islands that have just been discovered; they are called the islands of Japan.” That was in 1547, but the actual quote/unquote discovery had indeed occurred in 1543.
The first recorded Europeans to arrive on Japanese shores do appear to have been three Portuguese men who did land first on Tanegashima, did so in the right year, and did bring matchlocks with them. So far, so good for Pinto's version of events, but once you move past that layer of the story, his actual involvement in it is quickly called into question.
The basic issue is that the names of three Portuguese men appear in other sources, and those are Francisco Zeimoto, António Mota, and António Peixoto, not Diogo Zeimoto, regarding which Pinto may very well simply have misremembered or not known Zeimoto’s first name, not, it must be said, Fernao Mendes Pinto.
As for the arrival of firearms, that too appears to have been much as Pinto said, if not necessarily with his direct involvement.
Firearms, of a sort, had been present in Japan prior to the Portuguese arrival, what with the gunpowder weaponry that the Mongols had brought to those shores in the 13th century, but what came with the Portuguese was a much more modern sort of weapon, the matchlock, and when the Portuguese were seen using it, well, Pinto has already told us the rest.
As he wrote, the gun would be taken up enthusiastically. It would spread, really catching on and coming to be known by the name of the island where the Portuguese had first arrived and gone hunting: the Tanegashima. It was quickly manufactured within Japan, and records exist of a 1549 order for 500 of them. Stories exist of how that manufacturing was first managed.
That friendly lord who’d welcomed the Portuguese three, whatever you take their names to have been, had taken that musket he’d received from them and given it over to the care of a skilled smith, the sensible thing to do. He’d told the man to make him more of this delightful weapon, and the smith, a man named Yaita Kiyosada who was a master of his work but not really, or not yet, of European musketry, had successfully done just that. But tradition has it that he had trouble with one particular part of the mechanism, and that he went to the Portuguese for help.
The story goes that he traded his daughter for the secret of that mechanism, though it’s not clear who to. It’s supposed to have been the captain, but in both Pinto’s story and in other versions, the captain of the ship they had arrived on was Chinese. The mysterious Portuguese man with a convenient knowledge of the inner workings of firearms was supposed to have taken the smith’s daughter with him from Japan, stealing her away to what was said to be the, quote, “most miserable life that was ever lived.” However, in at least some versions of the story, he would later be so moved by her devastatingly homesick poetry that he would bring her back home.
That smith’s daughter was named Wakasa, and her sacrifice is recognized in monument form and in a statue of her standing with a gun balanced across her arms. There’s a park named after her in Nishinoomote, should you find yourself there at some point. It looks very nice, with a train in its playground that I would have surely loved as a child.
It’s a very striking story. Odd then, that Pinto would not make use of it. He was fond of a good story, and does not seem to have been adverse to including someone else’s where it would nicely fit in his own.
As for Pinto’s involvement, it’s hard to be sure. I’ve read that Pinto’s story of the daimyo’s son’s shooting accident and recovery was very similar to that of a contemporary incident involving a daimyo’s younger brother, that Pinto may have heard and made the story his own, a practice he was surely no stranger to. But I have also read that he was aboard a ship which arrived in Japan the year after Zeimoto, Mota, and Peixoto, a ship captained by a man named Jorge de Faria, not to be confused with the other two or three de Farias who have appeared in this series. And it would not be his final visit to Japan.
Despite my occasional sceptical remarks regarding Pinto’s account, despite his reputation as a notorious liar, he was held in his own time to be something of an expert and consulted as such upon returning to Portugal, and there are portions of his narrative that even now are thought to be largely accurate, even if the nature of his own involvement was not quite as he’d have us believe.
In the words of Olof G. Liden, “The general purport of Pinto’s story is … in so many respects close to [that of the Japanese sources] that it gives the impression of being an enlarged but not a bad narration of the story of the arrival of the first Portuguese and the first musket in Japan.” “The more one reads him,” Liden writes, “the more one finds, surprisingly, that he is rather close to the truth.”
We will press on with our own reading of Pinto, carrying on with him on his final trips to Japan and into a whole new phase to his life. We’ll do that next time, and I’ll talk to you then.