Francis reached Mozambique, in south-eastern Africa, in September 1541. It was here for the first time that he came across the slave trade. One of his fellow travellers on board the Santiago was Admiral Martin de Sousa, the new governor of the Indies, who decided to change ships and hasten on to Goa, the smallest state on the west coast of India. He insisted on taking the holy man Francis with him as a sort of insurance policy, while Xavier’s two companions would follow on later. Francis begged that his two companions might travel with him, but in vain.
As Francis and de Sousa made their way down to where their new ship waited, a slave market was in progress on the beach. White-robed merchants haggled with traders for the terrified human merchandise being paraded by their sellers, and pummelled by their buyers, before being sold. As they passed this revolting sight, Francis asked one of the Admiral’s secretaries what the price was for one of the slaves. As they boarded the ship, the secretary approached Francis, ‘Father Francis, I found out the price of that slave: thirty pieces of silver.’ ‘Thirty pieces of silver,’ Xavier repeated, ‘For neither more nor less Judas sold Jesus our Lord.’
Later, the Admiral told Francis that the top price for a slave was always thirty pieces of silver. As he put it, ‘The Christians among the buyers count it a crime to pay any higher price than that paid for our Redeemer.’ Francis was soon to discover that many of the so-called Christians in that part of the world were so only in name.
Francis reached Goa on May 6th 1542, thirteen months after he had left Lisbon. He spent five months there, and in addition to preaching to the Portuguese, visiting prisons, and ministering to and celebrating Mass for lepers, he tried to learn Tamil. His first missionary endeavour was among the Paravas, the pearl fishers who lived on India’s south eastern shore above Cape Comorin. The Paravas, some twenty thousand, had been converted between 1535 and 1537, but had been without a priest for years.
For years, the Portuguese had preyed on the pearl fishers, exploiting their ignorance of the value of their catch to the western world, shamefully underpaying the divers, and finally resorting to wholesale robbery with violence.
The pearl-fishing season began in March. The catamarans, rafts made of three logs lashed together, were loaded with divers, with a rower to paddle the craft through the surf. A whole fleet of them, sometimes fifty or seventy, set out for the oyster banks, leaving the coast at midnight to reach the shoals by sunrise. Then the diving commenced. The divers worked in pairs, one going down while the other worked the signal ropes. Usually the men worked the ropes while young boys dived. A ‘sink stone’ was let down at the end of the rope, and when the diver was coming up, the man above pulled up the ‘sink stone’ first, then the oyster crate, and finally the diver himself. The divers carried ironwood spikes to beat off sharks, and a snake-charmer went out on every catamaran to lure away the sharks from the diving beds. It was a hard and exhausting life, and the divers were short-lived.
When Francis arrived in Cape Comorin, he stood on an unknown shore, surrounded by people speaking a strange language. He suddenly felt an awful sense of loneliness. Here he was a scholar among an illiterate people, a Christian among pagan tribes, a European in the East, almost deaf and dumb amid this babble of strange sounds. He was faced with an impossible task. What could one man, with his human limitations, hope to achieve when everything seemed arrayed against him? Nothing! A tempting, inner voice spoke to him. ‘Alone: far from friends, far from help. Unable to make yourself understood. Alone, and oppressed with loneliness, and no help to be found on earth or in that strange mirage called heaven.’ Alone, yes. But one man, helped by God, could do a lot.
That first year, at the pearl fisheries, was very difficult. Xavier lived off rice, flavoured with pepper. There were mosquito-ridden nights, snakes, bats and monkeys to contend with, and the dreadful labour of mastering a language where the slightest inflection of voice or change in the stressing of a syllable gave words a meaning different from that intended. But Francis persisted. One incident reveals how Francis gradually won over some of the people to Christianity. A woman lay dying in childbirth. When spells and incantations, and sacrifices to the goddess Kali had failed, when the woman had been pronounced beyond help by the spell-casters and midwives, when even the mourning rites had begun, Francis was summoned. He gave a short instruction to the woman, baptized her and she had a safe delivery. All her household and neighbourhood, hearing of the miracle, asked for instruction in the faith, and were eventually baptized.
But everything did not go well for Francis and his little Christian community. Hordes of well-armed brigands descended on the fisheries, plundering each village as they came to it, slaughtering such inhabitants as had not fled to inaccessible rocky caves and to islands off the coast.
Francis later wrote: ‘I walked down the coast to the Cape. I visited the unhappy Christian survivors of the invasion. Such misery I have never witnessed. The fields were littered with the dying and the mutilated corpses of many of our converts. On all sides the wounded cry out for attention and relief; aged men, spent with hunger, crawl along searching in vain for food and shelter; mothers give birth on the public roads…If you saw the sights I daily witness, your heart would be wrung.’
Francis also wrote, ‘The Europeans enrich themselves by robbery disguised under many pretexts – robbery done with impunity, with no hesitation and in full and unashamed view of all.’ Xavier even wrote to the King of Portugal to protest; but in vain.