Transcriber’s Notes

A number of the variants in spelling have been left, e.g. gayly/gaily.

Much of the hyphenation has been standardised.

Changes made are noted at the [end of the book.]

THE CONQUEST OF THE GREAT NORTHWEST

Collier’s famous picture of Hudson’s Last Hours.

THE CONQUEST OF THE
GREAT NORTHWEST

Being the story of the ADVENTURERS OF ENGLAND
known as THE HUDSON’S BAY COMPANY. New pages
in the history of the Canadian Northwest and Western States.

BY

AGNES C. LAUT

Author of “Lords of the North,”
“Pathfinders of the West,” etc.

IN TWO VOLUMES
Volume I

TORONTO
THE MUSSON BOOK COMPANY
LIMITED

Copyright, 1908, by THE OUTING PUBLISHING COMPANY

Entered at Stationers’ Hall, London, England

All Rights Reserved

TO G. C. L. and C. M. A.

CONTENTS OF VOLUME I

ADDENDA

ILLUSTRATIONS

FOREWORD

It HAS become almost a truism to say that no complete account of the Hudson’s Bay Adventurers has yet been written. I have often wondered if the people who repeated that statement knew what they meant. The empire of the fur trade Adventurers was not confined to Rupert’s Land, as specified by their charter. Lords of the Outer Marches, these gay Gentlemen Adventurers setting sail over the seas of the Unknown, Soldiers of Fortune with a laugh for life or death carving a path through the wilderness—were not to be checked by the mere fiction of limits set by a charter. They followed the rivers of their bay south to the height of land, and looking over it saw the unoccupied territory of the Great Lakes and the Upper Mississippi. It was American territory; but what did that matter? Over they marched and took possession in Minnesota and the two Dakotas and Montana. This region was reached by way of Albany River. Then they followed the Saskatchewan up and looked over its height of land. To the north were MacKenzie River and the Yukon; to the west, the Fraser and the Columbia. By no feat of imagination could the charter be stretched to these regions. Canadian merchants were on the field in MacKenzie River. Russians claimed Alaska. Americans claimed Oregon down as far as the Spanish Settlements; but these things did not matter. The Hudson’s Bay Adventurers went over the barriers of mountains and statecraft, and founding their fur empire of wildwood rovers, took toll of the wilderness in cargoes of precious furs outvaluing all the taxes ever collected by a conqueror. All this was not enough. South of the Columbia was an unknown region the size of half Europe—California, Nevada, Utah, Wyoming, Idaho. The wildwood rovers of the Hudson’s Bay Adventurers swept south in pack-horse brigades of two- and three-hundreds from the Columbia to Monterey. Where Utah railroads now run, their trappers found the trail. Where gold seekers toiled to death across Nevada deserts, Hudson’s Bay trappers had long before marched in dusty caravans sweeping the wilderness of beaver. Where San Francisco stands to-day, the English Adventurers once owned a thousand-acre farm. By a bold stroke of statecraft, they had hoped to buy up Mexico’s bad debts and trade those debts for proprietary rights in California. The story of why they failed is theme for novelist or poet rather than historian. Suffice to say, their Southern Brigades, disguised as Spanish horsemen, often went south as far as Monterey. Yet more! The Hudson’s Bay Adventurers had a station half way across the Pacific in Hawaii.

In all, how large was their fur empire? Larger, by actual measurement, much larger, than Europe. Now what person would risk reputation by saying no complete account had yet been written of all Europe? The thing is so manifestly impossible, it is absurd. Not one complete account, but hundreds of volumes on different episodes will go to the making of such a complete history. So is it of the vast area ruled by the Hudson’s Bay Company. The time will come when each district will demand as separate treatment as a Germany, or a France or an Italy in its history. All that can be attempted in one volume or one series of volumes is the portrayal of a single movement, or a single episode, or a single character. In this account, I have attempted to tell the story of the Company only as adventurer, pathfinder, empire-builder, from Rupert’s Land to California—feudal lord beaten off the field by democracy. Where the empire-builder merges with the colonizer and pioneer, I have stopped in each case. In Manitoba, the passing of the Company was marked by the Riel Rebellion; in British Columbia, by the mad gold stampede; in Oregon, by the terrible Whitman massacres; in California, by the fall of Spanish power. All these are dramas in themselves worthy of poet or novelist; but they are not germane to the Adventurers. Therefore, they are not given here. Who takes up the story where I leave off, must hang the narrative on these pegs.

Another intentional omission. From the time the Adventurers wrote off £100,000 loss for search of the North-West Passage, Arctic Exploration has no part in this story. In itself, it is an enthralling story; but to give even the most scrappy reference to it here would necessitate crowding out essential parts of the Adventurers’ record—such as McLoughlin’s transmontane empire, or the account of the South Bound Brigades. Therefore, latter day Arctic work has no mention here. For the same reason, I have been compelled to omit the dramatic story of the early missions. These merit a book to themselves.

Throughout—with the exception of four chapters, I may say altogether—I have relied for the thread of my narrative on the documents in Hudson’s Bay House, London; the Minute Books of some two hundred years, the Letter Books, the Stock Books, the Memorial Books, the Daily Journals kept by chief factors at every post and sent to London from 1670. These documents are in tons. They are not open to the public. They are unclassified; and in the case of Minute Books are in duplicates, “the Foule Minutes”—as the inscription on the old parchment describes them—being rough, almost unreadable, notes jotted down during proceedings with interlinings and blottings to be copied into the Minute Books marked “Faire Copie.” In some cases, the latter has been lost or destroyed; and only the uncorrected one remains. It is necessary to state this because discrepancies will be found—noted as the story proceeds—which arise from the fact that some volumes of the corrected minutes have been lost. The Minute Books consist variously from one to five hundred pages each.

Beside the documents of Hudson’s Bay House, London, there is a great mass of unpublished, unexploited material bearing on the Company in the Public Records Office, London. I had some thousands of pages of transcripts of these made which throw marvelous side light on the printed records of Radisson; of Iberville; of Parl. Report 1749; of the Coltman Report and Blue Book of 1817-22; and the Americans in Oregon.

In many episodes, the story told here will differ almost unrecognizably from accepted versions and legends of the same era. This is not by accident. Nor is it because I have not consulted what one writer sarcastically called to my attention as “the secondary authorities”—the words are his, not mine. Nearly all these authorities from earliest to latest days are in my own library and interlined from many readings. Where I have departed from old versions of famous episodes, it has been because records left in the handwriting of the actors themselves compelled me; as in the case of Selkirk’s orders about Red River, Ogden’s discoveries in Nevada and Utah and California, Thompson’s explorations of Idaho, Howse’s explorations in the Rockies, Ogden’s robbery of the Americans, the Americans’ robbery of him.

I regret I have no clue to any Spanish version of why Glen Rae blew out his brains in San Francisco. On this episode, I have relied on the legends current among the old Hudson’s Bay officers and retold so well by Bancroft.

To Mr. C. C. Chipman, commissioner of the Hudson’s Bay Company, to Mr. William Ware, the secretary, and Lord Strathcona-and-Mount-Royal, the Governor—I owe grateful thanks for access to the H. B. C. documents.

On the whole, the record of the Adventurers, is not one to bring the blush of regret to those jealous for the Company’s honor. It is a record of daring and courage and adventuring and pomp—in the best sense of the words—and of intrigue and statecraft and diplomacy, too, not always in the best sense of the words—which must take its place in the world’s history far above the bloody pageantry of Spanish conqueror in Mexico and Peru. It is the one case where Feudalism played an important and successful rôle in America, only in the end to be driven from the stage by Young Democracy.

PART I

1610-1631

Being an Account of the Discoveries in the Great Sea of the North by Henry Hudson and the Dane, Jens Munck. How the Search for the North-West Passage Led to the Opening of two Regions—New York and the North-West Territories.

THE CONQUEST OF
THE GREAT NORTHWEST

CHAPTER I

1607

HENRY HUDSON’S FIRST VOYAGE

Practical men scorn the dreamer, especially the mad-souled dreamer who wrecks life trying to prove his dream a reality. Yet the mad-souled dreamer, the Poet of Action whose poem has been his life, the Hunter who has chased the Idea down the Long Trail where all tracks point one way and never return—has been a herald of light for humanity.

