Hudson himself had had enough. The Half Moon lifted its anchor and sailed away from the river whose name is Henry Hudson’s most glorious monument. Stopping in England on his way to Holland, he was engaged by the London Company to make another voyage in their behalf the following year. This time the ship he commanded was the Discovery. The course was past Iceland, around the southern part of Greenland, sighting Desolation Island, which he charted as in the northern part of Davis Strait. Through the strait which now bears his name he entered the sea known for all time as Hudson Bay.
This crew was a bad set of men. One young fellow whom Captain Hudson had picked up and befriended in London proved the worst of the gang. They did not face their hardships and sufferings with real courage. When starvation stared them in the face, every man looked out for himself. They hoarded food, and robbed and fought one another like wild beasts. At last they turned against Hudson, saying that he had brought them there to starve.
The young man to whom Hudson had been kindest of all bound his master. The rest tied up the six men who were most loyal to their chief, and Hudson’s son. These eight men were put bound into the ship’s boat. Then the crew hoisted the sail of the Discovery. They towed the little boat for a time, as if they were loath to do the dastardly deed that they had planned. But when they reached the open sea they cut the rope, and the little boat containing Henry Hudson and his son was never again seen by white men.
The ungrateful young man met a fate he richly deserved. In a fight with Arctic savages he was killed, and several of the rest were mortally wounded. Still others died of want before the few remaining deserters were picked up, starving, by a passing vessel. Their names are forgotten, and they are only remembered at all because of their wicked treachery. But the map of North America is a fitting monument to the heroic but ill-fated adventurer and discoverer, Henry Hudson.
LA SALLE AND THE MOUTH OF THE MISSISSIPPI
LITTLE is known now of the early life of Robert Cavelier de la Salle, until, at twenty-five or a little less, he came from Rouen, France, to Montreal. But of his life in America, in those days when the land was still a howling wilderness, there is much to tell. He was born a century and a half after Columbus thought he had found the coast of China; yet this young Frenchman still believed that China was only a little farther west than the land Columbus found, for he had but a narrow idea of the width of America.
The people who were living in Canada, the new country along the River St. Lawrence, were French. They traded with the Indians and trapped and skinned wild animals for their fur. Those were the days of Indian scouts and wigwams, and of war and scalp dances. Many of the French lived like Indians; they played Indian games—running, shooting, snowshoeing, lacrosse—and they learned to hunt and hide, and to travel stealthily through the forests, like real red men.
So the Indians liked the French people better than they liked other white settlers. The French called their scouts wood-runners. These brave, shrewd messengers went out among the Indian tribes and learned their languages and customs. Many of them ran from tribe to tribe, thousands of miles into the wilderness, and came back to the French settlement with skins of the mink, beaver, otter, and other animals. They also had strange stories to tell of meadows, which they called prairies, as level as a floor and hundreds of miles wide, where there were no trees except along the rivers. Down through this thousand-mile prairie region they said there were rivers which flowed together into a wide stream which the Indians called the Mississippi, or Father of Waters, which kept on in a mighty flood to the unknown south country.
These stories fired the fervent soul of Robert La Salle. He believed that mighty river should be used as a water highway to the South Sea—as the Pacific Ocean was still called; and that if they could sail down to its mouth they would find an outlet to China like the outlet which the St. Lawrence gave toward Europe. He was always talking about China and trying in every way he could to raise money for canoes and food and Indian guides to find the way to China through the western wilderness. The French people laughed at his enthusiasm and called some land which he owned beside the rapids above Montreal La Chine—French for China. That suburb of Montreal is still called Lachine, and the rapids are the Lachine Rapids.
Not having wealth enough of his own, La Salle went to France to ask the king to approve his plan, and to provide money for the planting of the lilies of France on the banks of the Mississippi. La Salle’s practical way of planting French lilies was to build and maintain forts at different points through all that great western country. Already Fort Frontenac had been built near the outlet of Lake Ontario, and Father Marquette, a heroic French missionary, accompanied by a trader named Joliet had found the Mississippi and explored that great river for hundreds of miles. On his return to a French settlement Joliet wrote to Count Frontenac, governor of Canada, telling of the dangers of his voyage: