The latter is a tempting surmise. But if it is correct, Hudson may have tried it once too often.
On a later expedition to America as master of an English ship he perished at the hands of his crew. He and his young son along with a few loyal sailors were set adrift in a shallop in the great bay that bears his name, never to be heard of again.
Be all of this as it may, by fortunate circumstance or by pre-meditation Hudson had with him on his memorable voyage in 1609 a map that had been sent to him from Virginia by Captain John Smith. And there was a letter that had come with the map from his adventurous friend suggesting that a passage to China might be found in the west above 40° where Smith himself had “left off.” Everything pointed to a big sea on the backside of Virginia. Many of the Indians Captain Smith met on his explorations had confirmed its existence (their version no doubt of the Great Lakes). And there was much evidence of navigable rivers paralleling the Susquehanna above 40°. They probably led toward this sea!
So Henry Hudson, contriving to cooperate with the mutineers aboard his ship and in flagrant disobedience to the specific instructions of his Dutch employers, sailed west instead of northeast.
After surviving a storm that tore away her foremast the Half Moon made a landfall in America off Newfoundland where she came among a fleet of French fishing boats taking cod on the banks. Captain Hudson salted a few fish for his own stores, and then put down the coast of Nova Scotia to Maine. There, at Penobscot Bay, he had a new pine mast cut and proceeded to relieve some French-speaking Indians of their stock-in-trade without benefit of barter.
“We espied two French shallops full of the Countrey people come into the Harbour,” his clerk wrote, “but they offered us no wrong, seeing we stood upon our guard. They brought many Beaver skinnes, and other fine Furres, which they would have changed for redde Gownes. For the French trade with them for red Cassockes, Knives, Hatchets, Copper, Kettles, Trevits, Beades and other trifles.... We kept good watch for feare of being betrayed by the people, and perceived where they layd their shallops.... In the morning we manned our Scute with foure Muskets, and sixe men and tooke one of their Shallops and brought it aboard. Then we manned our Boat and Scute with twelve men and Muskets, and two stone Pieces or Murderers, and drove the Salvages from their Houses, and tooke the spoyle of them, as they would have done of us. Then we set sail....”
If the Dutchmen left hurriedly it was probably in fear of revenge. Maybe the Indians showed signs of retaliating. After all, the natives of this coast must have been getting annoyed by the ways of white men, considering that this sort of thing had been going on, sporadically, since the first Norsemen invaded their land some six hundred years earlier.
The Half Moon sailed on south to Cape Cod, which the crew noted had been “discovered by Captain Bartholomew Gosnold in 1602.” Here, the sailors made sport of an Indian they brought aboard, getting the savage so drunk that “he leapt and danced.” After that Captain Hudson put out to sea once more, to arrive off the Capes of Virginia about the middle of August.
He nosed into the Chesapeake, possibly with the intention of visiting his friend Smith, but caution seems to have won out over the risk of exposing his Dutch-owned vessel to agents of the rival London Company. Being an Englishman himself, Henry Hudson knew only too well that the merchants of his native country made little distinction between a foreign competitor and a foreign enemy, especially when they had guns like those at Jamestown. He might risk disobeying his Dutch employers but not losing their ship—not before he’d made his grand discovery of a passage to the Orient. Perhaps, too, he turned a little sensitive about sailing under a Dutch flag with information furnished by a fellow Englishman.
So, a convenient “storm” blew the Half Moon back out to sea, and Hudson made his way northward, first to penetrate the Delaware River to shoal water, and then on to explore the river that now bears his name.