35053668-Empire-of-the-Soul-Paul-William-Roberts

108
EMPIRE OF THE SOUL
regarded them as heathens, pagans lucky enough to have received
God’s mercy and been delivered up to those capable of making
Christians out of them. The Goans of the time saw the best side of
Xavier in what little of him they saw.
They knew nothing of the part he had played in Portugal’s
Inquisition; nor did they know he had pleaded with his monarch,
Dom Joao, to ‘order the establishment of the Inquisition in Goa.’
Most of Xavier’s mass conversions – during which he
Christianised entire villages in a stroke – were performed in Kerala.
It’s possible he never carried out a single conversion while he was
in Goa, spending his time there in the hospital and visiting the
city’s three prisons, which he described as ‘the filthiest, foulest dens
on earth.’ He used to ring a little bell as he walked the streets,
gathering around him children, workers, and slaves to instruct them
in basics of the faith. Consequently, the memory he left behind was
saintly indeed: a ‘flame of faith’ befriending the friendless and
bringing hope to the hopeless.
But Xavier could not have spent more than six months in Goa
during the entire ten years he lived in the East. Arriving in May
1542, he had moved to Kerala by that September. The following
year, he returned for a few weeks before setting off on a conversion
spree that eventually took him, via Malacca and the Moluccas, as
far as Japan. Nine years later, he returned to Goa, spending less than
two months there before heading off for China – the land he felt he
was destined to convert. His god clearly had other plans. Xavier
died on November 25, 1552, on the island of San-chuan, near the
mouth of the Canton River, outside the closed gates of the Middle
Kingdom. He was accompanied only by a young Chinese convert
who had adopted the name Antonio de Santa Fe.
This devoted servant solicited help to bury his master, deciding
‘to pack the coffin with lime . . . as it would consume the flesh and
leave only the dry bones,’ in case someone decided they should be
interred elsewhere. Either the lime was highly diluted or the coffin
packed with another substance altogether, for when one of Xavier’s
dearest friends made the arduous journey to the island five months
later in order to look upon the Jesuit father’s face one last time, he
found, after digging up the coffin, that the body was wonderfully