On his way to execution, Raleigh noticed a man with a bald head and no hat. Taking off his own cap he tossed it down to the old man with—
“You need this, my friend, more than I do.”
On the scaffold he made a patriotic speech to the assembled crowd. Then he asked to see the axe. He smiled as he tried the edge of it with his thumb, and remarked to the executioner who stood before him, dressed, as was the custom, in black velvet tights, with a black mask over his face,
“This gives me no fear. It is a sharp and fair medicine to cure me of all my troubles.”
HENRY HUDSON, THE MAN WHO PUT HIMSELF ON THE MAP
JUST as Magellan set out to discover a way through America from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean, so Henry Hudson determined to find a northwest passage from ocean to ocean. The reason for wishing to cross in the north from one ocean to the other was to save going “round the Horn,” as sailors call the long voyage around Cape Horn, the southern point of South America. We now know that there is no northwest passage; at least, if there is such a waterway it is so near the North Pole that it is always frozen up. But Henry Hudson, like all sailors in his time, thought that it would be a simple matter to sail through the open polar sea and pass from the Atlantic to the Pacific north of North America.
In 1607 this bold British navigator undertook a voyage in the employ, as he wrote in his journal, of “certain worshipful Merchants of London.” The object of this voyage was to explore the coast of Greenland and, as he explained, “for to discover a passage by the North Pole to Japan and China.” His crew numbered only twelve persons, including one boy, his own son John. After sailing about for five months, suffering great hardships, Hudson returned to London without discovering that northern passage. The next year he started out again, this time sailing north-east along the coast of Norway, and returned after four months without finding anything but hardships.
Hudson’s third voyage was made in the employ of the Dutch East India Company. He sailed from Amsterdam, Holland, with a crew of twenty men and his young son, on the Half Moon. He started out a second time for a north-east passage, but he found so many difficulties that he turned his prow westward again, determined to discover the way past North America. About the 4th of July, 1609, he came to the Grand Banks of Newfoundland, where he saw a fleet of Frenchmen fishing for cod. After catching over a hundred of these fish for themselves, the crew of the Half Moon proceeded to the southwest, as Hudson had heard from his friend, Captain John Smith, that there was an open way to the Pacific south of Virginia.
After wandering down the coast and back, the Half Moon entered a broad bay and anchored beside an island which the natives called Manhattan. Hudson took possession of this region in the name of his Dutch employers and named it New Netherland. Here he traded with the Indians and sailed a little way up the beautiful river which now bears his name. “Here,” one of his men wrote in the journal, “the land grew very high and mountainous.” Hudson and his crew were afraid of the Indians. They captured two red men and tried to hold them as prisoners. They thought that the other Indians would treat the white men well for fear that Hudson would kill these two prisoners. But they made their escape through a porthole and swam to the shore. As the Half Moon got under way again, the two Indians and their friends stood on the bank, war-whooping, brandishing tomahawks, and calling for vengeance.
The Half Moon sailed on upstream, and towards night came to anchor near what is now Catskill Landing. “There,” as it is written in the journal of the voyage, “we found very loving people and very old men, where we were well used. Our boat went to fish and caught great store of very good fish.”