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HISTORY OF THE SEA. 



pelled to proceed upon the voyage alone. On her arrival at the 

 Moluccas she was attacked and captured by the Portuguese. 



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 nume- 

 rous 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 inhabit- 

 ant of a rocky, desolate island." De Weert presented her with 

 a knife, but left her without any means of changing her situa- 

 tion, though she made it understood that she wished to be trans- 

 ported 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 Groree, 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 