Of no one is this truer than the English pilot, Henry Hudson.

Hudson did not set out to find the great inland waters that bear his name—Hudson River and Hudson Bay. He set out to chase that rainbow myth—the Pole—or rather the passage across the Pole. To him, as to all Arctic explorers, the call had become a sort of obsession. It was a demon, driving him in spite of himself. It was a siren whom he could not resist, luring him to wreck, which he knew was certain. It was a belief in something which reason couldn’t prove but time has justified. It was like a scent taken up by a hound on a strange trail. He could not know where it would lead but because of Something in him and Something on the Trail, he was compelled to follow. Like the discoverer in science, he could not wait till his faith was gilt-edged with profit before risking his all on the venture. Call it demon or destiny! At its voice he rose from his place and followed to his death.

The situation was this:

Not a dozen boats had sailed beyond the Sixtieth degree of north latitude. From Sixty to the Pole was an area as great as Africa. This region was absolutely unknown. What did it hide? Was it another new world, or a world of waters giving access across the Pole from Europe to Asia? The Muscovy Company of England, the East India Company of Holland, both knew the Greenland of the Danes; and sent their ships to fish at Spitzbergen, east of Greenland. But was Greenland an island, or a great continent? Were Spitzbergen and Greenland parts of a vast Polar land? Did the mountains wreathed there in eternal mists conceal the wealth of a second Peru? Below the endless swamps of ice, would men find gold sands? And when one followed up the long coast of the east shore—as long as from Florida to Maine—where the Danish colonies had perished of cold centuries ago—what beyond? A continent, or the Pole, or the mystic realm of frost peopled by the monsters of Saga myth, where the Goddess of Death held pitiless sway and the shores were lined with the dead who had dared to invade her realm? Why these questions should have pierced the peace of Henry Hudson, the English pilot, and possessed him—can no more be explained than the Something on the Trail that compels Something in the hound.

Like other dreamers, Hudson had to put his dreams in harness; hitch his Idea to every day uses, The Muscovy Company trading to Russia wanted to find a short way across the Pole to China. Hudson had worked up from sailor to pilot and pilot to master on the Dutch traders, and was commissioned to seek the passage. The Company furnished him with a crew of eleven including his own boy, John. It would be ridiculous if it were not so pathetic—these simple sailors undertaking a venture that has baffled every great navigator since time began.

Led by Hudson with the fire of a great faith in his eyes, the men solemnly marched to Saint Ethelburge Church off Bishopgate Street, London, to partake of Holy Communion and ask God’s aid. Back to the muddy water-front opposite the Tower; a gold coin for last drinks; a hearty God-speed from the gentlemen of the Muscovy Company pompous in self-importance and lace ruffles—and the little crew steps into a clumsy river boat with brick-red sails. One gentleman opines with a pinch of snuff that it may be “this many a day before Master Hudson returns.” Riffraff loafers crane necks to see to the last. Cursing watermen clear the course by thumping other rivermen out of the way. The boat slips under the bridge down the wide flood of the yeasty Thames through a forest of masts and sails of as many colors as Joseph’s coat.

It is like a great sewer of humanity, this river tide with its city’s traffic of a thousand years. Farmers rafting down loads of hay, market women punting themselves along with boat loads of vegetables, fishing schooners breasting the tide with full-blown sails, high-hulled galleons from Spain, flat-bottomed, rickety tubs from the Zee, gay little craft—barges with bunting, wherries with lovers, rowboats with nothing more substantial than silk awnings for a sail—jostle and throng and bump each other as Hudson’s crew shoots down with the tide. Not a man of the crew but wonders—is he seeing it all for the last time?

But here is the Muscovy Company’s ship all newly rigged waiting at Gravesend, absurdly small for such a venture on such a sea. Then, in the clanking of anchor chains and sing-song of the capstan and last shouts of the noisy rivermen, apprehensions are forgotten. Can they but find a short route to China, their homely little craft may plough back with as rich cargo as ever Spanish caravel brought from the fabulous South Sea. The full tide heaves and rocks and bears out; a mad-souled dreamer standing at the prow with his little son, who is very silent. The air is fraught with something too big for words. May first, 1607, Hudson is off for the Pole. He might as well have been following the Flying Dutchman, or ballooning to the moon.

The city along the banks of the Thames has presently thinned to towns. The towns slide past into villages. The villages blur into meadow lands with the thatch roof of the farmer’s cot; and before night, the last harbor light has been left in the offing. The little ship has headed her carved prow north. The billows of the North Sea roll to meet her. Darkness falls with no sound but the swish of the waters against the ports, the hum of the wind through the rigging, and the whirring flap of the great sails shifting to catch the breeze.

For six weeks, north, northwest, they drove over the tumbling world of waters, sliding from crest to trough, from blue hollow to curdling wave-top, ploughing a watery furrow into the region of long, white light and shortening nights, and fogs that lay without lifting once in twenty days. The farther north they sailed, the tighter drew the cords of cold, like a violin string stretched till it fairly snapped—air full of pure ozone that set the blood jumping and finger-tips tingling! Green spray froze the sails stiff as boards. The rigging became ropes of ice, the ship a ghost gliding white through the fogs. At last came a squall that rolled the mists up like a scroll, and straight ahead, high and lonely as cloud-banks, towered the white peaks of Greenland’s mountains. Though it was two o’clock in the morning, it was broad daylight, and the whole crew came scrambling up the hatches to the shout of “Land!” Hudson enthusiastically named the mountain “God’s Mercy”; but the lift of mist uncurtained to the astonished gaze of the English sailors a greater wonder than the mountains. North, south, east, west, the ship was embayed in an ice-world—ice in islands and hills and valleys with lakes and rivers of fresh water flowing over the surface. Birds flocked overhead with lonely screams at these human intruders on a realm as white and silent as death; and where one crystal berg was lighted to gold by the sun, a huge polar bear hulked to its highest peak and surveyed the newcomers in as much astonishment at them as they felt at him. Truly, this was the Ultima Thule of poet’s dream—beyond the footsteps of man. Blue was the sky above, blue the patches of ocean below, blue the illimitable fields of ice, blue and lifeless and cold as steel. The men passed that day jubilant as boys out of school. Some went gunning for the birds. Others would have pursued the polar bear but with a splash the great creature dived into the sea. The crew took advantage of the pools of fresh water in the ice to fill their casks with drinking water. For the next twenty-four hours, Hudson crept among the ice floes by throwing out a hook on the ice, then hauling up to it by cable.

By night the sea was churning the ice in choppy waves, with a growl of wind through the mast, and the crew wakened the next morning to find a hurricane of sleet had wiped out the land. The huge floes were turning somersets in the rough sea with a banging that threatened to smash the little ship into a crushed egg shell. Under bare poles, she drove before the wind for open sea.

As she scudded from the crush of the tumbling ice, Hudson remarked something extraordinary in the conduct of his ship. Veering about, sails down, there was no mistaking it—she was drifting against the wind! As the storm subsided, it became plainer: the wind was carrying in one direction, the sea was carrying in another. Hudson had discovered that current across the Pole, which was to play such an important part with Nansen three hundred years later. Icebergs were floating against the wind, too, laboriously, with apparently aimless circlings round and round, but circles that carried them forward against the wind, and the ship was presently moored to a great icepan drifting along with the undertow.

Then the curse of all Arctic voyagers fell on the sea—fog thick to the touch as wool, through which the icebergs glided like phantoms with a great crash of waters, where the surf beat on the floes. Never mind! Their anchor-hold acts as a breakwater. They are sheltered from the turmoil of the waves outside the ice. And they are still headed north. And they are up to Seventy-three along a coast, which no chart has ever before recorded, no chart but the myths of death’s realm. As the coast might prove treacherous if the ice began thumping inland, Hudson names the region “Hold Hope,” which may be interpreted, “Keep up your Courage.”

Prince Rupert, from a Photograph in the Ottawa Archives, after Painting by Vandyke.

