Part 25

One of the causes that most moved Portugal to curiosity and acted as an incentive to discovery were the vague rumours of the existence of a mighty Christian prince, the half-mythical Prester John, Negus of Abyssinia. The priest FRANCISCO ALVAREZ (_c._ 1470?-_c._ 1540) set out with Duarte Galvam, first Portuguese Ambassador to Abyssinia, in 1515, but Galvam’s death delayed the mission, and it was not till 1520 that Alvarez and the new ambassador, D. Rodrigo de Lima, reached the Court of Prester John. They remained for six years in the country, and during this time Alvarez recorded in straightforward notes every detail of the country and its inhabitants with minuteness and accuracy. He considered himself old[511] in 1520; he was certainly active: he shoots hares and pheasants, washes unsuccessfully for gold, looks after his slaves, his nine mules, his fourteen cows, and organizes a procession against locusts. On their return, in Alvarez’ friend Antonio Galvam’s ship, to Lisbon, bringing ‘the length of Prester John’s foot’, he was eagerly questioned by king, prelates, and courtiers--the whole Court trooped out along the road from Coimbra to meet them--and when he published his fascinating diary of travel, _Verdadeira Informaçam das terras do Preste Joam_ (1540), it was soon translated into almost every language of Europe.[512] FREI GASPAR DA CRUZ of Evora, missionary in China, returned to Portugal in 1569, and in the same year began his _Tractado em que se cõtam muito por estẽso as cousas da China_ (1570). He calls it a _singella narraçam_, but it contains valuable information about China, nor did the author neglect his style. The Dominican FREI JOÃO DOS SANTOS (_c._ 1550-_c._ 1625?)[513] was born at Evora about the middle of the sixteenth century, and went out to East Africa and India as a missionary in 1586. He returned to Lisbon in August 1600 and nine years later published his _Ethiopia Oriental_ (1609), an attractive, curious account, written in a clear and easy style, of the natives, their land and customs. It is to be feared that some of the settlers sadly abused his credulity, as in the case of the _mercador’s_ tale of the native sorcerer or the man 380 years old, but this does not by any means impair the interest of his book. More individual and vivid is the _Itinerario_ (1560) of ANTONIO TENREIRO, who in brief, staccato sentences describes minutely what he saw (the _rosaes_ of red, white, and yellow roses in May near Damascus, the red roses of Shiraz, the fair, white Gurgis, complexioned like Englishmen) during his travels from Ormuz to the Caspian Sea and in Palestine and Egypt, and his overland journey from Ormuz to Portugal (1529) in which, alone with an Arab guide, he spent twenty-two days in crossing the desert. A similar land journey, a generation later, is described with an equal wealth of curious detail in the _Itinerario_ (1565) of Mestre MARTIM AFONSO, surgeon to the Viceroy, Conde de Redondo,[514] while the Franciscan FREI PANTALEAM DE AVEIRO in his _Itinerario da Terra Santa_, &c. (1593) described his journey to the Holy Land. Not less adventurous were the travels of another Franciscan, FREI GASPAR DE S. BERNARDINO, who related them with greater parade of erudition in a clear, elegant style in his _Itinerario da India por terra_ (1611), the promised second part of which was unhappily not finished or at least not published. Half a century later the Jesuit MANUEL GODINHO (_c._ 1630-1712),[515] in the _Relaçam do novo caminho que fez por terra e mar_ (1665), gave a remarkable account, in a style not untouched by the _culteranismo_ of the time, of his return journey in 1663 from Baçaim. But various and arresting as are the books of Portuguese travellers, they are all eclipsed by the wonderful _Peregrinaçam_ (1614) of FERNAM MENDEZ PINTO (_c._ 1510-83). This prince of travellers and adventurers was born at Montemôr o Velho. His parents were of humble station, and at the time of King Manuel’s death (1521) he was brought by an uncle to Lisbon in order to earn his living. Although he remained in Portugal for sixteen years, in the service first of a lady of Lisbon and later of D. João de Lencastre,[516] lord of Montemôr o Velho, at Setubal, he was but just in his teens when, crossing in a boat from Alfama, he was captured off Cezimbra by a French corsair as a foretaste of pleasures to come. In March 1537 he set out for India and his odyssey began in earnest. He had no sooner reached Diu than he re-embarked on an expedition to the Straits of Mecca. His hope was to make a rich prize and become _muito rico em pouco tempo_. He went next with three others on a mission to Ethiopia, and on the return voyage he was captured by the Turks, placed