What I call the Jesuit “early modernity” is more or less an adapted translation of a concept recently used in France by historians of science who work on Jesuit materials. They call it in French “la première moderne” or “the first modernity” in order to talk about the precocious scientific interests generated within the Jesuit networks of knowledge. The “early” modernity should be taken here as an extension of the French concept in order to encompass a variety of innovative social and cultural practice.

“It is extraordinary, and almost like a dream”, wrote a Jesuit priest in Macau in 1589, “that a man can be carried for six whole months in a ship, where the accommodations cannot in any way be sufficient and spacious, and many other difficulties must be endured.” Imagining a conversation with the group of Japanese youths who were sent to Europe as the representatives of the “Kings of Japan”, the author made a blunt assessment of the conditions of the passage to India aboard the carracks that plied the Carreira da Índia: Being trapped on ship for so long was tantamount “to being shut in a prison”. Yet, as he contended, “certainly no one who was offered a house, even a regally appointed one, to live shut inside for six months, could stay detained or locked in for so long; much less on a ship replete with so many different kinds of inconveniences”. Anxious lest his readers misunderstand this verdict on the Cape Route, the Jesuit author qualified his judgment in the fictional reply to this assertion: “Indeed, the inconveniences on ship surpass even those of prison.”