🇵🇹 Fernao Mendes Pinto

Fernao Mendes Pinto was born around 1509 in Montemor-o-Velho, near Coimbra, into a poor family, possibly of minor nobility that had fallen on hard times. Around 1521 an uncle took him to Lisbon to find work, and he entered domestic service in a noblewoman's household. After about eighteen months something frightened him into flight; he never explained what. He took ship, was captured by pirates, and so began a life of relentless movement.

In March 1537 Pinto sailed from Portugal for India, rounding the Cape of Good Hope and reaching the Portuguese fortress of Diu that September. For the next twenty-one years he roamed the vast, loosely held world of Portuguese Asia and beyond it, the seas and coasts of Ethiopia, the Red Sea, India, Burma, Siam, the Malay archipelago, China and Japan. He served, by his own account, as a soldier, a trader, a doctor, a diplomatic envoy and at times an outright pirate, and he was shipwrecked and enslaved more than once.

His most famous and most disputed claim is that he was among the first Europeans to reach Japan, arriving by chance around 1543 after his ship was blown off course, and that the Portuguese aboard introduced the matchlock firearm, the arquebus, to the Japanese. Whether Pinto personally was on that first ship is debated, but the broader event he describes, the arrival of Portuguese traders in Japan and the introduction of European guns, did happen and transformed Japanese warfare.

Pinto crossed paths with the Jesuit missionary Francis Xavier, was deeply moved by him, and for a time joined the Society of Jesus as a lay brother, even helping to fund Jesuit work and traveling to Japan again on a diplomatic and missionary mission. He later left the order. His religious life, like everything about him, was turbulent and hard to pin down.

In 1558 Pinto finally returned to Portugal a relatively wealthy man, expecting recognition and a royal pension for his decades of service. The reward, when it came after years of petitioning, was meager and slow. Embittered, he retired to a small estate near Almada, across the river from Lisbon, married, and from 1569 devoted himself to writing the long memoir of his wanderings.

The Peregrinacao was not published in his lifetime. Pinto died in 1583, and the book appeared only in 1614, edited by others. When it did, it became a sensation across Europe, translated into Spanish, French, English, Dutch and German. It is a sprawling, picaresque, deeply unconventional work, by turns adventure story, ethnography and confession.

What made the book extraordinary, and what got it dismissed as lies, was its tone. Pinto did not write as a triumphant conqueror. He described the Portuguese in Asia with an unsparing eye, recording their greed, cruelty and hypocrisy as readily as their courage, and he portrayed the peoples of Asia, their cities, religions and customs, with curiosity and frequent admiration rather than contempt. For a Portuguese reader raised on heroic narratives of empire, this was disorienting, and easier to call fantasy than to confront.

Modern scholarship has rehabilitated Fernao Mendes Pinto. Much of his geography and many of his episodes have been corroborated by independent sources, and historians now read the Peregrinacao as one of the richest and most honest European accounts of sixteenth-century Asia, precisely because it refuses to flatter. He was an unreliable narrator in the details, perhaps, but a profoundly truthful one about the human reality of the age of empire. He remains one of the most original voices the Age of Discovery produced, the explorer who turned his wandering into literature.