the delivery ship between the Portuguese and the Zamorin's men. The truce broken, a state of war resumed and the pepper blockade was immediately reinstated. [The Portuguese chroniclers blame the Zamorin for breaking the peace - that either he changed his mind (ultimately realized he didn't want to lose the Italian engineers) or was intending to break the peace all along, and just agreed to it in order to save Calicut from being bombarded once again by the Portuguese. However, others blame the Portuguese, suggesting they only agreed to the peace so long as they needed the pepper supplies to load the ships, but wanted the state of war to resume soon after. Both hypotheses might be correct - that is, that both the Zamorin and Albuquerque entered the peace cynically, knowing fully well it was not likely to hold, but nonetheless found it useful enough to buy some time; the skirmish itself might have been unplanned, a simple misunderstanding, but neither side seemed to be in a hurry to rectify or restore the peace.] Factory in Quilon The resumption of the pepper blockade seems to have put a crimp in Albuquerque's preparations of the return fleet, much of it having still lacked spice cargoes. Albuquerque dispatched two ships down to Quilon (Coulão, Kollam), with the factor António de Sá, to see if more could be procured there - Quilon having been better connected to Ceylon and points east, its spice supply was not as dependent on the Zamorin's sway and had often invited the Portuguese before. But soon after their departure, Albuquerque heard that the Zamorin of Calicut was preparing a Calicut fleet of some 30 ships for Quilon. Afonso de Albuquerque left Cochin and hurried down to Quilon himself. Albuquerque arrived in Quilon, and instructed the Portuguese factor to hurry his business along, and sought out an audience with the regent-queen of Quilon. They were still docked when the Calicut fleet arrived, carrying an embassy from the Zamorin with the mission to persuade (or intimidate) Quilon to abandon the Portuguese. The regent queen of Quilon rejected the Zamorin's request, but also forbade Albuquerque from engaging in hostilities in the harbor. Albuquerque, realizing Quilon was the only spice supply he had access to, acceded to her request. Albuquerque resigned himself to negotiating a commercial treaty and establishing a permanent Portuguese factory in Quilon (the third in India), placing it