Philip II’s 1619 arrival in Lisbon - (Wiki)
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Sources:
The Travels of Mendes Pinto, edited and translated by Rebecca D. Catz. University of Chicago Press, 1989.
Hart, Thomas R. “Style and Substance in the Peregrination.” Portuguese Studies 2 (1986).
Hart, Thomas R. “True or False: Problems of the ‘Peregrination.’” Portuguese Studies 13 (1997).
Rubiés, Joan Pau. “Real and Imaginary Dialogues in the Jesuit Mission of Sixteenth-Century Japan.” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 55, no. 2/3 (2012).
Rubiés, Joan Pau. “The Oriental Voices of Mendes Pinto, or the Traveller as Ethnologist in Portuguese India.” Portuguese Studies 10 (1994).
Spence, Jonathan D. The Chan's Great Continent: China in Western Minds. W. W. Norton & Company, 1999.
Script:
Last time out, we were there for the entrance of Francis Xavier and then his exit from the stage. That appearance was an impactful one, for others but also just for Pinto himself.
Pinto would find room in his writing to ascribe two more miracles to the saint, one for the lives thought lost on a sloop, one for the incorruptibility of Xavier’s own body after death.
Regarding the latter, he would write that, quote:
"...the Portuguese went ashore and had the grave opened in which the saintly corpse had been buried, with the intention of taking his bones back to Malacca if they were in fit condition. They found the body completely intact, with no sign of decomposition or defect of any kind, so much so, that not even the shroud and the cassock he wore were found to have any spots or blemishes, for both were as clean and white as if they had just been washed, with an extremely sweet smell about them. This had such an astounding effect on everyone that some, who were perturbed by what they saw with their own eyes, smote themselves repeatedly for the things they had said before…"
As I mentioned last time, Malacca would not actually be the final resting place for those untroubled remains, being moved on from there to India, to Goa. There’s a very striking scene in Pinto’s writing of the body being brought to the Our Lady of Ribandar church there, surrounded by lit torches and tapers, as boats arrived bringing people to shore to pay their respects. There is a scene in which the body is brought through the city gates and the streets within, quote, “very splendidly decorated from top to bottom with many carpets and silken hangings … with many ingenious devices at the doorways below giving off perfumes and sweet-smelling aromas.”
In the midst of these scenes, a letter arrived from the daimyo of Bungo, making clear that he expected Xavier’s return, and that he had promised to receive baptism upon his arrival. Father Belchior was assigned to see it done, and Pinto, of course, would go with him. But this episode isn’t just about that. It’s also about the end of his incredibly long time away from Portugal. It’s about what he did when he got back there, and what we might make of this peculiar book that he left behind.
Hello, and welcome. My name is Devon, and this is Human Circus: Journeys in the Medieval World, the history podcast which covers the stories of those who took those journeys and the histories around them. And it is a history podcast that is supported by a Patreon, at patreon.com/humancircus, where you can keep this vessel from succumbing to shipwreck, piracy, or cannibalism, where you can enjoy early episodes and extra ones, and do so without enduring any advertising, and where you can do all that for as little as a dollar a month or as much as makes sense for you.
That said, let’s get back to the story, back to the Fernao Mendes Pinto story for its final chapter.
As Pinto’s tale wound down, matters went awry in Malacca, with its captain arrested and interrogated. As Xavier had apparently foretold, that captain would soon, quote:
“...find himself beset with vexations and difficulties involving his honour, his property, and his life. As for his death, it is a well-known fact that he died in Portugal trying to free himself on bond of several charges filed against him by the crown prosecutors, and that the cause of his death was a huge abscess that formed on his neck, spreading infection throughout his entire body with such an unbearable smell that no one dared to go near him.”
His successor fared not much better, himself being arrested and then, though he was exonerated and allowed to resume in his role, dying of dysentery not long after. The captaincy of Pinto’s friend de Feria started to look like a wild success and a bit of an outlier by comparison.
For Pinto’s part, he was leaving Malacca behind and making one last voyage to Japan in the company of that Father Belchior. It was, he said, the first of April, 1555, and at that time, he was a Jesuit himself, having joined the society in 1554, perhaps an indication of the impact that Xavier had on his life, even if he would only remain in the society for a few years.
It was in this capacity and also as an ambassador from the viceroy in India, that he returned to Japan, and in this section—and it’s maybe just in translation—there does seem to be more of the first person “I,” with “I disembarked” or the “two brothers and I” who were with Belchior.
