"If we missionaries do not set the world afire, who will?"

About the time that Saint Francis Xavier climbed aboard the old carrack, Santiago, at Mozambique for the last stage of his dreadful, year-long voyage to India, another adventurer out from Lisbon, Fernan Mendes Pinto, was seeking in Chinese waters some craft to take him to the same destination. Many years later, when safely back in Portugal, Fernan, a self-educated man of genius, wrote a book of his travels which he called Peregrination. Now the worst of having too good a story to tell is that it will not be believed. That is what happened to Fernan and his Peregrination when, quite against his intentions, it was published in 1614, thirty-one years after his death. Even Cervantes, who should have known better from his own experiences, wrote him off as "a Prince of Liars." St. Francis Xavier figures largely and gloriously in this narrative, but the cautious Henry Cogan, Gent., who made the only English version of the book during Cromwell's dictatorship, thought it safer to leave so Catholic a person out. While the first biographers of the Saint drew with enthusiasm on Fernan's account, some later writers were skeptical. However, recent investigation has shown more and more that Peregrination is a perfectly genuine masterpiece of travel literature; indeed, one of the three or four greatest books of the kind ever written. Of the facts in the book, perhaps the most outstanding is this, that Fernan and no other was the first of Western men to discover and set foot on the shores of Japan.

That was the year 1542 and they found anchorage in the long, low island of Tanegashima, at the southern tip of Japan. The daimio or overlord of the place received them well, for he had learned from Chinese merchants, carefully instructed by such excellent propagandists as Fernan himself, about the greatness of Portugal. He had heard, he said, that "Portugal was far richer and of a larger extent than the whole empire of China . . ." But the matter of greatest interest and excitement to the Japanese, for they had never seen such a thing before, was a harquebus, which was used so expertly for their entertainment that twenty-six wild ducks were brought down at one shooting. They presented the gun to the daimio who "esteemed of it more than of all the treasures of China," and before they left the country six months later, the world's cleverest imitators of other peoples' ideas had reproduced the instrument of destruction six hundred times. In this roundabout way, by means of pirates, tempests and a primitive firearm, Japan was opened to the Portuguese trade and prepared in the providence of God for the coming of St. Francis Xavier.

Francis had, of course, heard the common rumour, started by Marco Polo, that beyond China there lay a great empire full of Oriental wonders, called Zipangu, but that remained the extent of his information until he came to Malacca for the second time during the summer of 1547, greatly dispirited by the countless obstacles to the progress of the faith among the teeming millions of India. He had come to an unknown land of mosques and minarets, where "Great is Allah and Mohammed is his prophet" was heard, rather than the Angelus. This was a an exotic land of peacocks and elephants, of indescribable wealth and unbelievable squalor, where cattle were sacred and human life of little value. When he went ashore on the island of Goa, his last contact with the old world was broken and the culture he was entering bore little resemblance to his own. The bishop told him: ". . . you will find them (the natives) a superstitious, helpless lot; they are not to be trusted nor relied upon. They have the intelligence of children and invariably return to their idols. What can you do when your enemies have some fifty thousand priests whose aim is to keep their victims in fear and ignorance?" To which Francis replied: ". . . do not deter me . . . if we missionaries do not set the world afire, who will? If we do not give the example, who is to?"

His ways were simple and direct; he went among the poor and the wealthy, the untouchables and the privileged. To all he brought the same message of God's love. Eventually the people of Goa responded; people who had not been to church in years came to confess their sins, brought their children to be baptised, to be confirmed. God had become a reality in their lives and Francis was congratulated, admired and looked upon as a wonder worker. His zeal would not permit him to rest upon these results and though entreated to remain in Goa, he found a small sailing vessel and was off for the Fishery Coast. A monsoon forced them to seek harbor and Francis began his ministry anew.

