In the summer of 1507 he separated, according to his instructions, from Tristão da Cunha, and when the latter returned to Portugal with the rest of the fleet Albuquerque with his six ships remained in India. Of these ships he has left a vivid description: there were no provisions, the lances and other arms were few and rotten, with great scarcity of cables, sails, and rigging; the powder was all wet, of bombardiers there were but few, of carpenters one or two, and a hundred and fifty men were dying of disease. Even so he set to work to strike terror into the Moors and hammer the Portuguese Empire into shape. Coasting down Arabia he sacked various cities, spreading desolation with fire and sword and mercilessly mutilating the Moors who surrendered. The poet Antonio Ferreira called Albuquerque “clement.” It is not a clemency that we would wish to encounter in ordinary life, and even among his contemporaries some condemned his cruelty. Bishop Osorio, for instance, considered it as unworthy of so great a man: _illius rebus gestis indignum_. But although Albuquerque could be harsh and grim enough (his suggestion to King Manoel that Spanish and Portuguese Jews in India should be extinguished one by one is most sinister), and was quick to anger and a stern disciplinarian, he had no delight in cruelty for cruelty’s sake. He wished to reduce the Moors throughout India to subjection, and considered that such acts would best spread the terror of his name and conceal the difficulties of his position. He would have been the first to admit that his policy in this respect was a sign of weakness. Albuquerque’s first great achievement was the bombardment and capture of the important city of Ormuz, at the entrance of the Persian Gulf, and in October he set about building a fortress. Milton in the following century wrote of “the wealth of Ormuz.” To Albuquerque it was but the first stone in the vast edifice of his projects, but to his captains it was already more than enough. They wished to be making prizes on the high seas, not to be bottled up in Ormuz building a fort as if they were masons. Albuquerque, to whom in their complaints they were very much like gnats in a thunderstorm, went on with his work, tore up their first petition and placed a second under a jamb of one of the fort’s doorways as it was being built. This was too much for the vanity of his captains and several of them sailed away to India. The result of this desertion was that Albuquerque was obliged temporarily to abandon Ormuz. Small wonder that he wrote of their conduct with extreme bitterness. “Without shame or fear of the King or your Lordship,” he says in his letter to the Viceroy, Dom Francisco de Almeida, “they deserted me in time of war, and during actual hostilities with this city they left me and fled.... Portuguese gentlemen have been guilty of no such vileness these three hundred years, nor have I read of any such in the ancient chronicles.”