Overwhelmed by this news, and afraid to face his creditors at Malacca, Faria, with the remnant of his fortune and the assistance of his friends, fitted out a small cruiser, in which he embarked in May, 1540, with several Portuguese, and Pinto among the rest, nominally to seek out the pirate who had robbed him, but in fact to recruit his fortune as he might. After many adventures—the acquisition of great wealth by numerous captures of richly laden corsairs and others, its loss by shipwreck, the getting of a new vessel, the meeting with the corsair who had robbed them at Lugor, the taking of his vessel, another shipwreck, and the sack of a Chinese town, where some of their shipwrecked companions were detained as prisoners—they put into Liampo (Ningpo), finding on some islands at no great distance from that city, and known as the Gates of Liampo, a Portuguese settlement of a thousand houses, with six or seven churches, and with regular Portuguese officers and laws—as much so, says Pinto, as if the place had been situated between Lisbon and Santarem.[13] Here they met with a Chinese corsair, who told them a marvellous story of the island of Calempui, not far from Pekin, in which lay buried seventeen Chinese kings, and whose tombs, guarded and watched over by priests, contained vast treasures. Under the pilotage of this corsair, Faria set out in May, 1542, to rob these tombs. Pinto’s account of the voyage thither, and of the tombs themselves, from which, terrified by the alarm that was raised, they fled away, with their object only partially accomplished, forms one of the most questionable, and at all events the most distorted, portions of his narrative.