ow in the early morning Hudson was seized and his arms bound behind
him.

"What does this mean?" he cried.

"You will know soon enough when you are in the shallop," they replied.

The boat was lowered and into it Hudson was put with his son, while
the "poor, sick, and lame men were called upon to get them out of their
cabins into the shallop." Then the mutineers lowered some powder and
shot, some pikes, an iron pot, and some meal into her, and the little
boat was soon adrift with her living freight of suffering, starving
men--adrift in that icebound sea, far from home and friends and all
human help. At the last moment the carpenter sprang into the drifting
boat, resolved to die with the captain sooner than desert him. Then
the _Discovery_ flew away with all sail up as from an enemy.

And "the master" perished--how and when we know not.

Fortunately the mutineers took home Hudson's journals and charts.
Ships were sent out to search for the lost explorer, but the silence
has never been broken since that summer's day three hundred years ago,
when he was deserted in the waters of his own bay.

CHAPTER XXXVIII

BAFFIN FINDS HIS BAY

Two years only after the tragedy of Henry Hudson, another Arctic
explorer appears upon the scene. William Baffin was already an
experienced seaman in the prime of life; he had made four voyages to
the icy north, when he was called on by the new Company of Merchants
of London--"discoverers of the North-West Passage"--formed in 1612,
to prepare for another voyage of discovery. Distressed beyond measure
at the desertion of Henry Hudson, the Muscovy Company had dispatched
Sir Thomas Button with our old friend Abacuk Prickett to show him the
way. Button had reached the western side of Hudson's Bay, and after
wintering there returned fully convinced that a north-west passage
existed in this direction. Baffin returned from an expedition to
Greenland the same year. The fiords and islets of west Greenland, the
ice-floes and glaciers of Spitzbergen, the tidal phenomena of Hudson's
Strait, and the geographical secrets of the far-northern bay were all
familiar to him. "He was, therefore, chosen as mate and associate"
to Bylot, one of the men who had deserted Hudson, but who had sailed
three times with him previously and knew well the western seas. So
in "the good ship called the _Discovery_," of fifty-five tons, with
a crew of fourteen men and two boys, William Baffin sailed for the
norther