leads a sally out and disperses the surprised Bantu besiegers in a bloody encounter. The furious Moconde, accuses the Sofalese nobles of having deliberately misrepresented the strength of the garrison and of leading him into a trap. Despite their protests of innocence, Moconde indignantly withdraws his warriors from the city, and returns to the mainland (burning down some of the Swahili nobles' villages on their way, as a parting gesture). That same night, in a bold operation, Anaia leads a Portuguese squad stealthily through the abandoned streets of Sofala and makes his way into the city's palace. The blind old sheikh Isuf is said to have thrown his sword towards the sound of the footsteps, managing to wound Anaia, but Isuf is himself immediately decapitated from behind by Manuel Fernandes. In the morning, seeing the head of the sheikh Isuf mounted on the walls of the Portuguese fort, Sofala falls into chaos. The first instinct of the sons of the sheikh is to attack the fort, but this does not go very far. The Sofalese nobles assembled for the assault immediately fragment into competing factions to compete for the succession. In the strife, Anaia somehow manages to play the arbitrator, and secures the installation of a certain Suleiman, one of the sons of Isuf, as ruler of Sofala. In March 1506, only a few days after these events, Pêro de Anaia himself is struck down by malaria and dies. The Portuguese garrison elect the factor Manuel Fernandes, the only European apparently immune to the fevers, as acting captain-major. In early June, the ships of Cide Barbudo and Pedro Quaresma, who had been on a search-and-rescue mission in South Africa, arrive in Sofala harbor, intending to deliver the Portuguese king's new instructions to Pêro de Anaia. Instead they find the Sofala fort and garrison in a dilapidated state, 76 Portuguese are by now dead from malarial fever and the remainder weakened and starving for lack of food. Cide Barbudo decides to go on to India by himself, leaving Quaresma behind with his caravel to help replenish the plagued Portuguese garrison. Aftermath Cide Barbudo stopped in Kilwa first, to see if assistance for Sofala could be procured from the Portuguese garrison there, only to find that that city too was in chaos. Following the assassination of the Portuguese-supported sultan a month or so earlier, violent strife had enveloped the city. Streams of