Henry Hudson | Page 6

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.

IV
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,