that their trade with the Chinese might be carried on securely and peacefully, and with profit to both parties. His brother, Simon d'Andrade, received from the king a commission to make another voyage to China, and departed in April 1518 from Malacca. Upon his arrival in August in the harbour of Tamu, he found that the Portuguese ambassador, Thomas Pires, had not yet left Canton, as, in spite of three applications, no order had yet been received from the court to escort him thither. At length the order came, and Pires went in the beginning of January 1520 by water as far as the mountain range Malenschwang, thence to Nankin, where the emperor was, who ordered him to Pekin, where he himself usually resided on account of the nearness of the Tartars, with whom he was continually at war. In January 1521, the emperor came there, and immediately dismissed the embassy. He had received unfavourable accounts of the Portuguese from the authorities at Canton and Nankin, whom the King of Bintang had influenced by an emissary; they told the emperor that, under the pretext of trading, the Portuguese explored the country with the view of taking it by force of arms, and that in this way they had made themselves masters of India and Malacca. Pires therefore was admitted no more into the palace. Meanwhile the emperor fell ill and died, and the counsellors of his successor were of opinion that Pires and all his companions should be put to death as spies. The emperor however ordered the ambassador, real or pretended, to be sent back to Canton with the presents, and to be kept in custody there until answer should be received from the Portuguese authorities at Malacca. Until then no Portuguese or Portuguese merchandise was to be admitted into the empire. The emperor further commanded that the king of Malacca, who was an ally of the emperor, and who had been driven out by the Portuguese, should be restored.

The severe conditions imposed upon the Portuguese by the emperor are not to be wondered at, for all the accounts which he had received from his authorities respecting them were prejudicial, and Simon d'Andrade himself gave frequent occasion for complaint by inconsiderate or unjust regulations, contrary both to the laws and to the received opinions of the country, and provoked the Chinese against the Portuguese; and even his personal behaviour seems to have been calculated to provoke animosity.[5] At last a hot encounter took place between the Portuguese and Chinese ships, during which, fortunately for the Portuguese, a storm arose, which scattered the Chinese fleet and favoured the flight of the Portuguese, so that they happily reached Malacca at the end of October.

Thomas Pires meanwhile was, upon his arrival in Canton, thrown into prison with all his companions, and died in chains; the presents which he had brought with him were stolen. The letters, which two or three years afterwards arrived from the prisoners, contained lamentable descriptions of the oppressions they had to endure, and of the robberies which were committed in foreign ships, upon the pretence that they had Portuguese on board. The great stores of valuable merchandize, gold and silver from India, were entirely lost. Mendoza does not complete the tale of Pires's adventures, but some interesting details are given by Remusat in his Nouveaux Mélanges Asiatiques, page 205, tom. ii.

The next Portuguese adventurer who comes within the range of our special notice, is Ferdinand Mendez Pinto, who from the apparent extravagance of his accounts became proverbial as an accomplished romancer. Congreve, in his Love for Love, makes Foresight thus address Sir Sampson Legend: "Ferdinand Mendez Pinto was but a type of thee, thou liar of the first magnitude." Like most of his predecessors, however, in early travel, he has by this time recovered much of his forfeited reputation, and, as in their case, some of his most remarkable statements have been confirmed by more recent explorations. Being compelled to leave his country from some accident, which he describes as casting "him into manifest peril of his life", he took to the sea. The chances of his life led him to Abyssinia, and subsequently along the coast of Arabia to India. With his adventures in these countries we have here nothing to do, but pass at once to the circumstances under which he was thrown upon the coast of China. At Goa, Pinto hired himself as a soldier to Pedro de Faria, who was proceeding as governor to Malacca. In this employ he was selected as Portuguese agent in the company of the ambassador of the Battas, on the return of the latter to Sumatra from his complimentary visit to Faria, at Malacca, the seat of government. Here he fell in with one Antonio de Faria, with whom he joined in a great commercial expedition to be sent up the Gulf of Siam.

We pass over various romantic adventures with pirates, described in his narrative, especially those with one Coja Acem, a native of Guzerat, and an implacable enemy of the Portuguese, whom Faria at length overcame in a desperate encounter. The adventurers then sailed to Liampoo (Ning-po), where Faria gained intelligence of an island called Calempluy, in which were the tombs of seventeen kings of China, all of gold, and containing great treasure of various descriptions. This place they sought and reached, and having plundered, loaded their ships with the treasure. About a month after they had put to sea, they were wrecked in a furious gale in the Gulf of Nanking, and fourteen of the Portuguese alone escaped with their lives. The Chinese gave the shipwrecked pirates but a harsh reception; they were first thrust into a pond where they were almost devoured by leeches, and were afterwards sent with other criminals to Nanking, where they were punished with a severe whipping. They were subsequently sent to Peking, also chained together in parties of three, and on their arrival received thirty lashes apiece by way of welcome. Pinto gives an animated account of the magnificence of these two great capitals, but splendid as the objects he observed in them were, they would scarcely bear comparison with those which presented themselves along the great rivers and canals. The multitude of cities, together with the abundance which here prevailed, was almost incredible. The immense concourse of boats at the time of the great fairs, the mode of rearing water-fowl, their plan of hatching eggs by artificial heat, the industry and regularity of populace, and their fashion of eating with chop-sticks, are detailed with great exactness. Upon the whole, his remarks leave no doubt, we think, of the truth of his having been an eye-witness of what he records. Upon the subsequent occurrences of his eventful life, and his final return to Lisbon in 1558, we shall not here dwell, but proceed to the consideration of the next in order on our list of European travellers to China.

Among a series of letters in Spanish, received in 1555 from various Jesuits in the East, and appended to the 1561 edition of Francisco Alvarez's Historia de Ethiopia, occurs an account of some matters regarding the customs and laws of the kingdom of China, which a man (who was a captive there for six years) related at Malacca, in the college of the Jesuits. This valuable account, we believe, has never before appeared in English, and is here translated.