Vasco da Gama, by the route of the Cape of Good Hope, entered the Indian Ocean in November, 1497, and, after coasting the African continent as far north as Melinda, arrived in May, 1498, at Calicut, on the Malabar or southwestern coast of the peninsula of Hindustan,—a discovery speedily followed, on the part of the Portuguese, by extensive Eastern explorations, mercantile enterprises, and conquests. The trade of Europe with the East in silks, spices, and other luxuries, chiefly carried on for two or three centuries preceding, so far as related to their distribution through Europe, by the Venetians, aided in the north by the Hanse towns, and, so far as the collection of the articles of it throughout the East was concerned, by the Arabs (Cairo, in Egypt, being the point of exchange), was soon transferred to the Portuguese; and Lisbon, enriched by this transfer, which the Mahometan traders and the Venetians struggled in vain to prevent, rose rapidly, amid the decline of numerous rivals, to great commercial wealth and prosperity, and the headship of European commerce.
The Portuguese, from the necessity of the case, traded sword in hand; and their intercourse with the nations of the East was much more marked by the insolence of conquest, than by the complaisance of traders. Goa, some three hundred miles to the north of Calicut, which fell into their power in 1510, became a splendid city, the vice-royal and archiepiscopal seat, whence were governed a multitude of widespread dependencies. The rule of the Portuguese viceroy extended on the west by Diu, Ormus, and Socotra (commanding the entrances into the Gulf of Cambay, the Persian Gulf, and the Red Sea), along the east coast of Africa by Melinda to Sofala, opposite the south part of Madagascar. Malacca, near the extremity of the peninsula of Further India, occupied in 1511, became the capital of their possessions and conquests in the far East, and soon rose into a magnificent seat of empire and commerce, second only to Goa. Among the most valuable dependencies of Malacca were the Moluccas or Spice Islands. The islands of Sumatra, Java, and Borneo,—in the occupation of which the Mahometans had preceded them,—Celebes, Mindanao, and even New Guinea were coasted, and commercial and political relations established, to a greater or less degree, with the native chiefs. The coasts of Pegu, Siam, Cambodia, and the southern parts of China, were visited as early as 1516; but the usual insolence of the Portuguese, in attempting to establish a fortified post not far from Canton, resulted in the imprisonment and miserable death of an ambassador of theirs, then on his way to Pekin, while it gave a new impulse to the suspicious policy of the Chinese, which allowed no intercourse with foreigners, and even forbade the Chinese junks to trade to foreign ports. In spite, however, of this prohibition, numerous Chinese merchants, self-exiled from home, were established in the principal trading marts of the southeastern seas; and with their aid, and sometimes that of the corsairs, by whom the coasts of China were then, as now, greatly infested, and by bribing the mandarins, a sort of commerce, a cross between smuggling and privateering, was carried on along the Chinese coast. The principal marts of this commerce were Ningpo (known to the Portuguese as Liampo, on the continent, opposite the isle of Chusan, in the suburbs of which city the Portuguese managed to establish a trading settlement) and Sancian, an island near the entrance of the bay of Canton, where the Chinese merchants from Canton met the Portuguese traders, who, during a few months in each year, sojourned there in temporary huts while the trade was going on. Down, however, to the year 1542 nothing had yet been heard of Japan, beyond Marco Polo’s mention and brief account of it.
The first visit of the Portuguese to Japan is ascribed to that year, 1542, by Antonio Galvano, in his little book, first published, after his death, in 1557, containing a brief chronological recital of discoveries by sea and land, from the flood to the year of grace 1555, particularly the recent ones of the Spanish and Portuguese, in which Galvano had been an active participator, having greatly distinguished himself as the Portuguese governor of the Moluccas. With a disinterestedness as uncommon then as now, more intent upon the public service than his own enrichment, after repeatedly refusing the regency of the Moluccas tendered to him by the natives, and putting into the public treasury the rich presents of spices which were made to him, he had returned to Portugal, in 1540, a poor man; and so vain was his reliance on the gratitude of the court that he was obliged to pass the last seventeen years of his life as the inmate of a charitable foundation, solacing his leisure by composing the history of exploits in which he no longer participated. His account of the discovery of Japan, which he must have obtained at second hand, as it happened after he had left the Indies, is thus given in Hackluyt’s translation[10]:
“In the year of our Lord 1542, one Diego de Freitas being in the realm of Siam, and in the city of Dodra, as captain of a ship, there fled from him three Portuguese in a junco (which is a kind of ship) towards China. Their names were Antony de Moto, Francis Zimoro, and Antonio Perota. Directing their course to the city of Liampo [Ningpo], standing in 30° odd of latitude, there fell upon their stern such a storm, that it set them off the land; and in a few days they saw an island towards the east, standing in 32°, which they do name Japan, which seemeth to be the isle of Zipangry whereof Paulus Venetus [Marco Polo] maketh mention, and of the riches thereof. And this island of Japan hath gold, silver, and other riches.”
