Excerpt from Fatal Journey
from Chapter 1: Mutiny
Like the needle of a compass, Henry Hudson was always attracted to the North. In 1607 he led a mission that he hoped would take him from England over the top of the world and past the pole toward East Asia. Like all European explorers of his age, Hudson knew the great rewards that would come to the one who found a new and quick route to the vast markets of spices and silks in East Asia and the southwest Pacific. The English had wanted to find a quick passage for almost a century. Explorers knew that discovery of the route would bring glory to their realm and even help the larger Protestant mission to rescue Christendom from the thralldom of Rome. Of course, Hudson’s backers had other goals too, notably making an enormous fortune by controlling the trade between East Asia and England. The English East India Company, organized only a few years earlier, had already begun to sail commodity-laden vessels home from the Spice Islands. But they had to follow the long course that took them out of Europe and around Africa and India before arriving at their destination—a journey through thousands of miles of open seas which put them at risk of Barbary pirates who had the unfortunate habit of taking English sailors captive and selling them as slaves. Hudson knew that a northern passage, despite the risks every sailor confronted in the Arctic, could cut the time substantially, and thereby increase profits by reducing the costs of any venture.
The expedition to sail past the pole failed and Hudson turned home. But he did not give up. The next year he launched another expedition from England in search of the Northeast Passage, a water route through seas north of Russia to East Asia. Other Europeans had sought this course before, most notably the Dutch explorer Willem Barentsz (William Barents), who had perished in 1597 on his third attempt to sail past Novaya Zemlya. Hudson could not find a way through the pack ice that blocked the route. Once again he returned to England. It would be almost three hundred years before Europeans managed to complete a voyage from the Atlantic to the Pacific north of Russia.
Despite these failures, Hudson’s reputation remained intact. In 1609 the Dutch East India Company—the leading competitor of the English mercantile house—hired Hudson to lead another journey in search of the Northeast Passage. Hudson guided the eighty-ton Halve Maen (Half Moon) toward that potential route,but gave up on it and instead sailed across the Atlantic. He had hoped to find an entryway to the much-fabled Northwest Passage somewhere north of Virginia,where the English had only recently established a colony based at Jamestown. Hudson eventually sailed into modern New York harbor and then up the river that now bears his name. On his return to Amsterdam he landed in England,perhaps detained by local authorities.
No English mariner of this age knew the North Atlantic as well as Hudson. His willingness to lead ships northward season after season revealed him as a man willing to take risks in the effort to explore new territory and bring home hard-won knowledge. Remarkably, none of Hudson’s men perished on the expeditions of1607 and 1608. As he proved, he knew what it took for all of his men to survive. He understood the particular challenges that all Europeans faced in northern waters. He knew how to overcome what the American novelist Jack London would identify three hundred years later as “the Fear of the North,” the terrifying “child of the Great Cold and the Great Silence.” He recognized the terrors that shrouded the Arctic once the sun,perpetually visible during the prime sailing months, made its inevitable dip below the horizon. The darkness that followed could seem inescapable to those unfamiliar with northern rhythms. Ship candles and oil lamps provided small solace in the gloom.
Few Europeans of Hudson’s time had much experience sailing the chilled waters of the Arctic. Norse sailors had traversed the northern reaches of the Atlantic in the centuries around the year 1000 and in the process had established outposts in Iceland, Greenland, and Newfoundland. In the years following Columbus’s journeys the English had sponsored expeditions by the Venetians John and Sebastian Cabot. But the English did not follow their efforts with any sustained efforts to explore North America for another two generations. Martin Frobisher sailed the North Atlantic in the mid-1570s and on his third journey he brought home 200 tons of ore that had glistened in the mid-summer sunshine, only to discover with dismay that it was worthless—tons of rock, no gold.Sir Humphrey Gilbert, half-brother of Sir Walter Raleigh sailed to Newfoundland in1583, but two of his three ships, including the one he was on, sunk on their return.
The English mariner John Davis led three journeys in the mid-1580s in search of the Northwest Passage. He explored the west coast of Greenland, sailed north into the strait that now bears his name,and also coasted the eastern shores of Baffin Island and modern Labrador. Europeans were not the only individuals to sail across the north Atlantic. By Hudson’s time some Inuit had made the long journey from as far as Baffin Island to the Old World. These individuals had been taken captive by Europeans and died soon after arriving in the realms of Queen Elizabeth I of England and King Christian IV of Denmark (whose territory included Greenland),though a fifteenth-century London chronicle claimed that three men who had returned on one of the Cabots’ voyages could for a time be seen walking the corridors of Whitehall.