Ice and fog, fog and ice, and the eternal silences but for the thunder of the floes banging the ports; up to Seventy-five by noon of June 25, when the sailors notice that the floundering clumsy grampus are playing mad pranks about the ship. The glistening brown backs race round the prow and somerset bodily out of the water in a very deviltry of sauciness! Call it sailors’ superstition, but when the grampus schools play, your Northern crew looks for storm, and by noon of June 26, the storm is there pounding the hull like thunder and shrieking through the rigging. Not a good place to be, between land and ice in hurricane! Hudson scampers for the sea, still north, but driven out east by the trend of Greenland’s coast along an unbroken barrier of ice that seems to link Greenland to Spitzbergen.

No passage across the Pole this way! That is certain! But there is a current across the Pole! That, too, is certain! And Greenland is as long as a continent. So driving before the storm, Hudson steers east for Spitzbergen. In July, it is warmer, but heat brings more ice, and the man at the masthead on the lookout for land up at Seventy-nine could not know that a submerged iceberg was going to turn a somerset directly under the keel. There was a splintering crash. Something struck the keel like a cannon shot. Up reared the little boat on end like a frightened horse. When the waters plunged down two great bergs had risen one on each side of the quivering ship and a jagged gash gaped through the timbers at water line. Water slushed over decks in a cataract. The yardarms are still dipping and dripping to the churning seas when the crew leaps out to a man, some on the ice, some in small boats, some astraddle of driftwood to stop the leak in the bottom. As they toil—and they toil in desperation, for the safety of the ship is their only possibility of reaching home—they notice it again—wood drifting against the wind, the undertow of some great unknown Polar Current.

Hudson cannot wait for this current to carry him toward the Pole, as Nansen did. Up he tacks to Eighty-two, within eight degrees of the baffling Pole, within four degrees of Farthest North reached by modern navigators. When he finds Spitzbergen locked by the ice to the north, he tries it by the south. But the ice seems to become almost a living enemy in its resistance. Hudson had anchored to a drifting floe. Another icepan shut off his retreat. Then a terrific sea began running—the effect of the ice jam against the Polar Current. The fog was so thick you could cut it with a knife. Not a breath of wind stirred. Sails hung limp, and the sea was driving the ship to instant destruction against a jam of ice. Heaving out small boats, the crew rowed for dear life towing the ship out of the maelstrom by main force, but their puny human strength was as child’s play against the great powers of the elements. Backwash had carried rowers and ship and small boats within a stone’s throw of the ramming icebergs when a faint air breathed through the fog. Moistening their fingers, the sailors held up hands to catch the motion of any breeze. No mistake—it was a fair wind—right about sails there—the little ship turned tail to the ice and was off like a bird, for says the old ship’s log: “it pleased God to give us a gale, and away we steered.”

The battle for a passage seemed hopeless. Hudson assembled the crew on decks and on bended knees prayed God to show which way to steer. Of no region had the sailors of that day greater horror than Spitzbergen. They began to recall the fearful disasters that had befallen Dutch ships here but a few years before. Those old sailors’ superstitions of the North being the realm of the Goddess of Death, came back to memory. That last narrow escape from the ice-crush left terror in the very marrow of their bones. In vain, Hudson once more suggested seeking the passage by Greenland. To the crew, the Voice of the North uttered no call. Glory was all very well, but they didn’t want glory. They wanted to go home. What was the good of chasing an Idea down the Long Trail to a grave on the frozen shores of Death?

When men begin to reason that way, there is no answer. You can’t promise them what you are not sure you will ever find. The Call is only to those who have ears to hear. You must have hold of the end of a Golden Thread before you can follow the baffling mazes of a discoverer’s faith, and these men hadn’t faith in anything except a full stomach and a sure wage. After all, their arguments were the same as the obstructions presented against every expedition to the Pole to-day, or for that matter, to any other realm of the Unknown. It was like asking the inventor to show his invention in full work before he has made it, or the bank to pay its dividends before you contribute to its capital. What reason could Hudson give to justify his faith? Standing on the quarter deck with clenched fists and troubled face, he might as well have argued with stones, or pleaded for a chance with modern money bags as talked down the expostulations of the mutineers. They were men of the kidney who will always be on the safe side. As the world knows—there was no passage across the Pole suitable for commerce. There was no justification for Hudson’s faith. Yet it was the goal of that faith, which led him on the road to greater discoveries than a dozen passages across the Pole.

Faith has always been represented as one of three sister graces; cringing, meek-spirited, downtrodden damsels at their best. In view of all she has accomplished for the world in religion, in art, in science, in discovery, in commerce, Faith should be represented as a fiery-eyed goddess with the forked lightnings for her torch, treading the mountain peaks of the universe. From her high place, she alone can see whence comes the light and which way runs the Trail. Step by step, the battle has been against darkness, every step a blow, every blow a bruise driving back to the right Trail; every blood mark a milestone in human progress from lowland to upland.

But Hudson’s men were obdurate to arguments all up in air. They will not seek the passage by Greenland. Hudson must turn back. To a great spirit, obstructions are never a stop. They are only a delay. Hudson sets his teeth. You will see him go by Greenland one day yet—mark his word! Meantime, home he sails through what he calls “slabbie” weather, putting into Tilbury Docks on the 15th of September. If money bags counted up the profits of that year’s trip, they would write against Hudson’s name in the Book of Judgment—Failure!

CHAPTER II

1608

HUDSON’S SECOND VOYAGE

Henceforth Hudson was an obsessed man. First, he possessed the Idea. Now the Idea possessed him. It was to lead him on a course no man would willingly have followed. Yet he followed it. Everything, life or death, love or hate, gain or loss, was to be subservient to that Idea.

That current drifting across the Pole haunted him as it was to haunt Nansen at a later date. By attempting too much, had he missed all? He had gone to Spitzbergen in the Eighties. If he had kept down to Nova Zembla Islands in the Seventies, would he have found less ice? The man possessed by a single idea may be a trial to his associates. To himself, he is a torment. Once he becomes baffled, he is beset by doubts, by questions, by fears. If his faith leaves him, his life goes to pieces like a rope of sand. Hudson must have been beset by such doubts now. It is the place where the adventurer leaves the milestones of all known paths and has not yet found firm footing for his own feet. Hundreds, thousands, have struck out from the beaten Trail. Few, indeed, have blazed a new path. The bones of the dead bleach on the shores of the realm ruled by the Goddess of the Unknown. It is the place where the beginner sets out to be a great artist, or a great scientist, or a great discoverer. Thousands have set out on the same quest who should have rested content at their own ingle-nook, happy at the plow; not good plowmen spoiled. The beginner balances the chances—a thousand to one against him! Is his vision a fool’s quest, a will-o’-the-wisp? Is the call the tickling of his own restless vanity; or the voice of a great truth? He can learn only by going forward, and the going forward may take him over a precipice—may prove him a fool. This was the place Hudson was at now. It is a place that has been passed by all the world’s great.

Nine Dutch boats had at different times passed between Nova Zembla and the main coast of Russia. To be sure, they had been blocked by the ice beyond, but might not Hudson by some lucky chance follow that Polar Current through open water? The chances were a thousand to one against him. Who but a fool would take the chance? Nansen’s daring plan to utilize the ice-drift to lift his ship above the ice-crush—did not occur to Hudson. Except for that difference, the two explorers—the greatest of the early Arctic navigators and the greatest of the modern—planned very much the same course.

This time, the Muscovy Company commissioned Hudson to look out for ivory hunting as well as the short passage to Asia. Three men only of the old crew enlisted. Hudson might enjoy risking his life for glory. Most mortals prefer safety. Of the three who re-enlisted one was his son.

Keeping close to the cloud-capped, mountainous shores of Norway, the boat sighted Cape North on June 3, 1608. Clouds wreathed the mountains in belts and plumes of mist. Snow-fields of far summits shone gold in sudden bursts of sunshine through the cloud-wrack. Fjords like holes in the wall nestled at the foot of the mountains, the hamlets of the fisher folk like tiny match boxes against the mighty hills. To the restless tide rocked and heaved the fishing smacks—emblems of man’s spirit at endless wrestle with the elements. As Hudson’s ship climbed the waves, the fishermen stood up in their little boats to wave a God-speed to these adventurers bound for earth’s ends. Sails swelling to the wind, Hudson’s vessel rode the roll of green waters, then dipped behind a cataract of waves, and dropped over the edge of the known world.

