Sebald de Weert was thus left without a consort and almost without a crew. When leaving the Strait, and towing the only remaining boat astern, the rope broke, and the boat went adrift and was not again recovered. The next morning they saw a boat rowing towards them, which proved to belong to another Dutch fleet, under Oliver Van Noort, bound to the South Sea and the East Indies. De Weert endeavored to sail in company with them; but the reduced condition of his crew--but forty-eight men remaining out of one hundred and ten--rendered it impossible. He finally abandoned all attempts to prosecute the voyage, and, profiting by the west winds, returned through the Strait to the Atlantic. He anchored at the Penguin Islands, where a large number of birds were taken and salted. Some of the seamen who were on shore discovered a Patagonian woman among the rocks, where she had endeavored to conceal herself. The chronicle thus speaks of her:--"A state more deeply calamitous than that to which this woman was reduced, the goodness of God has not permitted to be the lot of many. The ships of Van Noort had stopped at this island about seven weeks before, where this woman was one of a numerous tribe of Patagonians; but they were savagely slaughtered by Van Noort's men. She was wounded at the same time, but lived to mourn the destruction of her race, the solitary inhabitant of a rocky, desolate island." De Weert presented her with a knife, but left her without any means of changing her situation, though she made it understood that she wished to be transported to the continent. On the 21st of January, 1600, he left the Strait by the eastern entrance, and bent his course homewards. Six months afterwards he entered the channel of Goree, in Holland, having lost sixty-nine men during the voyage. The ship had been absent two years and sixteen days, the greater part of which had been misemployed. She had been only twenty-four days in the South Sea, and had spent nine months in the Strait of Magellan and the remainder in the passage out and back. The Faith was, nevertheless, more fortunate than her companions; for she was the only ship of the five which sailed under Jacob Mahu which ever reached home again. The Charity was abandoned at sea; the Hope was plundered by the Japanese at Bungo; the Glad Tidings was taken by the Spaniards at Valparaiso; and, as we have said, the Fidelity fell into the hands of the Portuguese at the Spice Islands. The Postillion shallop, which had been launched in the Strait, was never heard of after she entered the Pacific Ocean.