Part 2

And yet, in despite of this familiarity with his name, our certain knowledge of Hudson's life is limited to a period (April 19, 1607-June 22,1611) of little more than four years. Of that period, during which he did the work that has made him famous, we have a partial record--much of it under his own hand--that certainly is authentic in its general outlines until it reaches the culminating tragedy. At the very last, where we most want the clear truth, we have only the one-sided account presented by his murderers: and murderers, being at odds with moral conventions generally, are not, as a rule, models of veracity. And so it has fallen out that what we know about the end of Hudson's life, save that it ended foully, is as uncertain as the facts of the earlier and larger part of his life are obscure.

An American investigator, the late Gen. John Meredith Read, has gone farthest in unearthing facts which enlighten this obscurity; but with no better result than to establish certain strong probabilities as to Hudson's ancestry and antecedents. By General Read's showing, the Henry Hudson mentioned by Hakluyt as one of the charter members (February 6, 1554-5) of the Muscovy Company, possibly was our navigator's grandfather. He was a freeman of London, a member of the Skinners Company, and sometime an alderman. He died in December, 1555, according to Stow, "of the late hote burning feuers, whereof died many olde persons, so that in London died seven Aldermen in the space of tenne monthes." They gave that departed worthy a very noble funeral! Henry Machyn, who had charge of it, describes it in his delightful "Diary" in these terms: "The xx day of December was bered at Sant Donstones in the Est master Hare Herdson, altherman of London and Skynner, and on of the masters of the gray frere in London with men and xxiiij women in mantyl fresse [frieze?] gownes, a herse [catafalque] of wax and hong with blake; and there was my lord mare and the swordberer in blake, and dyvers oder althermen in blake, and the resedew of the althermen, atys berying; and all the masters, boyth althermen and odur, with ther gren staffes in ther hands, and all the chylders of the gray frersse, and iiij in blake gownes bayring iiij gret stayffes-torchys bornying, and then xxiiij men with torchys bornying; and the morrow iij masses songe; and after to ys plasse to dener; and ther was ij goodly whyt branches, and mony prestes and clarkes syngying." Stow adds that the dead alderman's widow, Barbara, caused to be set up in St. Dunstan's to his memory--and also to that of her second husband, Sir Richard Champion, and prospectively to her own--a monument in keeping with their worldly condition and with the somewhat mixed facts of their triangular case. This was a "very faire Alabaster Tombe, richly and curiously gilded, and two ancient figures of Aldermen in scarlet kneeling, the one at the one end of the tombe in a goodly arch, the other at the other end in like manner, and a comely figure of a lady between them, who was wife to them both."

The names have been preserved in legal records of three of the sons--Thomas, John and Edward--of this eminent Londoner: who flourished so greatly in life; who was given so handsome a send-off into eternity; and who, presumably, retains in that final state an undivided one-half interest in the lady whose comely figure was sculptured upon his tomb. General Read found record of a Henry Hudson, mentioned by Stow as a citizen of London in the year 1558, who may also have been a son of the alderman; of a Captain Thomas Hudson, of Limehouse, who had a leading part in an expedition set forth "into the parts of Persia and Media" by the Muscovy Company in the years 1577-81; of a Thomas Hudson, of Mortlake, who was a friend of Dr. John Dee, and to whom references frequently are made in the famous "Diary" such as the following: "March 6 . I, and Mr. Adrian Gilbert and John Davis did mete with Mr. Alderman Barnes, Mr. Townson, and Mr. Young, and Mr. Hudson abowt the N.W. voyage." Concerning a Christopher Hudson--who was in the service of the Muscovy Company as its agent and factor at Moscow from about the year 1553 until about the year 1576--the only certainty is that he was not a son of the Alderman. There is a record of the year 1560 that "Christopher Hudson hath written to come home ... considering the death of his father and mother"; and, as the Alderman died in the year 1555, and as his remarried widow was alive in the year 1560, this is conclusive. Being come back to England, this Christopher rose to be a person of importance in the Company; as appears from the fact that he was one of a committee (circa 1583) appointed to confer with "Captain Chris. Carlile ... upon his intended discoveries and attempt into the hithermost parts of America."

General Read thus summarized the result of his investigations: "We have learned that London was the residence of Henry Hudson the elder, of Henry Hudson his son, and of Christopher Hudson, and that Captain Thomas Hudson lived at Limehouse, now a part of the Metropolis; while Thomas Hudson, the friend of Dr. John Dee, resided at Mortlake, then only six or seven miles from the City ... By reference to a statement made by Abakuk Prickett, in his 'Larger Discourse,' it will be found that Henry Hudson the discoverer also was a citizen of London and had a house there." From all of which, together with various minor corroborative facts, he draws these conclusions: That Henry Hudson the discoverer was the descendant, probably the grandson, of the Henry Hudson who died while holding the office of Alderman of the City of London in the year 1555; that he "received his early training, and imbibed the ideas which controlled the purposes of his after life, under the fostering care of the great Corporation [the Muscovy Company] which his relatives had helped to found and afterwards to maintain"; that he entered the service of that Company as an apprentice, in accordance with the then custom, and in due course was advanced to command rank.

