The Signing Man: Luís Paes Pacheco and the 1626 Japan Voyage

The Harbor That Had Changed

The Macao to Nagasaki Silk Voyage of 1626 and the Port Pacheco Found

When Luís Paes Pacheco's six galliots rounded the headlands into Nagasaki harbor in the summer of 1626, he was looking at a city he thought he knew and had never actually seen.

He had bought the right to be there four years earlier. Around 1622, back in Macao, Pacheco had handed over a substantial sum to the City of Malacca — not for a piece of land, not for a building, but for a route: the rights to the Captaincy of the Japan Voyage, the Capitania-mór da Viagem do Japão, one of the most lucrative commercial privileges in the entire Portuguese Estado da Índia. The Crown habitually granted these captaincies to deserving colonial institutions, which in turn sold them to whoever could raise the capital. Pacheco was not gentry. He was a Macao-based widower in his early fifties who had spent a working life in the Asian trade and had finally accumulated enough silver to buy his way into the richest run in the sea.

The run he had bought into was the Nau do Trato — the Great Ship of Commerce. Or rather, by 1626, its smaller and more paranoid descendants. After the Madre de Deus catastrophe of 1610, when the Captain-Major André Pessoa had blown up his own carrack in Nagasaki harbor rather than surrender her to Japanese forces, the Portuguese had stopped sending single floating fortresses and started sending flotillas of galliots — galeotas — faster, lower, and less conspicuously valuable. Pacheco's 1626 fleet was six of these, holds packed with the staples of the run: Chinese raw silk and fine silk textiles — damasks, taffetas, pelings — along with gold, musk, porcelain, lead, tin, and medicinal China-root and rhubarb. Back in the hold would come Japanese silver in quantities so vast that a single successful voyage could transform a merchant's standing for life, alongside copper, camphor, lacquered cabinets, folding screens, and the finest swords in the known world.

The arithmetic of the Macao–Nagasaki run was still, in 1626, a license to become fabulously rich.

What the arithmetic did not tell you was the rest of it. The city Pacheco sailed into was no longer the cosmopolitan port of his youth, when Jesuits in black robes had walked openly through streets they had helped to build, when the annual carrack had been greeted like a returning monarch, and when the relationship between Portugal and Japan had been measured in ducats rather than in decapitations. The Nagasaki of 1626 was something else entirely. It was the operational headquarters of the most sophisticated anti-Christian machine in the world, and Luís Paes Pacheco had just sailed six galliots into the middle of it.

He was about to have the worst voyage of his life. And the worst voyage of his life would turn out to be his second-worst.

The Man Who Bought the Voyage

Who Was Luís Paes Pacheco and How He Bought the Japan Captaincy

Pacheco had been born in 1572 in Kochi — Cochim, as the Portuguese called it — on the Malabar Coast of Portuguese India. Kochi in 1572 was a trading city in the second rank of the Portuguese Asian empire, overshadowed by Goa to the north but prosperous in its own right. It was a place where a boy could grow up watching ships come in from Malacca, from the Moluccas, from Macao, and where the names of distant ports were not abstractions but practical geography — the way an Italian child might know Naples or a Dutch child Amsterdam. Japan, for a boy in Kochi, was somewhere at the edge of the known world. It was also where the money came from.

By the 1620s, Pacheco had moved east to Macao. Widowed, wealthy enough to matter in the affairs of the city, he had done what successful Macanese merchants did: he had converted accumulated capital into a piece of the Japan trade. The Crown, perpetually broke and perpetually hopeful, used the Japan captaincies as a kind of colonial pension scheme — awarding the right to specific voyages to institutions like the fortress of Malacca or the city of São Tomé de Meliapor, which would then auction the rights to men who could afford them. It was an elegant system. It kept the fortresses funded, it kept the voyages sailing, and it kept the actual risk on the shoulders of the men who stood to make the money. The Crown lost nothing if the ship sank. The buyer lost everything.

In Pacheco's case, what he had bought was a delay fuse. Between his purchase of the captaincy around 1622 and his actual voyage in 1626, the political landscape of Japan had undergone one of the most violent transformations in its history. In 1622 the Great Martyrdom of Nagasaki had burned or beheaded fifty-five Christians on Nishizaka hill. In 1623 Tokugawa Hidetada had abdicated in favor of his son, and the son had marked his accession with the Great Edo Martyrdom — fifty Christians burned on the main road into the capital, followed by another thirty-seven weeks later. In 1624 the Spanish had been formally expelled from Japan. In 1626 the new governor of Nagasaki, Mizuno Kawachi-no-kami Morinobu, had been appointed to the post with an explicit mandate to escalate.

