-dressed, they
desire clothes and are very civil--they have great store of maize,
whereof they make good bread. The country is full of great and tall
oaks." To this he adds that the women had red copper tobacco pipes,
many of them being dressed in mantles of feathers or furs, but the
natives proved treacherous. Sailing up the river, Hudson found it a
mile broad, with high land on both sides. By the night of 19th September
the little _Half-Moon_ had reached the spot where the river widens
near the modern town of Albany. He had sailed for the first time the
distance covered to-day by magnificent steamers which ply daily
between Albany and New York city. Hudson now went ashore with an old
chief of the country. "Two men were dispatched in quest of game," so
records Hudson's manuscript, "who brought in a pair of pigeons. They
likewise killed a fat dog and skinned it with great haste with shells.
The land is the finest for cultivation that ever I in my life set foot
upon."

Hudson had not found a way to China, but he had found the great and
important river that now bears his name. Yet he was to do greater things
than these, and to lose his life in the doing. The following year,
1610, found him once more bound for the north, continuing the endless
search for a north-west passage--this time for the English, and not
for the Dutch. On board the little _Discovery_ of fifty-five tons,
with his young son, Jack, still his faithful companion, with a
treacherous old man as mate, who had accompanied him before, with a
good-for-nothing young spendthrift taken at the last moment "because
he wrote a good hand," and a mixed crew, Hudson crossed the wide
Atlantic for the last time. He sailed by way of Iceland, where "fresh
fish and dainty fowl, partridges, curlew, plover, teale, and goose"
much refreshed the already discontented crews, and the hot baths of
Iceland delighted them. The men wanted to return to the pleasant land
discovered in the last expedition, but the mysteries of the frozen
North still called the old explorer, and he steered for Greenland.
He was soon battling with ice upon the southern end of "Desolation,"
whence he crossed to the snowy shores of Labrador, sailing into the
great straits that bear his name to-day. For three months they sailed
aimlessly about that "labyrinth without end" as it was called by Abacuk
Prickett who wrote the account of this fourth and last voyage of Henry
Hudson. But they could find no opening to