That is the net result of General Read's most laboriously painstaking investigations. The facts for which he searched so diligently, and so longed to find, he did not find. In a foot-note he added: "The place and date of Hudson's birth will doubtless be accurately ascertained in the course of the examinations now being made in England under my directions. The result of these researches I hope to be able to present to the public at no distant day." That note was written nearly fifty years ago, and its writer died long since with his hope unrealized.

But while General Read failed to accomplish his main purpose, he did, as I have said, more than any other investigator has done to throw light on Hudson's ancestry, and on his connection with the Muscovy Company in whose service he sailed. Our navigator may or may not have been a grandson of the alderman who cut so fine a figure in the City three centuries and a half ago; but beyond a reasonable doubt he was of the family--so eminently distinguished in the annals of discovery--to which that alderman, one of the founders of the Muscovy Company, and Christopher Hudson, one of its later governors, and Captain Thomas Hudson, who sailed in its service, all belonged. And, being akin to such folk, the natural disposition to adventure was so strong within him that it led him on to accomplishments which have made him the most illustrious bearer of his name.

III

"Anno, 1607, Aprill the nineteenth, at Saint Ethelburge, in Bishops Gate street, did communicate with the rest of the parishioners, these persons, seamen, purposing to goe to sea foure days after, for to discover a passage by the North Pole to Japan and China. First, Henry Hudson, master. Secondly, William Colines, his mate. Thirdly, James Young. Fourthly, John Colman. Fiftly, John Cooke. Sixtly, James Beubery. Seventhly, James Skrutton. Eightly, John Pleyce. Ninthly, Thomas Barter. Tenthly, Richard Day. Eleventhly, James Knight. Twelfthly, John Hudson, a boy."

With those words Purchas prefaced his account of what is known--because we have no record of earlier voyages--as Hudson's first voyage; and with those words our certain knowledge of Hudson's life begins.

St. Ethelburga's, a restful pause in the bustle of Bishopsgate Street, still stands--the worse, to be sure, for the clutter of little shops that has been built in front of it, and for incongruous interior renovation--and I am very grateful to Purchas for having preserved the scrap of information that links Hudson's living body with that church which still is alive: into which may pass by the very doorway that he passed through those who venerate his memory; and there may stand within the very walls and beneath the very roof that sheltered him when he and his ship's company partook of the Sacrament together three hundred years ago. Purchas, no doubt, could have told all that we so gladly would know of Hudson's early history. But he did not tell it--and we must rest content, I think well content, with that poetic beginning at the chancel rail of St. Ethelburga's of the strong life that less than four years later came to its epic ending.

The voyage made in the year 1607, for which Hudson and his crew prepared by making their peace with God in St. Ethelburga's, had nothing to do with America; nor did his voyage of the year following have anything to do with this continent. Both of those adventures were set forth by the Muscovy Company in search of a northeast passage to the Indies; and, while they failed in their main purpose, they added important facts concerning the coasts of Spitzbergen and of Nova Zembla to the existing stock of geographical knowledge, and yielded practical results in that they extended England's Russian trade.

The most notable scientific accomplishment of the first voyage was the high northing made. By observation (July 23, 1607) Hudson was in 80° 23'. By reckoning, two days later, he was in 81°. His reckoning, because of his ignorance of the currents, always has been considered doubtful. His observed position recently has been questioned by Sir Martin Conway, who has arrived at the conclusion: "It is demonstrably probable that for 80° 23' we should read 79° 23'." But even with this reduction accepted, the fact remains that until the year 1773, when Captain Phipps reached 80° 48', Hudson held the record for "farthest north."

To the second voyage belongs the often-quoted incident of the mermaid. The log of that voyage that has come down to us was kept by Hudson himself; and this is what he wrote in it (June 15, 1608) with his own hand: "All day and night cleere sunshine. The wind at east. The latitude at noone 75 degrees 7 minutes. We held westward by our account 13 leagues. In the afternoon, the sea was asswaged, and the wind being at east we set sayle, and stood south and by east, and south southeast as we could. This morning one of our companie looking over boord saw a mermaid, and calling up some of the companie to see her, one more came up and by that time shee was come close to the ships side, looking earnestly on the men. A little after a sea came and overturned her. From the navill upward her backe and breasts were like a womans, as they say that saw her, but her body as big as one of us. Her skin very white, and long haire hanging downe behinde of colour blacke. In her going downe they saw her tayle, which was like the tayle of a porposse, and speckled like a macrell. Their names that saw her were Thomas Hilles and Robert Rayner."

