's equally
exemplary punishment, equally deserved, came a little later. On the
homeward voyage the whole company got to the very edge, and Juet
passed beyond the edge, of starvation. When the ship was only sixty
or seventy leagues from Ireland, where she made her landfall,
Prickett tells that he "dyed for meere want."

What befell the survivors of the "Discovery's" crew, on the ship's
return to England, has remained until now unknown; and even now the
account of them is inconclusive. In the Latin edition of the year
1613 of his "Detectio Freti" Hessel Gerritz wrote: "They exposed
Hudson and the other officers in a boat on the open sea, and
returned into their country. There they have been thrown into
prison for their crime, and will be kept in prison until their
captain shall be safely brought home. For that purpose some ships
have been sent out last year by the late Prince of Wales and by the
Directors of the Moscovia Company, about the return of which
nothing as yet has been heard."

For three hundred years that statement of fact has ended Hudson's
story. The fragmentary documents which I have been so fortunate as
to obtain from the Record Office carry it a little, only a little,
farther. Unhappily they stop short--giving no assurance that the
mutineers got to the gallows that they deserved. All that they
prove is that the few survivors were brought to trial: charged with
having put the master of their ship, and others, "into a shallop,
without food, drink, fire, clothing, or any necessaries, and then
maliciously abandoning them: so that they came thereby to their
death, and miserably perished."

There, unfinished, the record ends. What penalty, or that any
penalty, was exacted of those who survived to be tried for Hudson's
murder remains unknown. Their ignoble fate is hidden in a sordid
darkness: fitly in contrast with his noble fate--that lies retired
within a glorious mystery.

XIV

Hudson has no cause to quarrel with the rating that has been fixed
for him in the eternal balances. All that he lost (or seemed to
lose) in life has been more than made good to him in the flowing of
the years since he fought out with Fate his last losing round.

In his River and Strait and Bay he has such monuments set up before
the whole world as have been awarded to only one other navigator.
And they are his justly. Before his time, those great waterways,
and that great inland sea, were mere hazy geographical concepts