Hudson’s knowledge of other explorers’ feats and his experiences during his first three journeys shaped the expedition he organized in the spring of 1610when he set out to find the Northwest Passage on the fifty-five ton bark named Discovery. He had done what he could to prepare for another effort to find a water route to East Asia. Discovery’s hold contained barrels of food and beer preserved for the long ocean voyage,nets to haul fish, firearms and pikes to hunt or defend the crew, and a carpenter with the skills to reconstruct at least two rowboats that would be necessary for exploring shallow waters.
Hudson was also intellectually prepared for the challenge. In the years prior to his expedition there was a growing recognition within England of the crucial relationship between mathematics and navigation. Hudson furthered the trend when he lured a mathematician named Thomas Wydowse to join the crew, an appointment that would have given any maps generated by the expedition while at sea added authority. Hudson had also made contacts with individuals who could help him. Even before his 1609 journey he had met Captain John Smith, a veteran of voyages to the new English colony on the banks of Chesapeake Bay who was eager to share his views about the possible water route through North America. Hudson quite likely knew Richard Hakluyt, England’s preeminent authority on overseas navigation who had published numerous accounts of journeys to the Northwest Passage and encouraged the first English translation of reports describing Barentsz’s expeditions. Hudson had also befriended some of Europe’s most sophisticated mapmakers. From such authorities he gathered information about the probable existence and location of the Northwest Passage. And the experience he had gained at sea was crucial too. After all, this was his fourth voyage in four years and he had learned much about the dangers that would face his men during their expedition. The Atlantic had become a second home to him. He spent almost as much time there during these years as he did on land.
By the time he departed Hudson had used his connections to obtain funding from some of London’s best known investors. Among them was Thomas Smythe (or Smith), who was one of three principle backers of the voyage of Discovery in 1610. At the time Smythe was already one of the dominant forces in English overseas trade. He was the first governor of the East India Company, and except for a period from 1605 to 1607 he served in that capacity until 1621. In 1609 he had become treasurer of the Virginia Company, the joint-stock effort responsible for the English settlement at Jamestown. He was also a member of the Company of Merchant Adventurers and one of the governors of both the Levant Company and the Muscovy Company, an enterprise with long connections to Hudson’s family. Smythe embraced the opportunities opened by long-distance trade and observers reported that sailors or their wives could often be found at his house. To get his funding signaled that a venture had the approval of the most illustrious men of his age, a man who also served in Parliament and would later become governor of the Somers Island Company, which tried to organize an English colony on Bermuda. Smythe kept in contact with those he supported, and shared information with Hakluyt, among others, thereby helping to keep the idea of long-distance trade in the minds of policy makers and the public—when editors published such reports.
But prominent contacts and ample financial support only took a ship commander so far. In the end it was Hudson—not Europe’s mapmakers or Hakluyt or Smythe—who had to lead an expedition into waters that Europeans had yet to explore. No plan was foolproof. Human error, the vagaries of the weather, a troublesome crew, or encounters with little-understood peoples could undermine any voyage. As a veteran of three earlier journeys, Hudson understood the risks he would soon face.
During the summer of 1610, Hudson guided Discovery across the Atlantic to the Canadian coast, entering the body of water now known as Hudson Strait and into modern Hudson Bay. Few Europeans had seen these waters before. It is possible that a Portuguese expedition had entered the strait much earlier,and that Frobisher did as well, though there is little evidence that either made it very far. Frobisher named an alleged passage from the Atlantic to the Pacific “Frobisher’s Straits,” but that act was the product more of his imagination than his observations. Davis had sailed across the opening to Hudson Strait. But he chose to continue south toward the coast of Labrador before heading back towards England. Hudson was the first English mariner to sail deep into the strait, which divided modern Baffin Island from the Ungava Peninsula. When Discovery arrived in Hudson Bay its captain thought that he had finally found what he had spent years looking for: a seaway that would take him through the North American continent to the Pacific (known to Europeans at the time as the South Sea). But finding the possible route westward would have been meaningless if he failed at that point. He needed time to guide Discovery through frigid Canadian bays and into warmer waters before the Arctic winter closed the seas and locked his men into a world of ice, skin-freezing winds, darkness, and possible death.