St. Francis Xavier sails to pearl fishers baptised but never taught

GOA, Portuguese India, October 1542 AD — Saint Francis Xavier left Goa by sea this month for the Fishery Coast, the pearl-fishing shore beyond Cape Comorin at the southern tip of India, two hundred leagues to the south. He sailed in the ship that was taking the new Portuguese captain of Comorin, the king’s commander for that coast, to his post. With him went young clerics born on that coast, to speak for him to people whose language he did not know.

St. Francis Xavier, a priest from Navarre and one of the first companions of St. Ignatius of Loyola, had been in India for five months. He had landed at Goa on May 6 with the Governor, Martim Afonso de Sousa. The people of the Fishery Coast, the Paravas, had been baptised about eight years earlier, almost all at once. The vicar general of the Indies, Michael Vaz, told St. Francis Xavier that they had nothing of Christianity but their baptism and the name. St. Francis Xavier asked to go to them, and the Governor sent him.

The coast he was sailing for ran forty or fifty leagues from Cape Comorin to the shoals of Ramanancor and the island of Mannar, with twenty or thirty villages at the water’s edge. The Paravas lived by fishing, and above all by fishing for pearls. The pearl beds were worked at sea twice a year, and the coast took its name from them: la Pesquería (the Fishery). Michael Vaz did not hide from St. Francis Xavier what the land was like. It was barren and so short of everything that no outsider would settle there. Merchants came for the pearl season and left again, and for the rest of the year the heat was unbearable. The Paravas wore their ears pierced and stretched so long that they reached the shoulders.

The Paravas became Christians because of a feud that began with a cut-off ear. In one of their villages a Muslim quarrelled with a Parava over something small and cut off one of his ears. Among the Paravas, that was one of the worst insults a man could suffer. The Parava and his relatives took revenge and killed some of the Muslims, and the feud grew until all the Paravas joined together and attacked the Muslims, killing many of them. The rich Muslim traders of the coast lived in two of its towns and held the pearl fishery. They put to sea in their ships and paid the Hindu kings who ruled the Paravas to make sure no Parava could escape by land or by water.

The Paravas asked for advice from Juan de la Cruz, an Indian Christian nobleman who had been to Portugal and been honoured there by the king. Juan de la Cruz told them that their only help lay with the King of heaven and with the Portuguese, whose fleets would defend them if they became Christians, and that the pearl fishery might even pass to them. Their headmen took money to Cochin to bring a Portuguese fleet to their side, with priests to baptise their people. The fleet came with the vicar of Cochin and other priests aboard, and the priests baptised the Paravas along twenty or thirty leagues of coast, as many as twenty thousand people. With the Portuguese fleet behind them, the Paravas took over the pearl fishery, and from then on the Muslims fished it only with the Paravas’ permission. No priest stayed behind to teach them.

The Paravas spoke Malabar, the language of that coast. St. Francis Xavier did not speak it; his own language was Basque, the language of Navarre, where he was born. The clerics had been brought to Goa from that coast as boys and trained there for the Church. St. Francis Xavier wrote to his companions in Rome on September 20: “Three students from the same country go with me, two of whom are deacons, fairly acquainted with Portuguese, as well as with their native tongue: the third has only received minor orders.”

St. Francis Xavier had waited for the end of the Indian winter, the season of wind and rain, to sail. Before he left Goa, he told the bishop of Goa, the Franciscan Juan de Albuquerque, what he meant to do and left the decision to him. The bishop said he knew how much the city would miss St. Francis Xavier, but that since God was calling him he should go with God’s blessing. The bishop blessed him and said goodbye close to tears. The Governor said he too was sorry to lose him, and promised whatever he needed, because the king had ordered it. St. Francis Xavier answered that he needed only a passage, because there was no way to reach the coast by land.

The king’s officials tried to give him supplies for the voyage, and he would not take them. When they pressed him, he asked only for a leather jerkin and a pair of boots, because he had been told how fiercely the sun burned on that coast. Then he sailed with the captain bound for the coast, south toward Cape Comorin, the high headland that faces the island of Ceylon.