Siam : The Land of the White Elephant as It Was and Is

by George B. Bacon

RUINS OF A PAGODA AT AYUTHIA.

"The Empire of Siam remaining without a lawfull successor, those two great lords of the Kingdom, namely, Oyaa Passilico, and the King of Cambaya, together with four or five men of the trustiest that were left, and which had been confederated with them, thought fit to chuse for King a certain religious man named Pretiem, in regard he was the naturall brother of the deceased prince, husband to that wicked queen of whom I have spoken; whereupon this religious man, who was a Talagrepo of a Pagode, called Quiay Mitran, from whence he had not budged for the space of thirty years, was the day after drawn forth of it by Oyaa Passilico, who brought him on January 17th, into the city of Odiaa, where on the 19th he was crowned King with a new kind of ceremony, and a world of magnificence, which (to avoid prolixity) I will not make mention of here, having formerly treated of such like things. Withall passing by all that further arrived in the Kingdom of Siam, I will content myself with reporting such things as I imagine will be most agreeable to the curious. It happened then that the King of Bramaa (Burmah), who at that time reigned tyrannically in Pegu, being advertised of the deplorable estate whereunto the Empire of Sornau (Siam) was reduced, and of the death of the greatest lords of the country, as also that the new king of this monarchy was a religious man, who had no knowledge either of arms or war, and, withall of a cowardly disposition, a tyrant, and ill beloved of his subjects, he fell to consult thereupon with his lords in the town of Anapleu, where at that time he kept his court."

The decision in favor of seizing this favorable opportunity for acquiring his neighbor's territory was practically unanimous, and the tyrant of Pegu accordingly assembled an army of 800,000 men, 100,000 of whom were "strangers," i.e., mercenary troops, and among these we find 1,000 Portuguese, commanded by one Diego Suarez d'Albergaria, nicknamed Galego. So the Portuguese, as we shall see, played important parts on both sides of the great war that followed. After capturing the frontier defences, the Burmans marched across the country through the forests "that were cut down by three-score thousand pioneers, whom the King had sent before to plane the passages and wayes," and sat down before the devoted capital. "During the first five days that the King of Bramaa had been before the city of Odiaa, he had bestowed labour and pains enough, as well in making of trenches and pallisadoes, as in the providing all things necessary for the siege; in all which time the besieged never offered to stir, whereof Diego Suarez, the marshall of the camp, resolved to execute the design for which he came; to which effect, of the most part of the men which he had under his command, he made two separated squadrons, in each of which there were six battalions of six thousand a piece. After this manner he marched in battell array, at the sound of many instruments, towards the two poynts which the city made on the south side, because the entrance there seemed more facile to him than any other where. So upon the 19th day of June, in the year 1548, an hour before day, all these men of war, having set up above a thousand ladders against the walls, endeavoured to mount up on them; but the besieged opposed them so valiently, that in less than half an hour there remained dead on the place above ten thousand on either part. In the mean time the King, who incouraged his souldiers, seeing the ill success of this fight, commanded these to retreat, and then made the wall to be assaulted afresh, making use for that effect of five thousand elephants of war which he had brought thither and divided into twenty troops of two hundred and fifty apiece, upon whom there were twenty thousand Moens and Chaleus, choice men and that had double pay. The wall was then assaulted by these forces with so terrible an impetuosity as I want words to express it. For whereas all the elephants carried wooden castles on their backs, from whence they shot with muskets, brass culverins, and a great number of harquebuses a crock, each of them ten or twelve spans long, these guns made such an havock of the besieged that in less than a quarter of an hour the most of them were beaten down; the elephants withall setting their trunks to the target fences, which served as battlements, and wherewith they within defended themselves, tore them down in such sort as not one of them remained entire; so that by this means the wall was abandoned of all defence, no man daring to shew himself above. In this sort was the entry into the city very easy to the assailants, who being invited by so good success to make their profit of so favourable an occasion, set up their ladders again which they had quitted, and mounting up by them to the top of the wall with a world of cries and acclamations, they planted thereon in sign of victory a number of banners and ensigns. Now because the Turks (Arabs?) desired to have therein a better share than the rest, they besought the King to do them so much favour as to give them the vantguard, which the King easily granted them, and that by the counsell of Diego Suarez, who desired nothing more than to see their number lessened, always gave them the most dangerous imployments. They in the mean time extraordinarily contented, whither more rash or more infortunate than the rest, sliding down by a pane of the wall, descended through a bulwark into a place which was below, with an intent to open a gate and give an entrance unto the King, to the end that they might rightly boast that they all alone had delivered to him the capital city of Siam; for he had before promised to give unto whomsoever should deliver up the city unto him, a thousand bisses of gold, which in value are five hundred thousand ducates of our money. These Turks being gotten down, as I have said, laboured to break open a gate with two rams which they had brought with them for that purpose; but as they were occupied about it they saw themselves suddenly charged by three thousand Jaos, all resolute souldiers, who fell upon them with such fury, as in little more than a quarter of an hour there was not so much as one Turk left alive in the place, wherewith not contented, they mounted up immediately to the top of the wall, and so flesht as they were and covered over with the blood of the Turks, they set upon the Bramaa's men which they found there, so valiently that most of them were slain and the rest tumbled down over the wall.

