He does not say how he answered, indeed it was hardly by words that this hidalgo of Spain preached in the many languages he could never learn. Once when his converts were threatened by a hostile army he went alone to challenge the invaders, and with uplifted crucifix rebuked them in the name of God. The front ranks wavered and halted. Their comrades and leaders vainly pressed them to advance, but no man dared pass the black-robed figure which barred the way, and presently the whole force retreated.
Once in the Spice Islands while he was saying mass on the feast of the Archangel Saint Michael a tremendous earthquake scattered the congregation. The priest held up the shaking altar and went on with mass, while, as he says, “Perhaps Saint Michael, by his heavenly power, was driving into the depths of hell all the wicked spirits of the country who were opposing the worship of the true God.”
Such was the apostle of the Indies, and it is a pleasant thing to trace the story of his mission in Japan in the Peregrination, a book by a thorough rogue.
Fernão Mendes Pinto was a distant relative of Ananias. He sailed for India in 1537 “meanly accommodated.” At Diu he joined an expedition to watch the Turkish fleet in the Red Sea, and from Massawa was sent with letters to the king of Abyssinia. That was great luck, because the very black and more or less Christian kingdom was supposed to be the seat of the legendary, immortal, shadowy, Prester John. On his way back to Massawa the adventurer was wrecked, captured by Arabs, sold into slavery, bought by a Jew, and resold in the commercial city of Ormus where there were Christian buyers. He found his way to Goa, the capital of the Portuguese Indies, thence to Malacca, where he got a job as political agent in Sumatra. With this ended the dull period of his travels.
Francis Xavier
In those days there were ships manned by Portuguese rogues very good in port, but unpleasant to meet with at sea. They were armed with cannon, pots of wild fire, unslaked lime to be flung in the Chinese manner, stones, javelins, arrows, half-pikes, axes and grappling irons, all used to collect toll from Chinese, Malay, or even Arab merchants. Pinto found that this life suited him, and long afterward, writing as a penitent sinner, described the fun of torturing old men and children: “Made their brains fly out of their heads with a cord” or looked on while the victims died raving “like mad dogs.” It was great sport to surprise some junk at anchor, and fling pots of gunpowder among the sleeping crew, then watch them dive and drown. “The captain of one such junk was ‘a notorious Pyrat,’ and Pinto complacently draws the moral ‘Thus you see how it pleased God, out of His Divine justice to make the arrogant confidence of this cursed dog a means to chastise him for his cruelties.’”
So Christians set an example to the heathen.
Antonio de Faria, Pinto’s captain, had vowed to wipe out Kwaja Hussain, a Moslem corsair from Gujerat in Western India. In search of Hussain he had many adventures in the China seas, capturing pirate crews, dashing out their brains, and collecting amber, gold and pearls. Off Hainan he so frightened the local buccaneers that they proclaimed him their king and arranged to pay him tribute.
Luckily for them Faria’s ship was cast away upon a desert island. The crew found a deer which had been left by a tiger, half eaten; their shouts would scare the gulls as they flew overhead, so that the birds dropped such fish as they had captured; and then by good luck they discovered a Chinese junk whose people, going ashore, had left her in charge of an old man and a child. Amid the clamors of the Chinese owners Faria made off with this junk. He was soon at the head of a new expedition in quest of that wicked pirate, Kwaja Hussain. This ambition was fulfilled, and with holds full of plunder the virtuous Faria put into Liampo. Back among the Christians he had a royal welcome, but actually blushed when a sermon was preached in his honor. The preacher waxed too eloquent, “whereupon some of his friends plucked him three or four times by the surplice, for to make him give over.” It seems that even godly Christian pirates have some sense of humor.