Upon the strength of this statement of Galvano’s, Maffei in his elegant Latin “Indian History,” first printed in 1589, and whom subsequent writers have generally followed, ascribes to the three Portuguese above mentioned the honor of the discovery of Japan, though it was claimed, he says, by several others. Of these others the only one known to us is Fernam Mendez Pinto, who in his “Peregrinations in the East,” first published in 1614, about thirty-six years after his death, seems to represent himself and two companions as the original Portuguese discoverers.
Pinto’s veracity has been very sharply called in question[11]; but the main facts of his residence in the East and early visits to Japan are amply established by contemporary letters, written from Malacca as early as 1564, and published at Rome as early as 1566, including one from Pinto himself. In the introduction to his “Peregrinations” he describes himself as the child of poor parents, born in the city of old Montemayor, in Portugal, but placed in the year 1521, when he was about ten or twelve years old,—he fixes the year by the breaking of the escutcheons on the death of King Manuel, a ceremony which he witnessed, and the oldest historical fact he could remember,—through the interest of an uncle, in the service of a noble lady of Lisbon. Having been with her for a year and a half, some catastrophe occurred—he does not tell what—which led him to fly in terror for his life; and, finding himself upon a pier, he embarked on a vessel just about to leave it. That vessel was taken by French pirates, who threatened at first to sell him and the other captives to the Moors of Barbary; but having taken another richer prize, after much ill treatment they put him and several others ashore on the Portuguese coast. After this he passed into the service successively of two noblemen; but finding their pay very small, he was prompted to embark to seek his fortune in the East, and, in pursuit of that object, landed at Diu in 1537.
It was by the daring and enterprise of just such adventurers as Pinto that the Portuguese, who, up to this time, had few regular troops in the East, had already acquired so extensive an empire there; just as a similar set of Spanish adventurers had acquired, and still were extending, a vast Spanish empire in America; the two nations, in their circuit round the globe, meeting at the Moluccas, the possession of which, though about this very time, as we shall see, contested by the Spaniards, the Portuguese succeeded in maintaining, as indeed they had been the first to visit and occupy them.
The Turks at this time were the terror and dread of all the Christian nations. In the West they had lately occupied Hungary, laid siege to Vienna, and possessed themselves of all the fortresses hitherto held by the Venetians in the Archipelago and the Morea. Having acquired the superiority over Egypt by dethroning the Mameluke sultans, and by the renunciation of the caliphs of Bagdad (long exiles in Egypt), the headship of the Mahometan church, they were now carrying on, with renewed energy, by way of the Red Sea, the perpetual war waged in the East, as well as in the West, by the Mussulmans against the infidels; and had, indeed, just before Pinto’s arrival at Diu, besieged that city in great force. Going to cruise against these Mussulman enemies, after various adventures and a visit to Abyssinia,—with which secluded Christian or semi-Christian kingdom the Portuguese had opened a communication,—Pinto was captured at the entrance of the Red Sea, carried to Mocha, and there sold to a Greek renegado, and by him to a Jew, from whom he was redeemed by the Portuguese governor of Ormus, who furnished him with the means of reaching Goa. At this centre of Portuguese enterprise and adventure Pinto entered into the service of Dom Pedro de Faria, captain-general of Malacca. Perceiving his superior intelligence and adroitness, Faria sent him on numerous missions to the native princes of those parts, by intermeddling in whose domestic affairs the Portuguese generally contrived to find a foothold for themselves. Despatched on one of these missions, he was shipwrecked, made a slave of, and sold to a Mussulman, who carried him to Malacca, whence he was again sent on a new mission, provided with money to redeem certain Portuguese captives, and taking with him also a small sum, which he had borrowed at Malacca, to trade upon for himself. While occupied with this mission, Pinto met, at Patana [present Patany] (on the east shore of the Malay peninsula, and some four hundred miles to the north of Malacca), with Antonio de Faria, a kinsman of his patron’s, sent thither on a political mission, but who had also improved the opportunity for trade, by borrowing at Malacca twelve thousand crusados,[12] which he had invested in cloths. Finding no market there for these goods, Faria was induced to despatch them to Lugor, on the same coast, further north; and Pinto, with his small adventure, was led by the hope of a profitable trade to embark in the same vessel. He arrived safely near Lugor; but the vessel, while lying in the river below that city, was boarded by a Saracen corsair. Pinto with two others plunged into the water and escaped, wounded, to the shore; and having succeeded in reaching Patana, he communicated to Antonio de Faria information of their mutual loss.