As for what this “I” was doing, well of course his ship was running aground. He was passing a place where the bodies of 62 men hung from trees, a warning displayed nearby to take on water quickly and then leave, if you valued your life. Of course he was again telling cautionary tales about the, quote, “lack of scruples and [the] poor judgement of a greedy Portuguese” who had greatly discredited his people. He was being gently mocked by a regional ruler, said, upon hearing their religious aims, to sigh to one of his followers that, quote, “Wouldn’t it be better for these people, as long as they are exposing themselves to such great hardship, to [just] go to China to get rich rather than to foreign kingdoms to preach nonsense?”
He was wintering in a port, waiting to go on to Japan.
While he waited, or while they waited, there on the Chinese coast, news arrived of a catastrophic earthquake. It lasted through the middle of one night and the next, he wrote, and then the night after that also. With, quote, “the most dreadful claps of lightning and thunder, the entire earth erupted into a boiling mass of water that seemed to rise up from the centre of the earth, and suddenly, an area of sixty leagues around was submerged, with only one lone survivor from among the entire population, a seven-year-old child who, in amazement, was taken to the [emperor] of China.”
Sceptical, some of the Portuguese had gone to see and found, from the devastation, that it was indeed so, small details as to solitary survivors aside, and there were other reports too, of blood raining in the capital over those very same three days, though none of Pinto’s fellow travellers had been able to confirm those.
This must have been the 1556 Shaanxi earthquake that Pinto was writing of, and it had indeed been horrifying in the scope of its destruction, sometimes estimated to have been the cause, directly and indirectly, of around 800,000 deaths, giving it the unpleasant distinction of the deadliest earthquake in history.
When the weather and waters again allowed it, Pinto and the rest set off for Japan, set back temporarily by the pilot becoming completely lost and overshooting the port, necessitating two weeks travel back along the coast. When they at last arrived, he went across land for the fortress where their friend the daimyo was sheltering from revolt, a preview of the divisions and trouble over Christianity to come there and an uncomfortable prospect for Pinto, who said he would rather not have gone, given the unrest. And when they reached that fortress, they found that the daimyo was away at present, not due to said unrest, but rather, hunting “a large fish of unknown species that had come there from the middle of the ocean with a large school of [smaller ones].” Pinto would identify the mysterious fish as a whale, saying that such mammals were unknown in Japan at the time, though the long history of Japanese whaling would suggest otherwise.
There’s an amusing scene in which Pinto sits with that daimyo while the man’s daughter and some other young noble girls perform a kind of skit. They profess themselves in song and speech to be poor merchants, down on their luck for lack of buyers of their very particular wares. Fortunately, they exclaim, these Portuguese visitors are just perfectly suited for what they have to sell, owing to the visitors’, quote, “great physical defect from which they suffer all the time.”
There is a great deal of giggling from among the audience, rather less so from the Portuguese, who are wondering what this is all about and probably finding the whole thing more than a little awkward. Then the girls/merchants come marching back in, and their goods on display, so perfectly suited to the Portuguese, are wooden hands. These, they announce to raucous laughter, would be perfectly suited to the foreigners, forced to live their lives with hands stinking of meat, fish, and whatever else they ate. If Pinto and others couldn’t use chopsticks, they could just use these wooden hands to eat.
The daimyo assured his guests that it was only as a mark of his friendliness toward them that he would allow his daughter to make such a joke before them.
As for the Portuguese evangelical mission there with the daimyo, they were, as I referenced last time, a few decades too early for his conversion. Father Belchior saw that as friendly as he was with them, they were not going to get what they wanted, and the Jesuit felt the pull of Ethiopia, a letter having arrived which led him to believe his work would be more productive there.
Pinto’s parallel diplomatic mission was also reaching its conclusion, and he made one last visit to the daimyo, receiving a letter and gifts in answer to what he had brought from the viceroy in India. On the 14th of November, 1556, by his reckoning, they left Japan. It would be his last stop there.
There is no mention of a final stop in Malacca, perhaps due to the aforementioned chaos there, and by the 17th of February, he was already in Goa, the trip back from east Asia going much quicker than the extended one there. He appeared before the viceroy, bringing out what the Japanese daimyo had given, and the viceroy in turn brought out some things for him, many things, “to compensate [him] for the trouble and expense [he] had gone to,” both of which, by his telling were substantial.
But Pinto refused these offers. He brought out documents and eyewitness accounts of his service to the king, the times, to quote Pinto, “I had been captured and had had my property stolen, thinking that that was enough, and that in my own country, on that basis alone, I would not be denied what I thought was due me.” To this accounting, the viceroy added a letter of his own, addressed to the crown.
“[It] made me feel, as a matter of course,” wrote Pinto, “that I would be more than amply compensated … for my services. Filled with confidence born of these hopes and the conviction that right was clearly on my side, I embarked for Portugal, so happy and proud of the papers I was carrying that I regarded them as the most precious possession I had, for I was persuaded that all I had to do was present them to receive satisfaction.”
