Galeote Pereira - Biography

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 Viceroy 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 bribe 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.