# Further India/The Explorations of the Portuguese

CHAPTER IV
THE EXPLORATIONS OF THE PORTUGUESE
THE circumstances which led to the establishment of the Portuguese Power in Malacca have been examined in the preceding chapter with a minuteness which is only warranted by the fact that this event marks, as has been already observed, the beginning of a new epoch in the exploration of southeastern Asia. Over the explorations which followed upon the settlement of Malacca we shall now have to pass with much less of detail and particularity, partly because considerations of space forbid more elaborate treatment of this single portion of our subject, and partly because the records of many wanderings are lost to us, while those which exist are too often of a very fragmentary character.
From the despatch by Dalboquerque of embassies to Siam, to Java and to several Sumatran kingdoms, and from the launching by him of the exploring fleet to the Moluccas, dates the gradual founding of commercial posts by white adventurers throughout southeastern Asia and the Malayan Archipelago. Malacca stood to each of these as a base of operations; the prestige of Malacca served to protect isolated outposts and individual traders; and the rumour of the wealth which was to be won in these regions speedily caused a host of hungry folk to ​quit Portugal in a continuous stream which poured unchecked into the distant East. Riches, rather than power, were the lure which tempted these men away from their fatherland, and in the pursuit of their object no difficulties or hardships sufficed to daunt them, no humanitarian considerations placed restraint upon their actions, and no regard for the rights of person or property vested in their Oriental victims served to shackle their lawlessness or their licence. They kept faith with no man, not even with their native allies; no sense of honour or love of fair-dealing actuated them in their intercourse with the Asiatics, whether questions of policy or of trade were in point; the cruelties which, on occasion, they committed, can only be recalled with horror; their avarice and cupidity were at once shameless and insatiable; and with very few exceptions they abused their power and their positions, seeking none save ignoble, selfish ends. Therefore it is an ugly chapter in the history of the relations of Europe with the East that holds the record of their doings—doings which have bequeathed a legacy of hatred the force of which is not yet wholly spent. But, through all and in spite of all, it is impossible to withhold from these men the tribute that is due to a dauntless courage and a tremendous self-reliance, or to divest them, squalid though many of their actions were, of the cloak of romance which must ever cling about the memories of those who adventured greatly.
Even in the heyday of their extraordinary success the Portuguese in Asia never had at their back the advantage ​of numbers. They were always a tiny band of aliens battering upon the face of the ancient East, severed by countless miles from their base in Europe, often, in individual cases, cut off entirely from the support of their countrymen. The unshaken conviction in the innate superiority of the white man over the bulk of mankind, which gives to our people to-day so immense a moral force, was at that time a thing of very recent growth, a belief founded upon a barely proved experience, a theory that was still in the testing. Yet in the face of all disadvantages, numerical, physical, moral, the Portuguese by the end of the year 1515—the date which saw the passing away of the strenuous soul of the great Alfonso Dalboquerque—had made good their footing in Asia, not only as a new, but in some sense as a dominant power.
"At the time of the death of Alfonso Dalboquerque," writes the author of the Commentaries, "peace was universal from Ormuz to Ceylon; and all the kingdoms of Cambay, Chaul, Dabul, Goa, Onor, Baticalá to Mount de Deli, Cananor, Ciacoulao and the Cape of Comorin—all the kings and lords and marine merchants—and the interior lands he left so quiet and well-ordered that there was never a nation left so completely conquered and subdued by force of arms as this was. And the land had by this time become so pacified that the Portuguese used to carry on their merchant business in every place, without being robbed of anything or being taken captive; and they used to navigate the whole of the Indian Sea in their ships, vessels, small or large sambucos, and used to cross the sea in safety from one part to the other; and the natives, on ​their part, used to visit Goa with their wares without molestation being offered to them. And from the Cape of Comorin castward Alfonso Dalboquerque left the kings of those countries in perfect peace and friendship with the King of Portugal, sending to them ambassadors bearing presents in his name, and they sent similarly to him. Among these I may name the King of Pegu, the King of Siam, the King of Pasé, and the fortress of Malacca, in repose. He remained also in the closest terms of peace with the King of China, and the King of Java, the King of Maluco, with the Gores, and all the other neighbour- ing princes were kept by him in a state of submission and tranquillity."