in a subterranean dungeon, and then sold to a Greek renegade, whom he describes as ‘the most inhuman and cruel dog of an enemy ever seen’. Fortunately after three months the Greek sold him for 12,000 _réis_ to a Jew, who brought him to Ormuz. After spending little over a fortnight there he embarked with a cargo of horses for Goa, and later was wounded in a fight with the Turks. He next proceeded to Malacca, and was sent thence on a mission to the King of the Batas, by whom he was made welcome ‘as rain to our rice crops’. After accompanying the king on a campaign he returned to Malacca, losing his cargo of tin and benjamin on the way. His next mission was to the King of Aaru. He returned to Malacca a slave, as his ship was wrecked, and after fearful sufferings he, the only survivor, was bought cheap by a poor Moorish trader. A trading expedition to Pão and Lugor ended as disastrously: after a fight with Moors he succeeded in swimming wounded to land, but returned penniless to Patane. In despair he joined the freebooting Antonio de Faria, and they preyed on Chinese junks till their ship was weighed down with silver and silk, damask and porcelain. Faria and his men are represented fighting, torturing, murdering, plundering, playing at dice on deck for pieces of silk, praying a litany, and promising rich and good spoil to Our Lady of the Hill at Malacca. After being shipwrecked they joined a Chinese pirate and again built up their fortunes. They weathered a storm by throwing overboard twelve cases of silver, sacked a Chinese city, were received in honour at Liampo (Ningpo), but again inordinate greed for gold proved their ruin, and, after a daring attempt to plunder the rich tombs of the Emperors of China in the island of Calemplui, they were finally stranded in China and arrested as vagabonds. After six weeks in the crowded prison at Nanking the Portuguese were taken to Peking and thence deported to Quansi (Kansu), where they were freed by the timely attack of the King of Tartary. He sent them to Cochin-China, but on the way they entered the service of a Chinese pirate. When they reached Japan only three Portuguese survived, the first Europeans, Mendez Pinto claims, to set foot there. When he brought news of this land to Liampo a trading expedition was hastily equipped and set out in defiance of times and seasons. Few of those who embarked in the nine junks ever saw land again. Mendez Pinto eventually reached Malacca (1544). Pedro de Faria later sent him on a mission to the King of Martavão. Martavão was, however, sacked soon after his arrival, and he was carried a prisoner to Pegu. He escaped by night and after many adventures returned to Goa. He immediately set out again ‘to challenge fortune in China and Japan’. After accompanying the King of Sunda on a war expedition he was again wrecked and spent thirteen days on a raft. Of the eleven survivors three were eaten by crocodiles and the rest sold as slaves. Released by the King of Calapa, Mendez Pinto served under the King of Siam and returned to Pegu and thence to Malacca. Once more he set out for Japan, and this time his voyage prospered and he came back with a fair profit. At Malacca he was eagerly questioned by St. Francis Xavier (1506-52) as to the conditions in Japan. He seems to have been infected with the saint’s enthusiasm, as were most of those who met him, and after his death he perhaps gave up a considerable fortune in order to return as missionary and ambassador to Japan. Before leaving Goa (April 1554) with St. Francis Xavier’s successor, Padre Belchior, he had been received into the Company of Jesus. After many hardships they landed in China in July 1556. In the spring of 1558, a few weeks after returning to Goa, Mendez Pinto sailed for home and arrived at Lisbon on September 22. The Lisbon officials dallied with his pretensions to reward for his services. During his wanderings in India, Ethiopia, China, Japan, Tartary, and Arabia he had persevered through captivities, battles, and shipwrecks, but four or five years of official evasions broke his spirit, and he retired to live in poverty at Almada. Philip II, stirred to interest in this legendary figure, granted him two bushels of wheat in January 1583, and in July of the same year he died. He had long before left the Company of Jesus, either of his own free will or expelled, perhaps on suspicion of Jewish descent.