Mendes Pinto Ferñao - The Travels of Mendes Pinto.

REBECCA D. CATZ is a research associate in Renaissance and medieval studies at the University of California, Los Angeles.

The map of Asia printed on the endsheets is from Abraham Ortelius, Theatrum orbis terrarum (Antwerp, 1570). Courtesy of the Edward E. Ayer Collection, The Newberry Library, Chicago

This publication has been supported by grants from the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation of Lisbon and the National Endowment for the Humanities, an independent federal agency.

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637
The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London
1989 by The University of Chicago
All rights reserved. Published 1989
Printed in the United States of America

98 97 96 95 94 93 92 91 90 543

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Pinto, Ferno Mendes, d. 1583.
[Peregrinaam. English]
The travels of Mendes Pinto / Ferno Mendes Pinto ; edited and translated by Rebecca D. Catz.
p. cm.
Translation of: Peregrinaam.
Bibliography: p.
1. AsiaDescription and travel. 2. Pinto, Ferno Mendes, d. 1583JourneysAsia. I. Catz, Rebecca. II. Title.
DS7.P5513 1989
910.4dc19 88-39778

ISBN 0-226-66951-3 CIP

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information SciencesPermanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984.

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-92323-9 (e-book)

THE TRAVELS OF MENDES PINTO

Ferno Mendes Pinto

Edited and Translated by
REBECCA D. CATZ

The University of Chicago Press
CHICAGO AND LONDON

Title page of the first edition (Lisbon, 1614).
Courtesy of the James Ford Bell Library, University of Minnesota

Contents

Illustrations

Following Chapter 123

Following Chapter 187

Acknowledgments

I was turned down by several colleagues whom I had asked to read the manuscript. Who can blame them? Time is short and Pintos book is long.

But there was one man, to whom I am extremely gratefulMarion A. Zeitlin of the University of California at Los Angeleswho, appropriately enough, was my first professor of Portuguese. He alone found the time to read, correct, suggest, and encourage me in what was to be a long and arduous labor of love. We did not always see eye to eye, but the exchange was always stimulating and fruitful. How can I thank him?

I am also indebted to Professor Francis M. Rogers of Harvard University, who read a good part of the manuscript, to which he gave his blessings, though not without some critical comments intended to eradicate a few errors in form and content.

At the same time I would like to express my most cordial thanks to the following institutions that supplied illustrations for this edition: the National Maritime Museum of Greenwich, the Academia das Ciencias of Lisbon, the Kunsthistorische Museum of Vienna, and the City Museum of Kobe. Especially warm thanks are due to John Parker of the University of Minnesotas John Ford Bell Library and Robert Karrow of the Newberry Library, who were extraordinarily helpful.

And last but not least, I am profoundly indebted to the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation of Lisbon for much appreciated financial support.

General reference map illustrating the travels of Mendes Pinto from the east coast of Africa to Japan

Introduction

Little is known about Ferno Mendes Pinto except that he was born (1510?) and died (1583) in Portugal, that he spent the best years of his life in Asia, and that he wrote a book which he never lived to see published. His total literary production is represented by his Peregrinaao [Travels], which appeared in 1614, some thirty years after the authors death, plus three extant letters, the first of which was written from Malacca on 5 December 1554 and published immediately after it was received in Portugal; the second, written from Macao on 20 November 1555, was not published until the beginning of this century. The third letter, written from Almada on 15 March 1571, was purchased by Harvard University in 1966 and published in 1983.

Pinto was still a young man in his late twenties when, in the year 1537, he sailed for India. There he amassed a considerable fortune as a merchant adventurer, only part of which he brought home. On one of his voyages to Japan he met and befriended Francis Xavier, to whom he lent money to build the first Christian church in Japan. In 1554 he joined the Society of Jesus and took part in and paid for a diplomatic and evangelical mission to Japan. Two years later he was separated from the order, at his own request, and not long afterwards, in the year 1558, he returned to Portugal, after an absence of twenty-one years.

Disappointed in his hopes of obtaining a royal sinecure, he left the court of Lisbon after four and a half years of fruitless petitioning, married, and retired to a modest estate in Almada, a town opposite Lisbon, on the other side of the Tagus River. There he devoted the remainder of his life to raising a family and writing a book that was to become a classic in Portuguese literature, a book that in the seventeenth century rivalled in popularity that of Cervantess famous classic.

But the books popularity abroad declined, due in great part to a proliferation of faulty and bigoted translations which to this day have not been corrected. From the beginning, Pintos work was misunderstood but thoroughly enjoyed as an amusing travelers tale or an imaginative adventure book, the first in European literature to tell of pirate battles on the high seas in the distant lands of the little-known Orient. This was far from the authors intention.

A close reading of Pintos Travels reveals that it is a work of corrosive satire in which the author attacks all the religious and political institutions of sixteenth-century Portugal. More than that, it represents a sweeping condemnation of the ideology of the crusade, which was the mythic lifeline of the overseas empire of the Portuguese. This was a dangerous subject in an age when a persons innermost thoughts were the particular object of episcopal censorship. Yet this is what makes the Travels a unique document in the history of Western thought. It is a rare book indeed, in a period of religious strife, that makes a plea for religious tolerance as a moral injunction from God. It is an early example, if not the first in a period that witnessed the beginnings of the age of European imperialism, of a book that questions the morality of the overseas conquests of the Portuguese, which the author views as barbaric acts of piracy, and much of which he claims to have seen in his lifetime, a lifetime that spans almost all of the sixteenth century.

At about the time that Pinto was born, the Portuguese had acquired a line of scattered maritime possessions that stretched from the coasts of Brazil to West Africa, East Africa, Persia, the Malabar coast of India, Ceylon, the Malay Archipelago, and the Moluccas. When Pinto died in 1583, Portugal had ceased to exist as an independent nation. In 1580 he witnessed the shameful absorption of his country into the empire of Philip II, who supported his claim to the Portuguese throne with well-placed money and military might. This tumultuous period of history is reflected in the book and needs to be known by anyone who would read it with understanding and appreciation.