Fernão Mendes Pinto

(c. 1510 - 1583)

Born in Montemor-o-Velho, Portugal, Fernão Mendes Pinto traveled to India in his twenties and spent the rest of his career zigzagging between ports in Asia, eventually writing about his adventures (exploration, trade, diplomacy, plundering) and misadventures (prison, hard labor on the Great Wall of China, shipwrecks, pirates, severed thumbs) in his often implausible memoir Pilgrimage, published posthumously in 1614.