the story of RO

SHOWING SOME SHIP TYPES

2010-03-06T22:53:00.030+01:00

This is just a hastily cooked melting pot of useful information (sometimes you can bet on its reliability, sometimes you will have to guess) coupled with pictures that are in these pages just for the ambiance, condensed in a single file that I can check quickly while I am drawing the page. When in doubt I can go back to more detailed files or make additional research, in case I want to complicate my story. But to have an idea of some of the ship types present in the seas around China and Japan in the 17th century, this is enough. Just to have a very general idea, because these examples are far from covering all the main ship types (or at least their denominations).

These pictures were taken from very different sources along several years, some were photocopied, most were scanned before I left Portugal, and some were more recently taken from the Internet. They are mostly pictures from books and magazines, some from old issues purchased on the flea market, but also contact proofs of pictures I took, and even postcards.
They were taken from so many different places, and some so long ago, that it will be a really very hard task, if not an impossible one, to track the origin of most of them, so I left all of them anonymous. If somebody feels to have the right to complain about it just contact me, I will remove the pictures in question.

NEW LOOK

2010-02-15T22:59:00.015+01:00

Rule number (whatever, one of the top): you never change the aspect of your story, once started. This means, you don’t do what I am doing, because people get confused, they may even feel cheated (they may like better the version you like less, or start to look for hidden reasons to dislike your work, which is bad) and also because you will have a lot of additional work to do.
But if you want to take the trouble and the risk, and feel you have a very strong reason to do it, and the story has not started yet to be published, you do it, and that is what I am doing. You may (or you may not) explain to your friends and blog readers why you are doing it, and that is what I am doing here.

What happened is that I had ten neatly arranged pages that included a nice whale, some shining bits of armor, some action and even had some corpses dancing in the water. A friend of mine, whose work I have in high consideration, wrote in his blog that those pages made him dream again. I hope I am not disappointing him.
For several weeks I was looking for a drawing to put on top of this blog, but every time I looked into those first pages, I found nothing that would fit in here.

This annoyed me. What? You have ten pages of story and you can’t find an image strong enough to represent it?
Then, one day that I laid another work to rest and paid again attention to this project, I realized I would never find the right image in this beginning of the story. Then it all happened very fast. I fished for an old black notebook where I had stuck a simple pencil drawing, done one day that I was tired of throwing away sketches of faces for the main character. The image survived exactly because it was simple. I looked in the backups for the a version of the same image worked on Photoshop and decided that, although it was very different from the pages I had already done, it had to be on the blog.
What happened almost immediately was a complete take-over. In fact I had the small crude image glued in there waiting for this opportunity to convince myself that it was indeed superior to any finished work I had done for this project.

So, this means I am going to have a lot of additional work and redraw the first ten pages in a slightly different style. Here you have a page of the new version. There are some changes besides the type of drawing (more sober drawing calls for a more sober text, less explicative) but the script is basically the same in both versions.

(Much later editing: this is not the latest version)

WHAT DID THE SHIPS TRANSPORT?

2010-01-29T14:59:00.012+01:00

The main cargo of the ships was by far silk and silver. The reason the trip existed was the commerce of Chinese silk to Japan, exchanged for silver. The profit was enormous and covered losses by bad weather, attacks by other ships, and all sorts of legal troubles with Japan. The Senate from Macau thought several times they would go bankrupt but every time they recovered with profit.
Human losses were also great, but that was an accepted fact, usually attributed to the will of God. When an embassy from Macau was condemned to be executed by Iemitsu (after repeated warnings and the prohibition that Portuguese set foot again in Japan), the people of Macau staged a religious feast claiming they were happy that so many of their people became martyrs. Considering this psychological frame it is easy to understand why the Portuguese could not stop proselytizing, despite the risks that they incurred.

But there were other things besides the profits of the silk trade and the joys of martyrdom. We can see, through the eyes of the author of the screens, people enjoying life. We also know that Portuguese merchants stayed in Nagasaki for long periods and even married there, and there was more to the cargo than just silk, like fine wines and dried fruits. Wine, olives and olive oil arrived in Macau almost at the same price as when they left Lisboa, the profit being reserved for the fabulous commerce of spices, silks and a few items more.

In this matter I follow my main written source for this story, the very detailed work of Charles Boxer (O Grande Navio De Amacau, ed. Fundação Oriente, translated from The Great Ship From Amacon, 1959) about the Black Ship from Macau. In the end of this post you will find the pages relative to a list of goods the Portuguese ships took to Japan in 1637 (by that time several smaller ships were being used instead of the big nau), made by a Dutch.
In this list, besides the great quantities of textiles that occupy four out of six pages you will find spices, precious woods and ivory, needles, fishing hooks, combs, padlocks, tobacco boxes, porcelain jars and even two live white mice.

