_ 38 _ of Melindi as far as Mombasa to see if there was any news of him and, if there was none, to sail on to India. They left Mozambique without four hundred of their men, who had all died there of sickness. They set sail and at the end of March they were off Mombasa, where they found the Governor. There was great rejoicing, and they dropped anchor outside the harbour bar; Aleixo de Sousa, who had come aboard in Zanzibar with the others who had escaped, was with them. Nuno da Cunha valued their arrival very much and he told them to enter the harbour, He received his brother and all the other noblemen with great happiness because he had given them up for lost, just as he feared for Antonio de Saldanha and Garcia de Sá, about whom he had received no reports at all; and he was deeply upset by the loss of Afonso Vaz Zambujos nau and Bernardin da Silveira, which they had heard about back in Mozambique. The captains discussed with the pilots whether there was still enough time to sail to India to winter there. Everyone agreed that it was very late in the season to set out for India and they decided that it would be better to go to Ormuz and wait there to catch the September monsoons, so that they wouldn’t all end up dying of fever in the very unhealthy climate where they were.
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