[517] His name was erased from the Company’s records and letters. Of his twenty-one years of trader, envoy, pirate, and missionary in the far East he wrote for his children a narrative of breathless interest, and, speaking generally, it bears the stamp of truth. We gather that he was brave and adventurous, despite a natural timidity, of a consuming curiosity which often got the better of his fears, pious, temperate, apt to be carried away by fugitive enthusiasms, but persistent, gay, and optimistic in defeat and disappointment. He appears not to have been particularly vain. He does not disguise some of his less creditable actions, and he certainly does not exaggerate his services in Japan.[518] He may possibly have been one of the three Portuguese who discovered it in 1542: their names are given by Couto (V. viii. 12) as Mota, Zeimoto and Peixoto. Gifted with keen imagination, he could exaggerate[519] when expediency required, but he knew that in the account of his travels exaggeration was not expedient, and he was constantly on guard against the notorious scepticism of his fellow-countrymen.[520] He may have heightened the colour occasionally, but as a rule he writes with restraint, although with delight in a good story and skill in bringing out the dramatic side of events. It is one of the charms of his work that it is very definite in dates and figures, but this also, through inevitable errors and misprints, afforded a handle to the pedantry of critics. The fatal similarity of Mendez and mendacity gave rise to the play on his name: _Fernam, mentes? Minto_ (‘Fernam, do you lie?--I lie’), and Congreve, in _Love for Love_, by calling him ‘a liar of the first magnitude’ clinched the matter in England. But comparatively early a reaction set in,[521] and modern travellers have unequivocally confirmed the more favourable verdict and corroborated his detailed descriptions of Eastern countries. The mystery of the East, the heavy scent of its cities, its fervent rites and immemorial customs, as well as the magic of adventure, haunt his pages. A hundred pictures refuse to fade from the memory, whether they are of silk-laden Chinese junks or jars of gold dust, vivid descriptions of shipwreck (the hiss and swell of the waves are in his rich sea-Latin) or the awful pathos of the Queen of Martavão’s death, the sketch of a supercilious Chinese mandarin or of St. Francis Xavier tramping through Japan.

Five years after Mendez Pinto’s return to Portugal a book scarcely less strange than his _Peregrinaçam_, of atmosphere as oriental and of interest as absorbing although more scientific, was printed at Goa. Its author, GARCIA DA ORTA[522] (_c._ 1495-_c._ 1570), born at Elvas, the son, perhaps, of Jorge da Orta, owner of a shop (_temdeiro_) in that town, studied medicine for ten years (1515-25) at Salamanca and Alcalá, and in 1526 began to practise as a doctor at Castello de Vide. From 1532 to 1534 he was Professor at the University of Lisbon, and in March 1534 sailed with his friend and patron, the insatiable Governor Martim Afonso de Sousa,[523] to India as king’s physician. The East cast its spell over his curious and inquiring mind; he remained under twelve or more Governors and died at a good old age, probably at Goa. There, on the veranda of his beautiful garden, in this land of _bellissimi giardini_,[524] served affectionately by many slaves, and with the books of his well-stocked library ready to his hand,[525] he would regale his guests with strange fruits--all the _maneiras á gula_ of India--and with still stranger knowledge. His knowledge was based on personal observation, for although he respected Galen and Dioscorides as the princes of medicine and was possessed of great erudition, he was not disposed to bow blindly to the authority of any writer, Arab or Greek, least of all to Scholasticism, he went to Nature and in his _Coloquios dos Simples_ (1563) recorded what he had seen and heard, the truth without rhetoric, setting aside the _mil fabulas_ of Pliny and Herodotus. These fifty-nine dialogues, arranged in alphabetical order, pay more regard to facts than to style. They are full of varied information and give us a most pleasant insight into the writer’s character, strong, humorous, obstinate, and into his life at Goa. From a scientific point of view they are of great importance: not only did they provide the first description of cholera[526] and of many unknown plants, but after three and a half centuries they retain their scientific interest and value. Begun many years earlier in Latin,[527] they were published in the author’s old age, with an introductory ode by his friend, the poet Camões. Unhappily they became known to Europe chiefly in a garbled Latin version by Charles de l’Écluse (Clusius)--a fifth edition appeared in 1605--from which the Italian and French translations were made. It was not until the nineteenth century that the skilful and eager care of the Conde de Ficalho enabled a larger number of those who read Portuguese to appreciate Orta at his true worth.