There is also in this book a list of the goods sent by the Jesuits to Japan in 1618. As expected it is mainly occupied by detailed descriptions of huge quantities of silks and other textiles: 19 crates of textiles and 1 crate of “pao china” (the root of a plant of the genus Smilax).

This was the merchandise bought with the silver sent by the priests staying in Japan. Then, there is the list of the provisions for the priests, including a common cotton fabric (six hundred fifty seven pieces) in black or blue, a load of sugar, nineteen “buyões” of non specified preserves and fifteen boxes of “perada” (probably pickled fruits), eleven pairs of shoes of two different types (six “lay” and five “our way”, from here we may guess priests, or at least Jesuits, used a characteristic type of shoe) and twelve pairs of (my guess) slippers of two sorts (two “chinelas” and ten “servilhas”) along with three pieces of leather, needles, three recipients (“botijas”, probably a sort of amphora with a flat bottom widely used in all sizes and shapes by Portuguese and Spanish for transporting these type of goods) of olive oil and two of olives, one (“buyão”, probably smaller and rounder than the “botija”) of raisins from Ormuz and one of prunes, an amount (“fardinho”, which implies a medium size package) of almonds, two sorts of cheese (four “flamengos”, and one “de Alentejo”) two boxes (probably Chinese or Japanese) with a writing set, one with three partitions and one with four partitions, nine boxes for letters and six containing ink tablets for writing, towels and sheets, one thousand and forty strings of rosary beads and (whatever these are) one thousand nine hundred “nominas”, one hundred fifty “cordões”, two hundred sixty copper “veronicas” and five “emzes”, twenty four glass “nominas” and, inevitably, an additional small load of silk.

What is missing in these lists that we could find in case we were pirates and took one of those ships?
The booty would surely include weapons, some elaborately decorated, gold (like the large gold chains seen in the screens), pepper pots and mills, pets besides the two white mice and personal belongings the kind of porcelain and silverware.
Also not listed in there are the personal merchandise taken not only by associated merchants, but also by soldiers and sailors. Forbidden items wouldn’t make part of such lists, although they would be shamelessly smuggled, like Japanese weapons after a certain period, and even people. One of the most irritating things for the Japanese authorities was that Portuguese insisted on smuggling Catholic priests inside Japan after these were banished.

If we enlarge the area of commerce, we also increase the diversity of products. Not only the Barbarians roamed the far eastern seas, Japanese were installed a little here and there and had ships for trade and war sailing along the same routes. But that is a different story.

COLORS

2009-12-26T22:37:00.009+01:00

“As alabardas esquinas para épocas pomposas, verde-negro, roxo-velho e granada o tom das roupagens (…)”, so writes Fernando Pessoa through the pen of Bernardo Soares in O Livro do Desassossego. These colors are not far from the ones worn by the Portuguese in the 17th century, shades of green tending to the dark ones, ecclesiastical purples and violets, the stately black, and the sepias that will become ever more present towards the middle of the century.

Although colors are all resolved in shades of gray in this story, their presence is important in understanding the people that wore them.
The Portuguese men of great or even not so great importance walked slowly their hands resting on their hips or on the hilts of their swords as a sign of distinction and (at least this is what they thought) to impose respect, used to send their servants with their own chairs ahead of them to the church, and when possible had another servant behind them with a parasol. If they could afford to sustain them they would be carried on a sedan chair and were followed by a troupe of swordsmen. Sometimes their slow-motion trip through importance would be interrupted by a rival brandishing a lethal weapon. It could be one of those swords with complicate guards depict in the screens, or even a Japanese sword (Japanese weapons were much appreciated and were smuggled out of Japan in great quantities), or it could be a pistol fired from a window. Their women, if they wanted to be considered deign of respect, would also walk slowly along or behind them with their women servants, their heads covered by a long shawl, and when at home would sit on cushions, not on chairs, behind shadowed windows, weaving in the company of other women. Or at least this is what they were supposed to do. They could have had a stronger role to play in these parts than the one that was traditionally assigned to them, and there are some indications they did.
These people wore black and dark greens or sepias, occasionally red, on stately occasions, which means, for some of them, all occasions they were out of home without wearing an armor suit. Long trips on board an overcrowded ship must have been an ordeal for them.
But as life on hot climates away from the etiquette of the court can be slightly more relaxed, they sometimes wore brighter shirts showing from under their vests and even indulge, in private meetings, in rolling their stockings and dip their feet in water to appreciate a large cup of wine on a fresh corner of their gardens (different ways of drinking are also important, it seems Japanese considered the Portuguese to be arrogant, unreliable and drunkard, the English also arrogant, more reliable but even more drunkard, and the Dutch the most boring type of arrogant because they didn’t drink).