You might sense some slightly ominous music picking up in the background here.
It was the 22nd of September, 1558, when Pinto reached Lisbon, no further adventures to speak of along the way.
It was with apparent certainty in the rightness of his cause that he presented himself and all his paperwork to Catarina of Austria, queen consort and then queen regent of Portugal.
“I gave her the letter I was carrying,” wrote Pinto, “and an oral report of everything I thought would redound to my credit. She sent me to the official then in charge of these matters who, with fine words and finer hopes—which I fully believed at the time because of what he said to me—held on to those poor papers for four and a half years. At the end of that time, the only harvest I reaped was the hardship and grief I suffered in presenting my petition, which I dare say was far worse than all that I had suffered throughout the previous years.”
That last part seems a bit of an exaggeration, given all that the previous years had entailed, but then Pinto was clearly embittered by the experience.
“When I saw how little either my past hardships or all my present petitioning profited me,” he wrote, “I decided to retire with the miserable pittance I had brought back with me, acquired at the cost of so much hardship and misfortune, which was all that was left after what I had spent in the service of this kingdom, and to leave the matter to divine justice. I immediately acted upon this decision, regretting the fact that I had not done so sooner, for if I had, perhaps I would have saved a good share of my wealth. And this was what came of my services of twenty-one years, during which I was captured thirteen times and sold into slavery sixteen times, as a result of the unfortunate series of events that took place in the course of this long peregrination of mine which I have narrated above at great length.”
As to the great length, he was certainly not exaggerating. As to the number of times he was captured and sold, I must admit that I have lost track, but I feel better about that in seeing that he did too. When he first mentioned it at the beginning of the text, he was sold into slavery 17 times, though perhaps this is an inconsistency that was introduced to the text later on.
Pinto would never get what he wanted, and he didn’t waste the opportunity to place one more point of emphasis on one of his book’s central themes. “I realize that it was due more to the workings of divine Providence which ordained it so, for my sins,” he wrote, “than [due] to any negligence or fault on the part of whoever, by the will of heaven, had the responsibility for compensating me.”
Easily said, in writing and in retrospect, but I am not so sure he actually managed that easy forgiveness for those responsible.
“I give many thanks to the King of Heaven,” he concluded his book, “[to he] who has seen fit in this manner to carry out his divine will on me, and I am not complaining about the kings of the earth, since I did not deserve any better, for having sinned so deeply.”
That seems as good a place as any to pause this story.
We will continue after this quick break.
…
Having been, as Rebecca Catz wrote, “a slave, soldier, merchant, pirate, ambassador, missionary, [and] doctor,” among other things, Pinto was home, not exactly happily so, for he seems to have regretted the four years or so spent at court before concluding that there really was no juice to be squeezed, but settled in and not going anywhere, having very much finished the travelling portion of his life—and that wasn’t really just one “portion,” I should note here. It’s something that’s easy to lose sight of as one seemingly absurd event follows another, but his position in the world was changing. From his beginnings as a kind of penniless adventurer, the more recent episodes find him as a more comfortable merchant or official ambassador. It’s not that the latter role really set you up for success, but he was able to donate money to the Jesuits and loan Xavier the funds for a church.
Pinto would retire to a small estate in Almada, just across the river from Lisbon. He would have neither the recognition nor the gold of the Portuguese crown, but he would have another sort of recognition, that of those who came to consult him on matters regarding China or Japan, including perhaps the most famous Portuguese historian of his time, a Medici ambassador, and a Jesuit commissioned to produce a history of the Portuguese in India.
In early 1583, Pinto would receive a daily stipend of wheat, obviously not quite the reward he’d been hoping for, and not one that he would get to enjoy for long, dying only months later on July the 8th of that year.
As to Pinto’s family, some information comes to us through his letters and those of Xavier. Two brothers, one of whom was present at the siege of Malacca, maybe the same one who was killed in Indonesia. In Lisbon, a sister and brother, the latter possibly included in that other two, and in Kochi, a wealthy cousin. After his retirement and return, a wife and daughters. But Pinto, as a person, is oddly obscure to us for someone who wrote so much. “...if we know from the work a little about Pinto’s mind, and a great deal about his imagination,” writes Catz, “the man himself remains unknowable, hidden as much as revealed by the [book], which alone has given substance to his name.”
As I have touched on at times, Pinto’s character is often a backseat passenger to the events he recounts, a blameless observer, tortured by tragedy and spiritually reflective but in other ways curiously untouched. Along these lines, Thomas Hart has written of the book occurring in a kind of “adventure-time,” and no, not that Adventure Time but one in which, quote:
“...the series of events narrated is in principle reversible, since the events leave no mark on the characters, and also infinite, since new adventures may be added at any point. In this world,” he says, quoting Mikhail Baktin on Greek romances, “an individual can be nothing other than completely passive, comparatively unchanging. … To such an individual things can merely happen.’”
