Zone of the Marvellous

by Martin Edmond

  Only twenty-two men of the sixty who left Tidore on the Victoria returned to Spain, eighteen Europeans and four Malays. They fired a salute as they came up to the dock in Seville on 8 September 1522, with enough spices aboard to make a modest profit when the cost of the entire expedition was reckoned. The ragged band of men made their way through the streets of the city to the cathedral, where they gave thanks to God and the Virgin Mary for their deliverance and safe return. One of the survivors was the Italian chronicler, Pigafetta, who was wounded at Mactan and so unable to attend the lethal banquet offered by the rajah of Cebu. He went to Valladolid and there presented a holograph manuscript of his journal to Don Carlos, who was by now, as well as king of Spain, Charles V, the Holy Roman Emperor. Del Cano, who criticised Magellan in order to clear himself of any blame, was celebrated as a hero; upon his new coat of arms cinnamon, nutmegs and cloves were inscribed beneath a crest of the globe with the motto Primus circumdedisti me attached. He died off the coast of South America during a subsequent voyage.

  As for Magellan, reckoned a traitor by the Portuguese, who incidentally claimed the Victoria’s cargo of spices as their own, he received obloquy at the hands of the Spanish too. The subsequent inquiry into the voyage did not absolve him of his faults or his errors: secrecy, impetuousness, a flagrant disobedience of orders in going ashore in the Ladrones and at Mactan. But the strait he sailed through, under snow mountains and dark looming forests, inhabited by unseen natives who put forth many smokes, still bears his name, as do the two constellations, the Magellanic Clouds, that his men saw in the sky above Tierra del Fuego. They also thought they heard the sea beating upon its southern shore as if it were the island that in fact it is; but afterwards European, particularly Spanish, cartographers could not resist the temptation to join the Land of Fire as a peninsula to the fabled Great South Land, which in their revamped but still Ptolemaic version now stretched all along the southern edges of the Pacific and Indian Oceans as far as Africa. The secretive Portuguese, who knew far more accurately the true dimensions of the globe, and what lands were upon it, kept their own counsel.

  ANTONIO PIGAFETTA was from Vicenza, the child of a wealthy family; in his youth he studied astronomy, geography and cartography, and sailed on the galleys of the Knights of Rhodes, the Hospitallers, of which order he became a member. He went in 1519 with the papal nuncio to Seville, where he petitioned to join Magellan’s voyage. His eyewitness account of that voyage is not the only one – there were two others, one by Francisco Albo and another by an unnamed Genoese – but it is the most comprehensive and also the most readable. Pigafetta took meticulous notes and collected detailed information on the geography, climate, flora, fauna and inhabitants of the places that the expedition visited; and made the first known recording of a Pilipino language, Cebuano. He even described penile implants used by the men of Mactan. Curiously his book, Relazione del Primo Viaggio Intorno Al Mondo (Report on the First Voyage Around the World), composed in the Venetian dialect, was not published in its entirety until the late eighteenth century. Sections did appear in Paris in 1525 but by then most of Europe had already learned of the circumnavigation from another source entirely: Maximilian of Transylvania.

  Maximilian was a Flem who served as private secretary to Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor, and accompanied him on his travels – perhaps as far as Transylvania. He had been a pupil of the Florentine theologian Peter Martyr and had other connections in Spain – he was married to a niece of Cristóbal de Haro, a Burgos merchant who was a financial backer of Magellan’s expedition and himself connected to German bankers the Fuggers, financiers of the pepper trade and much else besides. Maximilian went to Valladolid in 1522 to interview the survivors of the circumnavigation at the court of the Spanish king. His account, printed in Cologne in January 1523, again in Paris in July of that year and a third time in Rome in 1524, was written in a hurry and reliant on hearsay and shipboard gossip; much of his information and interpretation is contradicted by Pigafetta’s more disinterested and reliable account, particularly where the most contentious episodes of the voyage are concerned: the mutiny in South America, the death of Magellan at Mactan and the massacre on Cebu.