I am sorry to say that the too-conscientious Doctor Asher, in editing this log, felt called upon to add, in a foot-note: "Probably a seal"; and to quote, in support of his prosaic suggestion, various unnecessary facts about seals observed a few centuries later in the same waters by Doctor Kane. For my own part, I much prefer to believe in the mermaid--and, by so believing, to create in my own heart somewhat of the feeling which was in the hearts of those old seafarers in a time when sea-prodigies and sea-mysteries were to be counted with as among the perils of every ocean voyage.

This belief of mine is not a mere whimsical fancy. Unless we take as real what the shipmen of Hudson's time took as real, we not only miss the strong romance which was so large a part of their life, but we go wide of understanding the brave spirit in which their exploring work was done. Adventuring into tempests in their cockle-shell ships they took as a matter of course--and were brave in that way without any thought of their bravery. As a part of the day's work, also, they took their wretched quarters aboard ship and their wretched, and usually insufficient, food. Their highest courage was reserved for facing the fearsome dangers which existed only in their imaginations--but which were as real to them as were the dangers of wreck and of starvation and of battlings with wild beasts, brute or human, in strange new-found lands. It followed of necessity that men leading lives so full of physical hardship, and so beset by wondering dread, were moody and discontented--and so easily went on from sullen anger into open mutiny. And equally did it follow that the shipmasters who held those surly brutes to the collar--driving them to their work with blows, and now and then killing one of them by way of encouraging the others to obedience--were as absolutely fearless and as absolutely strong of will as men could be. All of these conditions we must recognize, and must try to realize, if we would understand the work that was cut out for Hudson, and for every master navigator, in that cruel and harsh and yet ardently romantic time.

It is Hudson's third voyage--the one that brought him into our own river, and that led on directly to the founding of our own city--that has the deepest interest to us of New York. He made it in the service of the Dutch East India Company: but how he came to enter that service is one of the unsolved problems in his career.

In itself, there was nothing out of the common in those days in an English shipmaster going captain in a Dutch vessel. But Hudson--by General Read's showing--was so strongly backed by family influence in the Muscovy Company that it is not easy to understand why he took service with a corporation that in a way was the Muscovy Company's trade rival. Lacking any explanation of the matter, I am inclined to link it with the action of the English Government--when he returned from his voyage and made harbor at Dartmouth--in detaining him in England and in ordering him to serve only under the English flag; and to infer that his going to Holland was the result of a falling out with the directors of the Muscovy Company; and that at their request, when the chances of the sea brought him within English jurisdiction, he was detained in his own country--and so was put in the way to take up with the adventure that led him straight onward to his death. In all of which may be seen the working-out of that fatalism which to my mind is so apparent in Hudson's doings, and which is most apparent in his third voyage: that evidently had its origin in a series of curious mischances, and that ended in his doing precisely what those who sent him on it were resolved that he should not do.

All that we know certainly about his taking service with the Dutch Company is told in a letter from President Jeannin--the French envoy who was engaged in the years 1608-9, with representatives of other nations, in trying to patch up a truce or a peace between the Netherlands and Spain--to his master, Henry IV. Along with his open instructions, Jeannin seems to have had private instructions--in keeping with the customs and principles of the time--to do what he could do in the way of stealing from Holland for the benefit of France a share of the East India trade. In regard to this amiable phase of his mission, under date of January 21, 1609, he wrote:

"Some time ago I made, by your Majesty's orders, overtures to an Amsterdam merchant named Isaac Le Maire, a wealthy man of a considerable experience in the East India trade. He offered to make himself useful to your Majesty in matters of this kind.... A few days ago he sent to me his brother, to inform me that an English pilot who has twice sailed in search of a northern passage has been called to Amsterdam by the East India Company to tell them what he had found, and whether he hoped to discover that passage. They had been well satisfied with his answer, and had thought they might succeed in the scheme. They had, however, been unwilling to undertake at once the said expedition; and they had only remunerated the Englishman for his trouble, and had dismissed him with the promise of employing him next year, 1610. The Englishman, having thus obtained his leave, Le Maire, who knows him well, has since conferred with him and has learnt his opinions on these subjects; with regard to which the Englishman had also intercourse with Plancius, a great geographer and clever mathematician. Plancius maintains, according to the reasons of his science, and from the information given him, ... that there must be in the northern parts a passage corresponding to the one found near the south pole by Magellan.... The Englishman also reports that, having been to the north as far as 80 degrees, he has found that the more northwards he went, the less cold it became."

