With the voyages of Weymouth, Knight, and Hall, which occupied the first few years of the seventeenth century, we need not concern ourselves at all, for they resulted in no discoveries of any importance. In the year 1607, however, Henry Hudson started off on the first of that series of travels by which his name became famous, and during the course of which he succeeded in carrying the British flag to places that had never before been trodden by the foot of civilised man.
As has already been seen, the north-west and north-east passages to the Indies had been tried and found wanting. British merchants, however, were by no means disposed to let Spain and Portugal retain their lucrative monopoly without making a struggle to wrest it from them, so they determined to send out a fresh expedition which should attempt to force its way to the land of gems and spices over the North Pole itself. The command of this expedition was entrusted to Henry Hudson, a seaman of such daring and skill that he was well able to accomplish the work if it lay within the power of a human being to do so. Hudson started off from the Thames on May 1, 1607, in a small barque which was manned by ten men and a boy, and made direct for the east coast of Greenland. By June 22 he had reached lat. 72° 38′, where he discovered the land which still bears his name, the chief promontory of which he named Cape Hold-with-Hope. He then set his course for Spitzbergen, which, as we have seen, had been first sighted by Barents eleven years earlier, and there he reached the high latitude of 80° 23′. His provisions being now nearly exhausted, he was obliged to return home.
On his second voyage he attempted to discover a north-east passage round Nova Zembla, but was so hampered by ice that he was unable to proceed far on his way, while the only geographic result of his third voyage was the discovery of the Hudson River. These early expeditions, however, though they achieved little in the way of discovery, proved of great commercial value, for they gave rise to the great Spitzbergen whale fishery.
Hudson’s fourth and last voyage, that of 1610, was organised by Sir John Wolstenholm and Sir Dudley Digges, who were convinced of the existence of the North-West Passage, and felt that Hudson was the man to find it. Accordingly, Hudson sailed on April 17 in the Discovery, a ship of 55 tons, which was provisioned for six months. By June 9 he had reached Frobisher Strait, and here a contrary wind arose which compelled him to ply westward into Hudson’s Bay. Several British seamen had already visited the mouth of the strait, and it is believed that Portuguese fishermen had actually entered the bay; but the terrible circumstances which attended Hudson’s voyage to it made it only natural that it should be named after him in commemoration of his achievements and his fate.
The Discovery had penetrated the bay to a distance of over three hundred miles further than ever an English ship had penetrated it before when she was beset by ice, and all chance of retreat was cut off. As we have already seen, she was only provisioned for six months, and the unfortunate crew found themselves, in consequence, with starvation staring them in the face. Hudson, fortunately, was a man of resource, and he lost no time in organising hunting and fishing parties which provided his party with sufficient provisions to tide over the winter. Had his crew remained faithful to him all might have been well, but disaffection broke out early in the winter, which, gathering force as the store of provisions grew more and more scanty, broke out into open mutiny in the spring. The ringleaders were the former mate and boatswain, whom Hudson had been obliged to displace for using improper language, and a young man named Greene, a protégé of Hudson, who repaid his benefactor’s kindness by deserting him when he most needed friends. These men, seeing that when the ship broke out of winter quarters in June there were barely fourteen days’ provisions left for the whole crew, determined to place Hudson and eight other men in a boat, and, leaving them to shift for themselves, to sail home for England. This heartless plan was promptly carried into execution. Hudson was seized and bound when he came out of his cabin, and with five sick men, John Hudson and John King, the carpenter, who bravely refused to join the mutineers, was thrown into a boat and deserted. Of the unfortunate castaways nothing more was ever heard, and the most careful search of Sir Thomas Button, who examined the whole of the western shore of the bay, failed to discover any clue to their fate. Of the mutineers, Greene and four others were killed in a fight with the natives, while the rest only just succeeded in reaching England.
The voyages of Hall in 1612 and Gibbons in 1614 did not result in much, but in 1615 William Baffin started out on the first of his two expeditions which were destined to add so much to the world’s store of knowledge of the Arctic seas. Baffin, who was described by Sherard Osborn as “the ablest, the prince of Arctic navigators,” was in 1615 appointed by the Merchants Adventurers pilot and associate to Richard Bylot, of the Discovery, which was now to make her fourth voyage in search of the North-West Passage. Making first for Hudson Strait, they soon discovered that they were being led into a blind alley. As the conditions, however, did not permit them to extend their voyage much that season, they were obliged to return home. In the following year, however, they were sent out once more by the Merchants Adventurers, and on this occasion they determined to push on north along the coast of Greenland. On May 30 they reached Sanderson’s Hope, Davis’s farthest point, and there they entered upon an entirely new field of discovery. With such energy did they apply themselves to the work that they had crossed Melville Bay by the beginning of June, and were sailing merrily on their way past Cape York, Cape Dudley Digges, and Whale Sound. At last, when they had exceeded Davis’s farthest north by over three hundred miles, their triumphant career was stopped at the entrance to Smith Sound, within sight of Cape Alexander. This latitude, 77° 45′, remained unequalled for over two centuries.
Unable to proceed any further to the north, Baffin and Bylot determined to sail south-west, and to see if they could not add to their growing list of discoveries on their homeward journey. Their hopes were amply fulfilled, for on July 12 they found themselves off the entrance to Lancaster Sound, which was the gate, as it afterwards proved, to the North-West Passage. The ice, unfortunately, did not permit them to enter the Sound, so they made for the coast of Greenland, where they rested their men prior to their return to England.
For the next hundred years or so very little was done in the way of Arctic discovery. A Dane of the name of Jens Munk started out to seek for the North-West Passage, and succeeded in making a few discoveries in Hudson’s Bay. In 1631, again, Captain Luke, alias “North-West,” Fox sallied forth on the same mission, bearing with him an epistle from the King of England to the Emperor of Japan, which, however, remained undelivered. The work which he did was not of much value, but he made up for this deficiency by writing a very humorous account of his experiences. Captain James, who went exploring in the same year, seems to have been dogged by ill-luck from the beginning to the end of his voyage, and Barrow describes his narrative of it as “a book of lamentation and weeping and great mourning.”
Though, however, very little was done in the way of exploration during the second half of the seventeenth century, great strides were made in the development of the country already explored by the formation of the famous Hudson Bay Company, which for two hundred years did a tremendous trade in Northern Canada. The inception of this Company was mostly due to a certain French Canadian of the name of Grosseliez, who, after an ineffectual attempt to induce the French Government to consider his schemes for founding a great industry, came to England, where he obtained the ear of Prince Rupert. The Prince sailed for Hudson Bay with Grosseliez, saw the possibilities of the country, and obtained from King Charles a charter, dated 1669, which conferred on him and his associates, exclusively, all the trade, land, and territories in Hudson’s Bay. The charter further ordained that they should use their best endeavours to find a passage to the South Sea, but the Company soon became so rich from its trade that it seems to have conveniently forgotten this clause.
Occasionally, it is true, it attempted to do something in the way of exploration, but these efforts were for the most part only half-hearted, and resulted in little. In 1719, for example, James Knight, allured by reports of mines of pure copper by a great river to the north, gave the Company to understand that he would call upon the authorities to examine their charter unless they arranged an expedition and appointed him its leader.