Early in the sixteenth century, before 1520, A. Pigapheta made a voyage to the East. He describes a visit to the house of the Queen of Mindanao: “I sat down by the side of her; she was weaving a palm mat to sleep upon. Throughout her house was seen porcelain vases suspended to the walls and four metal timbals.” He tells us that in Borneo, at Bruni: “For one cathil (a weight equal to two of our pounds) of quicksilver they gave us six porcelain dishes; for a cathil of metal they gave one small porcelain vase, and a large vase for three knives.... The merchandise which is most esteemed here is bronze, quicksilver, cinnabar, glass, woollen stuffs, linens; but above all they esteem iron and spectacles.
“Since I saw such use made of porcelain I got some information respecting it, and I learned that it is made with a kind of very white earth, which is left underground for fully fifty years to refine it, so that they are in the habit of saying that a father buries it for his son. It is said that if poison is put into a vessel of fine porcelain it breaks immediately.”
It is generally supposed that the table service, even among the rich, was very limited during the sixteenth century. A careful search of the inventories, however, shows that a complete service of faïence was to be found on the tables of the opulent in the first half of the sixteenth century. In 1532, we find that the widow of a minister of Francis I had two complete services of beautiful faïence: one entirely white, and the other “historied” with all kinds of coloured portraits. These two services were composed each of four dozen large and three dozen small plates, four aiguières, three round and one oval basin, three salts (sallières), eight pots, twelve tazzi, and three dozen spoons, some of ivory and some of wood and mother-of-pearl, “which we used in summer and autumn in serving collations of confitures, junkets, custards, syllabubs, fruits and cider to the great ladies who came to visit my daughters and myself; and in addition I have also many other vessels of the best pottery of Italy, Germany, Flanders, England and Spain.”
Besides the above, this lady possessed forty-two vases, pots, tazzi and plaques of porcelain “of the earliest days when Europeans went to China, which are of a beautiful white, and decorated with all kinds of little paintings.” The owner, who had evidently read Pigapheta, adds that the makers did not profit in their own lifetime by the manufacture of this “ravissante” porcelain, because it had to be buried in the earth for a century in order to come to perfection. Another reason why it should be prized is that it is “so healthy that if it is soiled with poison by evil doers who want to injure anybody, it will immediately fall to pieces rather than suffer the vile draughts with which people would ravage our entrails.”
At this date, the Oriental wares had not yet supplanted those that came through Turkey, Asia Minor and Egypt by way of Venice and other Italian ports. Among the lady’s possessions we find twenty-eight vases, pots, cups and little earthenware bowls of Turkish work, decorated on the necks and handles with little tufts resembling horses’ tails.
She also had four hundred beautiful glasses of all colours, and other Venetian crystal vessels, “adorned with the gayest fancies that the glass-blowers were capable of inventing, with which we delighted the eyes of royalty and the great ministers of state at the great entertainments we gave.”
After Portuguese navigators had found the route to the East around the Cape of Good Hope, they were able to outstrip Venice as a sea-carrier for Eastern merchandise. The Levant trade, with its costly loading and unloading from caravan to ship, could not hope to compete with an all-sea route, and therefore the Portuguese soon acquired a practical monopoly of the traffic between Western Europe and Eastern Asia.[[6]] Lisbon became the great mart whence lacquer, porcelain and other wares were distributed throughout Europe. Dutch ships swarmed in the Tagus, and transferred Oriental merchandise to Amsterdam and other European ports.
[6]. We know that much porcelain was brought into Europe through Venice from the Levant long after the Portuguese were dominant in the Eastern seas. As late as 1623, in Minshen’s Spanish dialogues, China metiall is defined as “the fine dishes of earth painted, such as are brought from Venice.”
The Vicomte de Santarem assures us that from 1497 to 1521 from Lisbon alone the Portuguese despatched thirty-three fleets, composed of 220 ships; and a fleet was despatched every year till the next century. The fleet of 1604 even consisted of five ships. Two carvels also sailed the same year.
We learn what these great ships were like from Pyrard de Laval (1601), who wrote: