Gaspar da Cruz

[2] Gaspar da Cruz embarked for Portuguese India under the orders of Friar Diogo Bermudes, with the purpose of founding a Dominican mission in the East.

[4] Cruz's book, Tratado das cousas da China (Treatise on things Chinese) was published by André de Burgos, of Évora, in 1569.

The full title, in the original orthography, was Tractado em que se cõtam muito por estẽso as cousas da China.

[5] Nonetheless, Cruz' book, at least indirectly, played a key role in forming the European view of China in the sixteenth century, alongside the earlier and shorter account by Galeote Pereira (1565).

[5] While Escalante's and Mendoza's works were translated into many European languages within a few years after the appearance of the Spanish original (the English versions were published in 1579 and 1588, respectively), Cruz' text only appeared in English in 1625, in Samuel Purchas' Purchas his Pilgrimes, and even then only in an abridged form, as A Treatise of China and the adjoining regions, written by Gaspar da Cruz a Dominican Friar, and dedicated to Sebastian, King of Portugal: here abbreviated.

[8] By this time his report had been superseded not only by Mendoza's celebrated treatise, but also by the much more informed work of Matteo Ricci and Nicolas Trigault, De Christiana expeditione apud Sinas (Latin 1616; English abridgment, in the same Purchas' collection of 1625).

[10] Gaspar da Cruz was aware of this trade, and, as his book (Chapter XV) implies, he had heard of the Portuguese slavers' attempts to justify their actions by claiming that they had been merely buying children that already were slaves while in China.

Because such an officer would have done what he did for the sake of the bribe...[11]In the first paragraph of the last chapter (XXIX) of his book Cruz severely criticized "a filthy abomination, which is that they are so given to the accursed sin of unnatural vice, which is in no way reproved among them.