Fernão Mendes Pinto
Fernão Mendes Pinto (1509-1583) was a Portuguese trader, diplomat, explorer and writer, famous for his extraordinary autobiographical memoir Peregrinação, published after his death in 1614.
Pinto lived life to the full and had more experiences than most people would accrue in a hundred lifetimes. It is these timeless stories of war, slavery and adventure in India, Indonesia and Japan that fill the pages of Peregrinação.
Born to a poor family in rural Montemor-o-Velho in 1509, Pinto moved to Setubal as a young man after fleeing domestic service in Lisbon as a 12-year-old. During his youth he worked in the service of wealthy and powerful noblemen but in an attempt to make his fortune he joined the Portuguese India Armada - the annual fleet sent from Portugal by the Crown to trade with India.
There is written evidence that two of his older brothers had been to the Orient (one killed in Malacca) and this may have influenced the young man's choice to go east and sail first to Diu on the west coast of India with the fleet.
For 21 years between 1537 and 1558 Pinto was away from Portugal firstly in India, secondly in the Red Sea between the coast of Africa and the Persian Gulf and finally from east India to Malacca and Sumatra in present-day Malaysia and Indonesia, Siam (Thailand), China and Japan.
Pinto's remarkable adventures recorded in his book include being taken prisoner and sold into slavery by the Ottomans, escape, various trading ventures and diplomatic assignments for the Portuguese state, numerous shipwrecks as well as finding time to participate in several regional conflicts.
Fernão Mendes Pinto, also, claimed to be the first Portuguese to visit Japan when a Chinese junk he was sailing on was shipwrecked on the island of Tanegashima in what is now Kagoshima Prefecture. If not the first Portuguese to arrive in Japan, Pinto must surely have been among the first few. The Portuguese (possibly Pinto) introduced the arquebus to Japan and the gun was later copied and produced on Tanegashima to become a common weapon in Japanese warfare.
Pinto left Japan in 1549 for Malacca with a fugitive called Anjiro - the first recorded Japanese Christian - and returned with the Jesuit missionary, Francis Xavier. Pinto himself became a Jesuit for a time before rounding out his travels in the East in Burma, Siam and Indonesia.
Much of what Pinto writes in Peregrinação may not have been all his own experience but rumour and hearsay picked up on his travels. However, this artistic borrowing does not make his work any less valid as an account of the history of Portuguese expansionism at the time.
Indeed, Pinto is a lone voice of criticism of what the Portuguese are doing as they established their empire. While carefully observing the orthodoxy of the age to avoid censor of worse from the Inquisition, Pinto is critical of the overt greed and hypocrisy of the Portuguese as they often rob and steal, as well as trade legitimately across the world, while, at the same time, trying to convert the peoples they encounter from the faith of their ancestors with their "warrior priests". For Pinto, it is the pagan, peaceful and tolerant Buddhists of China and South East Asia that he holds in the highest regard above the perfidious, cruel and warlike Christians and Muslims.
After his return from the Orient, Pinto married, had children and settled in Almada south of Lisbon to write his book.
References
Fernão Mendes Pinto and His Peregrinação, Rebecca Catz, University of California, Los Angeles