Hudson's name is not mentioned by Jeannin, but as no other navigator had been so far north as 80°, there can be no doubt as to who "the Englishman" was. The letter goes on to urge that the French king should undertake the "glorious enterprise" of searching for a northerly passage to the Indies, and that he should undertake it openly: as "the East India Company will not have even a right to complain, because the charter granted to them by the States General authorizes them to sail only around the Cape of Good Hope, and not by the north." But Jeannin adds that Le Maire "does not dare to speak about it to any one, because the East India Company fears above everything to be forestalled in this design."

Precisely that fear on the part of the East India Company did undercut the French envoy's plans. In a postscript to his letter he adds: "This letter having been terminated, and I being ready to send it to your Majesty, Le Maire has again written to me.... Some members of the East India Company, who had been informed that the Englishman had secretly treated with him, had become afraid that I might wish to employ him for the discovery of the passage. For this reason they have again treated with him about his undertaking such an expedition in the course of the present year. The directors of the Amsterdam Chamber have written to the other chambers of the same Company to request their approval; and should the others refuse, the Amsterdam Chamber will undertake the expedition at their own risk."

In point of fact, the other chambers did refuse (although, before Hudson actually sailed, they seem to have ratified the agreement made with him); and the Amsterdam Chamber, single-handed, did set forth the voyage.

In view of the fact that the French project in a way was realized, a curiously subtle interest attaches to Jeannin's showing of how narrow were the chances by which Hudson missed being taken into the French service, and was taken into that of the Dutch. A French ship, under the command of a captain whose name has not been preserved, did sail for the North--almost precisely a month later than Hudson's sailing--on May 5, 1609. Beyond the bare fact that such a voyage was made, nothing is known about it: whence the inference is a reasonable one that it produced no new discoveries. But suppose that Hudson had commanded; and, so commanding, had not sailed that unknown captain's useless course but had brought his French ship into what now are our bay and our river; and that the French, not the Dutch, had founded the city here that now is--but by those hair-wide chances might not have been--New York?

Mr. Henry C. Murphy--to whose searchings in the archives of Holland we owe so much--found at The Hague a manuscript history of the East India Company, written by P. van Dam in the seventeenth century, in which a copy of Hudson's contract with the Company is preserved. The contract reads as follows:

"On this eighth of January, in the year of our Lord one thousand six hundred and nine, the Directors of the East India Company of the Chamber of Amsterdam of the ten years reckoning of the one part, and Master Henry Hudson, Englishman, assisted by Jodocus Hondius, of the other part, have agreed in manner following, to wit: That the said Directors shall in the first place equip a small vessel or yacht of about thirty lasts [60 tons] burden, well provided with men, provisions and other necessaries, with which the above named Hudson shall, about the first of April, sail in order to search for a passage by the north, around the north side of Nova Zembla, and shall continue thus along that parallel until he shall be able to sail southward to the latitude of sixty degrees. He shall obtain as much knowledge of the lands as can be done without any considerable loss of time, and if it is possible return immediately in order to make a faithful report and relation of his voyage to the Directors, and to deliver over his journals, log-books, and charts, together with an account of everything whatsoever which shall happen to him during the voyage without keeping anything back.

"For which said voyage the Directors shall pay the said Hudson, as well for his outfit for the said voyage as for the support of his wife and children, the sum of eight hundred guilders [say $336]. And in case (which God prevent) he does not come back or arrive hereabouts within a year, the Directors shall farther pay to his wife two hundred guilders in cash; and thereupon they shall not be farther liable to him or his heirs, unless he shall either afterward or within the year arrive and have found the passage good and suitable for the Company to use; in which case the Directors will reward the before named Hudson for his dangers, trouble, and knowledge, in their discretion.

"And in case the Directors think proper to prosecute and continue the same voyage, it is stipulated and agreed with the before named Hudson that he shall make his residence in this country with his wife and children, and shall enter into the employment of no other than the Company, and this at the discretion of the Directors, who also promise to make him satisfied and content for such farther service in all justice and equity. All without fraud or evil intent. In witness of the truth, two contracts are made hereof ... and are subscribed by both parties and also by Jodocus Hondius as interpreter and witness."

Of Hudson's sailing orders no copy has been found; but an abstract of them has been preserved by Van Dam in these words: "This Company, in the year 1609, fitted out a yacht of about thirty lasts burden and engaged a Mr. Henry Hudson, an Englishman, and a skilful pilot, as master thereof: with orders to search for the aforesaid passage by the north and north-east above Nova Zembla toward the lands or straits of Amian, and then to sail at least as far as the sixtieth degree of north latitude, when if the time permitted he was to return from the straits of Amian again to this country. But he was farther ordered by his instructions to think of discovering no other route or passages except the route around the north and north-east above Nova Zembla; with this additional proviso that, if it could not be accomplished at that time, another route would be the subject of consideration for another voyage."