This account, which is substantially accurate, shows the spread of the Portuguese power during the first fifteen years of the sixteenth century. It must be remembered, however, that trade, rather than territorial possessions, was the lure which tempted the Portuguese adventurers to the East, and that Dalboquerque, more far-seeing than the majority of his contemporaries, did not desire an extensive empire so much as the command of the sea and the acquisition of convenient ports which might be used as business-centres and suitable bases for Portuguese commerce with the eastern world. In Malaya, for example, he was content with the conquest of Malacca, which disposed once for all of a formidable rival; and that accomplished, he did his best to establish friendly relations with the neighbouring kings and countries. Command of the sea and of the trade-routes once secured, the Portuguese had no great hankering after inland possessions, and ac​cordingly their explorations were practically confined to the islands and ports and the coast regions of the East.
The Moluccas or Spice Islands, the home of the clove and the nutmeg, had from the first been the principal goal which the Portuguese adventurers were bent upon reaching, and Dalboquerque, as we have seen, lost no time in despatching an expedition to explore this archi- pelago as soon as Malacca had fallen. Antonio Dabreu, who was in command, was not the first European, how- ever, to visit the group. Prior to the date of Dalbo- querque's victory in the Malay Peninsula, the Moluccas had been visited by the Italian wanderer, Ludovico di Varthema, and by Barbosa, the former being, so far as our information goes, the first white man to land upon their shores. Dabreu returned to Malacca in 1514 with all his party, except the crew of one vessel who, with their captain, Francisco Surão, had lost their ship at Ter- nate and had remained behind on that island. Pigafetta, the chronicler of Magellan's voyage, who was at Tidor during the latter months of 1521, mentions that this man, whom he calls Francisco Serrano, had become the "cap- tain-general of the King of Tarenate when he was mak- ing war upon the King of Tidore," and by his prowess had so earned the hatred of the latter that means had been contrived to poison him. Pedro Alfonso de Loroso, another Portuguese who was living at Ternate at the time of Pigafetta's visit, came to see the Spaniards and told them,
"That he had come to India sixteen years ago, and of these years he had passed ten in Moluco; and it was just ​ten years since these islands had been discovered by the Portuguese, who kept the discovery secret from us. He then related to us that a year, less fifteen days, had lapsed since a large ship had come hither proceeding from Ma- lacca, had gone away laden with cloves."
From this it is evident that direct trade between the Portuguese of Malacca and the Molucca islands began with the expedition sent to the group by Dalboquerque, and was carried on with more or less regularity from that time forward. It was not, however, until after the coming of the Spaniards had threatened the Portuguese monopoly of trade with the Moluccas that any portion of the group was annexed by Portugal. This was formerly done after the appointment of Lopo Vas de Sampayo to the post of Portuguese Governor of the Indies in 1526.
The enormous importance which was attached to the establishment of trade with this little archipelago by the nations of Europe is proved by the fact that, while the Portuguese kept the discovery of the Moluccas a close secret, the great voyage of Magellan had for its real and principal object, not the circumnavigation of the globe, but the opening up of a new sea-route to these precious islands. Pigafetta tells us that Francisco Serrano was a personal friend of Magellan, and that he had been instru- mental in instigating him to attempt a voyage to the Moluccas viâ the western route. It was because Magel- lan was himself a Portuguese who, having served in the East, was in the possession of what we should call "trade secrets,"—among the most prized of which was a knowl- edge of the exact locality of the Moluccas—that his tak​ing service with the King of Spain was regarded by his countrymen as an act hardly to be distinguished from. treason. On the arrival of Magellan's fleet at Tidor the Spaniards felt that the real end of their journey had been attained, although they were still far from having com- pleted the circuit of the earth.
"The pilot who had remained with us," says Pigafetta, "told us that there were the Moluco Islands, for which we gave thanks to God, and to comfort ourselves we dis- charged all our artillery. It need not cause wonder that we were so much rejoiced, since we had passed twenty- seven months, less two days, always in search of Moluco. . . . But I must say that near all these islands the least depth that we found was 100 fathoms, for which reason attention is not to be given to all that the Portu- guese have spread, according to whom the islands of Moluco are situated in seas which cannot be navigated on account of the shoals, and the dark and foggy atmos- phere."
From which it will be gathered that a meticulous re- gard for truth did not fetter the Portuguese in their efforts to keep their rivals off what they regarded as their own preserves!