Born at Alcacer do Sal, the celebrated scientist PEDRO NUNEZ (1492?-1577?), whose name lives in the instrument of his invention, the _nonius_,[528] was Cosmographer to Kings João III and Sebastian and Professor of Mathematics at the University of Coimbra (1544-62). Prince Luis and D. João de Castro were his pupils. He wrote indifferently in Latin, Spanish, or Portuguese, declared that as science treats of concrete things it can be expressed in any language however barbarous,[529] and, in order to secure for it a wider public, translated into Portuguese the Latin treatise (_libellus_) _De Sphaera_ by John of Halifax (Joannes de Sacro Bosco): _Tratado da Sphera_ (1537),[530] and into Spanish his own _Libro de Algebra en arithmetica & geometria_ (1567), originally written in Portuguese and addressed to his pupil and friend the Cardinal-King Henrique. His other works, including the _De Crepusculis_ (1542), were written in Latin.

The Homeric hero DUARTE PACHECO PEREIRA (1465?-1533?), about whose life, apart from the hundred days at Cochin (1504) and a fight off Finisterre (1509) with the French pirate Mondragon, singularly little is known,[531] on his return from India in 1505 wrote a work entitled _Esmeraldo de Situ Orbis_ [1505-6?]. This curious and important survey of the coast of Africa, the work of one more accustomed to wield sword than pen, but sometimes as picturesque and interesting as Duarte Barbosa, was to have consisted of five books, but only three and a part of the fourth were written. It remained in manuscript for nearly four centuries.

The three _Roteiros_ (logs)[532] written by the famous Viceroy D. JOÃO DE CASTRO (1500-48) on his voyages (1) from Lisbon to Goa in 1538, (2) from Goa to Diu, 1538-9, (3) from Goa to the Red Sea in 1541, are decked out with no literary graces. He wrote, he said, for seamen, not for ladies and gallants. Yet the scientific curiosity and enthusiasm of this keen-eyed, broad-minded observer give his descriptions force and truth, the same practical lucidity that marks his letters, which according to his friend Prince Luis contained _todas as cousas necessarias e nenhũas superfluas_, and they were early prized in Spain as _harto notables, muy curiosos_.[533] The third _Roteiro_ would seem to have been originally written in Latin, and perhaps translated by Castro at his beloved Sintra home. The manuscript was bought by Sir Walter Raleigh, and it appeared in English in 1625, 208 years before it was published in Portuguese.

Greater historical interest attaches to the letters of an earlier Governor, AFONSO DE ALBUQUERQUE (1461-1515). That grim conqueror of the East might have smiled somewhat sardonically to be numbered among Portugal’s writers. He merely said what he had to say, and there was an end of it, would be his comment. But it is precisely this directness--the powerful grasp of reality and the horror of useless rhetoric--which gives excellence to the prose of his _Cartas_. These incomparable reports, written to King Manuel in moments snatched from his many occupations as Governor of India (1509-15), sometimes rise to a biblical grandeur and eloquence, as in the splendid passage beginning _Goa é vossa; Onor, o rei dele paga-vos pareas_. Perhaps, after all, he was not wholly unconscious of his art, and certainly the source of it is clear: as Osorio[534] notices, he was a devoted student of the Bible. In more familiar mood he can give a vivid sketch in a few emphatic words, as when he describes the judge, ‘a little man dressed in a cloak of coarse cloth with a crooked stick under his arm’, or the impostors who will practise ‘a thousand wiles and deceits for one ruby’.

