_ 402 _ which was a remarkable reason for such a war. All the harm they had inflicted on the city in preventing provisions from going there the fleet itself suffered and it was as much needed there as by those besieged. To have a cask of water was costing him a great deal blood as all knew, but Khwaja Attar had put men on guard at the watering places on the mainland where there were accustomed to going for that purpose. They added more things that had passed with Afonso de Albuquerque, and it was early during the first moves towards war that they said to him how wrong it seemed to them. They also said how necessary it was to ignore the disappearance of those five men until the fortress was finished on which they were working, in order to oblige Khwaja Attar to deliver them from a position of greater safely, and to put a stop to his mischief. They reached the point of presenting him with a paper in the form of a request signed by all the captains and leading nobles of the fleet at the time that Afonso de Albuquerque was on the work of the fortress. In this request they put forward the things mentioned above and concluded that they were not obliged to obey him any longer to those matters that concerned the king’s order, which were to go with the armada along the coast of
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