The Bull promulgated by Pope Alexander VI at the end of the fifteenth century, decreeing the discoveries of the West to Spain and those of the East to Portugal, was the reason which made it appear necessary to the King of Spain to discover a new sea-route to the Moluccas. The nations of Europe not only acquiesced in the Pope's arrangement to a surprising extent, but seem to have re​garded the newly discovered sea-route round the Cape of Good Hope as in some sort the exclusive possession of the Portuguese. They did not recognise that the trade of Asia was also Portugal's peculiar property, but they seem to have held that if it were to be tapped by them some new means of getting at it must be devised. For a pe- riod, therefore, while all the maritime European peoples were fired to emulate the golden successes reaped by Spain and Portugal, the former tried to enlarge her field of operations by beating out a road to the East round Cape Horn and across the Pacific, while the British and the Dutch struggled again and again to discover a North- west Passage, urged thereto by the common hunger for the riches of the Indies.
"The doctrine that the ocean is the common property of the human race," writes Mr. Albert Gray," was as- serted first by Elizabeth and her bold seamen, and after- wards defended on legal principles by Grotius in his Mare Liberum. Owing to the disputes with the Dutch as to the North Sca fisheries, the doctrines of Elizabeth were abandoned by James, whose legal champion, Selden, re- plied to Grotius by his treatise, Mare Clausum. It is hardly necessary to add that time has been on the side of Grotius."
The defeat of the great Armada in 1588, however, was the real death-blow dealt to the pretensions, so long ad- vanced by Spain and Portugal, which claimed that the sea was the exclusive property of certain nations, and im- mediately after that event the invasion of the East by the white races began in earnest.
​During practically the whole of the sixteenth century, however, in spite of the incursion of Magellan's fleet, and the ascendency gained by the Spaniards after the acces- sion of Philip to the throne of Spain and Portugal, the Portuguese had the virgin field of Asia very much to themselves, and they took advantage of this to spread their outposts broad-cast throughout the East, establish- ing trading settlements even in China. It will be conven- ient, therefore, in this place to sketch in rapid outline the history of European intercourse with Burma, with Siam, and with Indo-China, from its beginning up to the time which saw the arrival upon the scene of the great East India Companies.
A reference to Burma, called by him Mien, occurs in the Book of Marco Polo, though the pagodas, described as having "on the top, round about the balls, little gold and silver bells," are the only distinctively Burmese ob- jects mentioned. There is no reason to believe that Polo himself ever visited Burma, and the honour of being the first white man to land in Pegu is generally attributed to the Venetian, Nicolo di Conti, who returned to his native city in 1444, after spending some five and twenty years wandering through Asia. He went to Racha, which is probably to be identified with Arakan, and thence "after seventeen days passing desert hills came into a cham- paign country." He must, therefore, have crossed the Arakan Yoma range, possibly by the Aeng pass, and so have reached the banks of the Irawadi. He speaks of Ava by name, and says, mistakenly, that its river is greater than the Ganges. The country he calls Machin ​—obviously a corruption of Maha Chin, Great China, a term applied by the natives of Hindustan at that time more or less indiscriminately to all countries lying to the eastward of the Gangetic valley. He also mentions the practice of tattooing, though he ascribes its use to women as well as men, which is no longer the case except among a few hill-tribes, and he is the first traveller to speak of the famous white elephant, the dust-coloured beast with. pink eyes and unsightly skewbald patches which is in re- ality such a disappointing object when seen in the flesh. In 1496 Hieronymo da Santa Stephano, a native of Genoa, landed in Pegu, which he is the first European to call by that name, but he was prevented from visiting Ava by one of the many wars between the two great Burmese kingdoms which was at that time raging. Ludovico di Varthema, whom we have already named in connection with the Moluccas, visited Pegu about the same time, and speaks of bamboos—"great canes as large as a barrel"—and of rubies. He too mentions that war was in progress between Pegu and Ava at the time of his visit.