Driftwood again on that Polar Current up at Seventy-five, driftwood and the endless sweep of moving ice, which compelled Hudson “to loose from one floe” and “bear room from another” and anchor on the lee of one berg to prevent ramming by another; “divers pieces driving past the ship,” says Hudson—just as it drove past Nansen’s Fram on the same course.

To men satiated of modern life, the North is still a wonder-world. There are the white silences primeval as the morn when God first created Time. There is “the sun sailing round in a fiery ring”—as one old Viking described it—instead of sinking below the horizon; nightless days in summer and dayless nights in winter. There is the desolation of earth’s places where man may never have dominion and Death must always veil herself unseen. Polar bears floundered over the ice hunting seals. Walrus roared from the rocks in herds till the surf shook—ivory for the Muscovy Company; and whales floated about the ship in schools that threatened to keel the craft over—more profit for the Muscovy traders.

What wonder that Hudson’s ignorant sailors began to feel the marvel of the strange ice-world, and to see fabulous things in the light of the midnight sun? One morning a face was seen following the ship, staring up from the sea. There was no doubt of it. Two sailors saw it. Was it one of the monsters of Saga myth, that haunted this region? The watch called a comrade. Both witnessed the hideous apparition of a human face with black hair streaming behind on the waves. The body was like a woman’s and the seamen’s terror had conjured up the ill omen of a mermaid when wave-wash overturned its body, exhibiting the fins and tail of a porpoise—“skin very white”—mermaid without a doubt, portent of evil, though the hair may have been floating seaweed.

Sure enough, within a week, ice locked round the ship in a vise. The floes were no brashy ice-cakes that could be plowed through by a ship’s prow with a strong, stern wind. They were huge fields of ice, five, ten, twenty and thirty feet deep interspread with hummocks and hillocks that were miniature bergs in themselves. Across these rolling meadows of crystal, the wind blew with the nip of midwinter; but when the sun became partly hidden in fiery cloud-banks, the scene was a fairy land, sea and sky shading off in deepest tinges to all the tints of the rainbow. Where the ocean showed through ice depths, there was a blue reflection deep as indigo. Where the clear water was only a surface pool on top of submerged ice, the sky shone above with a light green delicate as apple bloom. Where the ice was a broken mass of an adjacent glacier sliding down to the sea through the eternal snows of some mountain gorge, a curious phenomenon could sometimes be observed. The edge of the ice was in layers—each layer representing one year’s snowfall congealed by the summer thaw, so that the observer could count back perhaps a century from the ice layers. Other men tread on snow that fell but yesterday. Hudson’s crew were treading on the snowfall of a hundred years as though this were God’s workshop in the making and a hundred years were but as a day.

Beyond the floating ice fields, the heights of Nova Zembla were sighted, awesome and lonely in the white night, gruesome to these men from memory of the fate that befell the Dutch crews here fifteen years previously. Rowing and punting through the ice-brash, two men went ashore to explore. They saw abundance of game for the Muscovy gentlemen; and at one place among driftwood came on the cold ashes of an old fire. It was like the first print of man’s footstep found by Robinson Crusoe. Startled by signs of human presence, they scanned the surrounding landscape. On the shore, a solitary cross had been erected of driftwood. Then the men recalled the fate of the Dutch crew, that had perished wandering over these islands in 1597. What fearful battles had the white silences witnessed between puny men explorers and the stony Goddess of Death? What had become of the last man, of the man who had erected the cross? Did his body lie somewhere along the shores of Nova Zembla, or had he manned his little craft like the Vikings of old and sailed out lashed to the spars to meet death in tempest? The horror of the North seemed to touch the men as with the hands of the dead whom she had slain.

HUDSON’S VOYAGES of 1607-1608

To Pass across the Pole from EUROPE to ASIA.

The report that the two men carried back to Hudson’s boat did not raise the spirits of the crew. One night the entire ship’s company but Hudson and his son had gone ashore to hunt walrus. Such illimitable fields of ice lay north that Hudson knew his only chance must be between the south end of Nova Zembla (he did not know there were several islands in the group) and the main coast of Asia. It was three o’clock in the morning. The ice began to drive landward with the fury of a whirlpool. Two anchors were thrown out against the tide. Fenders were lowered to protect the ship’s sides. Captain and boy stood with iron-shod poles in hand to push the ice from the ship, or the ship from the ice. The men from the hunt saw the coming danger and rushed over the churning icepans to the rescue. Some on the ice, some on the ship, with poles and oars and crowbars, they pushed and heaved away the icepans, and ramming their crowbars down crevices wrenched the ice to splinters or swerved it off the sides of the ship. Sometimes an icepan would tilt, teeter, rise on end and turn a somerset, plunging the sailors in ice water to their arm pits. The jam seemed to be coming on the ship from both directions at once, for the simple reason the ship offered the line of least resistance. Twelve hours the battle lasted, the heaving ice-crush threatening to crush the ship’s ribs like slats till at last a channel of open water appeared just outside the ship’s prison. But the air was a dead calm. Springing from icepan to icepan, the men towed their ship out of danger.

Rain began to drizzle. The next day a cold wind came whistling through the rigging. The ship lay in a land-locked cove of Nova Zembla. Hudson again sent his men ashore to hunt, probably also to pluck up courage. Then he climbed the lookout to scan the sea. It was really to scan his own fate. It was the old story of the glory-seeker’s quest—a harder battle than human power could wage; a struggle that at the last only led to a hopeless impasse. The scent on the Trail and the eagerness in the hound leading only to a blind alley of baffled effort and ruin! Every great benefactor of humanity has come to this cul de sac of hope. It is as if a man’s highest aim were only in the end a sort of trap whither some impish will-o’-the-wisp has impelled him. The thing itself—a passage across the Pole—didn’t exist any more than the elixir of life which laid the foundations of chemistry. The question is how, when the great men of humanity come to this blind wall, did they ever have courage to go on? For the thing they pursued was a phantom never to be realized; but strangely enough, in the providence of God, the phantom pursuit led to greater benefits for the race than their highest hopes dared to dream.

No elixir of life, you dreamer; but your mad-brained search for the elixir gave us the secrets of chemistry by which man prolongs life if he doesn’t preserve eternal youth! No fate written on the scroll of the heavens, you star-gazer; but your fool-astrology has given us astronomy, by which man may predict the movements of the stars for a thousand years though he cannot forsee his own fate for a day! No North-West Passage to Asia, you fevered adventurers of the trackless sea; but your search for a short way to China has given us a New World worth a thousand Chinas! Go on with your dreams, you mad-souled visionaries! If it is a will-o’-the wisp you chase, your will-o’-the-wisp is a lantern to the rest of humanity!

Climbing the rigging to the topmast yardarm, Hudson scanned the sea. His heart sank. His hopes seemed to congeal like the eternal ice of this ice-world. The springs of life seemed to grow both heavy and cold. Far as eye could reach was ice—only ice, while outside the cove there raged a tempest as if all the demons of the North were blowing their trumpets.

“There is no passage this way,” said Hudson to his son. Then as if hope only dies that it may send forth fresh growth like the seed, he added, “But we must try Greenland again, on the west side this time.” It was ten o’clock at night when the men returned laden with game; but they, too, had taken counsel among themselves whether to go forward; and the memory of that dead crew’s cross turned the scales against Hudson. It was only the 5th of July, but they would not hear of attempting Greenland this season. From midnight of the 5th to nine o’clock of the 6th, Hudson pondered. No gap opened through the white wall ahead. The Frost Giants, whose gambols may be heard on the long winter nights when the icecracks whoop and romp, had won against Man. “Being void of hope,” Hudson records, “the wind stormy and against us, much ice driving, we weighed and set sail westward.” Home-bound, the ship anchored on the Thames, August 26.

