section_path: Third voyage and death/Death
section_name: Death
paragraph_text: Death
  
  Vasco da Gama immediately invoked his high viceregal powers to impose a new order in Portuguese India, replacing all the old officials with his own appointments. But da Gama contracted malaria not long after arriving and died in the city of Cochin on Christmas Eve in 1524, three months after his arrival. As per royal instructions, da Gama was succeeded as governor of India by one of the captains who had come with him, Henrique de Menezes (no relation to Duarte). Da Gama's sons Estêvão and Paulo immediately lost their posts and joined the returning fleet of early 1525 (along with the dismissed Duarte de Menezes and Luís de Menezes).
  
  Vasco da Gama's body was first buried at St. Francis Church, at Fort Kochi in the city of Kochi, but his remains were returned to Portugal in 1539. The body of Vasco da Gama was re-interred in Vidigueira in a casket decorated with gold and jewels.
  
  The Monastery of the Hieronymites, in Belém, which later became the necropolis of the Portuguese royal dynasty of Aviz, was erected in the early 1500s near the launch point of Vasco da Gama's first journey; its construction funded by a tax on the profits of the yearly Portuguese India Armadas. In 1880, what were believed to be da Gama's remains and those of the poet Luís de Camões (who celebrated da Gama's first voyage in his 1572 epic poem, Os Lusíadas), were moved to new carved tombs in the nave of the monastery's church, only a few meters away from the tombs of the kings Manuel I and John III, whom da Gama had served.
  
  However, by 1884, Teixeira de Aragão, one of the advocates for the transfer of da Gama's remains to the monastery, discovered documents suggesting that the wrong remains had been exhumed from Vidigueira. Apparently, da Gama's gravestone had been exchanged with that of his great-grandson Francisco da Gama, whose tomb lay opposite his, likely during restoration works in 1841. Additionally, it was found that the casket moved in 1880 contained the bones of more than one person, whereas the other tomb contained only one skeleton. It was not until May 1898, during the celebrations of the fourth centenary of da Gama's arrival in Calicut, that the remains from the other tomb in the chapel of Vidigueira were moved to the Hieronymite monastery. In 1994, a member of the family that now owns the estate where da Gama's remains were until the 1880s claimed that the real bones of Vasco da Gama were located in an unmarked spot on the estate, purportedly having been hidden there by the estate's owner in the 19th century, the Visconde de Ribeira Brava.