PINTO, Fernão Mendes (1509(?)-1583), a noted Portuguese adventurer, was born in 1509 or 1510 at Montemor-o-Velho, near Coimbra, and died near Lisbon, July 18, 1583. After spending some years in Lisbon and Setubal, and experiencing various adventures, he left his native country in 1537, in a fleet of five ships, committing himself to a career of adventure at sea, which lasted twenty-one years, in the course of which he was five times shipwrecked, thirteen times taken captive, and seventeen times sold as a slave. If Pinto’s own narrative is coloured in many passages by a wandering and fervid imagination, its substantial honesty is now generally admitted, in spite of Congreve’s opprobrium in Love for Love,—“ F. Μ. Pinto was but a type of thee, thou liar of the first magnitude.” The fleet with which Pinto left Portugal anchored, after various adventures, at Socotra, and he himself was taken captive near the Straits of Babelmandeb, carried to Mocha, sold as a slave, and ransomed by the Portuguese governor of Ormuz. Returning to the Indies, he was again engaged in several expeditions, again enslaved, again ransomed, and again captured by pirates. In 1542 he was engaged in an expedition to Calempin, near Peking, to rifle the tombs of seventeen Chinese kings. Shipwrecked and captured on the Chinese coast, he was set to work in repairing the Great Wall, whence an inroad of Tartars transported him to the siege of Peking and next to Tartary. Hence we follow him to Cochin-China, Macao, and Japan. At Ningpo his report of Japan and its wealth caused the equipment of nine ships, eight of which foundered, Pinto’s ship being driven to the Lew-chew Islands. After a variety of other adventures, Pinto returned a third time to Japan with Francis Xavier in 1548. In 1553, while ...