Pacheco had paid for his voyage in one world and was about to sail it in another.

There is no surviving record of what he thought as his galliots crossed the East China Sea in the summer of 1626. The sources are silent on the psychological question, perhaps because the psychological question would have seemed irrelevant to anyone who knew him. Merchants of Pacheco's generation had been raised to understand risk the way gamblers understand probability: as weather rather than as fate. You did not contemplate the Japan voyage. You sailed it, and you hoped, and if God willed otherwise you died having done your duty to your family and your creditors. The specific flavor of the risk — Dutch privateers, Chinese pirates, Tokugawa magistrates — mattered less than the arithmetic of the expected return.

The arithmetic still favored going. Until it didn't.

The Governor With a Mandate

Who Was Mizuno Kawachi-no-kami Morinobu, Governor of Nagasaki

The man waiting for Pacheco in Nagasaki was a bureaucratic innovator of the kind that produces revolutions by accident.

Mizuno Kawachi-no-kami Morinobu — to use his formal title and name — had been appointed bugyō of Nagasaki with a specific brief from the shogunate of Tokugawa Iemitsu. The brief was to solve a problem that his predecessors had failed to solve. The problem was that killing Christians was not working.

The arithmetic of the previous decade had been stark and embarrassing. Ieyasu had issued the 1614 Expulsion Edict. Hidetada had extended the death penalty to families and neighbors. The Great Martyrdoms had burned priests and laymen in public squares. And yet the underground Church had not collapsed. If anything, it had hardened. The fifty-two burned alive in Kyoto in 1619 had not deterred the faithful — they had inspired them. The fifty-five on Nishizaka in 1622 had produced not apostasy but defiance, a crowd of thirty thousand singing hymns while the condemned died in silence. The Tokugawa state was producing martyrs. Martyrs were proving to be bad for business.

Mizuno had been appointed to change that.

His instruments were two. The first was the fumi-e — the picture-treading test. Suspected Christians would be required to step on a copper or wooden image of Christ or the Virgin Mary. The theological elegance of the device was that refusal was proof of faith and stepping was proof of apostasy; there was no third option, and the act of trampling the image produced in the believer a trauma that recruiters of informers could exploit for years afterwards. The second was the boiling springs at Mount Unzen, a sulfurous range of hot springs in western Kyushu whose scalding waters could be ladled over a tied and naked victim repeatedly over hours or days. Unzen did not kill quickly. It was designed not to. The point was to break the believer, not to martyr them — to produce korobi, the fallen Christian, who would then walk home and tell the neighbors what they had done.

These two innovations — the fumi-e and Unzen — were Mizuno's contribution to the vocabulary of religious persecution. They would be imitated across Japan for the next two centuries. And they were being introduced, operationally, in the same months that Luís Paes Pacheco was sailing toward Nagasaki with a hold full of Chinese silk.

But Mizuno had also been thinking about the Portuguese.

The underground Church in Japan was not self-sustaining. It was fed — financially, logistically, spiritually — by a clandestine support network stretching back to Macao. The Jesuits still headquartered in the Portuguese enclave were sending priests into Japan in disguise, hidden in cargo holds, smuggled past the bugyō's inspectors by sympathetic merchants. They were sending letters. They were sending silver. They were acting as bankers, as couriers, as intelligence agents. And the Portuguese merchants of Macao — not just the Jesuits, but the lay merchants with names like Pacheco — were complicit at every level. Some of them were carrying correspondence. Some were managing funds for Japanese Christians who dared not hold silver in their own names. Some were acting as proxies for priests who could no longer trade openly but still needed to live.

Mizuno had studied the problem and concluded that the solution was not to kill more Christians. It was to cut the pipeline.

The instrument he designed for cutting it was the faxaques.

