Hudson Tercentenary / An historical retrospect regarding the object and quest of an all-water route from Europe to India; the obstacles in the way; and also Hudson's voyage to America in 1609 and some of its results

by Frank Chamberlain

The ancients held different opinions about the form, dimensions, the proportion of land to water, of the earth, and as to whether it was motionless, around which all the universe revolved, as the great center, and of supreme importance, or whether it was merely a satellite revolving around the sun. It seems flat and the heavenly bodies seem to revolve around it. Others thought the earth was a sphere because “the sphere is the most perfect form; it was the center of the universe because that is the place of honor; and it is motionless, because motion is less dignified than rest.” Some believed that the earth is round and rests upon the ocean. Homer (900 B. C.) taught that the earth is flat, and so, too, did some of the learned men of Greece and Rome, in the Augustan age. The great Church of Rome, of unequaled influence and power, taught that the earth is flat and the center of the universe and interdicted, and for centuries punished as heretics, those denying the infallibility of the Popes and teaching otherwise. It is probable that about 600 B. C., Thales of Miletus, one of the “Seven Wise Men of Greece,” a famous astronomer and geometer, was the first to teach that the earth is round. About 550 B. C. Pythagoras, the renowned Greek philosopher and mathematician, taught that “the earth is a globe which admits of antipodes; that it is in motion; is not the center of the universe, but revolves around the sun.” Plato, Aristotle, Hipparchus, Pliny, Cicero, Virgil, Ovid, Eratosthenes and many others, the most eminent scholars of their times, believed that the earth is a sphere; and Eratosthenes, an Alexandrian philosopher, astronomer, geometer and geographer about 210 B. C. thought that he had not only proved that by scientific astronomical observations but also the speed of the earth in its revolutions; its magnitude and also the relative proportion of its constituent elements of land and water.

Claudius Ptolemy, about 150 A. D., a celebrated Alexandrian astronomer, geographer and mathematician, held the opinion and promulgated it, that the earth is a sphere and that the sun, planets and stars revolve around it as the grand center. He was the founder of the Ptolemaic System which was almost universally received for 1,350 years, when the system of Copernicus (a revival of the system of Pythagoras) permanently displaced it, notwithstanding the violent opposition, extending to persecution, of the Church of Rome against it.

Claudius Ptolemy had calculated the equatorial girth of the earth to be 20,400 miles. Making allowance for latitude, the circumference at the Canaries would be about 18,000 miles and the diameter about one-third of that, or 6,000 miles. Columbus was a student of everything accessible concerning geography and navigation and a devout Roman Catholic. He credited the statement in the Apochrypha of the Bible, Second Esdras, chapter 6, verse 42, which says: “Upon the third day Thou didst command that the waters should be gathered in the seventh part of the earth, six parts has Thou dried up and kept them,” etc., etc.

If Ptolemy’s calculation had been correct and Esdras’s statement reliable, 18,000 miles divided by 7, giving a quotient of 2,571 miles, would have been the distance Columbus would have had to sail from the Azores to Japan. He estimated he might have to sail 4,000 miles (to reach the west coast of India facing Europe) by being deflected from a straight course. The real distance from the Canaries to Japan is 12,000 miles, and the relative proportion of salt water on the surface of the earth to the land is three-quarters. Columbus, believing that he was inspired and commissioned by God to convert the heathen, sailed and thought he had reached India, called the natives Indians (so they have been called ever since) and he died so thinking.

If the magnitude of the earth—its diameter had been ascertained and the relative proportion of land to water with the known longitude and latitude of India, then the problem was easily solved that an all-water route to India from Europe, whether by sailing westward or northward, would greatly diminish the distance (about 8,000 miles) covered by sailing around Cape Good Hope. That was a great desideratum—the aim of individuals and nations, which would seem to warrant the belief of speedy accomplishment. Let us not forget that we must consider the conditions of the past and not of the twentieth or nineteenth centuries.

Notwithstanding “Henry, the Navigator” applied the inventions and equipments so indispensable to scientific navigation, and did all he could to inspire his sailors to sail around South Africa, it was forty years before that was an accomplished fact. So inferior, so inadequate, for ocean navigation, were the vessels then, and so little was known about ocean currents and the trade winds, that we can easily imagine that long sea voyages were discouraging.

There is no other class of men so superstitious as were the sailors, nor as are the sailors now. Everything that they see or hear of, that is unusual or they don’t understand, frightens them as foreboding evil. It is an experience reported by so many of the famous navigators. You will recall Columbus’s experience in his first voyage across the Atlantic, and not only the evasive answers he gave when the sailors noticed a variation of the needle and his threats to enforce his orders, that he might continue his voyage.

About 480 B. C., Pindar, the greatest of the lyric poets of Greece, declared that “Beyond Cades (Cadiz in Spain) no man, however bold and brave, could pass; only a god might voyage those waters.” The Atlantic was deemed a dangerous ocean. Thus we are reminded of some of the obstacles which delayed European discovery of the western world.

All that is known of the life, education, pursuits and achievements of Hudson, the Navigator, whose name is perpetuated in monuments (“more enduring than brass”) upon the face of nature (its waters and land) in North America, is contained in the brief period of five years, or from 1606 to 1611, and is almost entirely contained in his log-books of his four voyages.

That so little about Hudson is known is not because efforts have not been made by competent and zealous investigators. It is greatly to be regretted that Richard Hakluyt and Samuel Purchas, Englishmen and contemporaries of Hudson, so greatly condensed in their writings the material they had and which is the chief source of information.