After the fall of Malacca, Ruy Nunez d'Acunha was sent to Pegu on a friendly embassy by Dalboquerque, and in 1545 the redoubtable Mendez Pinto, of whose voyage along the coasts of Indo-China we shall have more to say presently, was there as a military adventurer. He repeats the myth which had long been current of a great inland lake whence flowed all the rivers of the Indo- Chinese peninsula—a tradition which may possibly have had its origin in the Lake of Tonle Sap—and he adds, ​characteristically enough, that he had himself seen it! At this period there would appear to have been a con- siderable number of Portuguese traders and adventurers settled in Lower Burma, men who did their best to keep the trade of the country in their own hands, sought service under the native kings as mercenary soldiers, and unlike the first of the Portuguese invaders discouraged the missionary endeavours of their priests as calculated to attract white men to the place and so to interfere with the monopolies they enjoyed. In spite of this, however, the Dominican Gaspar de Cruz visited Burma, which he calls "Bramer," some time between 1550 and 1560, and another Dominican, Bomferrus came to India from Pegu in 1557 after an abortive attempt to convert some of the inhabitants to Christianity. In 1569 a Venetian named Cæsar Frederick was in Pegu and gave a detailed and interesting account of the country, and fourteen years later he was followed by another Venetian, Gasparo Balbi, a jeweller, who went to Pegu with a stock of emeralds. Entering the river this man anchored at Bassein, then called Cosmi or Cosmin, whence he made his way to Dagon, the modern Rangoon, via Dalla. Robert Fitch, the merchant of London, to whom be- longs the distinction of being the first Englishman to visit Burma, followed the same route as Balbi when he came to Pegu in 1586.
The accounts which all these travellers, and more especially Frederick and Fitch, give of the kingdom of Pegu, even when every deduction has been made for glamour and its consequent exaggeration, prove that this ​empire, established on the delta of the Irawadi, was in the sixteenth century possessed of a might, a wealth, a splendour and an importance which have never since. been approached in these regions. Even at that time, however, constant wars were in progress between Pegu and Siam, Tungu, Ava, and Arakan, in many of which Portuguese adventurers took an active part. During the campaign against Siam in 1548, a hundred and eighty Portuguese under James Suarez de Melo fought on the side of Pegu, while James Pereyra led a party of his countrymen under the flag of Siam. During the con- cluding years of the sixteenth century, however, the Kings of Arakan and Tungu overran Pegu and destroyed its power forever, and in 1600, Boves, a Jesuit priest, thus describes the destruction that had been wrought in the once prosperous kingdom.
"It is a lamentable spectacle to see the banks of the rivers, set with infinite fruit-bearing trees, now over- whelmed with ruins of gilded temples and noble edifices; the ways and fields full of skulls and bones of wretched Peguans, killed or famished and cast into the river in such numbers that the multitude of carcases prohibiteth the way and passage of any ships; to omit the burnings and massacres committed by this, the cruellest tyrant that ever breathed."
The King of Arakan is the tyrant here referred to, and once again Portuguese mercenaries took their share of the fighting. Their leader, Philip de Brito, received from the King of Arakan the port of Sirian as a reward for his services immediately after the fall of Pegu, and ​for some years he held the position of a kind of rival prince, keeping the son of his benefactor as a hostage. for whose release he demanded a ransom of 50,000 crowns! "He also domineereth and careth for nobodie," says a contemporary chronicler, and so secure to all see- ing was the eminence to which he had attained that his son married a daughter of the King of Martaban who had established a separate principality upon the ruins of Pegu. In 1613, however, de Brito was besieged in Sirian by the King of Ava, and after a manful resistance was betrayed into the hands of his enemy. The unhappy wretch was impaled by the King of Ava, and actually lived two whole days enduring the most hideous torments.
From this time dates the beginning of the domination of Ava over the whole of Burma. Tavoi was conquered, Tenasserim besieged, although a Portuguese outlaw of Cochin, Christopher Rebello, with forty of his compa- triots and a handful of slaves, utterly routed the fleet of Ava which numbered some five hundred sail. Shortly afterwards an alliance against Arakan was sought by the Court of Ava with the Portuguese, and an envoy was sent from Goa to conduct the negotiations. He was treated with the studied insults which always character- ised the dealings of the arrogant Burmese Court with foreign embassies, and nothing came of the mission. None the less, step by step, all the country between Assam on the north and Siam on the south, between the Bay of Bengal and the frontiers of China was absorbed by Ava, and though this rule was often inefficient, the hilly region inhabited by the sturdy tribesmen called the ​Red Karins was the only part of Burma which escaped its domination. The Portuguese, it will be noted, had never during all this time acquired any territory in Burma, adventurers like the miserable de Brito having fought, not for their king and country, but for their own hands. The opening of factories in Burmese territory was the work of the British and Dutch East India Com- panies, and with that we shall have to deal in a later chapter.
