“Cabral sacked an Arab vessel, provoking retaliation from Muslim merchants who burned down his warehouse and killed between fifty and seventy Portuguese men. Cabral took to the safety of the sea and looted every ship he could find and, in what was meant as a lesson to the Zamorin, bombarded Calicut from afar for an entire day, killing nearly 600 people.”
―
Manu S. Pillai,
The Ivory Throne: Chronicles of the House of Travancore