Other people were not so constrained by etiquette, although there must have been a limited amount of fashion options and some more or less intricate boundaries had to be carefully respected (or disrespected).
Servants dressed at the expense of their masters, merchants and swordsmen show, on the namban screens, the same colors as above and a more generous amount of red, light or grayish green, dark and light brown (possibly a buff leather or padded jerkin here and there), ocher and yellow, and a great variety of striped or patterned cloth. At the bottom of the scale are the tartan patterns that seem to be very popular for servants, sailors and slaves, a light green or light brown fabric that must have been cheap to produce and commissioned in great quantities.
The striped or patterned cloth appears also in the paintings of S. Roque, worn by children or by local people from Goa, where the dominant colors are red with white and brown, and white and red stripes. Also the sort of large loose trousers made of a rainbow type of vertically striped cloth appear already in the tapestries of D. João de Castro, dated from the end of the first half of the 16th century.

It would be interesting to know the provenience of those fabrics. The tartan could originate in a number of places in Europe, including Portugal, while the patterned and stripped cloth could be made in India and some in China. I am just guessing. Both cotton and silk must have been used, because similar patterns are worn by characters of very different social standings.

As for the cloth, striped blue and white, very common in latter Japanese prints, it doesn’t appear on the screens. Japanese taste for colors looks in there very much like the Portuguese one (black, brown and green mostly) with a particular tendency for gray, blue and red (or pink) with flower patterns for women and children.
But naturally the colors are similar, since they have been done with the same palette.

THE PAINTINGS ON THE CHURCH OF S. ROQUE

2009-12-22T19:11:00.011+01:00

Although I decided that the Namban screens (see previous posts under the label Namban) should be the primary iconographic source for this story, it has little value if it can’t be compared with other contemporary sources.
The screens have some details difficult to interpret, like decoration in clothing and armament, although, as I wrote before, in general things fit where they should, so we may assume they are the fruit of direct observation and not some fashionable fancy of the artist.

The second source I chose to confront the screens with is a series of paintings about the life of S. Francisco Xavier in the church of S. Roque, in Lisboa (I found, besides the entry on Wikipedia about this church, the official site of the museum and an interesting blog with a post on the subject where you can see the paintings in color – the images in this blog are exclusively black and white).

Both are usually dated from the first two decades of the 17th century (although the paintings are probably more recent than the screens, but this is just a guess). The screens are a much richer source of information than the paintings, since these are more conventional when representing the Portuguese.
The artist (the main artist, at least) of the paintings took the trouble of documenting himself about the time and places of the events it represents, some 60 to 80 years before his time. He possibly had access to pieces of wardrobe still extant in his own time, and tried to compose a plausible reconstruction of the events, so we must be very careful when dating them.
Some, like the suits of the sailors in two of the saint’s most represented miracles, are typically first half of the 16th century (compare one of the paintings and the notes I took from them, bellow), in some paintings the elements don’t seem to fit well and look more like a compromise between the fashions of both epochs, and others (like the painting representing the saint lying dead, which looks like a detailed account of fashionable devout Portuguese from the time of the artist, rich and not so rich) simply drop the chronological concerns.

Comparing details from those paintings with ones from the screens and with some more pieces of information may take us to interesting conclusions in future posts.

BELLIES, BEARDS AND HAIR STYLES

2009-11-22T16:13:00.021+01:00

This project started to mature when I acquired, many years ago, two books written by Charles Boxer about Portuguese in the East and a monograph on Namban screens. The screens in question belong to the Museu Nacional de Arte Antiga in Lisboa. Under the label “Namban”, I deal with the characters depicted in them and how I use it for the story.
Now, the people.

What impresses first: there are no fat people in the Namban screens. Although the popular stories of shipwrecks common at the time in Portugal refer fat people, namely one that had to be carried by the famished survivors of one of those shipwrecks through the jungle until, if I remember the story well, almost everybody dies, in Macau there seem to be only slim Portuguese (unless the fat were forbidden to travel because they occupy too much space).
I suspect the presence of so much slim people on the screens is due to an aesthetical choice, or also a caricature reinforced by the long capes worn by most important Portuguese. But, respecting the choice of the artist, I decided to ban the fat. No fat people on my ship!