CHAPTER III

1609

HUDSON’S THIRD VOYAGE

While Hudson was pursuing his phantom across Polar seas, Europe had at last awakened to the secret of Spain’s greatness—colonial wealth that poured the gold of Peru into her treasury. To counteract Spain, colonizing became the master policy of Europe. France was at work on the St. Lawrence. England was settling Virginia, and Smith, the pioneer of Virginia, who was Hudson’s personal friend, had explored the Chesapeake.

James II, Duke of York, Second Governor of the Hudson’s Bay Company.

But the Netherlands went a step farther. To throw off the yoke of Spain, they maintained a fleet of seventy merchantmen furnished as ships of war to wage battle on the high seas. Spanish colonies were to be attacked wherever found. Spanish cities were to be sacked as the buccaneers sacked them on the South Sea. Spanish caravels with cargoes of gold were to be scuttled and sunk wherever met. It was to be brigandage—brigandage pure and simple—from the Zuider Zee to Panama, from the North Pole to the South.

Hudson’s voyages for the Muscovy merchants of London to find a short way to Asia at once arrested the attention of the Dutch. Dutch and English vied with each other for the discovery of that short road to the Orient. For a century the chance encounter of Dutch and English sailors on Arctic seas had been the signal for the instant breaking of heads. Not whales but men were harpooned when Dutch and English fishermen met off Nova Zembla, or Spitzbergen, or the North Cape.

Hudson was no sooner home from his second voyage for the English than the Dutch East India Company invited him to Holland to seek passage across the Pole for them. This—it should be explained—is the only justification that exists for writing the English pilot’s name as Hendrick instead of Henry, as though employment by the Dutch changed the Englishman’s nationality.

The invitation was Hudson’s salvation. Just at the moment when all doors were shut against him in England and when his hopes were utterly baffled by two failures—another door opened. Just at the moment when his own thoughts were turning toward America as the solution of the North-West Passage, the chance came to seek the passage in America. Just when Hudson was at the point where he might have abandoned his will-o’-the-wisp, it lighted him to a fresh pursuit on a new Trail. It is such coincidences as these in human life that cause the poet to sing of Destiny.

But the chanciness of human fortune did not cease because of this stroke of good luck. The great merchants of the Netherlands heard his plans. His former failures were against him. Money bags do not care to back an uncertainty. Having paid his expenses to come to Holland, the merchant princes were disposed to let him cool his heels in the outer halls waiting their pleasure. The chances are they would have rejected his overtures altogether if France and Belgium had not at that time begun to consider the employment of Hudson on voyages of discovery. The Amsterdam merchants of the Dutch East India Company suddenly awakened to the fact that they wanted Hudson, and wanted him at once. Again Destiny, or a will-o’-the-wisp as impish as Puck—had befriended him.

At Amsterdam, he was furnished with two vessels, the Good Hope as an escort part way; the Half Moon for the voyage itself—a flat-bottomed, tub-like yacht such as plied the shallows of Holland. In his crew, he was unfortunate. The East India Company, of course, supplied him with the sailors of their own boats—lawless lascars; turbaned Asiatics with stealthy tread and velvet voices and a dirk hidden in their girdles; gypsy nondescripts with the hot blood of the hot tropics and the lawless instincts of birds of plunder. Your crew trained to cut the Spaniard’s throat may acquire the habit and cut the master’s throat, too. Along with these sailors, Hudson insisted on having a few Englishmen from his former crews, among whom were Colman and Juet and his own son. Juet acted as astronomer and keeper of the ship’s log. From Juet and Van Meteren, the Dutch consul in England in whose hands Hudson’s manuscripts finally fell—are drawn all the facts of the voyage.

On March 25 (April 6, new style), 1609, the cumbersome crafts swung out on the hazy yellow of the Zuider Zee. Motlier ships were about Hudson, here, than on the Thames, for the Dutch had an enormous commerce with the East and the West Indies. Feluccas with lateen sails and galleys for oarsmen had come up from the Mediterranean. Dutch pirates of the Barbary Coast—narrow in the prow, narrow in the keel, built for swift sailing and light cargoes—had forgathered, sporting sails of a different design for every harbor. Then, there were the East Indiamen, ponderous, slow-moving, deep and broad, with cannon bristling through the ports like men-of-war, and tawny Asiatic faces leering over the taffrail. Yawls from the low-lying coast, three-masted luggers from Denmark, Norwegian ships with hideous scaled griffins carved on the sharp-curved prows, brigs and brigantines and caravels and tall galleons from Spain—all crowded the ports of the Netherlands, whose commerce was at its zenith. Threading his way through the motley craft, Hudson slowly worked out to sea.

All went well till the consort, Good Hope, turned back north of Norway and the Half Moon ploughed on alone into the ice fields of Nova Zembla with her lawless lascar crew. This was the region where other Dutch crews had perished miserably. Here, too, Hudson’s English sailors had lost courage the year before. And here Dutch and English always fought for fishing rights. The cold north wind roared down in gusts and flaws and sudden bursts of fury. Against such freezing cold, the flimsy finery of damasks and calico worn by the East Indians was no protection. The lascars were chilled to the bone. They lay huddled in their berths bound up in blankets and refused to stir above decks in such cold. Promptly, the English sailors rebelled against double work. The old feud between English and Dutch flamed up. Knives were out, and before Hudson realized, a mutiny was raging about his ears.

If he turned back, he was ruined. The door of opportunity to new success is a door that shuts against retreat. His friend, Smith of Virginia, had written to him of the great inlet of the Chesapeake in America. South of the Chesapeake was no passage to the South Sea. Smith knew that; but north of the Chesapeake old charts marked an unexplored arm of the sea. When Verrazano, the Italian, coasted America for France in 1524, he had been driven by a squall from the entrance to a vast river between Thirty-nine and Forty-one (the Hudson River); and the Spanish charts of Estevan Gomez, in 1525, marked an unknown Rio de Gamos on the same coast. Hudson now recalled Smith’s advice—to seek passage between the James River and the St. Lawrence.

To clinch matters came a gust driving westward over open sea. Robert Juet, seeking guidance from the heavenly bodies, notices for the first time in history, on May 19, that there is a spot on the sun. If Hudson had accomplished nothing more, he had made two important discoveries for science—the Polar Current and the spot on the sun. Geographers and astronomers have been knighted and pensioned for less important discoveries.

West, southwest, drove the storm flaw, the Half Moon scudding bare of sails for three hundred miles. Was it destiny again, or his dæmon, or his Puck, or his will-o’-the-wisp, or the Providence of God—that drove Hudson contrary to his plans straight for the scene of his immortal discoveries? Pause was made at the Faroes for wood and water. There, too, Hudson consulted with his officers and decided to steer for America.

Once more afloat, June saw the Half Moon with its lazy lascars lounging over rails down among the brown fogs of Newfoundland. Here a roaring nor’-easter came with the suddenness of a thunderclap. The scream of wind through the rigging, the growlers swishing against the keel, then the thunder of the great billows banging broadsides—were like the burst of cannon fire over a battlefield. The foremast snapped and swept into the seas as the little Half Moon careened over on one side, and the next gust that caught her tore the other sails to tatters, but she still kept her prow headed southwest.

Fogs lay as they nearly always lie on the Grand Banks, but a sudden lift of the mist on June 25 revealed a sail standing east. To the pirate East Indian sailors, the sight of the strange ship was like the smell of powder to a battle horse. Loot! Spanish loot! With a whoop, they headed the Half Moon about in utter disregard of Hudson, and gave chase. From midday to dark the Half Moon played pirate, cutting the waves in pursuit, careening to the wind in a way that threatened to capsize boat and crew, the fugitive bearing away like a bird on wing. This little by-play lasted till darkness hid the strange ship, but the madcap prank seemed to rouse the lazy lascars from their torpor. Henceforth, they were alert for any lawless raid that promised plunder.

Back about the Half Moon through the warm June night. Dutch and English forgathered in the moonlight squatting about on the ship’s kegs spinning yarns of bloody pirate venture, when Spanish cargoes were scuttled and Spanish dons tossed off bayonet point into the sea, and Spanish ladies compelled to walk the plank blindfolded into watery graves. What kind of venture did they expect in America—this rascal crew?