To turn to lesser men, FERNAM RODRIGUEZ LOBO SOROPITA (born _c._ 1560), a distinguished Lisbon advocate and the first editor of the _Rythmas_ (1595) of Camões, was a poet celebrated for his wit in his day. That of his letters is perhaps a little forced, and the obscurity of the allusions now interferes with our enjoyment. The interest of the extracts from a manuscript in the British Museum written by FRANCISCO RODRIGUEZ SILVEIRA (1558-_c._ 1635) in 1608, published under the title _Memorias de um Soldado da India_ (1877), consists both in the record of his thirteen years’ service in India (1585-98) and in the account during the succeeding ten years of Portugal and especially Beira, the condition of the roads, the land, the peasants, and the sway of the local _caciques_--thief, Turk, Pasha, tyrant, he calls them--and his indignation gives a pleasant vigour to his prose. The _Arte da Caça da Altanaria_ (1616) of DIOGO FERNANDEZ FERREIRA (born _c._ 1550), page of the Pretender D. Antonio, is a work of great interest. The writer evidently delights in his theme and has a real love of birds, the migratory habits of which he describes in Part 6; and he treats ‘of swallows and of the swallow-grass which restores sight’, of the food made of sugar, saffron, and almonds for nightingales, and other alluring topics. Among the rare and curious books of the time we may notice that on the prerogatives of women, _Dos priuilegios & prœrogatiuas q ho genero femenino tẽ por dereito comũ & ordenações do Reyno mais que ho genero masculino_ (1557), by RUY GONÇALVEZ, Professor of Law at Coimbra in 1539 and subsequently Court Advocate at Lisbon.

Two writers especially attract attention even in the feast of interest which Portuguese prose in this century offers so abundantly. The son of a distinguished Dutch illuminator and painter settled in Portugal, Antonio de Hollanda, who painted Charles V at Toledo and may have illuminated the Book of Hours of Queen Lianor, FRANCISCO DE HOLLANDA (1518-84), born in Lisbon, painter, illuminator, and architect, in his short treatises _Da fabrica que fallece á cidade de Lisboa_ and _Da sciencia do desenho_, showed an enthusiasm for his subject almost out of place in the Portugal of the second half of the sixteenth century. Indeed, he nearly ran into trouble with the Inquisition by seeming to make painting ‘divine’, but prudently altered the passage. His curious and celebrated treatise _Da Pintvra Antigva_ (1548) is written in a style which may be rather rejoiced in than imitated, for, as he tells us, he was more at home with the brush than with the pen, but it is full of ingenious and original remarks. The first part deals in forty-four brief chapters with painting generally, and opens with a fine passage describing the work of God as the greatest of all painters. The second part contains the _Quatro dialogos_, in the first three of which he records the conversations of Vittoria Colonna, Michelangelo, Lattanzio Tolomei, and himself in the church of St. Sylvester or in a garden overlooking Rome; conversations which, despite their Portuguese dress, bear the stamp of truth and will retain their fascination so long as interest in art endures. Francisco worked first in the household of the Infante Fernando and then in that of the Archbishop of Evora. In 1537 he set out on a journey to Rome by land (Valladolid, Barcelona, Provence), and in Italy remained from 1538 to 1547. His friendship with Michelangelo continued after his return to Portugal, as a letter from Hollanda to Michelangelo in 1553 proves. The last part of his life he spent in the country between Lisbon and Sintra among the Portuguese whom he had called _desmusicos_, and despite his comfortable circumstances--he received a pension of 100,000 _réis_ from Philip II--he must often have looked back with regret to the fullness of those nine years in Italy. But his countrymen, thanks largely to the scholarly researches and studies of Dr. Joaquim de Vasconcellos, are now fully alive to his merits. And, indeed, even in the sixteenth century a passage in Frei Heitor Pinto’s _Imagem da Vida Christam_ sets him side by side with the great Italian.[535] PHILIPE NUNEZ, who professed as a Dominican in 1591, wrote on painting in the next century: _Arte poetica e da pintura e symmetria_ (1615). A work on music by ANTONIO FERNANDEZ of about the same date, _Arte de Mvsica de canto dorgam e canto cham_ (1626), consists of three treatises which do not profess to be original. MANUEL NUNEZ DA SILVA wrote on the same subject in his _Arte Minima_ (1685).