the royal physician and amateur astronomer, Master João Faras, who brought along the latest astrolabe and new Arabic astronomical staves for navigational experiments. One chronicler suggests that the knight Duarte Pacheco Pereira was also aboard. The fleet carried some twenty Portuguese degredados, who were criminal convicts who could fulfill their sentences by being abandoned along the shores of various places and exploring inland on the crown's behalf. Four of the degredados are known: Afonso Ribeiro, João Machado, Luiz de Moura, and Antonio Fernandes, who was also a ship carpenter. Finally, the fleet carried eight Franciscan friars and eight chaplains, under the supervision of the head chaplain, Fr. Henrique Soares of Coimbra. They were the first Portuguese Christian missionaries to India. There are three surviving eyewitness accounts of this expedition: (1) an extended letter written by Pêro Vaz de Caminha (possibly dictated by Aires Correia), written from Brazil on May 1, 1500, to King Manuel I; (2) the brief letter by Mestre João Faras to the king, also from Brazil; and (3) the account of an anonymous Portuguese pilot, first published in Italian in 1507 (commonly referred to as the Relação do Piloto Anônimo, sometimes believed to be the clerk João de Sá). Mission The priority of the mission was to secure a treaty with Zamorin's Calicut (Calecute, Kozhikode), the principal commercial entrepôt of the Kerala spice trade and dominant feudal city-state on the Malabar coast of India. Vasco da Gama's first armada had visited Calicut in 1498, but had failed to impress the elderly ruling Manivikraman Raja ('Samoothiri Raja'), the Zamorin of Calicut. As such, no agreements had been signed. Cabral's instructions were to succeed where Gama had failed, and to this end was entrusted with magnificent gifts to present to the Zamorin. Cabral was under orders to establish a feitoria (factory) in Calicut, which would be placed under Aires Correia. The second priority, assigned to Bartolomeu and Diogo Dias, was to search out the East African port of Sofala, near the mouth of the Zambezi river. Sofala had been secretly visited and described by the explorer Pêro da Covilhã during his overland expedition a decade earlier (c. 1487), and he identified it as the endpoint of the Monomatapa gold trade. The Portuguese crown was eager to tap into that gold source, but Gama's armada had failed to find it. The Dias brothers were instructed to find and establish a