Joaquim Magalhães de Castro
Throughout the 16th century, several plans were drawn up, each one more eccentric than the other, to invade the Middle Kingdom, megalomaniac and unrealistic plans that had among their most enthusiastic defenders several Dominicans and Spanish Franciscans.
King D. Filipe II learned on 18 November, thanks to a text by a certain Domingos Segurado, that the wreckage of a New Spain ship that had sunk off Macau had reinforced the crew of João da Gama, “owner” of a trip to Japan. The latter, having arrived in Macau, obeyed the viceroy’s order to transport the aforementioned crew, having received as a prize the concession of two trips from China to New Spain. Far away in the Pacific Ocean, João da Gama’s ship, caught by an unseasonable typhoon, was forced to anchor in the Japanese waters of Amasuka. Once the ship had been repaired and the entire crew had regained their strength, the voyage would resume – the date was October 1589.
The Portuguese captain was heading to a much more northern latitude than was usual for Manila’s career galleons, and this would lead him to a place called Ezo (Yezo), which means Hokkaido. If he landed there (that fact is not known), then Gama and his men should be given the status of the first Europeans to visit that island, although the Portuguese residing in the Orient had already heard of it.
In a letter from 1565, the Jesuit Luís de Frois mentions a large land located in northern Japan inhabited by savage “Tartars with dark skin, long hair and beards similar to those of the Muscovites”; and in 1571 his confrere and compatriot Gaspar Vilela informs us that such people “do not know God and worship the sun,” showing hope in future missionary campaigns.
Furthermore, as these lands “very likely” extend east, “to New Spain itself, and their inhabitants were “barbarous like those of Brazil,” Vilela suggested they were of American origin. Still in relation to the Ainu people – autochthonous from the island of Hokkaido – to which we have already referred, other speculations had been made, all by priests of the Society of Jesus, an institution dedicated exclusively to the evangelization of the Territories of the Rising Sun.
The Italian Nicolo Lanciolloto, for example, stationed in India, had heard of “a people from Japan called Esoo,” people “white-skinned, furry and fearful of war, just like the Germans”; the Portuguese Manuel Teixeira reported in 1564, in a letter sent from Macau, that these people inhabited the island of “Yesu,” and as the name indicates, “worshipped Jesus Christ.” Finally, the well-known João Rodrigues referred to Hokkaido as “a Tatar island called Ezo.”
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