On 11 February, 1522, the _Victoria_ sailed away from Timor into the great Indian Ocean. She was only a little vessel of 85 tons, and she had to buffet her way amidst various storms and high waves across the southern Indian Ocean, as far as the forty-second degree of south latitude before she could beat up north and round the Cape of Good Hope. The sufferings on board were terrible, the ship leaked badly and the pumps were always going, the provision of buffalo meat had putrefied, as they had had no salt to preserve it. There was little other food than rice. After rounding the Cape of Good Hope it took them a further two months before they could land anywhere to obtain fresh provisions, and twenty-one men died of scurvy and starvation during this terrible period. At last, constrained by their despairing condition, they stopped off the Island of Sant Iago, in the Cape Verde archipelago, which for some time had been a settlement of the Portuguese. Here they sent a boat ashore for food, with a concocted story to deceive the Portuguese into believing that the _Victoria_ was a ship coming from Spanish America and driven out of her course by storms. But on its second voyage to the shore the boat, containing thirteen men, was detained, because, having no money, they offered cloves in payment of the things they purchased. Seeing from a distance that the men had been arrested, the captain of the _Victoria_ felt obliged to abandon them to their fate and hastily sailed away. At last, on 8 September, 1522, the _Victoria_, having sailed into Spain up the Guadalquivir River, dropped anchor at the quay of Seville and discharged all her artillery in crazy joy at this return to the Motherland. On the following day all the survivors of this wonderful expedition--eighteen in number--went in shirts and barefooted, each man holding a candle, to visit the shrines of Santa Maria de la Victoria and of St. Mary of Antiquity in two different churches. As to the thirteen men left behind, they were not so ill treated after all by the Portuguese, but were ultimately dispatched to Seville, so that it may be said of the five ships which started with Magellan in 1519 to reach the Moluccas by way of the Pacific Ocean only one returned to Spain--the _Victoria_, the _Trinidad_ having been lost near the Spice Islands; while of the original 265 men (more or less) who left Spain in 1519 only 36 returned to Spain after circumnavigating the globe--18 in the _Victoria_, 13 in Portuguese ships from the Cape Verde Islands, and 5 survivors from the _Trinidad_ sent back by the Portuguese from Malaysia. In spite of all these disasters, however, the cargo of cloves and spices brought back by the _Victoria_ sufficed, not only to pay the whole cost of the equipment of the original expedition of five ships, but left a profit of about £200 in value over and above.