The Grand Peregrination

Sinopse

The life and times of Fernao Mendes Pinto, one of the great adventurers of the sixteenth century in the turbulent East

Years before the Elizabethan adventurers were born a Portuguese, Fernao Mendes Pinto, discovered the East. He wrote an account of his experiences in a vivid autobiography, Peregrination, first published thirty-one years after his death in the early seventeenth century. By 1614 it had been translated into all the languages of Europe and gone through three English editions.
Maurice Collis’s biography of this adventurer, the first in any language, provides a wonderful canvas of elations, disasters and observations of people and places.
Mendes Pinto intends to get rich quick abroad. On his first attempt he is almost sold as a slave to the Moors.
This gives him pause, but when he is twenty-eight (it is 1547) he embarks once more. A queen gives him a fortune in gold. Pirates take him. A Turk sells him to a Jew for ‘about two pounds worth of dates’. Ransomed, he turns mercenary and is wounded, goes to Sumatra as ambassador, to Thailand and China as trader, gets wrecked with two other Portuguese on Japan, thereby ‘discovering’ it, becomes a pirate-hunter . . . Twenty years later he returns home, having visited every land on the vast Asian litoral, seen kings, splendours and cruelties, met a great saint (Saint Francis Xavier) and seen the Light.
Collis, using much of the traveller’s own language in crisp translation, gives a brilliant account of these adventures.