All England mourned when they heard of his fate, and the Golden Hind was ordered by the Queen to be preserved with scrupulous care in memory of the marvelous journey it had made. When it, too, grew old and had to be broken up, a chair was made from its planks and sent to Oxford University, where it can be seen to the present day as a memorial of Drake's mighty achievements,—feats that stand in a class by themselves, and that will be hard to duplicate to the end of time.
CHAPTER XVI
HENRY HUDSON
When James the First was King of England, and four years after the death of the great Queen Elizabeth, there existed an English and Russian trading company of wealthy merchants which was known as the Muscovy Company—an association of great influence that desired to extend its commerce to far-off China, whose wealth in those days was considered to be fabulous. All the maritime nations of Europe desired to gain the China trade and to bring to their own ports the rich silks and spices of the Orient. All of them were seeking for some quick and easy route for sailing vessels from Europe to China, and fortunate indeed would be that nation whose sailors first discovered such a passage! Therefore, in the year 1607, the Muscovy Company tried to find some sea captain who would undertake a voyage of discovery to find a quicker way to the Far East than around the Cape of Good Hope in southern Africa.
Now at that very time there chanced to be living a mariner named Henry Hudson, who commanded a small coasting vessel which was anchored near the mouth of the River Thames. He heard of the offer made by the Muscovy Company and offered his services. And partly because the merchants believed him to be a capable seaman and partly because no other sailor volunteered for this dangerous mission, Henry Hudson was given command of the little ship called the Hopewell, and with a small crew set out to find the way to China by the northeast, hoping to skirt the northern shore of Russia and then sail south into Oriental seas along the Asiatic coast.
Nobody knows to-day who Hudson was or what his life had been up to the time when he entered the service of the Muscovy Company. Over three hundred years ago he suddenly appeared as a brave and capable sailor and explorer, only to disappear in the great bay in northern Canada that now bears his name, when he was deserted and left to certain death by a mutinous and cowardly crew. We do not know what he looked like, for no portrait of him has been preserved; we do not know who were the members of his family, for no records of them have been kept. All we know is that this master mariner sailed farther north than any sailor of his day—farther north, indeed, than any sailor who succeeded him for nearly three hundred years—and what is still more important, that he explored the great river now called the Hudson, on whose shore stands one of the mightiest cities of the world.
The Hopewell was a little ship, about the size of the smallest fishing vessels of to-day; and had been used many years before by another great explorer and a friend of Sir Francis Drake's named Martin Frobisher. That Hudson was able in this tiny craft to penetrate farther into the arctic wilderness than the great square-rigged ships and the strongly built steamers of the nineteenth century, is almost beyond belief. But the fact that he did so is not to be doubted, and the results of his voyages into those icy and deserted seas bore almost as great fruit as though he had discovered the passage to China that he hoped for.
First Hudson sailed north and then east, to the coast of what is now called Spitzbergen, after which he sailed along the shore of Greenland to the north. He tried to round the northern end of Greenland, but the great ice floes blocked his progress. Everywhere were icebergs and cliffs of solid ice, grinding against each other with a wicked roar on the great seas, and always was there fog born of the ice, or heavy gales that tossed the little Hopewell like a feather. After trying for many days to sail where no ship has ever sailed, Hudson finally gave up the attempt, and, bitterly disappointed, turned his prow toward England, where he reported to the Muscovy Company that great numbers of whales sported in the icy waters near Spitzbergen—a report that afterward resulted in the great whale fisheries of that locality and untold wealth for the ships and companies that pursued them. But Hudson had done more than he realized. Not only had he reached a latitude of eighty-one degrees, fifty minutes, north, but he brought back important information that there was no hope of reaching Asia in the direction he had followed.
The merchants of the Muscovy Company were disappointed, but they still believed that the passage to China could be found, and in 1608 Hudson set sail again, determined this time to find the great waterway that would make his name and fortune. But again he was doomed to failure and returned with even less to show than on the previous voyage. He did, however, bring back a curious tale that added to the superstitious sea lore of those times, for two of his sailors one morning when looking over the side of the vessel beheld what they declared was a mermaid—with a white skin and a tail like a mackerel, long, black hair, and a back and breast like a woman's. For a long time, these mendacious mariners insisted, the mermaid (who is believed to have been a seal) swam beside the vessel looking earnestly into their eyes, but at last a sea overturned her and she dove deep and disappeared from view.