In a short time they were visited by the Nantaquim (?) himself, accompanied by many gentlemen and merchants, with chests of silver. As he approached the ship, the first persons who attracted his attention were Pinto and his companions. Perceiving how different they were in complexion, features, and beard from the others, he eagerly inquired who they were. “The corsair captain made answer to him,” says Pinto, “that we were from a land called Malacca, to which many years before we had gone from another very distant country, called Portugal; at which the prince, greatly astonished, turning to those about him, said, ‘May I die, if these be not the Chenchicogins,[15] of whom it is written in our ancient books, that, flying on the tops of the waves, they will subdue all the lands about them until they become masters of all the countries in which God has placed the riches of the world! Wherefore we should esteem it a great piece of good fortune if they come to us with offers of friendship and good will.’ [16]” And then calling in the aid of a woman of Lew Chew, whom he employed as interpreter, he proceeded to make very particular inquiries of the captain as to where he had found these men, and why he had brought them thither. “To whom,” says Pinto, “our captain replied, that without doubt we were merchants and trusty people, whom, having found shipwrecked on the island of Lampacau, he had received on board his junk, as it was his custom to do by all whom he found in such case, having himself been saved in the same way from the like disaster, to which all were liable who ventured their lives and property against the impetuous fury of the waves.” Satisfied with this answer, the prince came on board; not with his whole retinue, though they were all eager for it, but with only a select few. After examining the ship very curiously, he seated himself under an awning, and asked the Portuguese many questions about their country, and what they had seen in their travels. Highly delighted with their answers and the new information they were able to give him, he invited them to visit him on shore the next day, assuring them that this curious information was the merchandise he most wished for, and of which he never could have enough. The next morning he sent to the junk a large boat loaded with grapes, pears, melons, and a great variety of vegetables, for which the captain returned a present of cloths and Chinese jewels. The next day, having first moored the ship securely, the captain went on shore with samples of his goods, taking with him the three Portuguese and ten or twelve of the best-looking of the Chinese. Their reception was very gracious, and the prince having called together the principal merchants, the samples were exhibited, and a tariff of prices agreed upon.
This matter arranged, the prince began to requestion the Portuguese; to which inquiries Pinto, who acted as spokesman, made answers dictated, as he confesses, less by strict regard to the truth than by his desire to satisfy the prince’s appetite for wonders, and to magnify the king and country of Portugal in his eyes. The prince wished to know whether it were true, as the Chinese and Lew Chewans had told him, that Portugal was larger and richer than China? Whether (a matter as to which he seemed very certain) the king of Portugal had really conquered the greater part of the world? And whether he actually had more than two thousand houses full of gold and silver? All which questions Pinto answered in the affirmative; though, as to the two thousand houses, he confessed that he had never actually counted them—a thing by no means easy in a kingdom so vast.
Well pleased with his guests, the king caused the Portuguese to be entertained, by a wealthy merchant, in a house near his own; and he assigned also warehouses to the Chinese captain to facilitate his trade, which proved so successful that a cargo, which had cost him in China twenty-five hundred taels[17] of silver, brought him in twelve times as much in Japan; thus reimbursing all the loss he had lately suffered by the capture of his vessels.
“Meanwhile we three Portuguese,” says Pinto, “as we had no merchandise to occupy ourselves about, enjoyed our time in fishing, hunting, and visiting the temples, where the priests, or bonzes, as they are called, gave us a very good reception, the Japanese being naturally well disposed and very conversable.” Diego Zeimoto went often forth to shoot with an espingarda [18]
At the end of three-and-twenty days, a ship arrived from the kingdom of Bungo, in which came many merchants, who, as soon as they had landed, waited on the prince with presents, as was customary. Among them was an old man, very well attended, and to whom all the rest paid great respect. He made prostrations before the prince, presenting him a letter, and a rich sword garnished with gold, and a box of fans, which the prince received with great ceremony. The reading of this letter seemed to disturb the prince, and, having sent the messengers away to refresh themselves, he informed the Portuguese, through the interpreter, that it came from the king of Bungo and Hakata, his uncle, father-in-law, and liege lord, as he was also the superior of several other principalities. This letter—which, as is usual with him in such cases, Pinto, by a marvellous stretch of memory, undertakes to give in precise words—declared that the writer had heard by persons from Satsuma that the prince had in his city “three Chenchicogins [Tenjikujin], from the end of the world, very like the Japanese, clothed in silk and girded with swords; not like merchants, whose business it is to trade, but like lovers of honor, seeking to gild their names therewith, and who had given great information, affirming, on their veracity, that there is another world, much larger than this of ours, and peopled with men of various complexions”; and the letter ended with begging that, by Hizen dono, his ambassador, the prince would send back one of these men, the king promising to return him safe and soon. It appeared from this letter, and from the explanations which the prince added to it, that the king of Bungo was a severe sufferer from a gouty affection and from fits of melancholy, from which he hoped, by the aid of these foreigners, to obtain some diversion, if not relief. The prince, anxious and bound as he was to oblige his relative and superior, was yet unwilling to send Zeimoto, his adopted kinsman, but one of the others he begged to consent to go; and when both volunteered, he chose Pinto, as he seemed the more gay and cheerful of the two, and so best fitted to divert the sick man’s melancholy; whereas the solemn gravity of the other, though of great account in more weighty matters, might, in the case of a sick man, rather tend to increase his ennui. And so, with many compliments, to which, says Pinto, the Japanese are much inclined, he was given in charge to the ambassador, with many injunctions for his good treatment, having first, however, received two hundred taels with which to equip himself.
