Galeote Pereira (sometimes also Galiote Pereira) was a 16th-century Portuguese soldier of fortune. He spent several years in China's Fujian and Guangxi province after being captured by the Chinese authorities in an anti-smuggling operation. The report he wrote after escaping China is one of the earliest known accounts by a westerner of life in Ming China; indeed, it is the first detailed observation of that civilisation by a lay (non-clerical) European visitor since that of Marco Polo.
Biography
Pereira and other Portuguese mercenaries helped defend the Siamese Ayutthaya Kingdom against the invading army of King Tabinshwehti of Pegu in the Burmese–Siamese War (1548–49), introducing Early Modern warfare to the region.
Pereira engaged in smuggling along the Ming Empire's South China Sea coast, for which enterprise one notorious centre was the Taishan islet of Wuyu in Xiamen Bay. He was aboard one of the two Portuguese junks seized in March 1549 near the Dongshan Peninsula during the Pirate Extermination Campaign of the Jiajing Emperor, which was actively carried out by Fujian's grand coordinator Zhu Wan. Luckily not among the crew members executed extrajudicially, Pereira and others were incarcerated at Fuzhou.
During and subsequent to his trial, the detainees were taken out "many times ... and were brought to the palaces of noblemen to be seen of them and their wives", which allowed Pereira to see something of Fuzhou. Fortunately for Pereira and other surviving Portuguese (and their companions, coming from various parts of the Portuguese colonial empire in Asia), Zhu Wan's enemy at the imperial court learned of the irregularities involved in the execution of the prisoners and the handling of captured merchandise; censors arrived from Beijing, a number of officials were removed from their positions and punished; Zhu Wan himself committed suicide. The Portuguese prisoners waiting for the end of their lives in Fuzhou's prison were dispatched to live out their sentences of separate internal exile, in various locations around Guilin, Guizhou.
With the help of the Portuguese merchants in Canton, many of the exiles managed to make their way by bribery and stealth back to the sea coast and to Portuguese ships and off-shore bases. Pereira was one of these escapees. It is known that in mid-February 1553, he was already in the Shangchuan Island, assisting at the exhumation of the incorrupt remains of Francis Xavier.
Pereira's story
Several of the Portuguese survivors of the 1549 incident and the subsequent imprisonment and exile wrote accounts of their experiences. The first of them was published as early as 1555. However, Galeote Pereira's is considered the most complete, and is the best known.
It is not known when Pereira first wrote his account. While C. R. Boxer surmised that Pereira may have penned his recollections soon after his escape to safety, the earliest known manuscript of his notes dates to 1561. It is a copy made by Indian pupils of the Jesuit Saint Paul's College in Goa, and sent to one of the Jesuits' central offices in Europe. While the original Portuguese text, entitled "Algũas cousas sabidas da China ..." ("Some things known about China ...") was not published at the time, its (slightly abridged) Italian translation appeared in Venice in 1565 in a book containing a number of other reports sent by Jesuits from India. An English translation of that Italian text, made by a former English Jesuit Richard Willis was printed in 1577, in the History of Travayle in the West and East Indies, under the title "Certain reports of the province China, learned through the Portugals there imprisoned, and chiefly by the relation of Galeote Pereira, a gentleman of good credit, that lay prisoner in that country many years. Done out of Italian by R.W.". Willis' translation was reprinted a number of times.
A complete English translation of the original (i.e., the earliest known to us) Portuguese manuscript was made by Boxer and published in 1953 in Archivum Historicum Societatis Iesu, vol. XXII, pp. 63–92. The original Portuguese text has since been published in Portugal, and in vol. 153 of Archivum Historicum Societatis Iesu in Rome.
Published accounts of other Portuguese prisoners captured together with Pereira include the letter of Afonso Ramiro, sent from Wuzhou to the Portuguese base at Langbaijiao in 1555.
