Heroic Leadership Read online

  There had to be a better way, and that's what Goes attempted to find-a better, safer, faster overland route for travel and communications within Asia, which would mean fewer colleagues lost at sea and years shaved from an arduous trip. And if there was a land route within Asia, perhaps a link could also be pioneered from Asia all the way back to Europe.

  The Jesuits had reason to believe that the route might already exist. Merchants who arrived at Akbar's court described their journeys to China along a "silk road." Their tales corroborated centuries-old reports that had tantalized European explorers and gave Goes a second reason for his mission: to find the great Cathay.

  Trying to find an elusive asset

  The Italian Marco Polo claimed to have visited in the 1200s a powerful, wealthy, and highly civilized empire in the East. When Christopher Columbus dropped anchor in the Caribbean in 1492, he was convinced that only a few more days of sailing separated him from this great kingdom. No such luck for Columbus, and no such luck for those who succeeded him on voyages of discovery. Indeed, as explorers slowly assembled the world jigsaw puzzle, a disconcerting problem arose: no Cathay-and fewer and fewer empty spaces on the world map. Mapmakers grasped at a handy solution. Few European explorers had been bold enough to leave behind the safety of coastal trading posts to venture far inland, so the Asian interior remained largely a mystery. No one quite knew, for example, where the Chinese kingdom ended and what countries-if any-might lie on the other side of China's Great Wall. European mapmakers took advantage of this question mark hanging over the Asian landmass and simply plopped Cathay into the unmapped, unexplored chunk of Asia north of India and northwest of China.

  The Jesuits had their own reasons for wanting to resolve the mystery of Cathay. Marco Polo had written of Christian communities in this kingdom, and now Jesuits in India were hearing descriptions of what sounded like Christian rituals from merchants who had traveled the Silk Road. If there were long-lost Christian communities somewhere in Asia, the Jesuits wanted to find them. Thus Goes was charged with a second objective: to find the great kingdom of Cathay, if it existed, and Cathay's lost Christian tribes, if they existed.

  Journeying into the unknown

  In the fall of 1602, Goes set off from Agra. His passport was a safe-conduct letter from Akbar, though Goes hadn't even reached the outskirts of the Mughal empire before finding independentminded territories for whom Akbar was "more a name than a reality."4 Goes, accompanied by a single guide, fell in with a fivehundred-person caravan. Snaking along narrow mountain trails and gorges, the caravan would have stretched out to quite some length-a motley jumble of camels, horses, merchants, and mercenaries bearing merchandise, food, and sleeping gear for the many nights spent in the open.

  To blend in with the other travelers, Goes dressed as a merchant, but of course his disguise fooled next to no one. As a European Christian, Goes was alternately a welcome curiosity and a blasphemous stranger in the remote mountain communities through which the caravan slowly wound its way. The king of Kashgar feted the foreigner and entertained himself with debates about Christianity and Islam. Farther on, the twelve-year-old king of Aksu, less interested in such lofty pursuits as religious debate, asked Goes to dance in the style of his native country. Goes obliged. Who can refuse a king?

  The journey must have been exhilarating, mortally terrifying, and breathtakingly beautiful. Goes almost certainly was the first European to travel the route in hundreds of years, if not the first ever, and no other European would pass that way again for another two centuries. The caravan wound through parts of what now forms India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Russia, and Mongolia. Two years into the journey, the caravan crossed the so-called roof of the world, where the Karakoram, Himalaya, and Hindu Kush mountain ranges collide to form the highest plateau on Earth. Goes had little opportunity for leisurely contemplation of the snowcapped peaks topping out above twenty-three thousand feet that later generations would pridefully call Lenin Peak and Stalin Peak (which revisionists later rechristened Communism Peak). But there was little time for sightseeing; rather, Goes was preoccupied with the sheer struggle to survive while trudging through snowy passes at altitudes that sometimes reached eighteen thousand feet. He reported that at least five of their packhorses "perished through the intense cold and the entire lack of fuel together with the uncongenial state of the atmosphere, which made it almost impossible for the animals to breathe."5 Intense cold, no fuel, and air too thin for the horses to breathe: how did the human travelers survive? Latter-day expeditions struggle with conditions on the great Asian peaks despite the high-tech accouterments of modern mountaineering: canned oxygen and space-age fabrics and freezedried high-protein foods. But Goes and his companions relied on distinctly low-tech, centuries-old remedies for coping with cold and high altitudes: eating dried apples and onions and rubbing garlic on the gums of their horses.

  Those who survived the climb up the mountains wound their way down the other side to the Tarim Basin, so barren and remote even centuries later that the Chinese government regarded it the ideal landscape for a nuclear testing program. From three miles above sea level, the Silk Road plunged down to hundreds of feet below sea level. Caravans left bitter mountain cold for equally oppressive desert heat; sandstorms replaced snowstorms, and the and ice snow gave way to waterless desert. All but the most foolhardy traveled the desert terrain in large groups and only at night. Tartar raiding parties enjoyed free rein to swoop down on passing caravans. Goes matter-of-factly reported the frequent result of these attacks: "One often comes across the dead bodies of Mohammedans who have attempted the journey unaccompa- nied."6

  Goes survived the desert, just as he had survived the mountains and the whole grueling three-thousand-mile trek. A journey anticipated to take six months had stretched on for nearly four years.