  Maximilian’s account, in Latin, usually abbreviated as De Moluccis Insulis, was sent as a letter to Matthäus Lang von Wellenburg, archbishop of Salzburg, who some say was his natural father. Lang was one of the great prince-bishops of Germany, rich, powerful, conservative and a crucial player in the election of Don Carlos I of Spain as Holy Roman Emperor. He received Maximilian’s letter in Nuremburg where he was attending the 1522 Diet that was attempting somehow to pacify the nascent Protestant uprisings of the Reformation. At the three Diets of Nuremburg (1522–24), Lang and his fellow princes, out of self-interest, effectively prevented any imperial resolution of the issues that were tearing the church apart. His receipt, at such a place and time, of Maximilian’s letter about the circumnavigation snaps the geopolitics of the endeavour into focus.

  Charles V had attained his position only a few years earlier in 1519, with money contributed by the Fuggers, a family of Swabian textile merchants who in a couple of centuries had risen from being members of the Guild of Weavers in Augsburg to multinational bankers with a particular relationship to the Hapsburgs. They organised a consortium of German and Italian bankers who loaned Charles 850,000 florins (3000 kilograms of gold) with which to bribe the seven electors to vote for him over his rival, Francis I of France; of this the Fuggers themselves contributed nearly two thirds, over half a million florins, at an interest rate of 10 or even 15 per cent. They had taken over from the Medicis (bankers no more, but popes, princes and patrons d’art) as international financiers and were principal investors, through their proxy de Haro, in Magellan’s Armada de Molucca.

  It was the beginning of global capitalism on a hitherto unprecedented scale. The wholesale plunder of the planet, which continues unabated today, started here. This was, as Luther Blisset wrote, a Europe in which political changes are determined by German bankers; in which religious faith is raised on the banners of mercenary armies; in which entire populations are subject to martial law. A Europe criss-crossed by columns of refugees, in which the rebellion of the desperate faces a compact front made up of the old families and the emerging mercantile powers … cannons and genocide, and then fire and the sword.

  AMONG THOSE ENLISTED in mercenary armies were numbers of renegade Portuguese who had gone out to Estada da Índia, nominally as employees of the state but really to make their fortune. One of these was Fernão Mendes Pinto – the man who met Tomé Pires’ daughter in China and heard from her the story of her father’s singular fate. But the contrast could not be greater than that between Mendes Pinto’s Peregrination, also known as The Travels of Mendes Pinto, and Pires’ Suma Oriental; one is a catalogue, a book on economics, while the other is a classic of the picaresque. Mendes Pinto boasts that he five times suffered shipwreck, was sixteen times sold, and thirteen times made a slave; his book, widely read and translated in seventeenth-century Europe, is a tale of adventures so exotic, violent and improbable that his name entered Roget’s Thesaurus as a synonym for a deceiver, along with those of Cagliostro, Tartuffe and Judas. Yet most modern scholars agree that while he may have embellished his adventures, he probably did not invent them, making the Peregrination a chronicle of true astonishments.

  Fernão Mendes Pinto was born at Montemor-o-Velho near Coimbra about 1510. His family may have been minor Portuguese nobility or possibly marranos, that is, Jews who had converted to Christianity. He says he was adopted by one of his uncles who took him to Lisbon where he became a servant to a very honorable lady until an unnamed accident made him flee both his job and his country. He stowed away at the port of Alfama on a caravel carrying a cargo of horses to Setúbal. The ship was attacked by French pirates and Mendes Pinto was in one version sold into slavery in North Africa and in another (more likely) abandoned on a beach near Alentejo. His voyage to the east began not long after, in 1537, when
he set sail from Lisbon on a ship captained by Vasco da Gama’s son.

  In Goa in 1539 Mendes Pinto met the newly appointed captain of Malacca, Pero de Faria, and went in his service to that fabulous city. De Faria employed him as a diplomat and business agent in Sumatra and on the Malay Peninsula, sending him to make contact with the still largely unknown states in the region, some of whom wished to ally themselves with the Portuguese against the Muslims of Aceh in northern Sumatra, the original sultanate in island South East Asia and still a turbulent Islamic enclave today. In the city of Patani on the eastern shore of the Malay Peninsula a trading ship belonging to António de Faria, kinsman of Pero, was pillaged and then sunk by the notorious Gujarati pirate Khoja Hassim. António de Faria swore vengeance and set off in pursuit of the Muslim, taking Mendes Pinto with him on what became a voyage of spectacular and piratical adventures through the seas and coasts of Siam, Cochin, Annam, Tonking, Hainan and southern China. Khoja Hassim was finally hunted down near a place called Lailó, killed in the naval action and his body drawn and quartered before being thrown into the sea where huge lizards were feeding on the remains of the dead.

