Part 42

The winter was unusually mild; until January they needed nothing warmer than their doublets. On the fourteenth, a Sunday, they went boating on the river, and came home singing the gay songs of France. A little later they went to visit the wheat fields two leagues from the fort, and dined merrily out of doors. When the snow melted they saw the little bright blades of the autumn sowing already coming up from the rich black soil. Winter was over, and work began in good heart. Poutrincourt was not above gathering turpentine from the pines and making tar, after a process invented by himself. Then late in spring a ship came into harbor with news which ended everything. The fur-traders of Normandy, Brittany and the Vizcayan ports had succeeded in having the privilege of De Monts withdrawn. Hardly more than a year after his arrival Lescarbot left his beloved gardens, and in October all the colonists were once more in France. Membertou and his Indians bewailed their departure, and held them in long remembrance. Wilderness houses soon go back to their beginnings, and it was not long before all that was left of the brave and gay French colony was a little clearing where the herb of immortality, the tansy of Saint Athanase, lifted its golden buttons and thick dark green foliage above the remnant of the garden of Helene.

Yet the experience of that year was not lost. It was the first instance of a company of settlers in that northern climate passing the winter without illness, discord or trouble with the Indians. Later, in the little new settlements of Quebec and Montreal, some of the colonists met again under the wise and kindly rule of Champlain. Little Helene lived to bring her own roses to a garden in New France, and teach Indian girls the secrets which old Jacqueline taught her. And it is recorded in the history of the voyageurs, priests and adventurers of France in the New World that wherever they went they were apt to take with them seeds and plants of wholesome garden produce, which they planted along their route in the hope that they might thus be of service to those who came after them.

THE WOODEN SHOE

Amsterdam's the cradle where the race was rocked-- All the ships of all the world to her harbor flocked. Rosy with the sea-wind, solid, stubborn, sweet, Played the children by canals, up and down the street. Neltje, Piet and Hendrik, Dirck and Myntje too,-- Little Nick of Leyden sailed his wooden shoe.

"Quarter-deck and cabin--rig her fore-and-aft,"-- Thus he murmured wisely as he launched his craft. "Cutlass, pike and musquetoun, howitzer and shot-- But our knives and mirrors and beads are worth the lot." Room enough for cargo to last a year or two, In the round amidships of a wooden shoe!

Bobbing on the waters of the Nieuwe Vlei See the bantam galleot, short and broad and high. Laden for the Indies, trading all the way, Frank and shrewd and cautious, fiery in a fray,-- Sagamore and mandarin are all the same to you, Little Nick of Leyden with your wooden shoe!

XVIII

THE FIRES THAT TALKED

All along the coast of Britain, from John o' Groat's to Beachey Head, from Saint Michael's Mount to Cape Wrath, twinkled the bonfires on the headlands. Henry Hudson, returning from a voyage among icebergs, guessed at once what this chain of lights meant. The son of Mary Queen of Scots had been crowned in London.

Hudson's keen eyes were unusually grave and thoughtful as the Muscovy Duck sailed up to London Pool on the incoming tide. The sailors looked even more sober, for most of them were English Protestants, with a few Flemings, and John Williams the pilot was an Anabaptist. It was he who asked the question of which all were thinking.

"Master Hudson, d'ye think the new King will light them other fires--the ones at Smithfield?"

Hudson shook his head. "That's a thing no man can say for certain, John. But there's the Low Countries and the Americas to run to. 'T is not as it was in Queen Mary's day."

"Aye, but Spain has got all of America, pretty near, and the French are nabbing the rest," said the pilot doubtfully.

"Nay, that's a bigger place than you guess, over yonder. Ever see the map that Doctor Dee made for Queen Bess near thirty years ago? I remember him showing it to my grandsire with the ink scarce dry on it. The country Ralegh's people saw has got room for the whole of France and England, and plenty timber and corn-land. Sir Walter he knew that."

There was plague in London when they landed, and all sought their families in fear and trembling, not knowing what might have come and gone in their absence. Hudson's house was at Mortlake on the Thames above London, and there he was rejoiced to find all well. Young John Hudson was brimful of Mr. Brereton's new Relacion of the Voyage of Captain Bartholomew Gosnold and Captain Bartholomew Gilbert to the North part of Virginia by permission of the honorable Knight Sir Walter Ralegh. Strawberries bigger than those of England, and cherries in clusters like grapes, blackbirds with carnation-colored wings, Indians who painted their eyebrows white and made faces over mustard, were mixed higgledy-piggledy in his bubbling talk. Hudson, turning the pages of the new book, saw at once that on this voyage around Cape Cod the little ship Concord had sailed seas unknown to him.