The Word for a Small Boat

What Were the Faxaques of 1626 and Their Four Prohibitions

Faxaques is what the Portuguese called a Japanese okite, written 掟, a body of binding rules, and is, in Boxer's suggestion, a mangling of hashike, which originally meant a small boat or sampan. How exactly the word traveled from "sampan" to "set of binding regulations" is one of those etymological journeys that linguists trace with some pleasure and the rest of us accept as the ordinary logic of port cities, where words are cargo and meanings change with tide.

What matters is what the word came to mean in Macao. By the 1620s, the faxaques were a formal category of edict — a set of prohibitions or regulations handed down by the Tokugawa authorities and imposed on the Portuguese mercantile community as a condition of continued trade. The faxaques of 1626 were not the first such document and would not be the last, but they were the most consequential. They were the first set to formally demand that the Portuguese abandon the Catholic mission in Japan under their own signatures.

The document contained four prohibitions, each of them aimed at a specific artery of the underground Church's support system. The four survive in a recitation preserved in Madrid, where forty-one returnees from Japan, in January 1635, recited the rules in force from the year Luís Paes Pacheco was Captain-Major down to their own day. The Portuguese, upon receiving the document, were required to formally accept it, to sign it, and to swear an oath of obedience. Pacheco — as Captain-Major of the 1626 voyage — was one of the principal signatories. Alongside him signed the Macao People's Factor, João Vaz Preto, and a number of other private Portuguese merchants operating in Nagasaki that season. They signed in the presence of Mizuno's officials, under conditions of intense pressure, with the unspoken but perfectly legible threat that refusal would mean the end of their voyage, their cargo, their profits, and probably their lives.

They signed.

The first prohibition forbade the Portuguese from handling silver belonging to Japanese Christians. This was a direct strike at the underground Church's capital base. Wealthy Japanese converts had been placing their silver with Macao merchants — either on deposit, or through maritime loan contracts (respondência), or as funds earmarked for the support of hidden priests. The faxaques made every such transaction a criminal act.

The second prohibition forbade the smuggling of supplies — letters, silver, chits, any physical goods — to the priests hiding in Japan. This closed the logistical lifeline. The underground missionaries had been surviving on a trickle of support smuggled in through sympathetic merchants. The faxaques made the merchants legally accountable for what they carried.

The third prohibition extended in the other direction: priests resident in Macao were entirely forbidden from sending letters, chits, or supplies to anyone in Japan, including Japanese Christians. They were also forbidden from engaging in "even the smallest matter concerned with trade and intercourse." This severed the command link between the Jesuit headquarters in Macao and the mission in Japan. The underground Church would, the logic ran, wither.

The fourth prohibition closed the last loophole: the Portuguese merchants were prohibited from conducting any business, trade, or transactions on behalf of the missionaries. Priests could no longer use lay merchants as proxies. The economic activity that had kept the Jesuits operationally solvent was criminalized at every level.

The four prohibitions, read together, amounted to a strangulation order. Mizuno had not asked the Portuguese to persecute Christians. He had asked them to stop sustaining them. The practical effect was identical, and the moral burden was transferred from the Tokugawa state to the Macao merchant community, which would now have to decide, season after season, how much of the mission it was willing to let die in order to keep its silk fleet running.

Pacheco, signing in the summer of 1626, was among the first to make that decision on behalf of the city. He was not the last.

The Price of a Signature

The Penalties for Breaking the Faxaques and the 1639 Exclusion Edict

There is a particular indignity in being coerced into signing a document that you understand perfectly well you will be hanged for violating later. The drafters of the faxaques had ensured that the penalties for breach were both individual and collective — a design feature that made every Macao merchant responsible not only for his own conduct but for the conduct of his colleagues.

Individual penalty was simple: death. Anyone caught violating the faxaques would be executed, and the sources note that execution in Tokugawa Nagasaki was rarely quick. The best-documented case came eight years later. In 1634, a Macao merchant named Jerónimo Luís Gouveia was caught in Nagasaki carrying letters from a Japanese priest in Macao — Paulo dos Santos — addressed to Christians in Nagasaki for the purpose of collecting debts. The letters were mundane. The violation was fatal. Gouveia was imprisoned, interrogated, and in October 1635 burned at the stake. He was carrying correspondence. He was not carrying a priest, or silver, or contraband of any significance. The letters were about debts. He burned anyway.

