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