Born c. 1510,
Monte-mor-o-Velho, Portugal
Died July 8, 1583,
Near Lisbon, Portugal

Fernão Mendes Pinto’s action-packed life of adventure in the Far East is stranger and more interesting than fiction. The first European to visit Japan, he claimed to have been shipwrecked, captured, and sold into slavery at least 16 times. He was called the “Prince of Liars” because his account of his travels, Peregrinação (“Wanderings”), was so widely disbelieved by his contemporaries. Yet scholars have concluded that the book is factual, and it gives modern readers a glimpse of what sixteenth-century Asia looked like to a European. This daring man, who barely escaped death on many occasions, lived to the age of 74.

Pinto was born in the Portuguese town of Monte-mor-o-Velho not far from the ancient university city of Coimbra. At the...