Then the fogs of the Banks settled down again like wool. Here and there, like phantom ships were the sails of the French fishing fleet, or the black-hulled bateaux, or the rocking Newfoundland dories.

A long white curl of combing waves, and they have sheered off from the Wreckers’ Reef at Sable Island.

Slower now, and steady, the small boats sounding ahead, for the water is shallow and the wind shifty. In the calm that falls, the crew fishes lazily over decks for cod. Through the fog and dark of July 16, something ahead looks like islands. The boat anchors for the night, and when gray morning breaks, the Half Moon lies off what is now known as Penobscot Bay, Maine.

Two dugouts paddled by Indians come climbing the waves. Dressed in breechcloths of fur and feathers, the savages mount the decks without fear. The lascars gather round—not much promise of plunder from such scant attire! By signs and a few French words, the Indians explain that St. Lawrence traders frequent this coast. The East India cut-throats prick up their ears. Trade—what had these defenceless savages to trade?

That week Hudson sailed up the river and sent his carpenters ashore to make fresh masts, but the East India men rummaged the redskins’ camp. Great store of furs, they saw. It was not the kind of loot they wanted. Gold was more to their choice, but it was better than no loot at all.

New Amsterdam or New York from an Old Print of 1660.

Albany from an Old Print.

The Half Moon was ready to sail on the 25th of July. In spite of Hudson’s commands, six sailors went ashore with heavy old-fashioned musketoons known as “murderers.” Seizing the Indian canoes, they opened fire on the camp. The amazed Indians dashed for hiding in the woods. The sailors then plundered the wigwams of everything that could be carried away. This has always been considered a terrible blot against Hudson’s fame. The only explanation given by Juet in the ship’s log is, “we drave the savages from the houses and took the spoyle as they would have done of us.” Van Meteren, the Dutch consul in London, who had Hudson’s account, gives another explanation. He declares the Dutch sailors conducted the raid in spite of all the force with which Hudson could oppose them. The English sailors refused to enforce his commands by fighting, for they were outnumbered by the mutineers. No sooner were the mutineers back on deck than they fell to pummeling one another over a division of the plunder. Any one, who knows how news carries among the Indians by what fur traders describe as “the moccasin telegram,” could predict results. “The moccasin telegram” bore exaggerated rumors of the outrage from the Penobscot to the Ohio. The white man was a man to be fought, for he had proved himself a treacherous friend.

Wind-bound at times, keeping close to land, warned off the reefs through fog by a great rutt or rustling of the tide, the pirate sailors now disregarding all commands, the Half Moon drifted lazily southward past Cape Cod. Somewhere near Nantucket, a lonely cry sounded from the wooded shore. It was a human voice. Fearing some Christian had been marooned by mutineers like his own crew, Hudson sent his small boat ashore. A camp of Indians was found dancing in a frenzy of joy at the apparition of the great “winged wigwam” gliding over the sea. A present of glass buttons filled their cup of happiness to the brim.

Grapevines festooned the dank forests. Flowers still bloomed in shady nooks—the wild sunflower and the white daisy and the nodding goldenrod; and the sailors drank clear water from a crystal spring at the roots of a great oak. Robert Juet’s ship log records that “the Indian country of great hills”—Massachusetts—was “a very sweet land.”

On August 7, Hudson was abreast New York harbor; but a mist part heat, part fog, part the gathering purples of coming autumn—hid the low-lying hills. Sliding idly along the summer sea, mystic, unreal, lotus dreams in the very August air, the world a world of gold in the yellow summer light—the Half Moon came to James River by August 18, where Smith of Virginia lived; but the mutineers had no mind to go up to Jamestown settlement. There, the English would outnumber them, and English law did not deal gently with mutineers. A heat hurricane sent the green waves smashing over decks off South Carolina, and in the frantic fright of the ship’s cat dashing from side to side, the turbaned pirates imagined portent of evil. Perhaps, too, they were coming too near the Spanish settlements of Florida. All their bravado of scuttled Spanish ships may have been pot-valor. Any way, they consented to head the boat back north in a search for the passage above the Chesapeake.

Past the swampy Chesapeake, a run up the Delaware burnished as a mirror in the morning light; through the heat haze over a glassy sea along that New Jersey shore where the world of pleasure now passes its summers from Cape May and Atlantic City to the highlands of New Jersey—slowly glided the Half Moon. Sand reefs gritted the keel, and the boat sheered out from shore where a line of white foam forewarned more reefs. Juet, the mate, did duty at the masthead, scanning the long coast line for that inlet of the old charts. The East India men lay sprawled over decks, beards unkempt, long hair tied back by gypsy handkerchiefs, bizarre jewels gleaming from huge brass earrings. Some were paying out the sounding line from the curved beak of the prow. Others fished for a shark at the stern, throwing out pork bait at the end of a rope. Many were squatted on the decks unsheltered from the sun, chattering like parrots over games of chance.

A sudden shout from Juet at the masthead—of shoals! A grit of the keel over pebbly bottom! On the far inland hills, the signal fires of watching Indians! Then the sea breaking from between islands turbid and muddy as if it came from some great river—September 2, they have found the inlet of the old charts. They are on the threshold of New York harbor. They have discovered the great river now known by Hudson’s name. Even the mutineers stop gambling to observe the scene. The ringleader that in all sea stories wears a hook on one arm points to the Atlantic Highlands smoky in the summer heat. On their left to the south is Sandy Hook; to the north, Staten Island. To the right with a lumpy hill line like green waves running into one another lie Coney Island and Long Island. The East India men laugh with glee. It’s a fine land. It’s a big land. This is better than risking the gallows for mutiny down in Virginia, or taking chances of having throats cut boarding some Spanish galleon of the South Seas. The ship’s log does not say anything about it. Neither does Van Meteren’s record, but I don’t think Hudson would have been human if his heart did not give a leap. At five in the afternoon of September 2, the Half Moon anchored at the entrance to New York harbor not far from where the Goddess of Liberty waves her great arm to-day.

Silent is the future, silent as the sphinx! How could those Dutch sailors guess, how could the Dutch company that sent them to the Pole know, that the commerce of the world for which they fought Spain—would one day beat up and down these harbor waters? Dreamed he never so wildly, Hudson’s wildest dream could not have forseen that the river he had discovered would one day throb to the multitudinous voices of a world traffic, a world empire, a world wealth.

In Hudson’s day, Spain was the leader of the world’s commerce against whom all nations vied. To-day her population does not exceed twenty million, but there flows through the harbor gates, which Hudson, the penniless pilot dreamer, discovered, the commerce of a hundred million people. It is no straining to say that individual fortunes have been made in the traffic of New York harbor which exceed the national incomes of Spain and Holland and Belgium combined. But if a city’s greatness consists in something more than volume of wealth and volume of traffic; if it consists in high endeavor and self-sacrifice and the pursuit of ideals to the death, Hudson, the dreamer, beset by rascal mutineers and pursuing his aim in spite of all difficulties, embodied in himself the qualities that go to make true greatness.

Mist and heat haze hid the harbor till ten next morning. The Half Moon then glided a pace inland. Three great rivers seemed to open before her—the Hudson, East River and one of the channels round Staten Island. On the 4th, while the small boat went ahead to sound, some sailors rowed ashore to fish. Tradition says that the first white men to set foot on New York harbor landed on Coney Island, though there is no proof it was not Staten Island, for the ship lay anchored beside both. The wind blew so hard this night that the anchor dragged over bottom and the Half Moon poked her prow into the sands of Staten Island, “but took no hurt, thanks be to God,” adds Juet.

Signal fires—burning driftwood and flames shot up through hollow trees—had rallied the Indian tribes to the marvel of the house afloat on the sea. Objects like beings from heaven seemed to live on the house—so the poor Indians thought, and they began burning sacrificial fires and sent runners beating up the wise men of all the tribes. A religious dance was begun typifying welcome. Spies watching through the foliage came back with word that one of the Manitous was chief of all the rest, for he was dressed in a bright scarlet cloak with something on it bright as the sun—they did not know a name for gold lace worn by Hudson as commander. When the Manitou with the gold lace went ashore at Richmond, Staten Island, Indian legend says that the chiefs gathered round in a circle under the oaks and chanted an ode of welcome to the rhythmic measures of a dance. The natives accompanied Hudson back to the Half Moon with gifts of maize and tobacco—“a friendly people,” Hudson’s manuscript describes them.

