Pinto’s veracity has been very sharply called in question[11]; but the main facts of his residence in the East and early visits to Japan are amply established by contemporary letters, written from Malacca as early as 1564, and published at Rome as early as 1566, including one from Pinto himself. In the introduction to his “Peregrinations” he describes himself as the child of poor parents, born in the city of old Montemayor, in Portugal, but placed in the year 1521, when he was about ten or twelve years old,—he fixes the year by the breaking of the escutcheons on the death of King Manuel, a ceremony which he witnessed, and the oldest historical fact he could remember,—through the interest of an uncle, in the service of a noble lady of Lisbon. Having been with her for a year and a half, some catastrophe occurred—he does not tell what—which led him to fly in terror for his life; and, finding himself upon a pier, he embarked on a vessel just about to leave it. That vessel was taken by French pirates, who threatened at first to sell him and the other captives to the Moors of Barbary; but having taken another richer prize, after much ill treatment they put him and several others ashore on the Portuguese coast. After this he passed into the service successively of two noblemen; but finding their pay very small, he was prompted to embark to seek his fortune in the East, and, in pursuit of that object, landed at Diu in 1537. It was by the daring and enterprise of just such adventurers as Pinto that the Portuguese, who, up to this time, had few regular troops in the East, had already acquired so extensive an empire there; just as a similar set of Spanish adventurers had acquired, and still were extending, a vast Spanish empire in America; the two nations, in their circuit round the globe, meeting at the Moluccas, the possession of which, though about this very time, as we shall see, contested by the Spaniards, the Portuguese succeeded in maintaining, as indeed they had been the first to visit and occupy them.