First After Marco Polo

THE GRAND PEREGRINATION (313 pp.) --Maurice Collis--Macmillan ($4.50).

In 16th Century Portugal, the stock advice to give an ambitious young man was "Go East." The East meant silks and spices, porcelain and pearls, the fabulous fast & loose traffic with India, China and the Indies. After a single voyage, men sometimes retired for life.

One young man who felt the lure was Fernao Mendes Pinto, son of a down-at-heel nobleman. He resolved to join the army and, once in the East, switch to trading. In 1537, at the age of 28, he sailed for Goa, Portugal's main outpost in India. Before he saw Portugal again, he was to visit all the lands of Asia, to be a merchant, a pirate, a slave, an ambassador and a Jesuit novice.

The long voyage home took him 20 years. And he did come back rich. Thereupon, good Renaissance man that he was, Pinto sat him down to write a book about it all. The Grand Peregrination is a retracing of Pinto's story by British Author Maurice Collis, and a bizarre and fascinating one it is.

Alligators & Hot Resin. Pinto had at least nine lives, and needed all of them. He was five times shipwrecked, 13 times put to slave labor. In China he was kept for two days, waist-deep in water, in a cistern crawling with leeches. Another time he put in 26 days in a lice-infested prison cell. The Burmans tortured him by dropping hot resin on his skin. A humane man himself, Pinto decided that his tormentors were simply retaliating for the brutalities that rakehell Portuguese had first inflicted on them.

Pinto piled up enough conspicuous "firsts" to make him the most renowned traveler in Asia after Marco Polo. He was the first European to describe alligators, cobras, orangutans and flying foxes (giant bats). "I shall not be surprised," he wrote, "if my readers who have not traveled refuse to believe in such creatures, for those who have seen little believe not much."

Even today, no one knows quite where fact leaves off and Pinto's fertile imagination takes over. His account of a meeting with the Dalai Lama is obviously grandiose fancy. His most disputed claim is that he was the first European to see Japan, and taught the Japanese how to use firearms. As Pinto tells it, he and two other Portuguese were on a Chinese ship which was blown off course and landed at an island off Kyushu. A Japanese prince sent for him, asked him if he knew of a cure for the gout. The prince was delighted when Pinto recommended a mixture of bark and water.

Ardor & Conscience. By 1554 Pinto was in Goa again, a wealthy man yearning for home after 17 years. But he had seen much and his conscience was troubled. His adventurer's gusto had always been tempered by suffering and a sense of sin. At just that time the body of St. Francis Xavier was brought to Goa. Xavier had died on a lonely island while on his way to China to convert the Chinese. Profoundly moved, Pinto became a novice in Xavier's order, the Society of Jesus, and determined to return and convert the Japanese. It took two years to get back to Japan, and there his ardor cooled. He shrewdly sensed that a mass conversion was impossible. Furthermore, he had dreamed of being St. Pinto, not a struggling missionary. In 1557 he left the East and the Jesuits forever.

Back in Portugal he married and spent 20 years on the manuscript of his adventures. It was never published in his lifetime, but he had official recognition of a sort anyway. In 1583, in his 74th year, the Portuguese government awarded him a pension of two hogsheads of corn annually "for his services in India." Four months later, Fernao Mendes Pinto was dead.

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