"The King of Bramaa redoubling his courage would not for all that give over this assault, so as imagining that those elephants alone would be able to give him an entry into the city, he caused them once again to approach unto the wall. At the noise hereof Oyaa Passilico, captain general of the city, ran in all haste to this part of the wall, and caused the gate to be opened through which the Bramaa pretended to enter, and then sent him word that whereas he was given to understand how his Highness had promised to give a thousand bisses of gold, he had now performed it so that he might enter if he would make good his word and send him the gold, which he stayed there to receive. The King of Bramaa having received this jear, would not vouchsafe to give an answer, but instantly commanded the city to be assaulted. The fight began so terrible as it was a dreadfull thing to behold, the rather for that the violence of it lasted above three whole hours, during the which time the gate was twice forced open, and twice the assailants got an entrance into the city, which the King of Siam no sooner perceived, and that all was in danger to be lost, but he ran speedily to oppose them with his followers, the best souldiers that were in all the city: whereupon the conflict grew much hotter than before, and continued half an hour and better, during the which I do not know what passed, nor can say any other thing save that we saw streams of bloud running every where and the air all of a light fire; there was also on either part such a tumult and noise, as one would have said the earth had been tottering; for it was a most dreadful thing to hear the discord and jarring of those barbarous instruments, as bells, drums, and trumpets, intermingled with the noise of the great ordnance and smaller shot, and the dreadful yelling of six thousand elephants, whence ensued so great a terrour that it took from them that heard it both courage and strength. Diego Suarez then, seeing their forces quite repulsed out of the city, the most part of the elephants hurt, and the rest so scared with the noise of the great ordnance, as it was impossible to make them return unto the wall, counselled the King to sound a retreat, whereunto the King yielded, though much against his will, because he observed that both he and the most part of the Portugals were wounded."

The king's wound took seventeen days to heal, a breathing space which we can imagine both sides accepted with satisfaction. Nothing daunted by the failure of his first onset, he attacked the city again and again during the four months of the siege, employing against it the machines and devices of a Greek engineer in his service, and achieving prodigies of valor. At length, upon the suggestion of his Portuguese captain, he began "with bavins and green turf to erect a kind of platform higher than the walls, and thereon mounted good store of great ordnance, wherewith the principal fortifications of the city should be battered." Considering the exhausted state of the defenders it is likely that this elaborate effort would have succeeded, but before the critical moment arrived word came from home that the "Xemindoo being risen up in Pegu had cut fifteen thousand Bramaas there in pieces, and had withal seized on the principal places of the country. At these news the King was so troubled, that without further delay he raised the siege and imbarqued himself on a river called Pacarau, where he stayed but that night and the day following, which he imployed in retiring his great ordnance and ammunition. Then having set fire on all the pallisadoes and lodgings of the camp, he parted away on Tuesday the 15th of October, 1548, for to go to the town of Martabano." So was Ayuthia honorably saved, but Pinto, we fear, followed with his countryman Diego in the Bramaa's train, for he has much to say henceforth of the civil disturbance in Burma and the Xemindoo's final suppression, but of Siam, excepting a brief description of the country, he tells us nothing more.