The establishment of the Portuguese in Malaya has already been recorded, and we can now glance rapidly at the history of their relations with Siam. The embassy sent to that country by Dalboquerque after the fall of Malacca has already been mentioned, and in 1516 Manoel Falcao established a factory in Pětâni, a Malayan king- dom on the eastern coast of the Peninsula which was subject to Siamese influence, as indeed at that time were most of the Malay States. This trading-station quickly assumed considerable proportions, and when it was visited by Fernandez Pinto about 1540 there were, he states, some three hundred Portuguese living in the place, and Antonio de Faria was able to recruit a sufficiently numer- ous band of adventurers from among them when he set out, as will presently be related, to harry the coasts of Indo-China. In Siam itself the Portuguese, though they neither sought nor obtained any territorial possessions, settled in considerable numbers, and fought as mercena- ries against the Peguan invaders in 1548. Pinto also speaks of Siam as a place in which Portuguese traders were in the habit of seeking refuge and passing the ​"winter," viz., the period during which the prevalence of the northeast monsoon rendered the China Sea difficult and dangerous to navigation. This commercial and un- official intercourse seems to have continued unchecked until 1633, and in 1620 the King of Siam actually sent to Goa and invited the Portuguese Government to take possession of a port upon his coast. At that time, how- ever, the position of Portugal in the East was becoming critical, and she was too busy defending what she had al- ready won to be able to devote her energies to the acqui- sition of new responsibilities. Nothing, therefore, re- sulted from this mission, and ten years later the Siamese quarrelled with the Portuguese colony, though the differ- ence was patched up in 1633, and in 1636 the King of Siam sent an embassy to the Governor of the Philippines. Intercourse between Siam and the Dutch East India Company, however, had begun as early as 1604, and from that time the influence of the Portuguese in Siam began to wane, just as it waned in India and in Malaya when other white nations appeared upon the scene whose past held no such record of wrong as that which embittered the relations between the peoples of the East and the earliest of the western invaders.
The first exploration of the coasts to Indo-China by the Portuguese would appear to have been undertaken, in somewhat peculiar circumstances in 1540-41. Its story is related by Ferdinand Mendez Pinto, and from him we learn, what is to be derived also from numerous other sources, that the seas of southeastern Asia were by this time teeming with Portuguese merchants and adven​turers. In India and at Malacca Portugal was established in force; in Pegu and Tenasserim, in Pětâni and Siam she had important trading colonies; and in writing of the port of Liampoo in China Pinto says of his countrymen:
"They had there built above a thousand houses, that were governed by Sheriffs, Auditors, Consuls, Judges, and six or seven other kind of Officers, where the Notaries underneath the publick Acts, which they made, wrote. thus, I, such publick Notary of this Town of Liampoo for the King our Sovereign Lord. And this they do with as much confidence and assurance, as if the place had been situated between Santarem and Lisbon, so that there were houses there which cost three of four thousand Ducates the building, but both they and all the rest were after- wards demolished for our sins by the Chineses."
The practice of sailing direct to China from the Straits of Malacca, only touching where necessary to take in water, which, as we have seen in earlier chapters, was that usually adopted by mariners bound for the Far East, caused a settlement so important as the one here described to have been established in the southern provinces of the Celestial Empire within thirty years of the fall of Malacca, while even the coasts of Indo-China continued to be prac- tically unknown. It fell to the lot of Mendez Pinto to give us an account of the first detailed exploration of these coast-lines, and though much of the matter con- tained in his narrative, such as the long-winded orations attributed to various Orientals, obviously owe more than a little to this author's imagination, the general outline of the events which he records bears every mark of sub​stantial accuracy. His itinerary, with its number of ex- traordinary proper names, is quite impossible to follow in detail, but his story owes its value to the fact that it is the earliest extant account of the exploration of the shores of Indo-China by men of European race, and because it is illustrative to a remarkable degree of the spirit which animated the Portuguese at this period, of their methods, and of the attitude by them assumed towards the East and its peoples. After reading Pinto's artless book one is at no loss to understand why the Portuguese speedily became an object of such intense detestation to the na- tives of Asia.
