The ship carrying Tycho's entourage out of Denmark stopped at Köge and Lübeck before discharging them at Rostock sometime before mid-June. It was a city that Tycho had come to know fairly well from the travels and studies of his youth. In particular, it was the place in which, thirty years earlier, he had fought and recuperated from the ill-starred duel with Parsberg. As Tycho stayed there through the summer of 1597, figuratively licking the wounds to purse and pride suffered in the previous year and renewing his acquaintance with the wise old men who had seen him through his earlier crisis, he must have sensed more than one melancholy reverberation from the past. His old friend and agent, Brucaeus, had died in 1593. But the theologian Chytraeus, and the clergyman who may have been Tycho's former landlord, Lucas Bacmeister, were still alive, and there was still a considerable colony of Danes in the city, which Tycho quickly sought out for news and opinion.

The news was that literally on the day Tycho had left Copenhagen, 2 June, the king had ordered a third commission to go out to Hven for some kind of investigation which Tycho could only interpret (but probably wrongly) as further harassment. And on the tenth, an executive order had been issued transferring Tycho's canonry at Roskilde from him to the chancellor, Christian Friis.