Two days passed in the Narrows with interchange of gifts between whites and Indians. On the morning of the 6th, Hudson sent Colman and four men to sound what is now known as Hell Gate. The sailors went on to the Battery—the southernmost point of New York City as it is to-day—finding lands pleasant with grass and flowers and goodly oaks, the air crisp with the odor of autumn woods. With the yellow sun aslant the painted autumn forests, it was easy to forget time. The day passed in idle wanderings. At dusk rain began to fall. This extinguished “the match-lighters” of the men’s muskets. Launching their boat again, they were rowing back to the Half Moon through a rain fine as mist when two canoes with a score of warriors suddenly emerged from the dusk. Both parties paused in mutual amazement. Then the warriors uttered a shout and had discharged a shower of arrows before the astonished sailors could defend themselves. Was the attack a chance encounter with hostiles, or had “the moccasin telegram” brought news of the murderous raid on the Penobscot? One sailor fell dead shot through the throat. Two of the other four men were injured. The dead man was the Englishman, Colman. This weakened Hudson against the Dutch mutineers. Muskets were wet and useless. In the dark, the men had lost the ship. The tide began to run with a high wind. They threw out a grapnel. It did not hold. All night in the rain and dark, the two uninjured men toiled at the oars to keep from drifting out to sea. Daylight brought relief. The enemy had retreated, and the Half Moon lay not far away. By ten of the morning, they reached the ship. The dead man was rowed ashore and buried at a place named after him—Colman’s Point. As the old Dutch maps have a Colman’s Punt marked at the upper end of Sandy Hook, that is supposed to have been the burial place. A wall of boards was now erected round the decks of the Half Moon and men-at-arms kept posted. Indians, who came to trade that day, affected ignorance of the attack but wanted knives for their furs. Hudson was not to be tricked. He refused, and permitted only two savages on board at a time. Two he clothed in scarlet coats like his own, and kept on board to guide him up the channel of the main river.

The Duke of Marlborough, One of the First Governors of the Hudson’s Bay Company.

The farther he advanced, the higher grew the shores. First were the ramparts, walls of rock, topped by a fringe of blasted trees. Then the coves where cities like Tarrytown nestle to-day. Then the forested peaks of the Highlands and West Point and Poughkeepsie, with the oaks to the river’s edge. Mist hung in wreaths across the domed green of the mountain called Old Anthony’s Nose. Mountain streams tore down to the river through a tangle of evergreens, and in the crisp, nutty autumn air was the all pervasive resinous odor of the pines. Mountains along the Hudson, which to-day scarcely feel the footfall of man except for the occasional hunter, were in Hudson’s time peopled by native mountaineers. From their eerie nests they could keep eagle eye on all the surrounding country and swoop down like birds of prey on all intruders. As the white sails of the Half Moon rattled and shifted and flapped to the wind tacking up the river, thin columns of smoke rose from the heights around, lights flashed from peak to peak like watch fires—the signals of the mountaineers. From the beginning of time they had dwelt secure on these airy peaks. What invader was this, gliding up the river-silences, sails spread like wings?

By the 13th of September, the Half Moon had passed Yonkers. On the morning of the 15th, it anchored within the shadow of the Catskills. On the night of the 19th, it lay at poise on the amber swamps, where the river widens near modern Albany. Either their professions of friendship had been a farce from the first, or they were afraid to be carried into the land of the Mohawks, but the two savages, who had come as guides, sprang through the porthole near Catskill and swam ashore, running along the banks shouting defiance.

Below Albany, Hudson went ashore with an old chief of the country. “He was chief of forty men,” Hudson’s manuscript records, “whom I saw in a house of oak bark, circular in shape with arched roof. It contained a great quantity of corn and beans, enough to load three ships, besides what was growing in the fields. On our coming into the house, two mats were spread to sit upon and food was served in red wooden bowls. Two men were dispatched in quest of game, who brought in a pair of pigeons. They likewise killed a fat dog and skinned it with great haste with shells. The land is the finest for cultivation that ever I in my life set foot upon.” Hudson had not found a passage to China, but his soul was satisfied of his life labor.

Above Albany, the river became shoaly. Hudson sent his men forward twice to sound, but thirty miles beyond Albany the water was too shallow for the Half Moon.

How far up the river had Hudson sailed? Juet’s ship log does not give the latitude, but Van Meteren’s record says 42° 40’. Beyond this, on September 22, the small boat advanced thirty miles. Tradition says Hudson ascended as far as Waterford.

While the boats were sounding, the conspirators were at their usual mischief. Indian chiefs had come on board. They were taken down to the cabin and made gloriously drunk. All went merrily till one Indian fell insensible. The rest scampered in panic and came back with offerings of wampum—their most precious possession—for the chief’s ransom. When they secured him alive, they brought more presents—wampum and venison—in gratitude. To this escapade of the mischief-making crew, moccasin rumor added a thousand exaggerations which came down in Indian tradition to the beginning of the last century. After the drunken frenzy—legend says—the white men made a great oration promising to come again. When they returned the next year, they asked for as much land as the hide of a bullock would cover. The Indians granted it, but the white men cut the buffalo hide to strips narrow as a child’s finger and so encompassed all the land of Manahat (Manhattan). The whites then built a fort for trade. The name of the fort was New Amsterdam. It grew to be a mighty city. Such are Indian legends of New York’s beginnings. They probably have as much truth as the story of Rome and the wolf.

On September 23, the Half Moon turned her prow south. The Hudson lay in all its autumn glory—a glassy sheet walled by the painted woods, now gorgeous with the frost tints of gold and scarlet and carmine. The ship anchored each night and the crew wandered ashore hatching pirate plots. Finally they presented their ultimatum to Hudson—they would slay him if he dared to steer for Holland. Weakened by the death of Colman, the English were helpless against the Dutch mutineers. Perhaps they, too, were not averse to seizing the Company’s ship and becoming sea rovers along the shores of such a land. At least one of them turned pirate the next voyage. Twice, the Half Moon was run aground—at Catskill and at Esopus—probably intentionally, or because Hudson dared not send his faithful Englishmen ahead to sound.

Hudson’s Third Voyage 1609, Discovery of Hudson River

Near Anthony’s Nose, the wind is compressed with the force of a huge bellows, and the ship anchored in shelter from the eddying gale. Signal fires had rallied the mountain tribes. As the ship lay wind-bound on the night of October 1, the Indians floating about in their dugouts grew daring. One climbed the rudder and stole Juet’s clothes through the cabin window. Juet shot him dead red-handed in the act, and gave the alarm to the rest of the crew. With a splash, the Indians rushed for shore, paddling and swimming, but a boat load of white men pursued to regain the plunder. A swimmer caught Juet’s boat to upset it. The ship’s cook slashed the Indian’s arm off, and he sank like stone. It was now dark, but Hudson slipped down stream away from danger. Near Harlem River the next afternoon, a hundred hostiles were seen ambushed on the east bank. Led by the guides who had escaped going up stream, two canoes glided under The Half Moon’s rudder and let fly a shower of arrows. Much as Hudson must have disliked to open his powder magazines to mutineers, arms were handed out. A spatter of musketry drove the Indians a gunshot distant. Three savages fell. Then there was a rally of the Indians to shoot from shore near what is now Riverside Drive. Hudson trained his cannon on them. Two more fell. Persistent as hornets, out they sallied in canoes. This time Hudson let go every cannon on that side. Twelve savages were killed.

The Half Moon then glided past Hopoghan (Hoboken) to safer anchorage on the open bay. It was October 4th before she passed through the Narrows to the Sea. Here, the mutiny reached a climax. Hudson could no more ignore threats. The Dutch refused to steer the ship to Holland, where punishment would await them. Juet advised wintering in Newfoundland, where there would be other Englishmen, but Hudson allayed discontent by promising not to send the guilty men to Holland if they would steer the ship to England; and to Dartmouth in Devon she came on November 7, 1609.

