Born c. 1510,
Monte-mor-o-Velho, Portugal
Died July 8, 1583,
Near Lisbon, Portugal
Fernão Mendes Pinto’s action-packed life of adventure in the Far East is stranger and more interesting than fiction. The first European to visit Japan, he claimed to have been shipwrecked, captured, and sold into slavery at least 16 times. He was called the “Prince of Liars” because his account of his travels, Peregrinação (“Wanderings”), was so widely disbelieved by his contemporaries. Yet scholars have concluded that the book is factual, and it gives modern readers a glimpse of what sixteenth-century Asia looked like to a European. This daring man, who barely escaped death on many occasions, lived to the age of 74.
Pinto was born in the Portuguese town of Monte-mor-o-Velho not far from the ancient university city of Coimbra. At the age of 10 or 12 he was taken to Lisbon by an uncle and placed in the household of a rich noblewoman. He stayed there a year and a half until “something happened that placed me in such great jeopardy that I was forced to leave the house at a moment’s notice and flee for my life.” While it is not known what happened, this incident seemed to have set the tone of his entire life. Pinto fled to the Alfama section of Lisbon where he caught a ship bound for southern Portugal. Fifteen miles from its destination the ship was captured by French pirates. After Pinto was eventually put ashore on the coast of Spain, he made his way to the Portuguese city of Setúbal. Employed by a nobleman, he stayed there for a year and a half.
Determined to seek his fortune elsewhere, Mendes Pinto sailed from Portugal on March 11, 1537, bound for India. He sailed around the Cape of Good Hope and arrived at the Portuguese fortress of Diu on the northwestern coast of India in September. He then joined an expedition to the Red Sea and delivered a message to the Portuguese soldiers who were fighting on the side of the Christian king of Ethiopia. Leaving Ethiopia, his ship was captured by Turks and the crew was taken to the port of Mocha in Yemen and sold into slavery. Eventually bought by a Jewish merchant, Pinto was taken to the port of Hormuz on the south coast of Persia, where he boarded a Portuguese trading ship.
Reaching the Portuguese headquarters of Goa, Pinto entered the service of the newly appointed captain of Malacca on the coast of Malay. He arrived in 1539 and served as an emissary to the kingdoms of Sumatra and Malaya. An astute and avid trader, he then went to Patani on the east side of the Malay Peninsula and started a thriving business with the Thais in Bangkok. After being robbed by pirates, he and his partners got revenge by becoming pirates themselves. He continued to trade along the coast of Indochina. After being shipwrecked on the coast of China, Pinto was reputedly convicted of plundering royal tombs. As punishment his thumbs were severed and he was sentenced to a year of hard labor on the Great Wall. When he was freed by Tatar invaders, Pinto returned overland to Indochina.
Sometime in 1542 or 1543, Pinto attempted to reach India by traveling with pirates on a Chinese junk. Driven off course during a storm, he ended up on the Japanese island of Tanegashima, south of Kyushu, to become the first European to reach that country. He was so impressed by the wealth of Japan that when he returned to Canton, China, he urged the Portuguese to take advantage of this new market. He set off with a group of merchants, but they were shipwrecked in the Ryukyu Islands. According to Pinto’s account of the event, they were saved by the pleas of the women of the island. He then returned to Malacca.
From Malacca he was sent on a mission to the Burmese, who had just captured the Kingdom of Pegu. Taken prisoner by the Burmese, he traveled as far as Luang Prabang in what is now Laos before escaping to Goa. His next mission was to establish trade with Java; instead, he became involved in a local war. Again he was saved by his good fortune and left just in time. On the way to China, Pinto’s ship was attacked by Japanese pirates and shipwrecked on the coast of Thailand. He and his men built a raft that ended up once again in Java, where they were reduced to cannibalism. In order to survive they sold themselves into slavery.
When he was freed again, Pinto borrowed money to start a second trading operation with Thailand. He became involved in Burmese-Thai wars and wrote the first European account of Burmese politics and history. From Thailand, Mendes Pinto turned his attention once again to Japan, and he soon sailed into the port of Kagoshima. Upon his departure, he brought a Japanese stowaway to Malacca and presented him to Saint Francis Xavier, the Roman Catholic missionary. This incident inspired Xavier to travel to Japan and Christianize the inhabitants.
In spite of disastrous reversals during his years in Asia, Pinto had accumulated a large fortune. He was a wealthy merchant when he made his third voyage to Japan in 1551, when Francis Xavier was installed at the court of one of the feudal lords of southern Japan. He gave Xavier the money to build the first Christian church in Japan.
In 1554 Pinto decided to return with his fortune to Portugal. While waiting in Goa for a ship back to Europe, he underwent a sudden conversion and turned over half of his fortune to the Jesuit missionaries. He was accepted by the order as a lay brother, and he traveled back to Japan with a group of missionaries. At the request of the Portuguese governor, Pinto financed a mission in Goa to establish diplomatic relations between Portugal and Japan. At some point following his final departure from Japan in 1557, he voluntarily separated himself from the Jesuits, although he remained on good terms with the Church.
Pinto returned to Portugal on September 22, 1558. He stayed at court for four years, hoping for some reward or recognition for his years of service in the Far East. When the honor was not forthcoming, he retired to a small estate on the Tagus River opposite Lisbon where he married and raised a family. Sometime between the years 1569 and 1578 he wrote an account of his travels, which was not published until 1614, over 20 years after his death. Translated into most Western languages, it is known in English as The Voyages and Adventures of Fernão Mendes Pinto. The book became a best-seller throughout Europe, but contained so many fantastic stories that it was considered to be a work of fiction. As more information about the exotic lands he visited became available the account was recognized to be largely factual. Pinto died on his estate on July 8, 1583, shortly after being awarded a small pension by the Portuguese government.
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