Although Joao had been badly shaken by Columbus's claims, he revived his India plan and prepared a new expedition. But for him it was too late. "The Man is dead," Isabella of Spain was said to have murmured when she heard the news in 1495. She had hoped to marry her daughter to Joao's son, Afonso, but he had already died. The throne passed to the young Dom Manuel, duke of Beja, who had witnessed the final briefing of Paiva and Covilha. Manuel fortuitously inherited a crown, eighty years of accumulated exploration experience, and the launchpad for the final push to India. He had even been gifted the wood to build the ships. If Joao passed into Portuguese history as the Perfect Prince, Manuel was destined to be the Fortunate King.

The first faltering steps in colonial administration were not error free. Timoji was initially put in charge of tax collecting, but this promised to stir dissent from both communities and his remit had to be altered. And although Albuquerque had promised religious freedom, he recoiled in horrer at the practice of suttee – the immolation of Hindu widows on their husband's funeral pyres – and banned it. The underlying sense of Christian mission and his own obduracy also led him to order summary executions that were to cause unrest.

Albuquerque had been in the Indian Ocean for nine years. He had worked continually and at a furious pace to build Manuel's empire, during which time he had endured the incessant voyaging, the wars, the intriguing, the rigors of the climate. He had been wounded at Goa; for three months he had been besieged in the Mandovi River in the rain. He had negotiated, intimidated, persuaded, and killed. To outsiders he appeared indestructible. The bullets and the spear wounds had not felled him; the cannonballs had whistled past his head; he had stood up in his boat to taunt the Turkish gunners of Benastarim. But he was nearly sixty years old, and to those who saw him up close, such as his secretary Gasper Correia, "he was old and very wasted in body." Now, in the atomizing heat of Ormuz, between the brilliant blue of the sea and the blinding sunlight on the barren rocks, he was dying.

Surveying the walls of Ormuz, he declared:

So long as they are upheld by justice and without oppression, they are more than sufficient. But if good faith and humanity cease to be observed in these lands, then pride will overthrow the strongest walls we have. Portugal is very poor and when the poor are covetous they become oppressors. The fumes of India are powerful - I fear the time will come when instead of our present fame as warriors we may only be known as grasping tyrants.