In the early-modern world, missionaries – more so even than sailors or long-distance merchants – conveyed exotic information and effected cultural contact. This chapter's treatment of reports and letters as cargo may not be surprising in an age that recognizes the commodification of information, nor did contemporaries doubt the potential of the written word. Officials of the Spanish and Portuguese crowns routinely considered information from the colonies state secrets. The Fugger firm of Augsburg required their overseas agents to supplement business letters with avvisi, gossip about and commentary on local conditions and events. A late seventeenth-century saying from Portuguese India saw less danger in “the point of an Arab's sword” than in “the nib of a Jesuit's pen.”