In the spring of 1540, Pinto tells us, he was sent to Pahang (Pan) on the east coast of the Malay Peninsula to fetch a cargo which had been purchased by a native agent on behalf of Pedro de Faria, the Governor of the citadel of Malacca. During a disturbance which occurred while he was still in Pahang, Pinto was robbed of all the prop- erty in his charge, and he escaped with just his life and his ship, and sailed forthwith for Pětâni. Here he learned that three junks belonging to some Pahang merchants were lying at anchor inside the mouth of the Kelantan River, and though it was not suggested that they were the property of the ruffians who had robbed him, the fact that they hailed from Pahang was, in these lawless days, sufficient grounds for making them the objects of repris- als. Accordingly, the permission of the Râja of Pĕtâni having been obtained, the Portuguese fitted out a small fleet, raided the Kĕlantan River, captured the Pahang junks after a hard fight, and carried their prizes back to ​Pětâni with all haste, "because," as Pinto naively re- marks, the whole Country thereabouts was in an up- roar." This, it may be noted in passing, was a condition into which the visits of the Portuguese adventurers were apt to throw the native States which these gentry hon- oured with their attentions.
At Pětâni there presently arrived Antonio de Faria, who was probably a relative of Pedro de Faria, the Gov- ernor of Malacca. He had been sent to ratify a treaty of friendship already existing between the Portuguese and the Râja, but he had brought with him a large con- signment of private merchandise, and since he could not sell it at a satisfactory profit in Pětâni, he sent Pinto with it to Lîgor, a little State further to the north on the east- ern shores of the Malay Peninsula. Here Pinto, while lying outside the bar, was set upon by native pirates, robbed of his ship and her cargo, and only saved himself by swimming ashore with such of his European compan- ions as had survived the fight. After terrible hardships he made his way back to Pětâni, and reported what had befallen him to Antonio de Faria, adding the information, which avowedly rested upon the merest guess-work, that the pirate who had used him so evilly was one Coio Acem,—probably Dato' Kâya Akhim, or some similar name and title. Upon hearing this Antonio de Faria at once determined to put to sea in search of this marauder, whose act of piracy (if indeed he had committed the deed) had ruined the ambassador, since the captured cargo had been bought with money borrowed in Malacca, and de Faria had now no means of discharging his liabilities. ​To us the spectacle presented by one who had been en- trusted by Government with a special embassy transform- ing himself with such suddenness into a sea-rover, appears incongruous enough, but such was evidently not the view taken by the Portuguese traders in Pětâni. For, says Pinto,
"All the Assistants very much commended his valor- ous resolution, and for the execution thereof there were many young Soldiers among them that offered to accom- pany him in that voyage; some likewise presented him with Mony, and others furnished him with divers neces- saries."
Accordingly, on Saturday, May 9th, in the year of Grace 1540, Antonio de Faria sailed from Pătâni, "and steered North Northwest, towards the Kingdom of Champaa, with an intent to discover the Ports and Havens thereof, and also by means of some good booty to furnish himself with such things as he wanted," a proper spirit, truly, for one who regarded it as his special mission to punish piracy! He first touched at Pûlau Kondor, as Marco Polo and many another traveller had done before him, crossed thence to the shores of Champa and skirted the coast in a northerly direction until a river was reached which formed the boundary between that kingdom and Kambodia. This river Pinto calls "Pulo Cambim," though pûlau significs an island, and he tells us on the authority of the natives that it had its source in a lake named Pinator in the neighbourhood of which there were gold mines, while there was a "diamond quarry" on its shores at a place called Buarquirim. It is ​impossible to make anything of these names, but the river was probably one of the principal mouths of the Mekong, a branch of which river connects with the great lake of Tonle Sap, but in any case the mineral wealth of the interior was greatly exaggerated. Seventeen leagues. north of Pulo Cambim Pinto places a port called Saleyza- can, which also defies identification, beyond which was the river of "Toobasoy." At this place de Faria was attacked by pirates, whom he repulsed and captured, his "bag" including "a Capher slave, one Turk, two Achens, and the captain of the junk, named Similau, a notorious Pyrat, and our mortal Enemy." The variety of nationalities represented is curious, and it serves to il- lustrate how much more general was the intercourse sub- sisting between the natives of different parts of Asia in the sixteenth century than it has since become. It is horrible to add that these prisoners were tortured to death with quite diabolical cruelty by Antonio de Faria, and it is typical of the times that this barbarous act was per- formed just before the feast of Corpus Christi, which re- ligious festival was observed with due form by the Chris- tian souls on board de Faria's piratical fleet!
