116 Boundaries and Beyond
on the circumstances, the gangs either traded as merchants, or raided
as pirates. Their enterprise, trade or piracy, was truly multinational in
nature. As Higgins has said about coastal piracy:
[It] was not a competitive nationalistic venture, rather it was
a system built on personal ties and loyalties within competing
collectivities. Often Chinese and Japanese or Malay, etc., joined
together in the same band, a cosmopolitan nucleus into which
various others, such as captives, refugees, shipwrecked or
marooned sailors could be introduced.^77There is a dearth of detailed information about the life and adventures
of the pirates and about the trading marts. The travel accounts of Fernão
Mendes Pinto offer glimpses of the roving Portuguese adventurers along
the China coast at that time. But the authenticity of Pinto’s accounts
remains controversial.^78 Donald Ferguson observes that the work is
not entirely a fabrication, but many of the incidents related are pure
βiction. Nevertheless, because Pinto was a contemporary observer and
a participant in many of the episodes that he describes, Z. Volpicelli
suggests that one can rely on his “general view of the life of the roving
Portuguese adventurers of that time in the Far East”.^79 The author surely
witnessed similar events somewhere, and his adventures, “marvelous
as some of them are, must be considered to have generally a small
substratum of truth and to be based, if not on what he saw or did, on
what he heard others had seen or done. Taken in such a light he gives us
a picturesque view of the life of those times....”^80
Pinto’s story contains a reference to a “daring and unprincipled”^81
Portuguese corsair named Antonio de Faria, who roamed the whole
coast as far as Ningbo in the early 1540s, capturing vessels and arming
them with Portuguese prisoners he liberated or with piratical sailors he
pressed into his service. At one time, he had 4 ships and over 600 men
under his command, of whom only about 50 were Portuguese. By chance
he sealed a cordial relationship with a Chinese pirate chief, Quiay Panjao,
who had 30 Portuguese in his service. Quiay Panjao‘s acquaintance with
the people of the coast, that enabled him to procure all the supplies and
- Higgins, “Piracy”, p. 36.
- See Boxer, South China, pp. xxin2, xxiii; and Ferguson, “Letters”, pp. 439, 439n40.
- Volpicelli, “Early Portuguese Commerce”, p. 47.
- Ibid., pp. 68‒9.
- This description is seen in Andrew Ljungstedt, A Historical Sketch of the
Portuguese Settlements in China and of the Roman Catholic Church and Mission
in China (Boston: James Munroe & Co., 1836), p. 3.
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