Van Noort called upon his few remaining officers to decide what they ought to do. If his expedition were to be a financial success, he must find some place where he could buy spices. Bantam was near by, but according to the stories of Houtman and his expedition, the people in Bantam were very unfriendly. With his twenty-three men the Dutch commander did not dare to risk another battle. It is true that since the visit of Houtman his successor Van Neck had established very good relations with the sultan; but Van Noort had been away from home for over three years, and knew nothing of Van Neck's voyage.
He might have guessed that there were Hollanders in Bantam when he found that there were no spices to be had in any of the other Javanese ports. Wherever he went he heard the same story. All the spices were now being sent to Bantam, where the Hollanders paid a very high price for them. But Van Noort distrusted this report. It might be another plot of the Portuguese to catch him, and to keep out of harm's way, he sailed through the straits of Bali, avoided the north coast of Java and went to the Cape of Good Hope.
The home trip was the most successful part of the entire voyage. It is true that, without good instruments, the Dutch ships once more lost their bearings. They thought that they were two hundred miles away from the coast of Africa when they had already passed the cape. On the twenty-sixth of May Van Noort landed at St. Helena. Three weeks later he met a large fleet. The ships flew the Dutch flag. They were part of a squadron commanded by Jacob van Heemskerk, outward bound for their second voyage to India. From them the Hollanders got their first news from home; how Van Neck's expedition had been a great success, and how Bantam, which had been carefully avoided, was now a Dutch settlement. Van Noort told them of his fight with the Spanish fleet in different parts of the Pacific, and in turn he was informed of the great victory which Prince Maurice had just won over the Spaniards near Nieuwpoort which had assured the Dutch Republic its final liberty. Then both fleets continued their voyage. On the twenty-eighth of August Van Noort and forty-four out of the two hundred and forty-eight who had sailed away with him three years before came back to Rotterdam.
La baye de Isle et Cite de Borneo. Bapt. a Deutechum fec.
The next year a few other men who had belonged to the expedition reached Holland. They had served on the Henrick Frederick which had disappeared just after Van Noort had left the Strait of Magellan. They had waited for their commander near the island of Santa Maria, but the arrival of the Spanish man-of-war had spoiled all idea of meeting each other on that spot. The Henrick Frederick had crossed the Pacific alone. Many of her men had died, and the others were so weak that when they reached the Moluccas they could no longer handle the ship. They had sold it to the Sultan of Ternate for some bags of nutmeg, and with a small sloop of their own construction they had reached Bantam in April of the year 1602. There they had found a part of the same fleet of Heemskerk which Van Noort had met on the coast of Africa. On one of the ships many sailors had just died. Their place had been offered to the men of the old Henrick Frederick. In the winter of 1602 they returned to their home city.
That ended one of the most famous of the expeditions which tried to establish for the Hollanders a new route to the Indies through the Strait of Magellan. But while Van Noort was in the Pacific the route of the cape had proved to be such a great and easy success that further attempts to reach Java and the Moluccas by way of the Strait of Magellan were hereafter given up. The Pacific trading companies were changed into ordinary Indian companies which sent all their ships around the cape. As for Van Noort, who was the first Hollander to sail around the world, he entered the naval service of the republic, and had a chance to practise his very marked ability as a leader of men in more dangerous circumstances. As an Indian trader he would not have been a great success. The old irresponsible buccaneering days of that trade were gone forever. The difficult art of founding a commercial empire by persuasion rather than by force was put into the hands of men who were not only brave, but also tactful.