Sailing on Wednesday from Toobasoy, which was probably one of the mouths of the Mekong, and continu- ing to coast in a northerly direction, de Faria arrived on the following Friday at the mouth of yet another river which, Pinto states, was called Tinacoreu by the natives, but Varella by the Portuguese. The fact that the white men had given a name of their own to the place would lead us to infer that it had been visited by the Portuguese ​prior to the arrival of de Faria, but Pinto expressly adds that he and his fellows were the first Europeans whom the natives had ever seen. Near the mouth of the river there was a village called Taquilleu, and at some distance in the interior, the Portuguese learned, there was a town called Pilaucacem, where the king of the country had his residence. I conceive that the wanderers were still among the mouths of the Mekong, and it seems probable that Pilaucacem was Pnom Penh, as it is described as be- ing the centre of an extensive trade with the "Lauhos, Pasuaas, and Gueos—very rich people," namely the na- tives of Laos and the wild tribes, so called, of the interior. The river of Tinacoreu, Pinto further tells us," extends to Moncalor, a mountain distant from thence some four score leagues," and that further up it was far broader, but not so deep. The Portuguese also learned of the exist- ence "in the midst of the continent" of a great lake called "Cunebetea" by its nearest neighbours, and Chiammay by others in which the river took its source. This belief in a great central lake in which all the large rivers of the Indo-Chinese peninsula took their rise was very persistent, and in writing of Burma, it will be re- called, Pinto declares that he had himself seen it—which is manifestly untrue. The great lake of Kambodia may have been the origin of this tradition, a lake at the head of the main branch of the Mekong being inferred by analogy with the more accessible branch which joins the parent stream near Pnom Penh, but it is obvious that the coast natives did not know that the river ran through a portion of China, and that it was never regarded by them ​as a possible highway for communication with the Celes- tial Empire.
Antonio de Faria next visited an island situated "in the entrance to the Bay of Cauchenchina forty degrees and a third to the northward," which was probably the island of Cham Collao. Thence he crossed over to Hainan (Ainan), and later returned to the mainland, arriv- ing at the kingdom of Tanququir, which was, of course, Tongking. Coasting thence forty leagues towards the east, he reached a port called Mutipinan (Turon?), whence, Pinto tells us, a great overland trade was carried on with the Laos and other peoples of the Hinterland. If this statement is correct the routes over the mountains from the valley of the Mekong into that of the Song Koi, which the French explorer de Lagrée ascertained had formerly been in frequent use, but in his day had been completely abandoned, must have been in existence at a very early period. From Mutipinan de Faria re- turned to Hainan, and later spent some months cruising about the coasts of Indo-China in a southerly direction with the intention of "wintering" in Siam, but some- where to the south of Quangiparu, "a fair town of 1,500 fires, as we guessed," in which there were "goodly build- ings and Temples," he met with utter shipwreck. The situation of this town cannot be determined, but it would appear to have been on the banks of a river which fell into the sea on the exposed coast of Annam, and it may perhaps be identical with the modern Quang-mai, The spot where de Faria and his fellows were cast ashore was barren and uninhabited, and for some days the survivors ​of the wreck—fifty-three souls, of whom twenty-three were Portuguese, out of a company some five hundred and thirty strong—wandered about in a condition of great distress. A Chinese vessel, however, soon put in there to water, and while her crew were ashore, de Faria suc- ceeded in surprising her, and sailed away in triumph leaving the dispossessed owners marooned upon an in- hospitable coast.
They next captured some unfortunate fisherfolk on a little island called Quintoo, to serve as pilots, and from them they learned that eighteen leagues distant there was a "good river and good Rode" called Xingrau. For this haven de Faria sailed, and thence, after touching at sev- eral islands and ports, and committing various acts of pi- racy, they made their way northward eventually reaching the Chinese port of Chinchu. How thereafter de Faria fell in with the pirate of whom he had so long been in search; how he defeated and killed him; of the rich spoil which he took, and of the splendid reception accorded to him by his enthusiastic countrymen at the port of Liam- poo, I cannot here tell in detail. De Faria, the sea-rover, it should however be remarked, was conducted in state to the church where public thanks were offered to the Al- mighty for the victorious crusade against the infidel, in the course of which this Christian hero had broken not a few of the Ten Commandments, had murdered and robbed and tortured and pillaged without scruple, and had made victims of the inoffensive natives of countries who never before had so much as seen a white man. It was a curi- ous age in which men could see virtue in the perpetrator ​of such enormities: it is less curious that before the end of the sixteenth century the name of the white man had been made to stink in the nostrils of Asiatics.
