The situation was this:
Not a dozen boats had sailed beyond the Sixtieth degree of north latitude. From Sixty to the Pole was an area as great as Africa. This region was absolutely unknown. What did it hide? Was it another new world, or a world of waters giving access across the Pole from Europe to Asia? The Muscovy Company of England, the East India Company of Holland, both knew the Greenland of the Danes; and sent their ships to fish at Spitzbergen, east of Greenland. But was Greenland an island, or a great continent? Were Spitzbergen and Greenland parts of a vast Polar land? Did the mountains wreathed there in eternal mists conceal the wealth of a second Peru? Below the endless swamps of ice, would men find gold sands? And when one followed up the long coast of the east shore—as long as from Florida to Maine—where the Danish colonies had perished of cold centuries ago—what beyond? A continent, or the Pole, or the mystic realm of frost peopled by the monsters of Saga myth, where the Goddess of Death held pitiless sway and the shores were lined with the dead who had dared to invade her realm? Why these questions should have pierced the peace of Henry Hudson, the English pilot, and possessed him—can no more be explained than the Something on the Trail that compels Something in the hound.
Like other dreamers, Hudson had to put his dreams in harness; hitch his Idea to every day uses, The Muscovy Company trading to Russia wanted to find a short way across the Pole to China. Hudson had worked up from sailor to pilot and pilot to master on the Dutch traders, and was commissioned to seek the passage. The Company furnished him with a crew of eleven including his own boy, John. It would be ridiculous if it were not so pathetic—these simple sailors undertaking a venture that has baffled every great navigator since time began.
Led by Hudson with the fire of a great faith in his eyes, the men solemnly marched to Saint Ethelburge Church off Bishopgate Street, London, to partake of Holy Communion and ask God’s aid. Back to the muddy water-front opposite the Tower; a gold coin for last drinks; a hearty God-speed from the gentlemen of the Muscovy Company pompous in self-importance and lace ruffles—and the little crew steps into a clumsy river boat with brick-red sails. One gentleman opines with a pinch of snuff that it may be “this many a day before Master Hudson returns.” Riffraff loafers crane necks to see to the last. Cursing watermen clear the course by thumping other rivermen out of the way. The boat slips under the bridge down the wide flood of the yeasty Thames through a forest of masts and sails of as many colors as Joseph’s coat.
It is like a great sewer of humanity, this river tide with its city’s traffic of a thousand years. Farmers rafting down loads of hay, market women punting themselves along with boat loads of vegetables, fishing schooners breasting the tide with full-blown sails, high-hulled galleons from Spain, flat-bottomed, rickety tubs from the Zee, gay little craft—barges with bunting, wherries with lovers, rowboats with nothing more substantial than silk awnings for a sail—jostle and throng and bump each other as Hudson’s crew shoots down with the tide. Not a man of the crew but wonders—is he seeing it all for the last time?
But here is the Muscovy Company’s ship all newly rigged waiting at Gravesend, absurdly small for such a venture on such a sea. Then, in the clanking of anchor chains and sing-song of the capstan and last shouts of the noisy rivermen, apprehensions are forgotten. Can they but find a short route to China, their homely little craft may plough back with as rich cargo as ever Spanish caravel brought from the fabulous South Sea. The full tide heaves and rocks and bears out; a mad-souled dreamer standing at the prow with his little son, who is very silent. The air is fraught with something too big for words. May first, 1607, Hudson is off for the Pole. He might as well have been following the Flying Dutchman, or ballooning to the moon.
The city along the banks of the Thames has presently thinned to towns. The towns slide past into villages. The villages blur into meadow lands with the thatch roof of the farmer’s cot; and before night, the last harbor light has been left in the offing. The little ship has headed her carved prow north. The billows of the North Sea roll to meet her. Darkness falls with no sound but the swish of the waters against the ports, the hum of the wind through the rigging, and the whirring flap of the great sails shifting to catch the breeze.
For six weeks, north, northwest, they drove over the tumbling world of waters, sliding from crest to trough, from blue hollow to curdling wave-top, ploughing a watery furrow into the region of long, white light and shortening nights, and fogs that lay without lifting once in twenty days. The farther north they sailed, the tighter drew the cords of cold, like a violin string stretched till it fairly snapped—air full of pure ozone that set the blood jumping and finger-tips tingling! Green spray froze the sails stiff as boards. The rigging became ropes of ice, the ship a ghost gliding white through the fogs. At last came a squall that rolled the mists up like a scroll, and straight ahead, high and lonely as cloud-banks, towered the white peaks of Greenland’s mountains. Though it was two o’clock in the morning, it was broad daylight, and the whole crew came scrambling up the hatches to the shout of “Land!” Hudson enthusiastically named the mountain “God’s Mercy”; but the lift of mist uncurtained to the astonished gaze of the English sailors a greater wonder than the mountains. North, south, east, west, the ship was embayed in an ice-world—ice in islands and hills and valleys with lakes and rivers of fresh water flowing over the surface. Birds flocked overhead with lonely screams at these human intruders on a realm as white and silent as death; and where one crystal berg was lighted to gold by the sun, a huge polar bear hulked to its highest peak and surveyed the newcomers in as much astonishment at them as they felt at him. Truly, this was the Ultima Thule of poet’s dream—beyond the footsteps of man. Blue was the sky above, blue the patches of ocean below, blue the illimitable fields of ice, blue and lifeless and cold as steel. The men passed that day jubilant as boys out of school. Some went gunning for the birds. Others would have pursued the polar bear but with a splash the great creature dived into the sea. The crew took advantage of the pools of fresh water in the ice to fill their casks with drinking water. For the next twenty-four hours, Hudson crept among the ice floes by throwing out a hook on the ice, then hauling up to it by cable.