CHAPTER III
1609
HUDSON’S THIRD VOYAGE
While Hudson was pursuing his phantom across Polar seas, Europe had at last awakened to the secret of Spain’s greatness—colonial wealth that poured the gold of Peru into her treasury. To counteract Spain, colonizing became the master policy of Europe. France was at work on the St. Lawrence. England was settling Virginia, and Smith, the pioneer of Virginia, who was Hudson’s personal friend, had explored the Chesapeake.
James II, Duke of York, Second Governor of the Hudson’s Bay Company.
But the Netherlands went a step farther. To throw off the yoke of Spain, they maintained a fleet of seventy merchantmen furnished as ships of war to wage battle on the high seas. Spanish colonies were to be attacked wherever found. Spanish cities were to be sacked as the buccaneers sacked them on the South Sea. Spanish caravels with cargoes of gold were to be scuttled and sunk wherever met. It was to be brigandage—brigandage pure and simple—from the Zuider Zee to Panama, from the North Pole to the South.
Hudson’s voyages for the Muscovy merchants of London to find a short way to Asia at once arrested the attention of the Dutch. Dutch and English vied with each other for the discovery of that short road to the Orient. For a century the chance encounter of Dutch and English sailors on Arctic seas had been the signal for the instant breaking of heads. Not whales but men were harpooned when Dutch and English fishermen met off Nova Zembla, or Spitzbergen, or the North Cape.
Hudson was no sooner home from his second voyage for the English than the Dutch East India Company invited him to Holland to seek passage across the Pole for them. This—it should be explained—is the only justification that exists for writing the English pilot’s name as Hendrick instead of Henry, as though employment by the Dutch changed the Englishman’s nationality.
The invitation was Hudson’s salvation. Just at the moment when all doors were shut against him in England and when his hopes were utterly baffled by two failures—another door opened. Just at the moment when his own thoughts were turning toward America as the solution of the North-West Passage, the chance came to seek the passage in America. Just when Hudson was at the point where he might have abandoned his will-o’-the-wisp, it lighted him to a fresh pursuit on a new Trail. It is such coincidences as these in human life that cause the poet to sing of Destiny.