Tomé Pires

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Tomé Pires (1465?–1524 or 1540)[1] was an apothecary from Lisbon who spent 1512 to 1515 in Malacca immediately after the Portuguese conquest, at a time when Europeans were only first arriving in South East Asia. After his arduous experiences in India and the East Indies, he headed the first official embassy from a European nation in China (Portugal to the Emperor of China, Zhengde, during the Ming Dynasty), where he died.

Pires was apothecary to the ill-fated Afonso, Prince of Portugal, son of King John II. He went to India in 1511 in the capacity of "factor of drugs",[2] an Eastern commodity that was an important element of what is generally called "the spice trade". In Malacca and Cochin he avidly collected and documented information from the Malay-Indonesia area, and personally visited Java, Sumatra (the two dominant islands of modern-day Indonesia) and Maluku.

From his Malay-Indonesia travels, he wrote a landmark book on Asian trade, Suma Oriental (a "Summa of the East"). Completed before the death of Afonso de Albuquerque (December 1515),[3] it shows him to be a discriminating observer, in spite of his tangled prose,[4] and superior to other Portuguese writers of the time. The book, couched as a report to Manuel of Portugal, and perhaps in fulfilment of a commission undertaken before he left Lisbon,[5] is regarded as one of the most conscientious first-hand resources for the study of the geography and trade of the Indies at this time, including one of the most important resources for the study of contemporaneous Islam in Indonesia. Although it cannot be regarded as completely free of inaccuracies in its detail, it is remarkably consistent with evidence of the time and makes no fundamentally erroneous statements about the area.[6] Its contemporary rival as a source is only the better-known[7] book of Duarte Barbosa.

The Suma Oriental, unpublished[8] and presumed lost in an archive until 1944, also includes the first written account of the 'Spice Islands' of Banda in Maluku,[9] the islands that first drew Europeans to Indonesia. In its detail "it was not surpassed, in many respects, for more than a century or two," its modern editor, Armando Cortesão, has asserted.[10] Suma Oriental is represented by a long-lost manuscript in Paris. Four letters written by Pires survive, and there are a scattering of references to him by contemporaries, including a letter of Albuquerque to the King, 30 November 1513.

[edit] See also

[edit] Notes

  1. ^ Madureira, 150–151.
  2. ^ (Pires 1990:xi)
  3. ^ Judging from the tenor of his references to Albuquerque (Pires 1990:lxiii).
  4. ^ "His style is far from clear," his modern editor has noted (Pires 1990:lxxiii) "and no doubt it often becomes more confused, owing to the transcriber's mistakes."
  5. ^ Armando Cortesão, introduction to Pires 1990:lxxiii
  6. ^ Ricklefs (1991), page 7
  7. ^ Barbosa's work was translated into Spanish and italian and published several times in the sixteenth century.
  8. ^ An excerpt was published anonymously by Giovanni Battista Ramusio
  9. ^ *Muller, Karl; Pickell, David (ed) (1997). Maluku: Indonesian Spice Islands. Singapore: Periplus Editions, p. 86. ISBN 962-593-176-7. 
  10. ^ Armando Cortesão, introduction to Pires 1990:xix.

[edit] References

  • Luis Madureira. "Tropical Sex Fantasies and the Ambassador's Other Death: The Difference in Portuguese Colonialism," Cultural Critique (Number 28; Fall of 1994): 149–173.
  • Muller, Karl, and David Pickell (eds) (1997). Maluku: Indonesian Spice Islands. (Singapore: Periplus Editions), p. 86.
  • (Pires 1990) Armando Cortesão, The 'Suma Oriental' of Tomé Pires: An Account of the East, from the Red Sea to China, 2 vols., (1944) 1990.
  • Ricklefs, M.C. (2nd. ed. 1991). A History of Modern Indonesia since c. 1300. London: MacMillan. ISBN 0-333-57689-6.