I am glad that Prickett got "a cruell wound in the backe." Were it not that by the killing of him we should have lost his narrative, I should wish that that weak villain had been killed along with the stronger ones. They were strong. It was a brave fight that they made; and Henry Greene's last recorded word, "Coragio!" was worthy of the lips of a better man. But he and the others eminently deserved the death that the savages gave them, and it is good to know that Hudson's murder so soon was avenged. Juet's equally exemplary punishment, equally deserved, came a little later. On the homeward voyage the whole company got to the very edge, and Juet passed beyond the edge, of starvation. When the ship was only sixty or seventy leagues from Ireland, where she made her landfall, Prickett tells that he "dyed for meere want."
What befell the survivors of the "Discovery's" crew, on the ship's return to England, has remained until now unknown; and even now the account of them is inconclusive. In the Latin edition of the year 1613 of his "Detectio Freti" Hessel Gerritz wrote: "They exposed Hudson and the other officers in a boat on the open sea, and returned into their country. There they have been thrown into prison for their crime, and will be kept in prison until their captain shall be safely brought home. For that purpose some ships have been sent out last year by the late Prince of Wales and by the Directors of the Moscovia Company, about the return of which nothing as yet has been heard."
For three hundred years that statement of fact has ended Hudson's story. The fragmentary documents which I have been so fortunate as to obtain from the Record Office carry it a little, only a little, farther. Unhappily they stop short—giving no assurance that the mutineers got to the gallows that they deserved. All that they prove is that the few survivors were brought to trial: charged with having put the master of their ship, and others, "into a shallop, without food, drink, fire, clothing, or any necessaries, and then maliciously abandoning them: so that they came thereby to their death, and miserably perished."
There, unfinished, the record ends. What penalty, or that any penalty, was exacted of those who survived to be tried for Hudson's murder remains unknown. Their ignoble fate is hidden in a sordid darkness: fitly in contrast with his noble fate—that lies retired within a glorious mystery.
XIV
Hudson has no cause to quarrel with the rating that has been fixed for him in the eternal balances. All that he lost (or seemed to lose) in life has been more than made good to him in the flowing of the years since he fought out with Fate his last losing round.
In his River and Strait and Bay he has such monuments set up before the whole world as have been awarded to only one other navigator. And they are his justly. Before his time, those great waterways, and that great inland sea, were mere hazy geographical concepts. After his time they were clearly defined geographical facts. He did—and those who had seen them before him did not—make them effectively known. Here, in this city of New York—which owes to him its being—he has a monument of a different and of a nobler sort. Here, assuredly, down through the coming ages his memory will be honored actively, his name will be in men's mouths ceaselessly, so long as the city shall endure.
And I hold that Hudson's fame, as a most brave explorer and as a great discoverer, is not dimmed by the fact that up to a certain point he followed in other men's footsteps; nor do I think that his glory is lessened by his seeming predestination to go on fixed lines to a fixed end. On the contrary, I think that his fame is brightened by his willingness to follow, that he might—as he did—surpass his predecessors; and that his glory is increased by the resolute firmness with which he played up to his destiny. Holding fast to his great purpose to find a passage to the East by the North, he compelled every one of Fate's deals against him—until that last deal—to turn in his favor; and even in that last deal he won a death so heroically woful that exalted pity for him, almost as much as admiration for his great achievements, has kept his fame through the centuries very splendidly alive.