  De Faria sailed north and tried to take the island of Calempuy where, it was said, sixteen Chinese emperors were buried along with their treasure. The attempt failed, de Faria’s ship was wrecked in a storm and the captain lost. Mendes Pinto was among nine survivors who came ashore near Nanjing, where they were arrested by the Chinese. The prisoners were taken north along the route of the Grand Canal to Beijing; it was on this journey that Mendes Pinto met Inês de Leiria, the daughter of Tomé Pires. Sentenced to hard labour, they were put to work on the incessant task of building and rebuilding the Great Wall; but Mendes Pinto did not complete his sentence, exchanging imprisonment by the Chinese for slavery under a Tartar general. He went west into Mongolia and later, in the company of a Tartar ambassador, travelled south toward Cochin – not the Indian port but present-day Vietnam. On the way he met a religious figure described as pope-like – possibly the Dalai Lama – who had never heard of Europe.

  Off the coast of Guangzhou Pinto and two companions boarded a Chinese pirate junk which was blown by a storm on to the island of Tanegashima, just south of Kyūshū. This is the source of Mendes Pinto’s spurious claim to be the first Westerner to enter Japan. He became obsessed with the rich island he had found and spent much of the rest of his time in the east plotting a return there to make his fortune. Before he did so there were two long interludes in Burma, where he worked as a mercenary and became intricately involved with the machinations that led to the foundation and consolidation of the Burmese kingdom under Bayinnaung. He was present when Bayinnaung attacked and took the Siamese capital, the holy city of Ayyuthaya, carrying back to Pegu, among much else, four sacred white elephants. Ayyuthaya was later destroyed and a new capital built at Bangkok, a little to the south. Mendes Pinto’s description of these events in Siamese and Burmese history is the most detailed account in Western annals.

  The adventurer next mounted, out of Malacca, another expedition to Japan, which at last made him his fortune – from gun-running. He returned to Tanegashima and there introduced the arquebus, subsequently known throughout Japan as the Tanegashima. Japanese sword-smiths reverse-engineered the Portuguese guns and soon learned how to mass-produce them. By 1553 there were more guns per capita in Japan than anywhere else and by 1600 Japanese guns were said to be the best in the world. The Tanegashima, until it was outlawed in the Tokugawa era, drastically altered Japanese warfare.

  In 1547 Mendes Pinto left Kyūshū from the port of Kagoshima, taking with him a Japanese fugitive known as Anjiro, whom he introduced, at Malacca, to the Basque Jesuit missionary Francis Xavier. Xavier took Anjiro to Goa, taught him Portuguese and generally schooled him as his interpreter for the planned mission to Japan. The rogue and the saint must have made a strange pair when Xavier joined Mendes Pinto’s next voyage to Japan, where he built the first Catholic church there with money lent him by the adventurer. Xavier famously went on to spread Catholicism in that country; but died off the Chinese coast before he had time to extend his mission to the mainland. Mendes Pinto was in Goa waiting for a ship back to Portugal when the saint’s incorruptible body arrived there; and the event seems to have induced in him an excess of piety leading to a conversion: he joined the Society of Jesus as a brother and donated to it a large part of his wealth. During his final voyage to Japan (1554–56) with Xavier’s successor, he served as the viceroy of Portuguese India’s ambassador to the daimyo Bungo on the island of Kyūshū.

  Mendes Pinto returned to Portugal in 1558. Years of piracy and trade – where the two can be distinguished – in Asia had made him wealthy; and he was already known in Europe as the author of a letter that the Jesuits had, in 1555, published. He petitioned Portugal’s Queen Catherine for a position with the government but, despite his wealth of experience, the Crown noted that he had enriched only himself and done little or nothing to further the state’s interests; his request was denied. Mendes Pinto weathered this disappointment and retired to an estate near Lisbon where, not long before his death, and belatedly, he was granted a state pension. He died, an old man surrounded by family, at Pragal near Almada on the opposite bank of the Tagus from Lisbon, in July 1583 at the age of seventy-four years.

