disillusion at Goa is poignantly described in a letter[409] written soon after his arrival. He found it ‘the stepmother of all honest men’, money the only god and passport, and he sends a note of warning to _aventureiros_ in Portugal eager to make their fortune in India. We know from the bitter pages of Couto and Corrêa how difficult it was for a private soldier to thrive there, and the position of a _reinol_ newly arrived from Portugal was precarious. Camões joined a few weeks later (November 1553) in a punitive expedition along the coast of Malabar against the King of Chembe, and in 1554 probably accompanied D. Fernando de Meneses in a second expedition to Monte Felix or Guardafui (Ras ef Fil), the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf. After his three years’ service (1553-6) he continued to live at Goa. He had found time to write poetry, and sent home a sonnet and an eclogue on the death of his friend D. Antonio de Noronha. His play _Filodemo_ was acted, probably in the winter of 1555, before the popular Governor Francisco Barreto, who provided him with the post of _Provedor Môr dos Defuntos e Ausentes_ (i. e. trustee for the property of dead or absent Portuguese) at Macao. Whether his satiric verses had anything to do with the appointment we do not know--some have maintained that the Portuguese of Goa appreciated his poetical powers best at a distance--but it is more probable that his appointment was a favour, since every post in India was eagerly coveted, and it was a kinder action to give him a comparatively humble one at once than the reversion to a more lucrative office, filled thrice or even ten times over by the deplorable system of ‘successions’.[410] He set sail in the spring of 1556, and after touching at Malacca, arrived at the Molucca Islands, the most lawless region in India. Camões himself, according to Storck, was wounded about this time, but in a fight at sea, not in one of the chronic broils at Ternate or Tidore. In 1557 or 1558 he reached Macao, but two years later he was relieved of his post owing to a quarrel with the settlers, whose part was taken by the captain of the silver and silk ship passing from Goa to China. On his authority Camões was sent to Goa, protesting against _o injusto mando_, which was a common fate of officials in India. He was shipwrecked off the coast of Tongking, lost all his possessions, and arrived penniless and perhaps in debt at Goa in 1560 or 1561. To these four or five chequered years are ascribed the wonderful _quintilhas_, the most beautiful in the language, _Sobolos rios que vam_, which may owe something to Vicente’s admirable paraphrase of Psalm l, the _canção Com força desusada_, the _oitavas Como nos vossos_, and the completion of the first six books of the _Lusiads_. Soon after his return he was probably imprisoned for debt, but was released, probably at the instance of the Viceroy, D. Francisco Coutinho, Conde de Redondo, to whom Camões addressed his