Collective penalty was more sophisticated and, for the Macao authorities, more terrifying. The Japanese government made it explicitly clear that any infraction by any Portuguese would be treated as an infraction by the entire city of Macao. One smuggled priest, one intercepted letter, one unauthorized transaction — and the shogunate would decree that all trade with Macao should cease. For a city whose entire economy was built on the Nagasaki run, this was a death sentence dressed up as a commercial regulation. The Macao Senate, confronted with this calculus, began taking measures that its own citizens found distasteful. Offending priests were exiled — to Malacca, to Cochinchina — not because Macao disapproved of their mission but because Macao could not afford to be associated with them. The city, in effect, began doing the Tokugawa's work for the Tokugawa, out of pure economic self-preservation.

And in the end — though no one in Nagasaki harbor in 1626 could have known this — the final penalty would be neither individual execution nor commercial embargo, but annihilation. The 1639 Kareuta Oshioki no Hōsho, the final exclusion edict, would decree that any Portuguese ship entering Japanese waters in violation of the sequence of prohibitions that had begun with the faxaques was to be burned, and every sailor, merchant, and passenger aboard was to be beheaded. The crescendo took thirteen years, and the faxaques were the first movement.

Pacheco signed what he signed in the summer of 1626 because the alternative was losing six galliots full of silk. He could not have known that he was signing the opening clause of a legal instrument that would, fourteen years later, kill him.

The Deportations

The 1626 Deportation of Japanese Christians and Eurasian Children to Macao

The faxaques were not the only humiliation of the 1626 voyage. Alongside the forced signature, Pacheco was ordered to perform a service that may have struck him, at the time, as the worst indignity of the season.

He was ordered to deport Christians.

The specific category of persons to be deported comprised Japanese converts and individuals of mixed Portuguese-Japanese descent — the Eurasian children who had been produced, across the decades of the trade, by Portuguese fathers and Japanese mothers. Mizuno's government had decided that these people were a contamination. They were to be loaded onto the departing Portuguese galliots and shipped out of Japan, ostensibly all the way to Portuguese India, though the sources note — with the faint sigh of people who have watched cargo manifests tell their own stories — that the majority never traveled further than Macao. The Eurasian children, in particular, ended up in the city that had produced their fathers, raised in a Portuguese-speaking community that was recognizably their own, but permanently severed from the Japanese world their mothers had belonged to. It was a policy of cultural amputation, carried out with the logistics of ordinary shipping.

The galliots that had arrived in Nagasaki carrying silk departed carrying people.

One tries, at this distance, to imagine what this looked like on deck. Children who had never seen the ocean. Japanese Christian mothers holding their half-Portuguese sons. Old men who had served Jesuit missions. All of them standing on the cramped deck of a Portuguese galliot commanded by a man who had just signed a document pledging to cut off precisely the community these passengers represented. Pacheco, the instrument of their exile, was also a man from Kochi — a Portuguese born in India to a world of colonial mestizaje — who would have recognized in the faces of the children something like the demographic reality of his own hometown.

The sources do not record what he thought. The sources rarely do. The deportations proceeded.

The Long Coda

How Luís Paes Pacheco Died with the 1640 Macao Embassy at Nagasaki

Pacheco sailed home to Macao in the autumn of 1626 with his cargo converted into silver, his oath sworn, and his passenger list larger than he had intended. The voyage was, on its balance sheet, a success — the silk had sold, the silver had come aboard, the fleet had returned intact. On every other measure, it was an inflection point. Macao now operated, formally, under a Japanese edict that criminalized the Jesuit mission. The city would spend the next thirteen years trying to preserve the trade by strangling its own missionaries, and the Tokugawa state would spend those same years concluding, correctly, that the strangulation was insufficient.

Pacheco himself returned to Macao and resumed the merchant life. He was not yet sixty. He had money. He was respected. He continued to occupy the standing in the city that his 1626 captaincy had cemented. But the world around him was contracting. The Shimabara Rebellion of 1637–38 — a peasant uprising in western Kyushu that the shogunate would frame, retrospectively and for its own reasons, as a Christian uprising — produced the final break. In 1639 came the edict Pacheco had helped to foreshadow: complete expulsion of the Portuguese, any arriving ship to be burned, every crew member to be beheaded. The Sakoku door slammed shut.