  MENDES PINTO SEEMS to have finished writing his book around 1578. The Peregrination existed for some forty years as a single manuscript before publication in 1614. The original is lost and the surviving text dubious, since it was altered, selectively erased or added to by its editor, a friar named Belchior Faria. These alterations were made mostly towards the end of the book and probably concerned Mendes Pinto’s time with the Jesuits; nowhere does it say he joined the brotherhood. Nor that, in 1557, for unknown reasons, he left the order. The Jesuits never again allowed the name of Fernão Mendes Pinto to be mentioned in any of their publications and would no doubt have expunged it from recorded history had that been possible.

  Notwithstanding, the Peregrination became one of the most popular books in Portugal and then in all of Europe – as popular as Il Milione was and had been. In the seventeenth century alone there were six Castilian, four English, four French and four Dutch editions. In that condensed cornucopia of adventures, events, descriptions, surprises, atrocities, tempestuous seas, a modern Portuguese editor wrote, what impresses the attentive reader is the character of the author, offering himself to the laughter of the readers as a slave, a niggard and a wolf. He is an anti-hero, a brother of Sancho Pancha … An impressive account of China, of medieval Japan before wide-scale European intervention in Asian affairs and of the militaristic invention of the Burmese state, some have argued that the Peregrination is also a satire; that is, a statement about the follies and cruelties of the often incompetent and always savage mid-sixteenth-century Portuguese empire.

  But Mendes Pinto’s tone is not that of a satirist; rather, his is the voice of an adventurer who was neither righteously indignant nor sentimentally pious but rough, ready and mostly realistic. When he and his fellows are about to loot a Chinese pagoda and are justifying their acts to its resident hermit as God’s will, he reports without comment the old man’s reply: I now have before me something I never dreamed I would ever see or hear – inborn wickedness and feigned virtue all in one, that is – to steal and to preach! Such was the nature of the Portuguese empire and such, perhaps, was Mendes Pinto’s character too.

  His book is a precise contrary to that of his near contemporary Luís Vaz de Camoens’ nationalistic epic, The Lusiads: prose, not poetry; coarse, not elevated; humorous and anecdotal, without the sonorous set-pieces of the epic. The armature of gods, goddesses and other mythological figures in The Lusiads is replaced in the Peregrination by an array of human characters of many types, religions and cultures, all described with Mendes Pinto’s characteristic verve and eye for detail. He was neither policeman nor poet; his piratical inhabitation of the heterotopias of the East was unromantic, without idealism or any
concept of virtue that did not involve profit and/or survival. This view of the world and its opportunities was to prove serviceable to generations of colonists; while those who went with loftier aims often betrayed both themselves and those they came to help.

  Camoens, too, had served in the east, and met there the vicissitudes of fortune. He lost an eye serving as a common soldier at Ceuta, had been at Malacca and in the Moluccas; at Macau, after the Chinese in 1554 granted the Portuguese a concession, he was trustee for the dead and absent, which meant that he dealt with the property and effects of those who could not do so for themselves. Inevitably he fell foul of the relatives of those whose assets he held in trust and was returned to Goa a prisoner. Shipwrecked at the mouth of the Mekong, he is said to have swum ashore with a precious manuscript held over his head in one hand; later, stranded in Mozambique, his Parnasso de Luís de Camões, a book rich in learning, doctrine and philosophy, was stolen by a rival and lost forever.

  Camoens himself died in Lisbon in 1580 not long after the boy king Sebastian had personally led an army against the Moors to the debacle at Alcácer-Keber, thereby sealing the fate of Portugal; the poet wrote sardonically on his death bed that all would see that so dear to me was my country that I was content to die not only in it but with it. A few months later, in June of that year, Spanish troops under the Duke of Alba crossed the Portuguese border and, after the Battle of Alcântara, the two kingdoms were united under the Spanish Crown as the Iberian Union and would remain so for the next sixty years. Despite the fiction of formal autonomy and separate administrations, Portugal as an independent kingdom no longer existed.