Word: pintos
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...young man who felt the lure was Fernão Mendes Pinto, son of a down-at-heel nobleman. He resolved to join the army and, once in the East, switch to trading. In 1537, at the age of 28, he sailed for Goa, Portugal's main outpost in India. Before he saw Portugal again, he was to visit all the lands of Asia, to be a merchant, a pirate, a slave, an ambassador and a Jesuit novice...
...long voyage home took him 20 years. And he did come back rich. Thereupon, good Renaissance man that he was, Pinto sat him down to write a book about it all. The Grand Peregrination is a retracing of Pinto's story by British Author Maurice Collis, and a bizarre and fascinating...
Alligators & Hot Resin. Pinto had at least nine lives, and needed all of them. He was five times shipwrecked, 13 times put to slave labor. In China he was kept for two days, waist-deep in water, in a cistern crawling with leeches. Another time he put in 26 days in a lice-infested prison cell. The Burmans tortured him by dropping hot resin on his skin. A humane man himself, Pinto decided that his tormentors were simply retaliating for the brutalities that rakehell Portuguese had first inflicted on them...
...Pinto piled up enough conspicuous "firsts" to make him the most renowned traveler in Asia after Marco Polo. He was the first European to describe alligators, cobras, orangutans and flying foxes (giant bats). "I shall not be surprised," he wrote, "if my readers who have not traveled refuse to believe in such creatures, for those who have seen little believe not much...
Even today, no one knows quite where fact leaves off and Pinto's fertile imagination takes over. His account of a meeting with the Dalai Lama is obviously grandiose fancy. His most disputed claim is that he was the first European to see Japan, and taught the Japanese how to use firearms. As Pinto tells it, he and two other Portuguese were on a Chinese ship which was blown off course and landed at an island off Kyushu. A Japanese prince sent for him, asked him if he knew of a cure for the gout. The prince was delighted...