HENRY HUDSON

Though the adventurers to Hudson Bay turned to fur trading and won
wealth, and discovered an empire while pursuing the little beaver across
a continent, the beginning of all this was not the beaver, but a
myth--the North-West Passage--a short way round the world to bring back
the spices and silks and teas of India and Japan. It was this quest, not
the lure of the beaver, that first brought men into the heart of New
World wilds by way of Hudson Bay.

In this search Henry Hudson led the way when he sent his little
high-decked oak craft, the _Discovery_, butting through the ice-drive of
Hudson Strait in July of 1610; 'worming a way' through the floes by
anchor out to the fore and a pull on the rope from behind. Smith,
Wolstenholme, and Digges, the English merchant adventurers who had
supplied him with money for his brig and crew, cared for nothing but
the short route to those spices and silks of the orient. They thought,
since Hudson's progress had been blocked the year before in the same
search up the bay of Chesapeake and up the Hudson river, that the only
remaining way must lie through these northern straits. So now thought
Hudson, as the ice jams closed behind him and a clear way opened before
him to the west on a great inland sea that rocked to an ocean tide.

Was that tide from the Pacific? How easily does a wish become father to
the thought! Ice lay north, open water south and west; and so south-west
steered Hudson, standing by the wheel, though Juet, the old mate, raged
in open mutiny because not enough provisions remained to warrant further
voyaging, much less the wintering of a crew of twenty in an ice-locked
world. Henry Greene, a gutter-snipe picked off the streets of London, as
the most of the sailors of that day were, went whispering from man to
man of the crew that the master's commands to go on ought not to be
obeyed. But we must not forget two things when we sit in judgment on
Henry Hudson's crew. First, nearly all sailors of that period were
unwilling men seized forcibly and put on board. Secondly, in those days
nearly all seamen, masters as well as men, were apt to turn pirate at
the sight of an alien sail. The ships of all foreign nations were
considered lawful prey to the mariner with the stronger crew or fleeter
sail.

[Illustration: THE ROUTES OF HUDSON AND MUNCK
Map by Bartholomew.]

The waters that we know to-day as the Pacific were known to Hudson as
the South Sea. And now t