"Why won't the Company send you to the Americas, Dad?" the boy asked eagerly. "When will I be old enough to go to sea?"

"Wait till ye're fourteen at least, Jack," his father answered. "There's much to learn before ye're a master mariner."

In the next few years things were not so well with English mariners as they had been. Cecil and Howard, picking a quarrel with Ralegh, had him shut up in the Tower. The Dutch were trading everywhere, seizing the chances King James missed. But Hudson was in the employ of the Muscovy Company like his father and grandfather, and the Russian fur trade was making that Company rich.

Captain John Smith, a shrewd-faced soldier with merry eyes, appeared at the house one day and told entertaining stories of his campaigns under Prince Sigismund of Bohemia. He and the boy John drove the neighbors nearly distracted with curiosity, one winter evening, signalling with torches from the house to the river. To anxious souls who surmised a new Guy Fawkes conspiracy Captain Smith showed how he had once conveyed a message to the garrison of a beleaguered city in this way. Here was the code. The first half of the alphabet was represented by single lights, the second half by pairs. To secure attention three torches were shown at equal distances from one another, until a single light flashed in response to show that the signal was understood. For any letter from A to L a single light was shown and hidden one or more times according to the number of the letter from the beginning; thus, three flashes meant C; four meant D, and so on. For a letter between M and Z the same plan was followed using two torches. The end of a word was signified by three lights. In this way Smith had spelled out the message, "On Thursday night I will charge on the east; at the alarum, sally you." He had, however, translated it into Latin, to make it short.

John Hudson found new interest in Latin.

When Captain Smith began to talk of joining a new colony to go to Virginia the boy begged hard to be allowed to go. But just at this time the Muscovy Company was sending Henry Hudson to look for a way round through northern seas to the Spice Islands. The Dutch were already trading in the Portuguese Indies. If England could reach them by a shorter route, it would be a very pleasant discovery for the Muscovy Company.

Even in 1607 geographers believed in an open polar sea north of Asia. Hudson tried the Greenland route. Sailing east of Greenland he found himself between that country and the islands named "Nieuwland" by William Barents the Dutch navigator in 1596. Their pointed icy mountains seemed to push up through the sea. Icebergs crowded the waters like miniature peaks of a submerged range. Hudson returned to report to the company "no open sea."

In 1608 he was again sent out on the same errand. This time he steered further east, between those islands and another group named by Barents Nova Zembla. He sailed nearer to the pole than any man had been before him, and found whales bigger, finer and more numerous than anywhere else. Rounding the North Cape on his way home he made the first recorded observation of a sun-spot. In August, when he returned and made his report, there was a sensation in the seafaring world.

The Dutch promptly sent whaling ships into the arctic seas, and suggested, through Van Meteren the Dutch consul in London, a friend of Hudson, that the English navigator should come to Amsterdam and talk of entering their service. While there, he received an offer from the French Ambassador, suggesting that his services would be welcome to a proposed French East India Company. Hearing this, the Dutch hastened to secure him, and on April 4, 1609, he sailed from Amsterdam in a yacht of eighty tons called the Half Moon and shaped rather like one, manned by a crew of twenty, half English and half Netherlanders, and John as cabin-boy.

John was in such a state of bliss as a boy can know when sailing on the venture of his dreams. His father had told him in confidence that as his sailing orders were almost the same as the year before, he did not expect to find the northern route to India in that direction. Failing this the Half Moon would look for it in the western seas. Of this plan he had said nothing in Holland.

He found, as he had expected, that the arctic waters were choked with ice, and turning southward he headed for the Faroe Isles. While in Holland he had had a letter from Captain John Smith, who had explored the regions about Chesapeake Bay. No straits leading to the western ocean had been discovered there, and no Sea of Verrazzano. Captain Smith's opinion was that if such a passage existed it would be somewhere about the fortieth parallel. Explorations had already been made farther north. Davis Strait had been discovered some years before by John Davis, now dead. Martin Frobisher had found another strait leading northwest. Both of these were so far north that they were likely to be ice-bound by the time the little Half Moon could reach them. Hudson meant to look along the coast further south, and see what could be found there.

The Half Moon took in water at the Faroes and anchored some seven weeks later, on July 18, in Penobscot Bay. Her foremast was gone and her sails ripped and rent by the gales of the North Atlantic, and the carpenter with a selected crew rowed ashore and chose a pine tree for a new mast. While this was a-making and the sails were patched up, the crew not otherwise engaged went fishing.

"I say," presently observed John Hudson, who knew Brereton's Relacion by heart, "this must ha' been the place where they caught so many fish that they were 'pestered with Cod' and threw numbers of 'em overboard. This makes twenty-seven, Dad, so far."