  Goes survived the desert, just as he had survived the mountains and the whole grueling three-thousand-mile trek. A journey anticipated to take six months had stretched on for nearly four years. Soon into his journey it became more than clear to him that the overland route was, if anything, even more treacherous than the sea journey. He left this understated, stoic assessment for his Jesuit superiors: "The journey is very long, full of difficulties and dangers. No one from the Society [of Jesus] should ever attempt to repeat it."7

  Redefining the success or failure of a leader

  Goes survived the worst of the journey only to die a thousand miles short of Beijing. He never found the kingdom of Cathay. Nor did he find the hoped-for shortcut from India to China.

  Appearances sometimes deceive. Goes may have died broke and more or less alone, but he was not a failure.

  Appearances sometimes deceive. Goes may have died broke and more or less alone, but he was not a failure. Though the romantic notion of Cathay continued to haunt a few die-hard explorers, Goes had essentially resolved the vexing historical question of Cathay's location by proving what some of his Jesuit colleagues had begun to suspect: China was Cathay. There was no other great kingdom; there were no lost Christian tribes. If Marco Polo made the journey he claimed to have made (and some recent scholars have questioned this), the great empire he called Cathay was the same empire that sixteenth-century Europeans were calling China. Instead of dissipating their energies on the hunt for some mythical empire, Goes's colleagues could now focus their full efforts on two empires that really did exist: India and China.

  Goes also settled speculation about a more efficient route between the two countries. That didn't exist either, and it wouldn't until centuries later, when technological advances allowed for a faster, safer land route.

  Goes's story is not well known, even to Jesuits. There is at least one obvious reason why this is: he left behind a scanty historical record, and the few supposed facts concerning his life sometimes conflict. But there's another reason as well. History readily celebrates those who literally put places on the map-Columbus, Hudson, even Goes's Jesuit colleague Jacques Marquette, who navigated the Upper Mississippi
River. But there's only a quick slide into oblivion for those who came away empty, or those like Goes who removed places like Cathay from the map. The difference is completely understandable in one way and curious in another. Columbus found something, all right, but not what he was looking for. And what these early explorers discovered-or didn't-was often a result of chance and luck. The measure of their personal greatness is less what they found at journey's end and more the depth of human character that carried them along the way: their imagination, will, perseverance, courage, resourcefulness, and willingness to bear the risk of failure.

  The measure of their personal greatness is less what they found at journey's end and more the depth of human character that carried them along the way: their imagination, will, perseverance, courage, resourcefulness, and willingness to bear the risk of failure.

  These traits have often marked those explorers who found "what's out there." But they have also marked lesser-sung explorers like Goes who discovered what's not out there, just as they have marked unheralded medical researchers whose failed efforts pointed the path toward medical solutions, as well as countless other scientists, inventors, philosophers, and mathematicians who have contributed similarly in their own fields. Goes's story redefines leadership success by illustrating how one need not make a big, visible, self-aggrandizing "win" to be successful; sometimes success comes in the form of a contribution that helps the team to win. In Goes's case, leadership was proven by something as unremarkable-yet arduous-as exploring a blind alley so that future colleagues wouldn't have to.

  Goes died all but alone in a remote Chinese outpost. No Jesuit colleagues had accompanied him on his journey, and none tended him at his death. So how did even the few details of his historic journey ever become known?

  Every once in a while the postal service surprises you. This was one of those times. Once Goes's trading caravan finally reached Xuzhou, he entrusted merchants bound for Beijing with letters addressed to a Matteo Ricci. The odds of his letter reaching this Ricci were slim: Goes had no address for Ricci, nor was he capable of addressing his letter with Chinese characters; more than a thousand miles still lay between Goes and Beijing; and his postman was a merchant trader who might become wealthy trading his goods in the capital but stood to gain absolutely nothing by tracking down this Ricci.

  In Goes's case, leadership was proven by something as unremarkable-yet arduous-as exploring a blind alley so that future colleagues wouldn't have to.

  But the odds were not even that good. Strictly speaking, there was no one named Matteo Ricci in Beijing at the time. The Italian Jesuit Goes knew as Matteo Ricci was known in China by another name: Li Ma-tou.

  However unlikely, the letter reached Ricci. And perhaps it's not so extraordinary that it did. The roman script of the letter would have been indecipherable to Beijing residents, but it would have pointed to a non-Chinese as the intended recipient. And there was only one westerner legally residing in Beijing at the time, together with a handful of his colleagues. So the letter perhaps naturally found its way into Ricci's hands, and he immediately dispatched a young Chinese candidate for Jesuit membership to rendezvous with Goes in Xuzhou. The young man arrived barely in time to see Goes die and to retrieve a few scraps from his diary. He returned to Beijing with the diary accounts and in the company of the servant who had traveled with Goes throughout his trek.

