Fernão Mendes Pinto. Portuguese traveler. He composed an autobiographical work that became a classic of sea travel, called Peregrinação, or Pilgrimage, which was published only in 1614. During his 21 years of travel, he was shipwrecked and enslaved a number of times. Java, Japan (where he may have been first to introduce firearms) and China were among the countries he visited. He was taken away by Altan Khan when he attacked Peking.
Rebecca Catz, tr., The Travels of Mendes Pinto, University of Chicago Press (Chicago 1989).
Rebecca Catz, Fernão Mendes Pinto and His Peregrinação, Hispania, vol. 74, no. 3 (1991), pp. 501-507.
Herbert A. van Scoy, Fact and Fiction in Mendez Pinto's Peregrinaçam, Hispania, vol. 32, no. 2 (May 1949), pp. 158-167. The English translation by Henry Cogan was published in 1663. It is said that he made a later trip to Japan in 1547 and carried off a Japanese named Anjiro, said to have been the first Japanese convert to Christianity.
Stephen Wheeler, Mendez Pinto, The Geographical Journal, vol. 1, no. 2 (February 1893), pp. 139-146. It's possible that Pinto passed through Amdo, and seems to record, calling them "extravagancies and fooleries," a teaching by the Dalai Lama III (if that's who he means by Talapicor).
