The last survivors, five men and a boy, worked it home with its cargo of pepper which they had earlier looted from a passing Portuguese ship. Lancaster himself, marooned on the Comoro Islands with the rest of his crew after he was shipwrecked during a cyclone, finally found his way home in 1594. On the way he had been stuck in the doldrums, ravaged by scurvy, lost three ships and seen almost all his fellow crew members speared to death by angry islanders. It was lucky that the Levant Company had deep pockets, for the voyage was a devastating financial failure.