: Henry Hudson: A Brief Statement of His Aims and His Achievements by Janvier Thomas A Thomas Allibone - Explorers Great Britain Biography; Hudson Henry -1611

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PART I A Brief Life of Henry Hudson

PART II Newly-discovered Documents

PREFACE It is with great pleasure that I include in this volume contemporary Hudson documents which have remained neglected for three centuries, and here are published for the first time. As I explain more fully elsewhere, their discovery is due to the painstaking research of Mr. R.G. Marsden, M.A. My humble share in the matter has been to recognize the importance of Mr. Marsden's discovery; and to direct the particular search in the Record Office, in London, that has resulted in their present reproduction. I regret that they are inconclusive. We still are ignorant of what punishment was inflicted upon the mutineers of the "Discovery"; or even if they were punished at all.

The primary importance of these documents, however, is not that they establish the fact--until now not established--that the mutineers were brought to trial; it is that they embody the sworn testimony, hitherto unproduced, of six members of Hudson's crew concerning the mutiny. Asher, the most authoritative of Hudson's modern historians, wrote: "Prickett is the only eye-witness that has left us an account of these events, and we can therefore not correct his statements whether they be true or false." We now have the accounts of five additional eye-witnesses , and all of them, so far as they go, substantially are in accord with Prickett's account. Such agreement is not proof of truth. The newly adduced witnesses and the earlier single witness equally were interested in making out a case in their own favor that would save them from being hanged. But this new evidence does entitle Prickett's "Larger Discourse" to a more respectful consideration than that dubious document heretofore has received. Save in matters affected by this fresh material, the following narrative is a condensation of what has been recorded by Hudson's authoritative biographers, of whom the more important are: Samuel Purchas, Hessel Gerritz, Emanuel Van Meteren, G.M. Asher, Henry C. Murphy, John Romeyn Brodhead, and John Meredith Read.

No portrait of Hudson is known to be in existence. What has passed with the uncritical for his portrait--a dapper-looking man wearing a ruffed collar--frequently has been, and continues to be, reproduced. Who that man was is unknown. That he was not Hudson is certain.

Lacking Hudson's portrait, I have used for a frontispiece a photograph, especially taken for this purpose, of the interior of the Church of Saint Ethelburga: the sole remaining material link, of which we have sure knowledge, between Hudson and ourselves. The drawing on the cover represents what is very near to being another material link--the replica, lately built in Holland, of the "Half Moon," the ship in which Hudson made his most famous voyage.

The copy of Wright's famous work on navigation that Hudson may have had, and probably did have, with him was of an earlier date than that of which the title-page here is reproduced. This reproduction is of interest in that it shows at a glance all of the nautical instruments that Hudson had at his command; and of a still greater interest in that the map which is a part of it exhibits what at that time, by exploration or by conjecture, was the known world. To the making of that map Hudson himself contributed: on it, with a previously unknown assurance, his River clearly is marked. The inadequate indication of his Bay probably is taken from Weymouth's chart--the chart that Hudson had with him on his voyage. A curious feature of this map is its marking--in defiance of known facts--of two straits, to the north and to the south of a large island, where should be the Isthmus of Panama.

The one seemingly fanciful picture, that of the mermaids, is not fanciful--a point that I have enlarged upon elsewhere--by the standard of Hudson's times. Hudson himself believed in the existence of mermaids: as is proved by his matter-of-fact entry in his log that a mermaid had been seen by two of his crew.

A BRIEF LIFE OF HENRY HUDSON

HENRY HUDSON

If ever a compelling Fate set its grip upon a man and drove him to an accomplishment beside his purpose and outside his thought, it was when Henry Hudson--having headed his ship upon an ordered course northeastward--directly traversed his orders by fetching that compass to the southwestward which ended by bringing him into what now is Hudson's River, and which led on quickly to the founding of what now is New York.

Indeed, the late Thomas Aquinas, and the later Calvin, could have made out from the few known facts in the life of this navigator so pretty a case in favor of Predestination that the blessed St. Augustine and the worthy Arminius--supposing the four come together for a friendly dish of theological talk--would have had their work cut out for them to formulate a countercase in favor of Free Will. It is a curious truth that every important move in Hudson's life of which we have record seems to have been a forced move: sometimes with a look of chance about it--as when the directors of the Dutch East India Company called him back and hastily renewed with him their suspended agreement that he should search for a passage to Cathay on a northeast course past Nova Zembla, and so sent him off on the voyage that brought the "Half Moon" into Hudson's River; sometimes with the fatalism very much in evidence--as when his own government seized him out of the Dutch service, and so put him in the way to go sailing to his death on that voyage through Hudson's Strait that ended, for him, in his mutineering crew casting him adrift to starve with cold and hunger in Hudson's Bay. And, being dead, the same inconsequent Fate that harried him while alive has preserved his name, and very nobly, by anchoring it fast to that River and Strait and Bay forever: and this notwithstanding the fact that all three of them were discovered by other navigators before his time.

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