The Muscovy Company still believed that an all-water and a very much shorter route than that via Cape of Good Hope from Western Europe to India could be found by the northeast, fitted out a vessel with a larger crew and gave our Captain Henry Hudson the command of it and under the same instructions as before. His son, as well as several others of his crew on the “Hopeful,” went with him on this second voyage. He sailed from London April 25, 1608, and, obstructed by the ice, he could go no further than Nova Zembla, which had been discovered in 1553. He promptly returned to England and reported to the company. Hudson asked for more men and less rigid orders that he might make another voyage, but the company did not comply with his request. “It is not known whether it was because it had abandoned the hope of finding a northeastern route or had lost confidence in Hudson’s ability.” Navigators, like prophets, “are not without honor save in their own country;” as examples, Columbus, John Cabot, Verazzano, Magellan and Americus Vespucius, whose discoveries were for nations not their own.
Hudson, firm in the belief that he could find a much shorter all-water route than then was known, sought employment from the Dutch East India Company, which had heard of him as an able, brave and skilled navigator who had been in the employ of their rival—the English—an incentive to secure his services. Hudson was invited to Amsterdam to confer with the directors of the Dutch East India Company. He went and there met the Amsterdam directors of the Dutch East India Company. The Amsterdam directors thought favorably of securing Hudson’s services for the Dutch East India Company—at all events to prevent him from entering any other service and it is said they asked him to come to them a year later for employment as a matter of that importance could be acted on only by the Council of Seventeen. This was to postpone the matter, much to Hudson’s disappointment and detriment—ending, possibly, in mere talk. The Dutch East India Company was then the most prosperous of the East India companies and was really more anxious to prevent any other company from discovering a new all-water route (the company had resolved to do that at any cost) than to find one themselves. However, the Amsterdam directors did not hoodwink Hudson by their excuse for delay, which would bind him for a year and leave them free. A former director of the Dutch East India Company, who thought he had been ill treated by the company, resigned, became a bitter opponent of the company and resided in Paris. He told Hudson of the duplicity and purpose of the Amsterdam directors in holding him in suspense. The then French King, Henry IV, felt chagrined that France, through oversight or neglect, had not in any due proportion, considering her dignity and importance, shared in the India trade and that her expeditions to Canada had not proved a success, determined to seek and obtain an experienced navigator to take command of a well-equipped expedition in quest of the best all-water route to India. The French King was advised to communicate with James Lemaire, a Dutch navigator of great wealth and residing in Paris. He did so and Lemaire knew Hudson and named him as the best man for the position.
Governments employ a secret service to keep a close watch upon other governments and to report promptly what they are doing and contemplating. King Henry learned about Henry Hudson’s conference with the Amsterdam directors of the Dutch East India Company who wanted to bind him to wait a year before engaging again in a voyage of discovery for India and then come to them for employment.
The French King gave orders that Hudson be engaged at once on most liberal terms in the service of France, but the Amsterdam directors learned of his decision and without any further delay entered on the 8th of January, 1609, in a contract with Hudson which resulted in the Dutch claim of New Netherlands instead, perhaps, of extended French claims in the New World. This contract has been very sharply commented upon as being very illiberal in the compensation stated for the services and great risk that Hudson was to undergo; that while clear in terms it was not in perfect good faith for as it claimed to be an act of the Dutch East India Company and was signed by only two of the directors of the Amsterdam chamber who had no authority to bind the company in such a matter and that therefore it was voidable if for any reason the company so desired. It might have been merely an inexpensive scheme to prevent Hudson from entering any other employ. Then, too, it appeared singular that either the Amsterdam directors or Hudson should want to attempt the northeastern route which so often had resulted in failure before our Hudson’s time and that Hudson himself as a master had signally failed in two expeditions and probably before that while as a mariner in the employ of the Muscovy Company. It seemed as though Hudson who, after commanding two searches for the Muscovy Company wanted greater freedom in the pursuit and so asked of that company. The belief on the part of some was that there was a secret agreement or understanding between the contracting parties that Hudson might, or was really, to ignore the contract which was given to the public as a blind. While subsequent events gave color, plausibility to these thoughts, they were merely conjectures, for it is most remarkable that there has so little documentary evidence been found about a man whose name appears so often and so prominently in North America. Hudson’s last voyage was for three wealthy Englishmen, viz.: Sir Thomas Smythe, Sir Dudley Digges and John Wolstenholme. Doubtless very much of Hudson’s writings were not made public—probably publication at that time was forbidden, fearing that rival navigators would thereby gain some information to their advantage and to the detriment of Hudson’s employers. Then, too, it has been thought and said that if Hudson’s writings had been published in full some things would have been revealed that at least some of the contracting parties were anxious to conceal. Although nearly 300 years have passed and the public has not been fully enlightened on this subject there still remains the belief that Hudson’s writings about his contracts for searching for an all-water and shorter route to India will yet be discovered and published. To engage in any great and hazardous undertaking there must be some adequate motive. Considering the high demands and promises made to bold and skillful navigators (perhaps in compensation, rank, and authority none comparable with the case of Christopher Columbus) it is scarcely presumable that Henry Hudson entered the service of the Dutch East India Company merely for the paltry sum named in that contract and in a route which he himself on two occasions or more had found impracticable—presumably impossible. Henry Hudson, a bold and experienced navigator, well posted in the discoveries made by maritime discoverers especially in the New World; in the discoveries in geography, geometry, and in possession of the latest and best maps of the world, surely had some strong motive, presumably a worthy ambition to become a discoverer of a new all-water route to India, and in his journal he told of his desire to seek that route by sailing westward when his instructions were distinct and positive to sail north and east.
