Once in the Malay states, Pinto and a friend of his, a Moslem, were asked to dine with a bigwig, also a True Believer. At dinner they spoke evil about the local rajah, who got wind of the slander. Pinto watched both of these Moslem gentlemen having their feet sawn off, then their hands, and finally their heads. As for himself, he talked about his rich relations, claiming Dom Pedro de Faria, a very powerful noble, as his uncle. He said the factor had embezzled his uncle’s money and fully deserved his fate. “All this,” says Pinto, “was extemporized on the spur of the moment, not knowing well what I said.” The liar got off.
Pinto’s career as a pirate ended in shipwreck, capture, slavery and a journey in China where he was put to work on the repairing of the Great Wall. He was at a city called Quinsay in 1544 when Altan Khan, king of the Tumeds—a Mongolian horde—swept down out of the deserts.
The Mongols sacked Quinsay, and Pinto as a prisoner was brought before Altan Khan who was besieging Pekin. When the siege was raised he accompanied the Mongol army on its retreat into the heart of Asia. In time he found favor with his masters and was allowed to accompany an embassy to Cochin China. On this journey he saw some cannon with iron breeches and wooden muzzles made, he was told, by certain Almains (Germans) who came out of Muscovy (Russia), and had been banished by the king of Denmark. Then comes Pinto’s account of Tibet, of Lhasa, and the Grand Lama, and so to Cochin China, and the sea. If it is true, Pinto made a very great journey, and he claims to have been afterward with Xavier in Japan. In the end he returned to Lisbon after twenty-one years of adventure in which he was five times shipwrecked, and seventeen times sold as a slave.
It is disheartening to have so little space for the great world of Portuguese adventure in the Indies, where Camoens, one of the world’s great poets, wrote the immortal Lusiads.
However ferocious, these Portuguese adventurers were loyal, brave and strong. They opened the way of Europe to the East Indies, they Christianized and civilized Brazil. Once, at sea, a Portuguese lady spoke to me of England’s good-humored galling disdain toward her people. “Ah, you English!” she cried. “What you are, we were once! what we are, you will be!”
Vasco da Gama and his Successors, by K. G. Jayne. Methuen.
X
A. D. 1841 RAJAH BROOKE
Borneo is a hot forest about five hundred miles long, and as wide, inhabited by connoisseurs called Dyaks, keen collectors. They collect human heads and some of their pieces are said to be very valuable. They are a happy little folk with most amusing manners and customs. Here is their ritual for burial of the dead:
“When a man dies his friends and relations meet in the house and take their usual seats around the room. The deceased is then brought in attired in his best clothes, with a cigar fixed in his mouth; and, being placed on the mat in the same manner as when alive, his betel box is set by his side. The friends go through the form of conversing with him, and offer him the best advice concerning his future proceedings, and then, having feasted, the body is deposited in a large coffin and kept in the house for several months.”
The habits of the natives have been interfered with by the Malays, who conquered most of them and carved their island up into kingdoms more or less civilized, but not managed at all in the interests of the Dyaks. These kingdoms were decayed and tumbling to pieces when the Dutch came in to help, and helped themselves to the whole of Borneo except the northwestern part. They pressingly invited themselves there also, but the Malay rajah kept putting them off with all sorts of polite excuses.