“Meanwhile we three Portuguese,” says Pinto, “as we had no merchandise to occupy ourselves about, enjoyed our time in fishing, hunting, and visiting the temples, where the priests, or bonzes, as they are called, gave us a very good reception, the Japanese being naturally well disposed and very conversable.” Diego Zeimoto went often forth to shoot with an espingarda [a large hand-gun or musket], which he had brought from Tartary, and in the use of which he was very dexterous. One day, at a lake where were many kinds of birds, he killed at various shots six-and-twenty ducks. Some Japanese, observing this new method of shooting, which they had never seen before, reported it to the prince, who was busy at the moment in observing the running of some horses, which had been brought to him from a distance. Zeimoto, being called, came into his presence, with the gun on his shoulder, and two Chinamen loaded with the game; and as the thing was entirely novel in this country, and as the Japanese knew nothing of the secret of the powder, they all ascribed it to enchantment,—an astonishment which Zeimoto increased by shooting on the spot a kite and two doves. The prince caused Zeimoto to be mounted on a horse, himself sitting behind him, and to be conducted through the town, followed by a great crowd, preceded by a herald, who proclaimed him an adopted kinsman of the prince, to be treated by all as such; and having taken him to his own palace, he assigned him an apartment there next his own, doing many favors also to the other Portuguese for his sake. Zeimoto responded by making the prince a present of the gun, who sent him, in return, a thousand taels of silver, beseeching him much to teach him how to make the powder; with which request Zeimoto complied. The prince, greatly delighted with his acquisition, caused other guns to be made like it; “so that,” says Pinto, “when we left, which was in five months and a half, there were more than six hundred; and when I visited Japan, in 1556, as ambassador from the Portuguese viceroy, Don Alonzo de Noronha, to the king of Bungo, the Japanese told me that in the city of Fuchū [or Funni], the capital of that kingdom, there were more than thirty thousand guns. And when I expressed my astonishment at this as incredible, some very respectable merchants positively assured me that in the whole land of Japan there were more than three hundred thousand, and that they themselves, in six voyages to Lew Chew, had carried thither five-and-twenty thousand. From which it may be known what this nation is, and how naturally inclined to military exercises, in which it delights itself more than any other of these distant nations yet discovered.”[18]