  THE LINGUIST, MAPMAKER, PHILOSOPHER, AND MULTIGULTURALIST

  Matteo Ricci had been on a journey of his own. Though less physically taxing than Goes's passage through three-mile-high mountain passes, it had stretched over many more years. In one very real if intangible sense, Matteo Ricci's journey to Beijing began in 1552, the year of his birth in Italy. In that same year, the first Jesuit attempt to enter China ended in failure on a remote island some thirty miles from what is now Hong Kong. A succession of Jesuits followed, building up a years-long track record of uninterrupted and unmitigated failure.

  Early Jesuits attempting to reach China remained bottled up in the Portuguese trading post of Macao. Those few to venture onto the decidedly xenophobic Chinese mainland were promptly deported-frequently in cages and under armed guard.

  Ricci changed all that by radically altering the Jesuit approach to China, and in the process he helped shape Jesuit strategy across Asia for generations. Early on, he had established himself as a man given to charting his own course. His family had proudly sent him from their hilltop hometown of Macerata in central Italy to Rome for a law degree. They must have been puzzled if not dismayed to learn soon after that he had instead decided to join the Jesuits at age eighteen.

  Jesuit ingenuity: A linguist, mapmaker, and priest

  This portrait of Matteo Ricci was painted soon after his death by his Chinese colleague (Manuel) Yu Wen-hui, a convert to Christianity who later joined the Jesuits. The Jesuit NicolasTrigault brought the portrait to Rome on the same bittersweet trip during which he recruited Jesuits to work in China, only to see most of them die during the grueling ocean journey to Asia.

  Ten years later he was in Macao immersing himself in Chinese language studies. His language texts in that pre-Berlitz era were a few hand-scrawled notes and vocabulary lists that his colleagues had managed to puzzle out. Ricci couldn't possibly have imagined or prepared for life in China. Who would have prepared him? Even the most educated Europeans had never seen an Asian person, heard an Asian language, or seen Chinese characters. Ricci's letters to his colleagues capture the challenge of describing something still utterly new to Europe:

  I have applied myself to the Chinese language and can assure Your Reverence that it is a different thing from Greek or German.-.-.-. The spoken tongue is prey to so many ambiguities that many sounds mean more than a thousand things, and sometimes there is no more difference between the one and the other than in pronouncing the sound with the voice raised or lowered in four kinds of tone.-.-.-. As to the alphabet, it is a thing one would not believe in had one not seen and tried it as I have.-.-.-. Their manner of writing more closely resembles painting, which is why they write with a brush in the manner of our painters.8

  Ricci mastered the Chinese language as no westerner known to history had mastered it before him. Within a few years of setting foot in Macao, he had drafted and published a treatise in Chinese, On Friendship. He made greater progress with this one document than his predecessors had made over forty years. "This treatise has established our reputation as scholars of talent and virtue; and thus it is read and received with great applause and already has been published in two different places." 9

  Applying a radical strategy

  On Friendship was a linguistic tour de force, but it was even more remarkable for the radical strategic reversals it signaled. After all, European missioners had rarely attempted to master fully the languages of the countries they visited. When they dabbled in local tongues, it was generally only to produce direct translations of Christian prayers or catechisms. This attitude toward language betrayed a not-so-concealed belief that it was indigenous populations who needed to do the changing, not the European missioners and colonialists. Converts were expected to Europeanize themselves, or, as most Europeans regarded it, civilize themselves. Converts on the Indian subcontinent might have wondered how clunky European boots and heavy Portuguese garments were connected to a Christian lifestyle, not to mention why anyone would favor such attire in a subtropical climate. But to Europeans in Asia, these were not matters of discussion. Civilized people dressed themselves as Europeans did-or so most Europeans were convinced.

  Enter Ricci. On Friendship fit comfortably; it didn't chafe like a European boot. For Ricci had not only mastered the Chinese language; he had also honed a style familiar to his readers. He wrote not in the dry, scholastic approach that he had studied in Rome but with the literary forms that a Confucian scholar might use. His ideas, grounded in Judeo-Christian values, were certainly new to his audience. But literate Chinese were familiar with his topic; he had purposely chosen not to translate so
me work of European literature but to address a core human relation discussed in Confucian texts.

  Ricci had turned the tables on himself. Instead of dragging potential converts into an alien European culture, he was pioneering a radical strategy of "inculturation," a term coined by later Jesuits to describe their strategy of assimilating themselves to their host cultures. He did the changing, accommodating himself to the culture, values, and norms of his Chinese hosts. This time it wasn't the converts who were forced into unfamiliar dress; it was Ricci and his team who donned new robes. "We have let our beards grow and our hair down to our ears; at the same time we have adopted the special dress that the literati wear-.-.-. which is of purple silk, and the hem of the robe and collar and the edges are bordered with a band of blue silk a little less than a palm wide." 10 What would they have thought back in Macerata, Italy?

  Instead of dragging potential converts into an alien European culture, he was pioneering a radical strategy of "inculturation," a term coined by later Jesuits to describe their strategy of assimilating themselves to their host cultures.