Macao was economically gutted. The Senate, desperate, began preparing an embassy — a last-ditch diplomatic mission to plead with the shogunate for the restoration of trade. The chosen ambassador, the man whose age, prestige, experience of Japan, and demonstrated willingness to sign difficult documents recommended him to the Senate, was Luís Paes Pacheco. He was 68 years old.

The 1640 Macao Embassy is covered in detail elsewhere on this site. The short version is that Pacheco sailed into Nagasaki harbor a second time, in his gala dress, carrying a petition, an offer of debt repayment, and the hopes of a dying colonial city. The shogunate of Iemitsu responded by arresting the delegation, confining them at Dejima for a month, and then reading them a death sentence in the formal voice of imperial decree. On Nishizaka hill — the same Martyrs' Mount where the fifty-five had burned in 1622, the same hill where the twenty-six had been crucified in 1597 — Luís Paes Pacheco knelt with sixty members of his delegation and was beheaded by a Japanese executioner trained, like all Japanese executioners of his profession, for administrative efficiency.

It was August 1640. Pacheco had been Captain-Major of the 1626 voyage. He had signed the faxaques. He had shipped the Eurasian children home to Macao. He had spent fourteen years trying to keep a trade alive under conditions designed to make it impossible. He had sailed back to Nagasaki with an offer of accommodation, and the shogunate had declined the accommodation, courteously at first and then very finally, in the oldest language the Tokugawa state knew how to speak.

The head of the Captain-Major of 1626 was placed on a spike above the hill.

What the Signature Meant

Why the 1626 Faxaques Changed the Macao Japan Trade

There is a tendency, looking back at the long decline of the Portuguese trade with Japan, to treat it as a single process — a slow tightening of the screws, undifferentiated, inevitable, with a clear beginning in 1614 and a clear end in 1639. The tendency is not entirely wrong, but it elides something important about the actual mechanics of historical change. Decline is not a smooth curve. It is a sequence of specific transactions, each of them executed by named individuals in identifiable places on recorded dates, and each of them extracting a specific concession that could not be extracted from the same people a year earlier.

The faxaques of 1626 were one of these transactions. They marked the moment at which the Portuguese merchant community of Macao — the men who had built the trade, who had invested their fortunes in it, who had treated the Japan run as the structural foundation of their city — were compelled to accept, under signature and oath, that the Tokugawa state had the authority to dictate the terms of their involvement with Japanese Christianity. Before 1626, Macao could publicly pretend that the mission and the trade were separable concerns, that the Jesuits and the merchants operated in different spheres, that the silk ships were commercial vessels whose occasional carriage of priests was a matter of private conscience. After 1626, Macao could no longer pretend this. The city had signed a document that said otherwise. Every subsequent violation — Gouveia's letters, the smuggled priests, the discreet deposits of silver — would be understood by both sides as a breach of an explicit legal instrument.

Mizuno had, in other words, changed the shape of the problem. He had moved the Portuguese from the defendant's seat to the defendant's docket. The underground Church still existed. The smuggling still happened. The martyrs were still being made. But the diplomatic architecture that had protected these activities — the Portuguese ability to claim that the Catholic mission was not their concern — had been demolished by the signing of a single document in the summer of 1626.

For Luís Paes Pacheco, the signing was the price of a good voyage. For the Tokugawa state, it was a structural alteration of the Luso-Japanese relationship. For the Jesuit mission in Japan, it was the beginning of the last chapter. The priests would hold out, most of them, for another decade or so. The Kakure Kirishitan — the Hidden Christians of Kyushu — would hold out for two centuries more. But the formal Catholic Church in Japan had been given an execution date, and the signatures on the faxaques were among the witnesses to its sentence.

Pacheco died on Nishizaka hill in 1640 knowing, one imagines, something about what his 1626 captaincy had set in motion. Whether he felt responsible for it, or merely used by it, is a question the sources do not answer. He had been a merchant. He had bought a voyage. He had sailed it through a political storm that no one in the Macao of 1622 could have fully anticipated, and when a Japanese bugyō had demanded his signature, he had weighed the alternatives and provided it. Fourteen years later, the state that had extracted the signature had extracted his life.

The mission of the royal embassy under Siqueira de Souza in 1644–47 would be ignored into departure, and the final São Paulo voyage of 1685 would bring a last Portuguese keel into a Japanese harbor four decades after Pacheco's death, only to be told, politely, that the door remained closed.