They departed in a sort of galley; and stopping in various places, arrived in four or five days at Usuki, a fortress of the king of Bungo,[19] seven leagues distant from his capital of Fuchū (present Ōita), to which they proceeded by land. Arriving there in the middle of the day (not a proper time to wait upon the king), the ambassador took him to his own house, where they were joyfully met, and Pinto was well entertained by the ambassador’s wife and two sons. Proceeding to the palace on horseback, they were very graciously received by a son of the king, some nine or ten years old, who came forth richly dressed and with many attendants. After many ceremonies between the young prince and the ambassador, they were taken to the king, who, though sick abed, received the ambassador with many formalities. Presently Pinto was introduced, and by some well-turned compliments made a favorable impression, leading the courtiers to conclude—and so they told the king—that he could not be a merchant, who had passed his life in the low business of buying and selling, but rather some learned bonze, or at least some brave corsair of the seas. In this opinion the king coincided; and, being already somewhat relieved from his pains, proceeded to question the stranger as to the cure of the gout, which he suffered from, or at least some remedy for the total want of appetite by which he was afflicted. Pinto professed himself no doctor, but nevertheless undertook to cure the king by means of a sovereign herb which he had brought with him from China (ginseng, probably); and this drug he tried on the patient with such good effect that in thirty days he was up and walking, which he had not done for two years before. The next twenty days Pinto passed in answering an infinite number of questions, many of them very frivolous, put to him by the king and his courtiers, and in entertaining himself in observing their feasts, worship, martial exercises, ships of war, fisheries, and hunting, to which they were much given, and especially their hunting with hawks and falcons, quite after the European fashion.
A gun, which Pinto had taken with him, excited as much curiosity as it had done at Tanegashima, especially on the part of a second son of the king, named Arichandono (?), about seventeen or eighteen years old, who was very pressing to be allowed to shoot it. This Pinto declined to permit, as being dangerous for a person without experience; but, at the intercession of the king, he appointed a time at which the experiment should be made. The young prince, however, contrived beforehand to get possession of the gun while Pinto was asleep, and having greatly overloaded it, it burst, severely wounding his hand and greatly disabling one of his thumbs. Hearing the explosion, and running out to see what might be the matter, Pinto found the young prince abandoned by his frightened companions, and lying on the ground bleeding and insensible; and by the crowd who rushed in he was immediately accused of having murdered the king’s son, hired to do so, as was suspected, by the relations of two noblemen executed the day before as traitors. His life seemed to be in the most imminent danger; he was so frightened as not to be able to speak, and so beside himself that if they had killed him he hardly thinks he would have known it; when, fortunately, the young prince coming to, relieved him from all blame by telling how the accident had happened. The prince’s wounds, however, seemed so severe, that none of the bonzes called in dared to undertake the cure; and it was recommended, as a last resource, to send to Hakata, seventy leagues off, for another bonze, of great reputation, and ninety-two years old. But the young prince, who declared that he should die while waiting, preferred to entrust himself to the hands of Pinto, who, following the methods which he had seen adopted by Portuguese surgeons in India, in twenty days had the young prince able to walk about again; for which he received so many presents that the cure was worth to him more than fifteen hundred crusados. Information coming from Tanegashima that the Chinese corsair was ready to sail, Pinto was sent back by the king in a galley, manned by twenty rowers, commanded by a gentleman of the royal household, and provided with abundant supplies.
The corsair having taken him on board, they sailed for Liampo (Ningpo), where they arrived in safety. The three survivors of Antonio de Faria’s ship were received at that Portuguese settlement with the greatest astonishment, and many congratulations for their return; and the discovery they had made of the rich lands of Japan was celebrated by a religious procession, high mass, and a sermon.
These pious services over, all hastened with the greatest zeal and contention to get the start of the rest in fitting out ships for this new traffic, the Chinese taking advantage of this rivalry to put up the prices of their goods to the highest rates. In fifteen days nine junks, not half provided for the voyage, put to sea, Pinto himself being on board one of them. Overtaken on their passage by a terrible storm, seven of them foundered, with the loss of seven hundred men, of whom a hundred and forty were Portuguese, and cargoes to the value of three hundred thousand crusados. Two others, on board one of which was Pinto, escaped, and arrived near the Lew Chew Islands; where, in another storm, that in which Pinto was, lost sight of the other, nor was it ever afterwards heard of. “Towards evening,” says Pinto, “the wind coming east-northeast, the waves ran so boisterous, wild, and high, that it was most frightful to see. Our captain, Gaspar de Melo, an hidalgo and very brave, seeing that the junk had sprung a leak in her poop, and that the water stood already nine palms deep on the lower deck, ordered, with the advice of his officers, to cut away both masts, as, with their weight and the rolling, the junk was opening very fast. Yet, in spite of all care he could not prevent the mainmast from carrying away with it fourteen men, among whom were five Portuguese, crushed in the ruins,—a most mournful spectacle, which took away from us survivors all the little spirits we had left. So we suffered ourselves to be drifted along before the increasing tempest, which we had no means to resist, until about sunset, when the junk began to open at every seam. Then the captain and all of us, seeing the miserable condition in which we were, betook ourselves for succor to an image of our Lady, whom we besought with tears and groans to intercede for us with her blessed Son to forgive our sins.”
The night having passed in this manner, about dawn the junk struck a shoal and went to pieces, most of the crew being drowned. A few, however, escaped to the shore of what proved to be the Lew Chew Islands, now first made known to the Portuguese. Here happened many new dangers and adventures; but at last, by female aid, always a great resource with Pinto, he found his way back in a Chinese junk to Liampo, whence, after various other adventures, he again reached Malacca.