)[4] The VOC officials at the eastern headquarters of Batavia on Java in the Dutch East Indies (now Jakarta, Indonesia) were unimpressed and uninterested but were eventually overruled by the heeren back in the Netherlands, who ordered them to investigate.
[1] Quast was instructed to go to the area matching the Spanish and Japanese accounts by way of the Philippines and then to continue northwest from there to explore Korea and the possibilities for a Northeast Passage around Mongolia, Manchuria, and Siberia ("Tartary").
The crew decimated by illness exacerbated by poor rations and the ships beginning to fail, Quast finally abandoned his fruitless search on 25 October.
[2] Bad as things were, he directed his men to sail for Fort Zeelandia on Taiwan (now within Tainan's Anping District) rather than attempting to continue northwest.
[2] Uninhabited, remote, and without known resources or harbors, the Bonins were entirely ignored by the Dutch East India Company[6] as they had been ignored by any Spanish before them, permitting their rediscovery and colonization by the Japanese in the next century.