remembering how bitter and uncertain are the promises of men, and that I might not gain much fruit from the voyage I was about to undertake, because it was dangerous, and not the season for navigating in those countries." In this sober, straightforward style, the narrative of Fernand Pinto is written throughout. Here and there, indeed, his imagination or his credulity runs away with him in a description of what he has heard; but in describing his own feelings, motives, and actions, his writing is uniformly modest, frank, and tinged with a certain grave melancholy that is not without its charm.

Pinto's visions of wealth were soon dissipated in the rudest manner. His ship was attacked and taken by three piratical Turkish galleys, and thus our traveller was for a second time a prisoner. The Christian captives were carried to Mocha and paraded through the town amid the execrations and insults of the inhabitants, by whom, as well as by their captors, they were very brutally treated. Miserably beaten, half starved, and covered with wounds and bruises, the survivors were sold to whoever would purchase such damaged wares. Pinto fell into the hands of a Greek, and had a very bad time of it indeed. Afterwards he was purchased by a Jew, who carried him to Ormuz, on the Persian Gulf, and here he was delivered from slavery by two Portuguese gentlemen; and he ends the seventh chapter of his travels with pious thanksgivings for his liberty.

Finding a ship ready to sail to Goa, in the East Indies, Pinto embarked, with courage undiminished by past mishaps, and towards the end of the year 1538 he arrived safely at that port. Here he joined the captain of a foist who was going to visit the Queen of Onoro, on the Malabar coast, and afterwards intended to cruise against the Turks; and in this expedition he saw some rough work and reaped very small profit. Indeed, this part of his narrative reminds us of the letter of the French recruit, who, writing to his friend, says " Nous avons eu de grands avantages; la mitraille m'a brisé les os; nous avous pris arines et bagages—et moi, j'ai deux balles dans le dos." And, indeed, it was with two wounds for his share of the profits that poor Mendez Pinto returned to Goa. But here better fortunes seemed about to smile on him. Don Pedro de Faria, captain-general of Malacca, took the disconsolate traveller into his service; and now Pinto had an opportunity of seeing and describing a country till then almost unknown even to the most adventurous of voyagers.

An embassy soon came to Don Pedro de Faria from the King of

Batta, in Sumatra, requesting help against the Acheens, another nation inhabiting the same island, and with whom his majesty was at war. Five nations then held sway in the land, and among them that of the Acheens seems to have been the most powerful. Mendez Pinto gives a vivid description of the country; and allowing for such inaccuracies as may be expected in the record of a traveller describing many things by hearsay, and many others which he could only imperfectly view, his narrative is both interesting and attractive, having been confirmed in many particulars by the accounts of later travellers, especially Sir Stamford Raffles.

In the strife between the Battas and the Acheens, the latter had decidedly the best of it. Pinto, who was sent by Don Pedro as agent to the Batta court, witnessed the defeat of his allies with no little chagrin. In his account of the country he especially makes mention of the caquesseitan, á great bird, probably the cassowary. He becomes somewhat imaginative in describing the serpents, some of which he declares to be so venomous "that they can kill people by merely breathing upon them." The great apes and baboons of the island are also mentioned. Speaking of his voyage up a little river which he calls

Guateamgrin, he says:—

"Now, while we were navigating with a good wind, we saw through a thicket which was on the bank such a number of bats and other crawling animals not less prodigious by their size than by their singular forms, that I shall not be astonished if those who read this history will not deign to believe what I shall relate concerning them, principally persons who have not travelled, for I am well aware that they who have seen little will believe little, compared with that which will be believed by those who have seen much. Along this river, which, moreover, is not broad, there was a great number of lizards, which may more properly be called serpents, inasmuch as some of them are as large as a little vessel they call Almadia; they have scales on their backs, and their jaws are two feet wide. Those of the country have assured us that these animals are so bold that some of them are to be found who will attack an Almadia, principally when they see only four or five people in it, and that they sink it with their tails in order that they may eat the men, whom they swallow whole, without dismembering them. We also saw in this place a strange animal they call caquesseitan. They are of the size of a great goose, very black, and scaly on the back, with a row of sharp points on the spine of the length of a writing-pen.

Furthermore, they have wings like those of the bat, a very long neck, and on the head a little bone, shaped like a cock's comb, with a very

long tail marked with green and black spots, like the lizards of this country."

In the lizard the reader will not fail to recognise the alligator, though the story concerning the Almadia sunk by the animal's tail, and of the discrimination of the monster, which selects a vessel in which there are "only four or five men," seems very like an attempt of the unscrupulous Battas to impose on their visitor's credulity. The caquesseitan, also, might have puzzled Buffon or Cuvier, so strange a compound of bird and beast does it appear to be. The description goes on to record still greater marvels. Pinto tells us―

"These animals jump and fly together like grasshoppers, and in this manner they chase monkeys and other animals of the kind, which they

pursue to the tops of the trees, and by this chase they usually subsist. We also noticed hooded serpents as thick as a man's thigh, and so venomous that the negroes of the country told us how, if their breath touched anything living, it immediately died, without there being any remedy or any antidote that could be applied. We saw some others that were not hooded nor so venomous as the preceding, but much larger and longer; moreover, they had heads as big as that of a calf. We were told us that these are accustomed to hunt the others. This serpent mounts the wild trees, of which there are a great number in this country, and twining round some branch with its tail, it lets its body hang down. By the same means, putting its head to the grass at the foot of the tree, it presses one of its ears to the ground, so that in this manner it may hear if anything stirs in the silence of night. If by chance an ox, a wild boar, or any other animal passes by the foot of the tree or near it, they seize it in their jaws; and inasmuch as they

P

have the tail already twisted in the branch of the tree, they catch nothing that they do not draw up on the tree, so that in this manner nothing escapes them. There we also perceived a number of magots (macaques), grey and black, of the size of a great mastiff, of which the negroes of the country are more afraid than of any other animals, because they attack with so much boldness that none can stand against them."

We have made this extract from Figuier's translation, and quote it literally, as showing the style of Pinto and the nature of his inaccuracies. The reader will have no difficulty in recognising the boaconstrictor in the gigantic serpent angling for its prey from the lofty tree; and the great magots are evidently mandrils and other baboons. It will be seen that what Pinto himself observed he described accurately enough, and that the marvellous particulars with which his narrative is embellished are generally stories with which he has been favoured by the negroes of that country.

Mendez accompanied the King of the Battas as a volunteer in his expedition against the Acheens, and saw some tolerably hard fighting. In the end the latter nation gained the victory, partly by their greater amount of powder and partly by their superior strategy. In the height of the combat they managed to fire a mine and blow three hundred Battas-among whom was the captain who led them-into the air "with so great a noise and so thick a smoke," says the chronicle, “that the place seemed the very picture of hell." This catastrophe decided the victory, and Pinto made the best of his way back to Malacca to his patron Don Pedro, noting, as his manner was, many strange and marvellous things on his way.

II.

Pinto's Mission to the King of Aaru-Hostilities against the Acheens-Pinto's Shipwreck-He is Employed by a Mussulman Merchant-Antonio de Faria turns Pirate, and is Joined by Pinto-Captures and Adventures-Shipwreck-The Chinamen Tricked.

SOON after he had related to his patron the story of the wonderful

things to be seen in Sumatra, Pinto was employed on a new and more important mission. The King of Aaru, monarch of another of the five nations of Sumatra, sent an ambassador to Don Pedro de Faria, requesting assistance against the ruler of the Acheens, who was a