The door had been closing for a long time. The signature of 1626 was one of the specific hands that had pushed it.

Sources & Further Reading

Boxer, C.R. The Great Ship from Amacon: Annals of Macao and the Old Japan Trade, 1555–1640. Centro de Estudos Históricos Ultramarinos, 1959. The foundational study of the Macao–Nagasaki trade, with detailed treatment of the captaincy system, the galliot flotillas of the 1620s and 1630s, and the financial mechanics that Pacheco operated within.

Boxer, C.R. The Christian Century in Japan, 1549–1650. University of California Press, 1951. Indispensable for the broader religious and political context of the 1626 voyage, including Mizuno Kawachi-no-kami's role in the escalation of the persecution.

Cooper, Michael. They Came to Japan: An Anthology of European Reports on Japan, 1543–1640. University of Michigan Press, 1965. Contains translated extracts from Portuguese and Jesuit sources describing the conditions of the Nagasaki trade under the faxaques regime.

Elison, George. Deus Destroyed: The Image of Christianity in Early Modern Japan. Harvard University Press, 1973. The authoritative account of the ideological framework of the anti-Christian persecution, with particular attention to the institutional development of the fumi-e, the terauke temple registration system, and the weaponisation of commerce against the mission.

Hesselink, Reinier H. The Dream of Christian Nagasaki: World Trade and the Clash of Cultures, 1560–1640. McFarland, 2016. Essential for the specific history of Nagasaki under Mizuno's administration, including the introduction of the Unzen tortures and the fumi-e test, and the experience of the Portuguese merchant community during the 1620s.

Laver, Michael S. The Sakoku Edicts and the Politics of Tokugawa Hegemony. Cambria Press, 2011. Traces the sequence of anti-Christian and anti-foreign directives from the 1614 Expulsion Edict through the 1639 Exclusion, situating the faxaques within the broader legislative escalation.

Massarella, Derek. A World Elsewhere: Europe's Encounter with Japan in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries. Yale University Press, 1990. A comparative study of the European trading presences in Japan, including the Portuguese response to the tightening regulatory regime of the 1620s.

Oka, Mihoko. The Namban Trade: Merchants and Missionaries in 16th and 17th Century Japan. Brill, 2021. Prints, in English, the four articles of the 1626 okite — the faxaques that Pacheco and the Factor João Vaz Preto signed for — from the Madrid manuscript of the Paulo dos Santos dossier.

Oka, Mihoko. 「日本関係マカオ史料にみる寛永十一年のパウロ・ドス・サントス事件」 [The Paulo dos Santos Affair of Kan'ei 11 in the Macao Sources Relating to Japan]. 東京大学史料編纂所研究紀要 15 (2005): 75–94. Prints the same four-article faxaque from Biblioteca de la Real Academia de la Historia, Madrid, Legajo 9-7239(2), f. 421, and proposes the okite of Kan'ei 3 as the origin of the 1639 exclusion edict.

Pagès, Léon. Histoire de la religion chrétienne au Japon depuis 1598 jusqu'à 1651. Charles Douniol, 1869–70. The nineteenth-century French compilation remains a primary reference for the detailed chronology of the persecution, including the execution of Jerónimo Luís Gouveia in 1635.

Ribeiro, Madalena. "The Japanese Diaspora in the Seventeenth Century: According to Jesuit Sources." Bulletin of Portuguese/Japanese Studies 3 (2001): 53–83. On the Japanese and Eurasian communities deported from Nagasaki in the 1620s and their fate in Macao and beyond.

Souza, George Bryan. The Survival of Empire: Portuguese Trade and Society in China and the South China Sea, 1630–1754. Cambridge University Press, 1986. Covers the economic consequences of the Japan trade's decline for Macao and the city's subsequent commercial adaptations.

Valignano, Alessandro, and the Jesuit correspondence from Japan. Various letters and reports preserved in the Ajuda Library, Lisbon, and the Biblioteca da Ajuda's Jesuítas na Ásia collection, document the operational impact of the faxaques on the underground mission.

Videira Pires, Benjamim, S.J. A Viagem de Comércio Macau-Manila nos Séculos XVI a XIX. Instituto Cultural de Macau, 1994. A Portuguese-language study of Macao's trading networks that contextualises the Japan captaincy within the broader Estado da Índia system.