And now, their heads.

The hair style used by the samurai on the screens are more discreet than the later style that we are used to see in some movies, with shorter hair gathered and knotted in two turns over the shaved top, or at least is how I interpret the hair on the back of these gentlemen in the previous image. Not looking with attention to this picture forced me to redraw some parts of the beginning of the story (I had mainly pictures from the 19th century in mind, like the one bellow, from a picture by Felice Beato taken from Wikipedia, as you can see there is a big difference).
Also the samurai in the screens look a lot happier than the ones in the picture. The artist, showing good humor, represents one of them open-mouthed, fascinated by the arrival of the exotic barbarians.
They use short beards or moustaches and sideburns, but some present themselves to posterity neatly shaved. Based on other pictures of samurai I decided to adorn some of them with a short tuft on the chin. I also used the more simple form of topknot that usually goes along with the unshaved head.
As for the barbarians, which came not only from Europe but also from Africa and the coasts of the Indian Ocean, Bay of Bengal and China Sea, they wear the hair short, sometimes with sideburns, and the Europeans possess frequently an unintentional hairless top that the artist takes delight in showing. Goatees and pointed moustaches are almost obligatory for the Europeans, and the ones that don’t wear it may be too young to have something that deserves showing. Some servants also wear facial air.

And the slaves? We will have a lot of questions about slavery, in this story. Beards were probably still associated with gentlemen’s honor, but things were not that simple. How to distinguish, in the characters of the screens, a slave from a servant or from a simple sailor? None of the dark skinned people represented in there is a well-off merchant or member of the gentry, but apart from that he can be anything, including a freed slave that had no other option than being now a servant. Many of them wear unruly beards. The artist shows some of them in the traditional way of representing the common people, with coarse features and twisted mouths, from which fate he spares others who look more cheerful or dignified.

One European covers his head with a simple piece of white cloth, and another uses one around his head in the Japanese fashion. They are probably veteran sailors or swordsmen.

THE NAMBAN SHIP

2009-11-21T17:00:00.010+01:00

This project started to mature when I acquired two books written by Charles Boxer about Portuguese in the East and a monograph on Namban screens, as additional information for another story. Immediately the Namban byobu captivated my attention and I said to myself that one day (more than fifteen years later, in fact) I would have to use it in a story. The screens in question belong to the Museu Nacional de Arte Antiga in Lisboa.
Under the label “Namban”, I will deal with the characters depicted in them and how I use it for the story.

The Kurofune, or Black Ship, is one of the stars of the story of Ro and also one of the main subjects of the screens. I will deal with it in detail on the label “Ships”, but let first see how the Japanese artist saw her.
First of all, he had the extraordinary ability to show stem, stern and starboard simultaneously, thus providing us with plenty of information in one single picture. Since a great number of details in the screens proved to be accurate (later screens, when the ships were no more to visit Japan, were more fantasist) I have no reason to consider any information on them to be fortuitous. Probably some contemporary European paintings were less useful for naval history.

The Black Ship is indeed very dark, although not entirely black, and the artist took pains to show that. Portuguese ships of the time didn’t present painted hulls and were the color of the wood, so the Black Ship was most probably in various shades of dark brown.

The ship looks like an old Portuguese Nau with some changes, mostly the shape of stem and stern, and curvature of the ribs, to fit new trends. We will go back to this on another post.

The second thing that calls our attention (their purpose, after all) is the banners floating over the aft part of the ship. They don’t look European at all and you may suppose the artist, unable to understand the intricacies of European heraldry, decided to use the more familiar Chinese type.
The Portuguese, despite their arrogance (only matched by the superior quality of the Dutch arrogance), were dealing with peoples that usually looked upon them as inferior, namely the Chinese and the Japanese, so commerce had to be done following the rules of the house. As Fernão Mendes Pinto notes in “Peregrinação”, what for an arriving European ship means war (noisy instruments, banners, canon shots), in the Orient means peace and good fortune, and they are essential for the costumer not to be suspicious of piracy or at least very bad manners. So the Chinese banners and streamers stay, in the story.

Third, we may think that life on board was terrible. The barbarians that come out of it look noisy and restless, jumping, laughing and shouting incessantly at each other. The contrast of the enormous Black Ship with the golden luminosity of the beach is eloquent. Can you smell the sweat?

THE STORY

2009-11-16T13:31:00.016+01:00

This project started several years ago (I’ll explain you later how), and I have just finished what is (maybe) the last written version of the story, which is now searching for a publisher. (Edited in February: the graphics of the story changed several times in meanwhile.)