If, then, such were the views and purposes of Hudson when he made the contract (which is quoted herein) with the Amsterdam directors of the Dutch East India Company, let us see, if we may, the real and principal motives actuating that company, so powerful, so dominant in the Netherlands, to engage Hudson by contract and whether either party was not going to live up to it in good faith or whether the strong presumption is that it was merely a blind to deceive rivals and that there was another and very different secret agreement.
Charles V, German Emperor, was born at Ghent, Flanders, 1500. He was the eldest son of Philip, Archduke of Austria, and of Joanna, the daughter of Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain. Philip’s parents were the Emperor Maximilian and Marie, daughter and heiress of Charles the Bold, Duke of Burgundy. On the death of his grandfather, Ferdinand, in 1516, Charles took possession of the throne of Spain by the title of Charles I.
On the death of Maximilian in 1519 Charles was elected German Emperor and crowned October 22, 1519, at Aix-la-Chapelle and received from the Pope the title of Roman Emperor, making him the most powerful monarch in Europe. A zealous Catholic, he aimed to nullify the doctrine taught by the reformer Martin Luther and to compel the Hollanders, the Netherlanders, to express their faith and belief in Ignatius Loyola, the reputed founder of the Society of Jesus—the Jesuits. It was not Loyola but Torquemada, whose name, as the Chief Inquisitor, became a by-word and reproach. Justin Winsor, a high authority, said that Carlyle said, “Those Dutch are a strong people. They raised their land out of a marsh and went on for a long time breeding cows and making cheese and might have gone with their cows and cheese till doomsday. But Spain comes over and says, ‘We want you to believe in Ignatius.’ The Dutch replied, ‘We are very sorry, but we cannot.’ ‘God, but you must,’ said Spain, and went about it with guns and swords to make the Dutch believe in Ignatius.” Thus began a religious war (usually the fiercest and most unrelenting) which, with some cessation of hostilities, lasted for nearly seventy years, down to 1648, when the independence of the Dutch Republic was acknowledged and it had become one of the foremost, if not really the foremost, power in Europe.
War (which Erasmus called “the malady of princes” and General Sherman called “hell”), begun by Charles I of Spain against the Netherlands, was continued by his son and grandson and resulted in driving out of Europe many of North America’s early and most desirable settlers.
Many of the Dutch East India Company’s vessels were equipped for war as well as for commerce and her East India possessions were active in building and fitting out ships which captured many and rich prizes from the Spaniards. The richest locality for capturing such prizes was in the West Indies, and what the Netherlands greatly needed was territory near there, where her ships could be sheltered, repaired, and obtain the needed supplies. Spain was in possession of nearly all of what is now the south of the United States, and France of Canada. The English held Virginia and claimed what is now called New England, but between the two was a territory that seemed free for settlement and there is reason to believe that the Dutch East India Company was aware of that fact and aimed to take it.
In 1497 and 1498 the Cabots, in the employ of Henry VII of England, sailed westward in search of a shorter all-water route to India, coasting along the Atlantic from a parallel of latitude about the same as that of the Straits of Gibraltar clear up to Hudson straits, where the icebergs prevented further advance. Having landed and planted the English flag, they claimed the country for the British crown and under their discovery the English claim in North America rested. On a German map made in 1515 America is represented as a large island in the western Atlantic. Magellan, in whose honor the straits near Cape Horn, South America, were named, sailed around the globe in 1519-21, proved that America was a continent and the world a sphere. Sir Francis Drake, in 1577-79, also circumnavigated the globe. In 1728 Vitus Behring sailed through the straits which bear his name and proved that America is no part of Asia. From 1499 to 1504 Americus Vespucius, a Florentine navigator and explorer, made, in the employ of Spain, four voyages to the east coast of South America and built a fort on the coast of Brazil, and from him, or rather in his honor, the western continent was named “America”—the name first appearing in a little pamphlet published in France in 1507 by Waldseemuler, a German geographer, who gave as his reason for the name the following, viz.: “The fourth part of the world having been discovered by Americus, it may be called the land of Americus or America.”