Fernao Mendez Pinto Quotes
The king comes out two times and each year in order that all should see him and is accompanied by 200 elephants on which there are mounted many lords and captain’s, and he is accompanied by five to 6000 guardsmen is carried on an elephant, sitting on a very ornate chair and one of his pages sits on the elephants head and carries a golden rope on his right hand was a bag full of coins which he distributes as alms.
Fernao Mendez Pinto, 1510-1583, Portuguese Adventurer, Traveler, and Writer, Letter Reporting on Siam to the Fathers and Brothers of the Society of Jesus (The Jesuits)
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He chronicled the early Portuguese entry into South-East Asia in the sixteenth century. Siam became Thailand.
He had introduced a bill to provision a military garrison at the mouth of the Columbia River on the West Coast and protect and develop trade with China and India. President Monroe was for it and he persuaded the House to vote for it, but the bill to encourage foreign free trade with the Orient died in the Senate. Floyd was another American ahead of his time. . Floyd was very modern in his economic views, so much so that he, even as a Southern politician, opposed slavery on the grounds that it was economically inefficient and the South would never develop industrially if it had no incentive, as existed in the North and England, to reduce the amount of labor required for economic opportunity. He was right on that point as well.
this quotation is one of the first references to Siam. It also illustrates the drive for trade. Malacca was a trading center but the King who was constantly in war with Siam did not want to allow the Siamese ships to bring their goods into his port to trade with the Europeans. A Portuguese had an interesting and novel concept of free trade. That and they should be free to trade with anyone in Asia, anywhere, so long as other European nations were not. Siam however was a much larger kingdom and Malacca and had much more skilled artisans and a greater variety of products. Therefore, Portugal sided with what Alfonso de Albuquerque decided would be its best supplier in the area.
Felipe, capitalizing on the death of the Portuguese King, declared in 1580 his intention of uniting the Iberian peninsula under his rule.
Fernão Mendes Pinto was a Portuguese explorer and writer. His voyages are recorded in Pilgrimage (Portuguese: Peregrinação) (1614), his autobiographical memoir. The historical accuracy of the work is debatable due to the many events which seem far fetched or at least exaggerated, earning him the nickname "Fernão Mentes Minto" (wordplay with the Portuguese verb mentir 'lie', meaning "Fernão, are you lying? I am lying."). Some aspects of the work can be verified, particularly through Pinto's service to the Portuguese Crown and by his association with Jesuit missionaries.
