He mentions, in the same letter, that the voyage to Japan was so dangerous, that not more than two vessels out of three were expected to arrive there in safety. He even seems to have had some temptations to abandon the enterprise; but in spite of numerous obstacles put in his way, as he will have it, by the great adversary of mankind, he determined to persevere, especially as letters from Japan gave encouraging information of the desire there for Christian instruction, on the part of a prince of the country who had been much impressed by the efficacy of the sign of the cross, as employed by certain Portuguese merchants, in driving the evil spirits from a haunted house.
Another letter of Xavier’s, written from Kagoshima, in Japan, and dated in November, 1549, about three months after his arrival, gives an account of his voyage thither.
Taking with him the three Japanese, Cosme de Torres, a priest, and Jean Fernandes, a brother of the society,—of which, besides several who had joined it in India, some ten or twelve members had followed Xavier from Portugal, and had been distributed in various services,—he sailed in the ship of Chinese merchants, who had agreed with the Portuguese commander at Malacca to carry him to Japan. As Pinto tells the story, this merchant was a corsair, and so notorious a one as to go by the name of the Robber. Xavier says nothing of that, but complains of the levity and vacillation natural to barbarians, which made the captain linger at the islands where he touched, at the risk of losing the monsoon and being obliged to winter in China. Xavier was also greatly shocked at the assiduous worship paid by the mariners to an idol which they had on board, and before which they burnt candles and odoriferous wood, seeking oracles from it as to the result of the voyage. “What were our feelings, and what we suffered, you can well imagine,” he exclaims, “at the thought that this demon should be consulted as to the whole course of our journey.”
After touching at Canton the Chinese captain, instead of sailing thence to Japan, as he had promised, followed the coast north toward Chincheo; but hearing, when he approached that port, that it was blockaded by a corsair, he put off in self-defence for Japan, and arrived safe in the port of Kagoshima.
Anjirō, or Paul as he was now called, was well received by his relations, and forty days were spent by Xavier in laborious application to the rudiments of the language, and by Paul in translating into Japanese the ten commandments, and other parts of the Christian faith, which Xavier determined, so he writes, to have printed as soon as possible, especially as most of the Japanese could read. Anjirō also devoted himself to exhortations and arguments among his relations and friends, and soon made converts of his wife and daughter, and many besides, of both sexes. An interview was had with the king of Satsuma,—in which province Kagoshima was situated,—and he presently issued an edict allowing his subjects to embrace the new faith. This beginning seemed promising; but Xavier already anticipated a violent opposition so soon as his object came to be fully understood. He drew consolation, however, from the spiritual benefits enjoyed by himself, “since in these remote regions,” so he wrote, “amid the impious worshippers of demons, so very far removed from almost every mortal aid and consolation, we almost of necessity, as it were, forget and lose ourselves in God, which hardly can happen in a Christian land, where the love of parents and country, intimacies, friendship and affinities, and helps at hand both for body and mind, intervene, as it were, between man and God, to the forgetfulness of the latter.” And what tended to confirm this spiritual state of mind was the entire freedom in Japan “from those delights which elsewhere stimulate the flesh and break down the strength of mind and body. The Japanese,” he wrote, “rear no animals for food. Sometimes they eat fish;—they have a moderate supply of rice and wheat; but they live, for the most part, on vegetables and fruits; and yet they attain to such a good old age, as clearly to show how little nature, elsewhere so insatiable, really demands.”
Anjirō himself wrote at the same time a short letter to the brethren at Goa, but it adds nothing to the information contained in Xavier’s.
The following account, which Cosme de Torres,[24] a Spaniard by birth, Xavier’s principal assistant, and his successor at the head of the mission, gives of himself in a letter written from Goa to the society in Europe, just before setting out, shows, like other cases to be mentioned hereafter, that it was by no means merely from the class of students that the order of the Jesuits was at its commencement recruited.
Though always inclined, so Cosme writes, to religion, yet many things and various desires for a long time distracted him. In the year 1538, in search he knew not of what, he sailed from Spain to the Canaries, whence he visited the West Indies and the continent of New Spain, where he passed four years in the greatest abundance, and satiety even, of this world’s goods. But desiring something greater and more solid, in 1542 he embarked on board a fleet of six ships, fitted out by Mendosa, the viceroy of New Spain, to explore and occupy the islands of the Pacific, discovered by Magellan in 1521. Standing westward, on the fifty-fifth day they fell in, so Cosme writes, with a numerous cluster of very small, low islands, of which the inhabitants lived on fish and the leaves of trees. Ten days after they saw a beautiful island, covered with palms, but the wind prevented their landing. In another ten or twelve days the ships reached the great island of Mindanao, two hundred leagues in circumference, but with few inhabitants. Sailing thence to the south they discovered a small island abounding in meat and rice; but having, during half a year’s residence, lost four hundred men in contests with the natives, who used poisoned arrows, they sailed to the Moluccas, where they remained about two years, till it was finally resolved, not having the means to get back to New Spain, to apply to the Portuguese governor to forward them to Goa. At Amboina, Cosme met with Xavier, whose conversation revived his religious inclinations; and, proceeding to Goa, he was ordained a priest by the bishop there, who placed him in charge of a cure. But he found no peace of mind till he betook himself to the college of St. Paul (which seems by this time to have passed into the hands of the Jesuits), being the more confirmed in his resolution to join the order, by the return of Xavier to Goa, whose invitation to accompany him to Japan he joyfully accepted, and where he continued for twenty years to labor as a missionary.
Cosme, in his letter above quoted, says nothing of any hostile collision of the Spanish ships, in which he reached the East, with the Portuguese; but it appears, from Galvano’s account of this expedition, that such collision did take place. He also gives, as the reason why the Spaniards did not land on Mindanao, the opposition they experienced from some of the princes of it, who, by his own recent efforts, had been converted to Catholicism; and who, owing their obedience to him, would by no means incur his displeasure by entertaining these interloping Spaniards.
One of the Spanish ships was sent back to New Spain with news of their success thus far. This ship passed among the northern islands of the group, which seem now first to have received the name of the Philippines. Another fleet sailed from Seville, in the year 1544, to coöperate with Rui Lopes; but none of the ships succeeded in passing the Straits of Magellan, except one small bark, which ran up the coast to Peru. The Spaniards made no further attempts in the East till the expiration of ten years or more, when the Philippines were finally colonized—an event not without its influence upon the affairs of Japan.