For two and a half years he worked this coastal area, sharing the lives of the people, joining them in their labors, learning their language, teaching them and unceasing in his efforts to draw them to God. Sometimes his converts were not sincere and caused him many a heartache, but by his love he defended them: ". . . their lapses come from frailty . . . though they are not yet good, some day they will become so." Though everyone loved him, this brought no satisfaction as long as there were still so many souls he had not reached. He fretted because in every part of the country a different dialect was spoken. He could not talk to the people about the God he wanted them to know; he could not pour out the love that was being hemmed in. He battled heat, exhaustion and illness, and, to his despair, pillagers from among his own Portuguese race against the natives. He wrote to Europe and for the first time there was a note of discouragement: ". . . what is the use of toiling for years when in a few minutes everything that has been so painfully built up is destroyed by our own countrymen? Is not my work in vain?"

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Life and history are full of dramatic encounters, some brought about by accident. It might be argued that a cannon-ball was responsible for bringing Ignatius Loyola and Francis Xavier together, even for the foundation of the Society of Jesus. Similarly, it was a murder that introduced St. Francis to Japan. A samurai named Anjiro, who had done the deed, sought refuge on board a Portuguese ship in the harbour. He must have had earlier dealings with these traders, for he understood their language and could speak it a little. One of them, George Alvarez, knew and loved St. Francis and recommended the fugitive, whose conscience was troubling him, to seek a remedy at the hands of the "Great Father" as he was called by his Indian and Malayan neophytes. The excitement produced by that meeting is evident in his letter to the Jesuits of Rome, written after his return to India through the most terrible hurricane in his seafaring experience. "While in Malacca," he told them, "I heard great news from some Portuguese merchants, men of good standing, about certain big islands discovered a short time ago and called the Islands of Japan. There, in the opinion of these men, much more fruit might be gained for the increase of our holy faith than anywhere else in the Indies, for they are a people greatly avid of knowledge, which the heathen of India are not. With the merchants there came looking for me a Japanese named Anjiro, who desired to confess some grave sins of his past in the hope of obtaining God's forgiveness . . . he was delighted when we met for he has a longing to learn about our religion . . . in my turn I asked him whether, if I went back with him to his country, the people of Japan would become Christians . . ."

What a promising vineyard Japan seemed to be! Yet some eighteen months were to pass before Francis could turn his attention in that direction. In the interim, he voyaged a good two thousand miles of stormy seas back to Cochin, then trudged a hundred and fifty miles to the isolated pearl fishers of Cape Comorin, and that done, crossed to Ceylon. Upon returning to Cochin, he took a coastal ship to Goa and on to Bassein, north of Bombay, then back to Goa and on to Travancore. Two months later, it was Goa again, then Cochin again, then Bassein again — an incredible odyssey of travel in an age when physical exhaustion was an inevitable companion to journeying. Yet this was a time when his brethren said of him that though his uplifted eyes were always wet, "his mouth was brimful of laughter."

The letters and memorials which Francis wrote by the score give the measure of his phenomenal and utterly lovable personality. They are the most unliterary letters imaginable, disorderly, repetitive, ungrammatical and without the slightest regard for effect. Picturesque detail is almost entirely lacking. He seemed incapable of forgetting anyone he had ever known and, a true Basque, of relinquishing any cause, however lost, that he had once championed. Some have said that he hated India. In one letter he said he would love to go the round of the European universities and cry aloud about the need for workers in God's vast neglected vineyard of India. He once awoke as from a nightmare, crying out, "Jesus, how crushed I feel!" About the perils of his travels he declared: ". . . all these things are in the hands of God and I fear none of them, but only God Himself who may chastise me for my negligence in His service and for my unfitness and uselessness in promoting the name of Jesus Christ among people who know it not."

Over four hundred years ago St. Francis with his companions and thirty bushels of the finest Malaccan pepper disembarked in Japan. The day was the Feast of the Assumption and the Mother of God must have looked down with tenderest, smiling love on her Quixote from Navarre who had come with thirty bushels of pepper to win her Divine Son an empire. By the sheer magic and glory of his example which led others through the great door he had opened, he nearly succeeded.