Japan and the Japanese

: *-ERNAM MENDEZ PINTO. 25
there for these goods, Faria was" induced to despatch them to
Lugor, on the same coast, further north ;
and Pinto, with his small
adventure, was led by the hope of a profitable trade to embark in
the same vessel. He arrived safely near Lugor; but the ves-
sel, while lying in the river below that city, was boarded by a
Saracen corsair. Pinto with two others plunged into the water
and escaped, wounded, to the shore; and having succeeded in
reaching Patana, he communicated to Antonia de Faria information
of their mutual loss.
Overwhelmed by this news, and afraid to face his creditors at
Malacca, Faria, with the remnant of his fortune and the assistance
of his friends, fitted out a small cruiser, in which he embarked in
May, 1640, with several Portuguese, and Pinto among the rest,
nominally to seek out the pirate who had robbed him, but in fact
to recruit his fortune as he might. After many adventures,
the acquisition of great wealth by numerous captures of richlyladen
corsairs and others, its loss by shipwreck, the getting of a
new vessel, the meeting with the corsair who had robbed them at
Lugor, the taking of his vessel, another shipwreck, and the sack of
a Chinese town, where some of their shipwrecked companions were
detained as prisoners, they put into Liampo, finding on some
islands at no great distance from that city, and known as the Gates
of Liampo, a Portuguese settlement of a thousand houses, with six or
seven churches, and with regular Portuguese officers and laws as
much so, says Pinto, as if the place had been situated between Lisbon
and Santarein.* Here tKey metwith a Chinese corsair, who
told them a marvellous story of the island of Calempui, not far
from Pekin, in which lay buried seventeen Chinese kings, and
whose tombs, guarded and watched over by priests, contained vast
treasures. Under the pilotage of this corsair, Faria set out in
May, 1642, to rob these tombs. Pinto's account of the voyage
thither, and of the tombs themselves, from which, terrified by the
alarm that was raised, they fled away, with their object very par-
tially accomplished, forms one of the most questionable, and, a-t all
evants, the most distorted portions of his narrative.
* This Portuguese colony was of no long continuance. It was soon broken
tip by the Chinese, as Pinto intimates, through the folly of the Portuguese
residents.