on was taken until the trial
began in Oyer and Terminer. The date of that beginning cannot be
fixed precisely--there being no date attached to the True Bill
found against Bileth, Prickett, Wilson, Motter, Bond, and Sims.
(For some unknown reason Mathews and Clemens were not included in
the indictment; although Clemens, certainly, was within the
jurisdiction of the Court.) The date may be fixed very closely,
however, by the fact that the two most important witnesses,
Prickett and Byleth, were examined on 7 February, 1616 (O.S.).
Three months later, 13 May, 1617 (O.S.), Clemens was examined. And
that is all! There, in the very middle of the trial--leaving in the
air the examinations of the other witnesses and the judgments of
the Court--the records end.

Had document No. 2 of the Oyer and Terminer series been found, some
explanation of the five years' delay of the trial might have been
forthcoming; and the exact date of its beginning probably would
have been fixed. As the records stand, they leave us--so far as the
trial is concerned--with a series of increasingly disappointing
negatives: We do not know why two of the crew--one of them
certainly within reach of the Court--were not included in the
indictment; nor why the trial was postponed for so long a time; nor
certainly when it ended; nor, worst of all, what was its result.

I should be glad to believe that the mutineers--even including
Byleth, who was the best of them--came to the hanging that the
Elder Brethren of the Trinity, in their off-hand just judgment,
declared that they deserved. If they did, there is no known record
of their hanging. A curiously suggestive interest, however,
attaches to the fact that at just about the time when the trial
ended one of them, and the only conspicuous one of them, seems
permanently to have disappeared. That most careful investigator the
late Mr. Alexander Brown was unable to find any sure trace of
Byleth after his second voyage with Baffin, which was made in
March-August, 1616. Seven months later, as the subjoined records
prove, he was on trial for his life. It seems to me to be at least
a possibility that the result of that trial may have led directly
to his permanent disappearance. If it did, and if Prickett and the
others in a like way disappeared with him, then was justice done on
Hudson's murderers.

THE DOCUMENTS

Trinity House MS. Transactions. 1609-1625.

(24 _October_ 1611)

The 9 men turned out of