In five days he writes nineteen letters to the King, some of them of considerable length, this task occupying him till dawn, after a long day’s work. On a single day he wrote the King eight letters, one of which contains a splendid general account of the state of India, another is a little masterpiece describing the misdeeds of one of his captains. No doubt his critics believed him to be harsh and insensible. That this was far from being the case is shown by the fact that on receiving, amid a shower of blame and criticisms, a sympathetic letter from his old friend, the historian Duarte Galvão, he shed tears, and also by the deep feeling he displayed when a whole batch of letters came from the King full of dispraise. “Your Highness blames me, blames me, blames me,” he wrote, and again, “My spirits fell to the ground and my hair turned twice as white as it was before.” When, therefore, a few months after he had written of his intention to return from Ormuz to India in order to see the King’s letters and know if he had sent ships and men for the expedition against Aden, he heard that his successor was appointed, it is scarcely an exaggeration to say that the news killed him. Albuquerque’s crime was to have thought of India and Portugal first, before personal interests and ambitions. “They call me a harsh man,” he said; and “these officials of yours do not love me.” But if he could vigorously show his dislike of the false and slovenly, he always liberally rewarded good service, was loyal, generous, and unselfish, and showed a most delightful pleasure in any thorough work or workman. “The best thing I ever saw,” he says of a map; and of a good carpenter, “he is a marvellous man.”[18] No sooner was Albuquerque dead than his greatness was felt, and posterity has never sought to deny it. If we consider the conditions under which his great work was accomplished in six years--his ships often so rotten that they sank of sheer old age, his men few and ill-armed (before he received reinforcements in October 1512 he says that the whole number of Europeans under his command in India were but 1,200, of whom barely 300 were properly armed), the fact that all his projects were liable to be upset by orders dictated in ignorance at home, and that as soon as his back was turned (for instance, when he went to attack Aden) all the officials in India treated him as dead and his instructions as a dead letter--we will not deny that posterity has done well to honour and admire this man in his lonely magnificence. _Fannomi onore e di ciò fanno bene._