the boys to return to Japan, whilst the girls were detained with their mothers.
All this reads strangely like South Sea island morality, and connects in imagination fair Owhyhee and Otaheite, as Cook and Bligh found them, with the wanderings of these Japanese adventurers.
But we must onward in our fragmentary sketches, premising to those who may be shocked at the scandals involved in this legend of the sea, that it cannot be wrong for a seaman to repeat what a spiritual father thought right to record.
By the year 1540, two hosts of most Christian robbers were rapidly advancing upon the Cipangu of Marco Polo—the Spaniard by way of the Americas, the Portuguese by that of the Cape of Good Hope. The latter won the race. By the early part of the sixteenth century the azure flag and emblazoned arms of Portugal, had carried sword and cross from the Red Sea to the Straits of Malacca, and the cry of the slaughtered and plundered Mahomedans and Hindoos went up from Zeylah and Aden on the east, to Malacca on the west. In advance, however, of the legitimate arms of Portugal, there were a host of deserters and adventurers, who embarked in native Malay, or Arab vessels, and explored the way to fresh scenes of rapine. They were as jackals to the lions in their wake. Such was one Fernandez Mendez Pinto, who with many more of a like repute harassed and robbed along the coasts of China, until they met, and coalesced with the Japanese pirates frequenting the neighbourhood of Ningpo, or Lampo, as it was then called. Pinto accompanied his new allies upon a grand robbing expedition to some island in the neighbourhood of that port, probably to the one now known in the Chusan group as Kin-shan, or Golden Island, the necropolis past and present of many a wealthy Chinaman, of whose desire to take to the heaven of Budha some of his earthly treasures, these worthies doubtless took undue advantage. We have been calling the followers of Bernal Diaz, and the avant-couriers of Albuquerque hard names; perhaps the reader may, on perusing what we have just said of Pinto’s researches in Kinshan, be inclined to add to the terms buccaneer and pirate, those of sacrilegious robber and defiler of the resting-places of the dead! But let us be just to Fernandez Mendez Pinto, and his countrymen. We are all—ay, all—my American cousins, as big buccaneers as ever they were; and as to robbing the dead, why one Frenchman, and he is no worse than many an Englishman, except in his opportunity being greater, has, it is said, very recently broken up many thousand departed Egyptians for the few paltry ornaments wrapt up in their cerements! And, as we write, the negroes of Panama are disentombing a race of buried Indians for the sake of a few golden idols, that they wished to take with them to their happy hunting-grounds.
Let us, then, cease to rail at these men of the Sixteenth Century, and remember the world, if not better, is at any rate three hundred years older.
As the interdict against strangers visiting Japan, arising out of Kublai Khan’s invasion, had not been revoked, it is natural to suppose that the plea of accident, or stress of weather was advanced by the enterprising Pinto, when he accompanied his new found friends to their own country. This event, from the concurrent testimony of Japanese and Portuguese chronicles, occurred about the years 1542 or 1543; and, although Pinto for a long time rejoiced in the reputation of a liar, for having said that he wintered in Cipangu, there is every reason to believe that he did so. Strangely enough, some testimony in his favour has very recently been elicited through the industrious researches of Mr. Harris, the present able American minister at the court of Yeddo. During his residence at Simoda in 1855-56, Mr. Harris was struck with the strong resemblance of a Japanese fire-arm, which he observed in the hands of the higher officials, to the ancient “petronel” of Europe. On inquiry, he learnt that these arms were mostly manufactured on the island of Kanegasima, and that the natives of that dependency of the empire had long been famous for the art. A knowledge of the mode of constructing these petronels had been acquired they said several centuries previously from Europeans on board a vessel that was forced there in a tempest; and furthermore Mr. Harris thought he could trace in the Japanese term for this weapon a corruption of its Portuguese name, all of which information we may safely carry to the credit of the old Portuguese buccaneer. The intelligence carried back by Pinto to the haunts of his countrymen in China and the Eastern Seas, caused many to visit that southernmost island of the Japanese empire which is now named Kiu-siu, but in those times was called Bongo, after one of the large principalities into which it was divided. Three of the most influential princes in this island received the Portuguese with open arms, and the Prince of Fizen, whose territories laid on the western side of the island, gave them free permission to trade or settle in all the ports under his especial control. The chiefs of Arima, Oruma, and Bongo were equally zealous to secure the advantages of Portuguese intercourse; they touted for yearly visits from these western adventurers, they coveted each other the wonderful novelties of Europe, or the rich products of Hindostan and Arabia, which the Portuguese were able to import, and they joyfully paid the most outrageous prices for all these commodities. The excitement for foreign intercourse extended to the Japanese seamen and merchants, and we find them constantly mentioned by Spanish and Portuguese writers of this period as sailing and trading to their settlements of Macao, Malacca, and the Philippines; and the commercial intercourse, especially with the Portuguese, became in a very short time most important. The Church of Rome took good care in those days that the servants of the cross were not far behind the pioneers of European civilisation, and from several quarters the devoted disciples of Ignatius Loyola hastened to the rich harvest awaiting them in Japan. François Xavier, then at Goa, fired by his wonderful success in Southern India, longed to hasten to the far East, whence rumours soon reached the seat of Portuguese power, of the hospitality of the inhabitants of Japan to European visitors. This desire appears to have been further stimulated by the arrival at Goa of a Japanese,