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had been despatched, he would seize upon their ships. This intelligence, which may quite possibly have been true, does not appear to have been in any way tested by Siqueira, who seems to have accepted it unreservedly, and to have acted at once with more, perhaps, of promptitude than of wisdom. He sent a native man and woman ashore "with an arrow passed through their skulls" to the Sultan, "who was thus informed," de Barros tells us, "through his subjects that unless he kept a good watch the treason which he had perpetrated would be punished with fire and sword." The Sultan retaliated by arresting Ruy de Araujo, the factor," and twenty other men who were on land with him attending to the collection of the cargo of the ships," though it is to be noted that the Muhammadan monarch used them with no such atrocious barbarity as that which the Christian captain had practised upon his Malay victims. Siqueira, finding his force thus considerably diminished, burnt two of his vessels, since he had not enough men to navigate them, and sailed out of Malacca, proceeding himself direct to Portugal, after despatching a couple of vessels to bear the tidings of his abortive enterprise to Cochim, where the great Alfonso Dalboquerque was now reigning unopposed.

The news of the check which Siqueira had received caused considerable annoyance to the authorities both in Portugal and in India, and on March 12th, 1510, Diogo Mendez de Vasconcellos with a fleet of four ships set out "to go and conquer Malacca." The situation in India, however, was at this moment so critical that Alfonso