The Sodrés were a well-connected family of English origin, said to have been descended from Frederick Sudley from Gloucestershire, who accompanied the Earl of Cambridge to Portugal in 1381, and subsequently settled down there.
In 1494, he was dispatched by the order's new grand master, Manuel, Duke of Beja, to the order-owned island of Madeira to audit the repairs of the defenses of the town of Funchal.
Correia suggests the Egyptian merchant's testimony was critical in rousing the sultan into taking more active steps against the Portuguese in the Indian Ocean.
However, before his departure, Vasco da Gama ordered his uncles to keep the patrol near the Malabar Coast of India, to protect the Portuguese-allied cities of Cochin and Cannanore from any vengeful attacks by the Zamorin of Calicut.
Although it is significant that Ataíde, in that same letter, asked the king to grant him Vicente Sodré's old position of alcalde-mor of Tomar (Ataide, alas, died shortly after in Mozambique).
[7] The wreck site of Vicente and Bras Sodré's ships was first discovered just off the north-eastern coast of Al Hallaniyah island, Oman, in May 1998 by a two-person team from Blue Water Recoveries Ltd (BWR); location was based on the company's own analysis of historical documents.
Later that year, a larger team from BWR, including a contracted nautical archaeologist from Portugal, conducted a reconnaissance survey of the bay and wreck site.
They recovered a number of artifacts consistent with an early 16th-century shipwreck, including lead-covered iron shot, stone cannonballs of varying sizes, and a sounding lead.
These challenges were addressed in 2013 by David L. Mearns, owner and Director of BWR, and an agreement was made with Oman's Ministry of Heritage and Culture (MHC) to jointly conduct and co-manage the project.
The MHC is the official government body responsible for the protection of Oman's underwater cultural heritage, and this was the first collaborative archaeological excavation of a historic wreck-site in Omani waters.
More than 2,800 artifacts have been recovered from the site, including a ship's bell with a date of 1498, an important copper-alloy disc marked with the royal coat of arms of Portugal and the "esfera armilar"(armillary sphere) - a personal emblem of King Manuel I, and an extremely rare silver coin known as the "INDIO", first minted in 1499 by the Portuguese specifically for trade with India.
On 15 March 2016, the MHC formally announced the discovery of the wreck site at a press conference in Muscat, and simultaneously published an interim print report by Mearns, Parham and Frohlich in the International Journal of Nautical Archaeology.
[9] The IJNA article, which relies on extensive scientific testing of the recovered objects and contributions from numerous other experts, also concludes that the probable source of the remaining, unsalvaged wreckage is from Vicente Sodré's ship "Esmeralda".
[10] Despite Ataíde's efforts at gentle treatment, Portuguese 16th-century chroniclers have usually presented Vicente Sodré in a negative light - principally because of his abandonment of Cochin to the assault of the Zamorin of Calicut.
At the Battle of Cochin (1504), the new Portuguese patrol captain Duarte Pacheco Pereira had a hard time persuading the Cochinese that he would not abandon them, as Sodré had done.
"A man of strong condition and lustful for money, with no other intention but to enrich himself"[12] Correia cites Vicente Sodré's mistreatment of a well-connected Cairo merchant in Cannanore as the spark which set off the assembly of an Egyptian-led fleet to dislodge the Portuguese from the Indian Ocean in 1507.