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The way I encountered this rumor was that there were 9-12 official duels fought between the Portuguese and Samurai. The Portuguese won all except one, which was believed lost on account of 'excessive drunkenness.' According to the story, the dead fellow's superior officer engaged the Samurai in a duel on the following day, and defeated him out of hand.
Now, this has never been proven or disproven. The story goes that this information is all in the Portuguese national archive, (which is huge) and was stumbled on by some student, who tells his friend. His friend posts about it on the net, and asks the student to go get official copies from wherever in the archive he found it, and the student, (who isn't all that interested) promises to go back and get it eventually, but never does. Legendary needle in a haystack stuff, but it could be true. Or it could be an urban legend. |
I'd be very wary of trusting anecdotal accounts, especially those floating around the Greatest Rumor Mill in All History, without sources. Things can get elaborated real easy, especially when agendas get involved. I've also heard rumors essentially turning the above situation around.
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In 1574, a group of wako (Sino-Japanese pirates) under the Chinese leader Lim-Ah-Hong and his Japanese partner, Sioco, attacked Spanish-held Manilla with 62 armed junks and about 4,000 warriors. They were ultimately defeated by a combined force of Spanish regulars and Pampangan mercenaries (there were usually comparatively few Spanish troops in the Philippines at any given time), under the command of Juan de Salzedo, the so-called "Cortez of the Philippines". Keep in mind that this was hardly a one-sided affair; the wako were well equipped with both arquebuses and even artillery for their ships (the Spanish initially thought they were under attack by a Portuguese squadron). There was plenty of HTH action too. A basic account of this action can be found in Mark Wiley's Filipino Martial Culture. Detailed period Spanish accounts can be found in the 55-volume series, The Philippine Islands 1493-1898, edited by Emma Helen Blair and James Alexander Robinson. |
Interesting. I don't suppose you could post up an account of the battle?
It's also worth noting that the wako, though certainly scary enough as pirates, were probably markedly inferior in tactics and equipment to actual Japanese troops. The same Chinese armies that had managed to clear the coast of China of wako raiders in the 1580s were cut to pieces by the Japanese again and again during the Imjin War, even when they had a large numerical advantage - I don't think a Chinese army was ever successful in taking a Japanese-held fortification that was still being defended by its garrison, even when the wajo fortress was still well under construction!
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The incident took place in Nagasaki (in Jan. of 1610--my mistake), and started with difficulties between Pessoa and the local governor. This became more heated when it was learned that Pessoa--when he was governor of Macau--had killed a group of Japanese sailors there, only a few months before. Ieyasu then responded with an order to kill Pessoa and take his ship. |
Given that the Japanese were operating under "capture intact" orders, that goes a long way towards explaining the difficulty they experienced in taking Pessoa's ship - taking an aware Dutch East Indiaman-style ship from small boats is geneally a nonstarter, and it sounds as though the battle turned against the Portugese once the Japanese got serious. The initial raids after the first sound more like probing attacks to keep the galleon's crew on a knife's edge while preparations were made to storm the ship. Also, Pessoa neither fled nor took offensive action over a period of four days, which leads me to believe that he was "bottled up" in the harbor by Japanese shore batteries (of which there were many during the Edo period) and the Japanese could take their time. The Turkish navy, despite 50-to-1 superiority in galleys, was unable to stop several high sailing ships from getting into the Golden Horn during the Siege of Constantinople and nobody's trying to use that to prove Turkish naval inferiority.
Perhaps similar accounts of attempts to take tall ships by force in major Western harbors could provide perspective?