Note 103 — Chapter XXIII

Lopo de Vega, the poet, who held the office of procurator fiscal to the apostolic chamber of the archbishopric of Toledo, celebrated the constancy of the Japanese martyrs, in a pamphlet entitled “Triumpho de la Fe en los Regnos del Japon, pas los annos de 1614 y 1615,” published in 1617. “Take away from this work,” says Charlevoix, “the Latin and Spanish verses, the quotations foreign to the subject, and the flourish of the style, and there will be nothing left of it.” The subject was much more satisfactorily treated by Nicholas Trigault, himself a very distinguished member of the Chinese mission, which he had joined in 1610. He returned to Europe in 1615, travelling on foot through Persia, Arabia, and Egypt, to obtain a fresh supply of laborers. Besides an account of the Jesuit mission to China (from which, next to Marco Polo’s travels, Europe gathered its first distinct notions of that empire), and a summary of the Japanese mission from 1609 to 1612, published during this visit to Europe, just before his departure, in 1618 (taking with him forty-four missionaries, who had volunteered to follow him to China), he completed four books concerning the triumphs of the Christians in the late persecution in Japan, to which, while at Goa, on his way to China, he added a fifth book, bringing down the narrative to 1616. The whole, derived from the annual Japanese letters, was printed in 1623, in a small quarto of five hundred and twenty pages, illustrated by numerous engravings of martyrdoms, and containing also a short addition, bringing down the story to the years 1617-1620, and a list of Japanese martyrs, to the number of two hundred and sixty-eight. There is also added a list of thirty-eight houses and residences (including two colleges, one at Arima, the other at Nagasaki) which the Jesuits had been obliged to abandon; and of five Franciscan, four Dominican, and two Augustinian convents, from which the inmates had been driven. These works of Trigault, published originally in Latin, were translated into French and Spanish. Various other accounts of the same persecution appeared in Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese. “A Brief Relation of the Persecution lately made against the Catholic Christians of Japan” was published at London, 1616. Meanwhile Purchas, in the successive editions of his “Pilgrimage,” gave an account of the Japanese missions, which is the best and almost the only one (though now obsolete and forgotten) in the English language. That contained in the fourth edition (annexed as a fifth part to the “Pilgrimes”), and published in 1625, is the fullest. Captain Saris, according to Purchas, ascribed the persecution to the discovery, by the Japanese, that the Jesuits, under the cloak of religion, were but merchants.