Overwhelmed by this news, and afraid to face his creditors at Malacca, Faria, with the remnant of his fortune and the assistance of his friends, fitted out a small cruiser, in which he embarked in May, 1540, with several Portuguese, and Pinto among the rest, nominally to seek out the pirate who had robbed him, but in fact to recruit his fortune as he might. After many adventures—the acquisition of great wealth by numerous captures of richly laden corsairs and others, its loss by shipwreck, the getting of a new vessel, the meeting with the corsair who had robbed them at Lugor, the taking of his vessel, another shipwreck, and the sack of a Chinese town, where some of their shipwrecked companions were detained as prisoners—they put into Liampo (Ningpo), finding on some islands at no great distance from that city, and known as the Gates of Liampo, a Portuguese settlement of a thousand houses, with six or seven churches, and with regular Portuguese officers and laws—as much so, says Pinto, as if the place had been situated between Lisbon and Santarem.[13] Here they met with a Chinese corsair, who told them a marvellous story of the island of Calempui, not far from Pekin, in which lay buried seventeen Chinese kings, and whose tombs, guarded and watched over by priests, contained vast treasures. Under the pilotage of this corsair, Faria set out in May, 1542, to rob these tombs. Pinto’s account of the voyage thither, and of the tombs themselves, from which, terrified by the alarm that was raised, they fled away, with their object only partially accomplished, forms one of the most questionable, and at all events the most distorted, portions of his narrative.
Shortly after, they were shipwrecked again on the Chinese coast. Faria with most of his countrymen were drowned; but Pinto with thirteen others escaped to the shore, where they lived a while by begging, but were presently taken up as vagabonds, harshly treated, sent to Nankin, and there, on suspicion of being thieves, condemned to lose their thumbs. They appealed from this sentence by the aid of certain officers appointed to look after the poor, and were taken to Pekin, where, after a residence of two months and a half, the charge of theft was dismissed for want of proof, the prosecutors being obliged to pay them damages; but still they were sent in confinement to the frontier town of Quansi for eight months, there to work in the maintenance of the great wall. From this imprisonment they were delivered by an inroad of Tartars, who laid siege to Pekin, and to whom one of the Portuguese, the party reduced by this time to nine, rendered essential military service. Accompanying these invaders back to Tartary, they were sent, except one, who remained behind, as attendants upon the train of an ambassador to Cochin China, by whose procurement they were conveyed to the island of Sancian, in hopes of finding a passage thence to Malacca. But the Portuguese ships had departed five days before; and so they proceeded on some leagues further to the island of Lampacau (the same upon which the Portuguese town of Macao was not long afterwards built, and already a resort for merchants and rovers). Here they found no other resource except to enlist in the service of a Chinese corsair, who arrived shortly after they did, with two ships, of which the crews were mostly wounded, having just escaped, with the loss of many other ships, from a recent engagement with a Chinese fleet off Chincheo, a great city, about half-way from Canton to Ningpo. The Portuguese had got into a quarrel among themselves, which they carried out, as Pinto says, with true Portuguese obstinacy. Five of them embarked in one of the corsair’s ships, and Pinto, with two companions, named Diego Zeimoto and Christopher Borello, in the other. The five, with the vessel in which they sailed, were soon after lost in a desperate naval engagement, which lasted a whole day, with seven large corsair junks, in which that vessel was burnt. The other, in which Pinto was, escaped with the greatest difficulty, by favor of the breeze, which freshened at night. This breeze changed soon into a gale, before which the corsair ran for the Lew Chew islands (Riū-Kiū), with which he was familiar; but being without a pilot, and the wind shifting to the northeast, they had to beat against it for twenty-three days before they made land. After running along the coast for some distance they anchored off an island in seventy fathoms.[14] “Immediately,” says Pinto, “two little skiffs put off the shore to meet us, in which were six men, who, on coming on board, after having saluted us courteously, asked us whence our junk came; and being answered that it came from China, with merchandise to trade there, if permission should be obtained, one of the six said to us that the Nantaquim (?), the lord of that island, which was called Tanegashima, would willingly permit us to trade if we would pay the duties customarily paid in Japan; ‘which,’said he, ‘is that great island which you see there over against us.’” Whereupon the ship was piloted into a good harbor, on which was situated a considerable town, and was soon surrounded with boats bringing provisions to sell.