Still, many aspects of the work can be verified, particularly through records of Pinto's service to the Portuguese crown and by his association with Jesuit missionaries.

Pinto eventually made his way to Setúbal, where he entered the service of Francisco de Faria, a knight of Santiago.

He remained there for four years and then joined the service of Jorge de Lencastre, a master of the Order of Santiago and an illegitimate son of King John II of Portugal.

On 5 September that year, he arrived in Diu, a fortified island and town northwest of Bombay (Portuguese since 1535 but under siege by Suleiman the Magnificent).

The mission was to deliver a message to Portuguese soldiers guarding the mother of "Prester John" (Emperor Dawit II of Ethiopia) in a mountain fortress.

Pinto threatened suicide and was sold to a Jewish merchant for about thirty ducats' worth of dates.

With the Jewish merchant, Pinto travelled the caravan route to Hormuz, a leading market town in the Persian Gulf.

He was made captain of the Fortress of Hormuz and the Portuguese king's special magistrate for Indian affairs.

Against his will, Pinto was transferred en route to a naval fleet bound for the Mughal port city of Debal (modern Karachi) near Thatta.

Pinto was sent to establish diplomatic contacts, particularly with small kingdoms allied with the Portuguese against the Muslims of northern Sumatra.

Pinto was shipwrecked, apprehended by the Chinese and sentenced to one year hard labour on the Great Wall of China.

Pinto and two companions jumped ship to a Chinese pirate junk and were shipwrecked onto the Japanese island of Tanegashima, south of Kyūshū.

It is widely accepted now, however, that several Portuguese traders, including António Mota and Francisco Zeimoto, visited Japan a year earlier.

In 1554, Pinto joined the Society of Jesus and donated a large sum of his trading wealth to the mission.

In a letter, Ōtomo Yoshishige, daimyō of Bungo, offered his conversion and requested Pinto return to Japan.

Pinto similarly was betrayed by a mercenary, captured by the Burmese and placed under the charge of the king's treasurer who took him to the kingdom of Calaminham.

He may have resorted to cannibalism before submitting to slavery in order to secure passage out of the swampy Java shore.

However, it documents the impact of the Asian civilizations on the Europeans and is a reasonable analysis of Portuguese action in the Orient (in comparison to Luís de Camões' Os Lusíadas).

Even so, Tiele admits Pinto's account cannot be disregarded because of the lack of alternative information about Javanese history during the time.

Maurice Collis holds the opinion that Pinto's accounts, while not entirely true, remain compatible with historical events.

[6] A high school in Almada, Portugal, built in 1965, was named in his honour and in 2011, a 2 euro coin was issued to mark the 500th anniversary of Pinto's birthday.