The verdict passed by Pinto upon Indo-China is worth repeating. After describing its wealth from information derived from native sources, he says,
"Whereby it may be gathered that if the Country could be taken, it would without so much labour or loss of blood, be of greater profit and less charge than the Indies," an opinion which its present possessors, the countrymen of Dupleix would, I conceive, be little likely to echo, however much they might desire to be able to give it their endorsement.
After Pinto's day the Portuguese appear to have settled in Kambodia, much as they settled in Burma, at their own risk and without receiving much active support from their Government. The Dominican Gaspar de Cruz visited the country in 1590, as also did Christoval de Jaques between 1592 and 1598. According to the latter the Lake of Tonle Sap and the Khmer ruins at Angkor had been discovered by the Portuguese in 1570, and this would seem to indicate that the intercourse between the rulers of Kambodia, whose capital was at or near Pnom Penh, and the Portuguese traders had increased considerably during the half century immediately following the famous voyage of Antonio de Faria. In about the year 1580 a Frenchman named Louvet visited the delta of the Mekong, and was thus the first of his race to set foot in the region which was destined to become at a later date the great Asiatic colony of France. Five years later an​other Frenchman, Père George La Mothe of the Order of St. Dominic, went to Cochin-China in the company of a Portuguese missionary named Fonseca. The two priests were attacked by the natives, Fonseca was murdered, and La Mothe, sorely wounded, made his escape on board a Spanish ship, but died of the injuries he had received before he could reach Malacca. Jan Huygen van Linschoten, whose book published in 1596 wrought, as we shall presently see, so much injury to the prestige of Portugal, had collected much information concerning all the lands with which the Portuguese held commerce, and he is one of the first to speak of the great river of Kambodia by name.
"Through this kingdom (Champa)," he writes, "runneth the river Mecom into the sea, which the Indians name Captain of all the Rivers, for it hath so much water in the Summer that it covereth and watereth all the country as the river Nilus does Ægypt." . . . "Upwards in the land behind Cambaia (Kambodia)," he adds, "are many nations, as Laos, which are a great and mightie people, others named Auas (Avas, i. e., Burmese of Upper Burma) and Bramas (Lower Burmese) which dwel in the hilles; others dwel upon the hils called Gueos, which live like wild men, and eat men's flesh and marke their bodies with hot irons which they estéeme a fréedome."
The knowledge in his possession, it will be seen, was not precisely accurate, the Burmese being by no means hill tribes, anthropophagy being a practice unknown in Indo-China, and tattooing, which is only in use among the Burmese and the Shans and hill tribes of the north, ​being effected by pigment rather than by "hot irons," which would seem to imply a process of branding. Linschoten, however had had opportunities of ascertaining from the best Portuguese authorities all the facts within their knowledge, and his book probably represented the best information concerning the peoples of the Hinterland of Indo-China that was then at the disposal of Europeans in the East.
Late in the sixteenth, or early in the seventeenth century, the Portuguese established regular trading-posts in Cochin-China and Kambodia, the most advanced of these being at Pnom Penh. Beyond this and the district of Siam-reap at the north of the Lake of Tonle Sap, they do not appear to have penetrated, and the first organised attempt to explore the interior of Indo-China by the Mekong route was made, not by them, but by the Dutch East India Company. With this we shall have to deal in a later chapter, but the explorations of the Portuguese in south-eastern Asia, which began with the fall of Malacca in 1511, may be said to have ended early in the following century. When the other nations of Europe began to flock eastward the Portuguese found the task of defending their own position sufficiently arduous, and thereafter they ceased to push their discoveries into new lands. During the hour of their prosperity they scattered themselves broadcast with a quite extraordinary rapidity, but they were content for the most part with the exploitation of the coasts and easily accessible places at no great distance from the sea, and the heavier work of discovery fell to the lot of other white nations. Yet the traces of the ​Portuguese traders have not even now completely vanished, and in almost every town of any size in southeastern Asia men are to be found bearing historic names of Portugal, speaking a bastard dialect of the Peninsula, and albeit they are generally more swarthy than the natives of the land, cherishing in the ignominy of the present a passionate disdain for the full-blooded Oriental. This latter sentiment is almost the last relic of the pride of the once powerful race who for a space ruled the seas and coast of Asia, and passing bequeathed to the East this sorry legacy of half-breeds.