Shortly after, they were shipwrecked again on the Chinese coast. Faria with most of his countrymen were drowned; but Pinto with thirteen others escaped to the shore, where they lived a while by begging, but were presently taken up as vagabonds, harshly treated, sent to Nankin, and there, on suspicion of being thieves, condemned to lose their thumbs. They appealed from this sentence by the aid of certain officers appointed to look after the poor, and were taken to Pekin, where, after a residence of two months and a half, the charge of theft was dismissed for want of proof, the prosecutors being obliged to pay them damages; but still they were sent in confinement to the frontier town of Quansi for eight months, there to work in the maintenance of the great wall. From this imprisonment they were delivered by an inroad of Tartars, who laid siege to Pekin, and to whom one of the Portuguese, the party reduced by this time to nine, rendered essential military service. Accompanying these invaders back to Tartary, they were sent, except one, who remained behind, as attendants upon the train of an ambassador to Cochin China, by whose procurement they were conveyed to the island of Sancian, in hopes of finding a passage thence to Malacca. But the Portuguese ships had departed five days before; and so they proceeded on some leagues further to the island of Lampacau (the same upon which the Portuguese town of Macao was not long afterwards built, and already a resort for merchants and rovers). Here they found no other resource except to enlist in the service of a Chinese corsair, who arrived shortly after they did, with two ships, of which the crews were mostly wounded, having just escaped, with the loss of many other ships, from a recent engagement with a Chinese fleet off Chincheo, a great city, about half-way from Canton to Ningpo. The Portuguese had got into a quarrel among themselves, which they carried out, as Pinto says, with true Portuguese obstinacy. Five of them embarked in one of the corsair’s ships, and Pinto, with two companions, named Diego Zeimoto and Christopher Borello, in the other. The five, with the vessel in which they sailed, were soon after lost in a desperate naval engagement, which lasted a whole day, with seven large corsair junks, in which that vessel was burnt. The other, in which Pinto was, escaped with the greatest difficulty, by favor of the breeze, which freshened at night. This breeze changed soon into a gale, before which the corsair ran for the Lew Chew islands (Riū-Kiū), with which he was familiar; but being without a pilot, and the wind shifting to the northeast, they had to beat against it for twenty-three days before they made land. After running along the coast for some distance they anchored off an island in seventy fathoms.[14] “Immediately,” says Pinto, “two little skiffs put off the shore to meet us, in which were six men, who, on coming on board, after having saluted us courteously,