About a century after Pinto's stay in Siam another adventurer found his way thither while seeking his fortune in the golden Orient and encountered there such vicissitudes of experience as to rival in picturesqueness and wonder the tales of the Arabian Nights. This was the Greek sailor, Constantine Phaulcon, whose story, even when stripped of the extravagant embellishments with which the devout priest, his biographer, has adorned it, is marvellous enough to deserve a place in the annals of travel and adventure. His strange life has been woven into a romance, "Phaulcon the Adventurer," by William Dalton, but the following sketch of his career, condensed from Sir John Bowring's translation of Père d'Orléans' "Histoire de M. Constance," printed in Tours in 1690, is a better authority for our purpose.

Constantine Phaulcon, or Falcon, born in Cephalonia, was the son of a Venetian nobleman and a Greek lady of rank. Owing to his parents' poverty, however, he left home when a mere boy to shift for himself, and presently drifted into the employ of the English East India Company. After several years passed in this service he accumulated money enough to buy a ship and embark in speculations of his own, but three shipwrecks following in rapid succession brought him at length into a desperate plight of poverty and debt. Being cast in his third misadventure upon the Malabar coast, he there found a fellow sufferer, the sole survivor of a like catastrophe, who proved to be the Siamese ambassador to Persia returning from his mission. Phaulcon was able with the little money saved in his belt to assist the ambassador to Ayuthia, where that officer in gratitude recommended him to the Baraclan (prime-minister) and the king, both of whom were delighted with his ability and determined to make use of him. He was first taken into favor, it is said, from the address with which he supplanted the Moors in the employment, which seemed to have been made over to them, of preparing the splendid entertainments and pageants that were the king's chief pride. Reforms introduced into this office resulted in the production of much more effective spectacles at a smaller expense to the treasury, for the Moors had indulged in some knavish practices, and when their dishonesty was discovered by the Greek his high place in the sovereign's estimation was fully assured.

At this time his prosperity was interrupted by a severe illness that well-nigh proved fatal to the new favorite, but was turned to good account by Father Antoine Thomas, a Flemish Jesuit, who was passing through Siam on his way to join the Portuguese missions in China and Japan. Thoroughly alive to the importance of securing so powerful a man to the Roman Church, the good father adroitly converted the invalid, and at last had the satisfaction of receiving from Phaulcon abjuration of his errors and heresies and numbering him among the faithful. By the priest's advice, also, "he married, a few days afterward, a young Japanese lady of good family, distinguished not only by rank, but also by the blood of the martyrs from whom she was descended and whose virtues she imitates." It is an interesting episode in the history of Siam that for about a generation near the beginning of the seventeenth century there existed, besides the free intercourse with Western nations, an active exchange of commodities between this part of Cochin China and Japan, many of whose merchants found good employments under Phra Narain, the Siamese king. They proved themselves, however, to be such profound schemers as finally to earn the hatred of the natives, who drove them out in 1632. Soon after this date Japan adopted a policy of complete exclusion and we hear no more of her subjects in any foreign country.

"If, as a man of talent," continues Père d'Orléans, "Phaulcon knew how to avail himself of the royal favor to establish his own fortune, he used it no less faithfully for the glory of his master and the good of the state; still more, as a true Christian, for the advancement of religion. Up to this time he had aimed chiefly to increase commerce, which occupies the attention of Oriental sovereigns far more than politics, and had succeeded so well that the king of Siam was now one of the richest monarchs in Asia; but he considered that, having enriched, he should now endeavor to render his Sovereign illustrious by making known to foreign nations the noble qualities which distinguished him; and his chief aim being the establishment of Christianity in Siam, he resolved to engage his master to form treaties of friendship with those European monarchs who were most capable of advancing this object."

We must be cautious, however, in accepting all his motives from his Jesuit biographer, who doubtless does him too much honor. According to the Dutch historian Kämpfer, Phaulcon had the fate of all his kind ever before his eyes, and the better to secure himself in his exalted position, "he thought it necessary to secure it by some foreign power, of which he judged the French nation to be the most proper for seconding his designs, which appeared even to aim at the royal dignity. In order to do this he made his sovereign believe that by the assistance of the said nation he might polish his subjects and put his dominion into a flourishing condition."