For Hart, as he has elsewhere written, this peculiar “adventure-time” novel can best be read as “a record of a pilgrimage, a spiritual journey. The destination, which gives retrospective meaning to the whole journey, is Mendes Pinto's discovery that what had seemed mere accident, the caprice of Fortune, is really a manifestation of God's Providence.”
What Catz and others have thought clear about Pinto is that the voices in his book can be separated from the person. Catz identifies four such voices, in that of the good man, the naive innocent, the patriotic defender of the faith, and the roguish adventurer whose participation in evil deeds condemns them.
“This ‘poor inoffensive me,’ writes Catz, “travels throughout the world as a wolf in sheep’s clothing. He takes us on a voyage in which he reveals, in the most realistic terms, the overseas actions of the Portuguese … [as] the very incarnation of evil. He shows us the ugliest and most cruel aspects of their overseas adventures but at the same time pretends not to see anything ignoble in them. On the contrary, he appears to be proud of the colonial enterprise and of his part in it. But beware of this faux ingénu, for every episode is artfully contrived to make a criticism.”
Catz, as I have mentioned a few times, frames the overall work as a satirical one, a “corrosive satire” that is, as Jonathan Spence writes, “designed to belittle the institutions of his native Portugal, and to discredit the lingering ideology of the crusading mentality still so prevalent among Portuguese expansionists.” And Catz is not alone in this position. However, I should add that not all readers have been convinced by this particular take.
Joan-Pau Rubiés, who I referenced in the last episode, is sceptical, for example, of necessarily reading intentional irony into Pinto’s suggestion that a place would be easily and profitably conquered coming in close proximity to his comment as to its people’s generous hospitality. However, he does see moral purpose there. For Rubiés, who has described Pinto’s book as a heavily fictionalized “autobiographical romance,” Pinto is a religious reformer, calling out his fellow Christians for unbecoming behaviour while placing sympathetic, if inauthentic, speech in the mouths of Asians as he went.
Even if he were really there for all of those encounters, and not borrowing from other sources to heavily supplement his own experiences, it would be an astonishing feat of memory to recreate all those conversations decades later. But the conversations are there. The speeches made by everyone from the son of a Chinese seafarer to the ruler of Aru are there, and they’re overwhelmingly critical of the Portuguese in nature. So whether or not you accept Catz’s thesis as to Pinto’s satirical intent—something that I think probably requires an expert reading in the original language, like hers, to really assess—that critique of the Portuguese abroad is very much present in the text and emphasized through its repetition.
Having arrived back in Portugal in 1558, Pinto wrote his book between 1569 and 1578, producing an unwieldy and encyclopedic wonder, packed with all the main characters of the Portuguese actions in Asia through the first half of the 16th century. More than the main characters really, all sorts of supporting cast members, extras, and more.
Pinto finished writing in 1578, and the manuscript apparently circulated, but it was not immediately published. When he died in the summer of 83, the book was, as requested in his will, brought to the charitable house Casa Pia das Penitentes where it was known of and indeed consulted, but, again, not published.
The application for that publication came and was approved in 1603, but still the book went unpublished for another decade, finally appearing in print in 1614, the reasons for that further delay variously explained away as caused by financial difficulties, ones posed by preparing the awkward text for publication, or the intervention of the Jesuits, acting out of lingering resentment at his departure, though I’m not sure there’s much in the way of supporting evidence for that theory.
Perhaps more interesting than the reasons for that posthumous delay is the question of why Pinto himself did not attempt to publish while alive. It would seem a natural step in his quest to establish his worth and at last be compensated by the crown, but he does not seem to have attempted it. For Catz, the answer is unquestionably one of fear.
There may have been concern over contradiction from his peers who had also been in Asia and could challenge his version of events, but mostly, she says, “The times were dangerous, and he had written a dangerous book,” one which criticized “every institution, sacred and profane, of his country.” By leaving it in the hands of a pious institution, his great work “would have a sponsor both unsuspecting and above suspicion and could safely be transmitted to posterity,” and his children would be shielded from any negative consequences. In that, it seems, he was successful.
We’ll leave Fernao Mendes Pinto and his sprawling literary project there. Thank you so much for joining me on this long voyage.
When next we speak, it’ll be with another subject, and having gone so long on this one, I’ve got some shorter ones in mind, maybe some standalone episodes for a while for a little change of pace.
I’ll be back with one of those soon, and I’ll talk to you then.