Japan and the Japanese

COSMK 1E TORRES. 5i
remote regions," so he wrote, " amid the impious worshippers of
demons, so very far removed from almost every mortal aid and con
solation, we almost of necessity, as it were, forget and lose ourselves
in God, which hardly can happen in a Christian land, where the love
of parents and country, intimacies, friendships and affinities, and
helps at hand both for body and mind, intervene, as it were, between
man and God, to the forgetfulness of the latter." And what
tended to confirm this spiritual state of mind was the entire freedom
in -Japan " from those delights which elsewhere stimulate the
flesh and break down the strength of mind and body.
The Japan-
ese," he wrote, " rear no animals for food. Sometimes they ea*
fish ; they have a moderate supply of rice and wheat ; but they
live, for the most part, on vegetables and fruits ; and yet they attain
to such a good old age, as clearly to show how little nature, else-
where so insatiable, really demands."
Angiro
himself wrote at the same time a short letter to the
brethren at Goa, but it adds nothing to the information contained
in Xavier's.
The following account, which Cosme de Torres,* a Spaniard by
birth, Xavier's principal assistant, and his successor at the head
of the mission, gives of himself in a letter written from Goa to the
Society in Europe, just before setting out, shows, like other cases to
be mentioned hereafter, that it was by no means merely from the
class of students that the' order of the Jesuits was at its commence-
ment recruited.
Though always inclined, so Cosme writes, to religion, yet many
things and various desires for a long time distracted him. In the
year 1538, in search he knew not of what, he sailed from Spain to
the Canaries, whence he visited the West Indies and the continent
of New Spain, where he passed four years in the greatest abundance,
and satiety even, of this world's goods. But desiring some-
thing greater and more solid, in 1542 he embarked on board a fleet
of six ships,
fitted out by Mendosa, the viceroy of New Spain, to
explore and occupy the islands of the Pacific, discovered by Magellan
in 1521. Standing westward, on the fifty-fifth day they
fell in, so Cosme writes, with a numerous cluster of very small, lo\v
islands, of which the inhabitants lived on fish and the leaves of
* In the Latin version of the Jesuit letters he is called Cosmus Turrianus.