What was Hudson’s surprise to learn he had become an enormously important personage! The Muscovy Gentlemen of London did not purpose allowing his knowledge of the passage toward the Pole to pass into the service of their rivals, the Dutch. Hudson was forbidden to leave his own country and had to send his report to Holland through Van Meteren, the consul. The Half Moon returned to Holland and was wrecked a few years later on her way to the East Indies. It is to be hoped Hudson’s crew went down with her. The odd thing was—while Hudson was valued for his knowledge of the Polar regions, the discovery of Hudson River added not one jot to his fame. In fact, one historian of that time declares: “Hudson achieved nothing at all in 1609. All he did was to exchange merchandise for furs.” Nevertheless, the merchants of Amsterdam were rigging out ships to establish a trading factory on the entrance of that newly discovered river. Such was the founding of New York. Money bags sneer at the dreamer, but they are quick to transmute dreams into gold, though three hundred years were to pass before any of the gold drawn from his dreams was applied toward erecting to Hudson a memorial.

CHAPTER IV

1610

HUDSON’S FOURTH VOYAGE

Three years almost to a day from the time he set out to pursue his Phantom Dream along an endless Trail, Hudson again set sail for the mystic North. This time the Muscovy Gentlemen did not send him as a company, but three members of that company—Smith, Wolstenholme and Digges—supplied him with the bark, The Discovery. In his crew of twenty were several of his former seamen, among whom was the old mate, Juet. Provisions were carried for a year’s cruise. One Coleburne went as adviser; but what with the timidity of the old crew and the officious ignorance of the adviser stirring up discontent by fault-finding before the boat was well out of Thames waters—Hudson was obliged to pack Coleburne back on the first craft met home-bound. The rest of the crew comprised the usual proportion of rogues impressed against their will for a voyage, which regular seamen feared.

Having found one great river north of the Chesapeake, Hudson’s next thought was of that arm of the sea south of Greenland, which Cabot and Frobisher and Davis had all reported to be a passage as large as the Mediterranean, and to Greenland Hudson steered The Discovery in April, 1610. June saw the ship moored off Iceland under the shadow of Hekla’s volcanic fires. Smoke above Hekla was always deemed sign of foul weather. Twice The Discovery was driven back by storm, and the storm blew the smoldering fears of the unwilling seamen to raging discontent. Bathing in the hot springs, Juet, the old mate, grumbled at Hudson for sailing North instead of to that pleasant land they had found the previous year. The impressed sailors were only too ready to listen, and the wrong-headed foolish old mate waxed bolder. He advised the men “to keep muskets loaded in their cabins, for they would need firearms, and there would be bloodshed if the master persisted going by Greenland.” And all unconscious of the secret fires beginning to burn against him, was Hudson on the quarter-deck gazing westward, imagining that the ice bank seen through the mirage of the rosy North light was Greenland hiding the goal of his hopes. All you had to do was round Cape Farewell, south of Greenland, and you would be in the passage that led to the South Sea.

It was July when the boat reached the southern end of Greenland, and if the crew had been terrified by Juet’s tales of ice north of Asia, they were panic-stricken now, for the icebergs of America were as mountains are to mole-hills compared to the ice floes of Asia. Before, Hudson had cruised the east coast of Greenland. There, the ice continents of a polar world can disport themselves in an ocean’s spacious area, but west of Greenland, ice fields the area of Europe are crunched for four hundred miles into a passage narrower than the Mediterranean. To make matters worse, up these passages jammed with icebergs washed hard as adamant, the full force of the Atlantic tide flings against the southward flow of the Arctic waters. The result is the famous “furious overfall,” the nightmare of northern seamen—a cataract of waters thirty feet high flinging themselves against the natural flow of the ice. It is a battle of blind fury, ceaseless and tireless.

Hudson Straits may be described as a great arm of the ocean curving to an inland sea the size of the Mediterranean. At each end, the Straits are less than fifty miles wide, lined and interspread with rocky islands and dangerous reefs. Inside, the Straits widen to a breadth of from one hundred to two hundred miles. Ungava Bay on the east is a cup-like basin, which the wash of the iron ice has literally ground out of Labrador’s rocky shore. Half way up at Savage Point about two hundred miles from the ocean, Hudson Straits suddenly contract. This is known as the Second Narrows. The mountainous, snow-clad shores converge to a sharp funnel. Into this funnel pours the jammed, churning maelstrom of ice floes the size of a continent, and against this chaos flings the Atlantic tide.

Old fur-trade captains of a later era entered the Straits armed and accoutered as for war. It was a standing regulation among the fur-trade captains always to have one-fourth extra allowance of provisions for the delay in the straits. Six iron-shod ice hooks were carried for mooring to the ice floes. Special cables called “ice ropes” were used. Twelve great ice poles, twelve handspikes all steel-shod, and twelve chisels to drill holes in the ice for powder—were the regulation requirements of the fur traders bound through Hudson Straits. Special rules were issued for captains entering the Straits. A checker-board sky—deep blue reflecting the clear water of ocean, apple-green lights the sign of ice—was the invariable indication of distant ice. “Never go on either at night or in a fog when you have sighted such a sky”—was the rule. “Get your ice tackle ready at the straits.” “Stand away from the indraught between a big iceberg and the tide, for if once the indraught nails you, you are lost.” “To avoid a crush that will sink you in ten minutes, run twenty miles inside the soft ice; that will break the force of the tide.” “Be careful of your lead night and day.”

But these rules were learned only after centuries of navigating. All was new to the seamen in Hudson’s day. All that was known to the northern navigator was the trick of throwing out the hook, gripping to a floe, hauling up to it and worming a way through the ice with a small sail.

Carried with the current southward from Greenland, sometimes slipping into the long “tickles” of water open between the floes, again watching their chance to follow the calm sea to the rear of some giant iceberg, or else mooring to some ice raft honeycombed by the summer’s heat and therefore less likely to ram the hull—The Discovery came to Ungava Bay, Labrador, in July. This is the worst place on the Atlantic seaboard for ice. Old whalers and Moravian missionaries told me when I was in Labrador that the icebergs at Ungava are often by actual measurement nine miles long, and washed by the tide, they have been ground hard and sharp as steel. It is here they begin to break up on their long journey southward.

An island of ice turned turtle close to Hudson’s ship. There was an avalanche of falling seas. “Into the ice we put for safety,” says the record. “Some of our men fell sick. I will not say it was for fear, though I saw small sign of other grief.” Just westward lay a great open passage—now known as Hudson Strait, so the island in Ungava Bay was called Desire Provoked. Plainly, they could not remain anchored here, for between bergs they were in danger of a crush, and the drift might carry them on any of the rock reefs that rib the bay.

Juet, the old mate, raged against the madness of venturing such a sea. Henry Greene, a penniless blackguard, whom Hudson had picked off the streets of London to act as secretary—now played the tale-bearer, fomenting trouble between master and crew. “Our master,” says Prickett, one of Digges’ servants who was on board, “was in despair.” Taking out his chart, Hudson called the crew to the cabin and showed them how they had come farther than any explorer had yet dared. He put it plainly to them—would they go on, or turn back? Let them decide once and for all; no repinings! There, on the west, was the passage they had been seeking. It might lead to the South Sea. There, to the east, the way home. On both sides was equal danger—ice. To the west, was land. They could see that from the masthead. To the east, between them and home, the width of the ocean.

The crew were divided, but the ice would not wait for arguments and see-sawings. It was crushing in on each side of The Discovery with an ominous jar of the timbers. All hands were mustered out. By the usual devices in such emergencies—by blowing up the ice at the prow, towing away obstructions, rowing with the ship in tow, all fenders down to protect the sides, the steel-shod poles prodding off the icebergs—The Discovery was hauled to open water. Then, as if it were the very sign that the crew needed—water opened to the west! There came a spurt of wind. The Discovery spread her sails to the breeze and carried the vacillating crew forward. For a week they had lain imprisoned. By the 11th of July they were in Hudson Straits on the north side and had anchored at Baffin’s Land, which Hudson named God’s Mercy.

That night the men were allowed ashore. It was a desolate, silent, mountainous region that seemed to lie in an eternal sleep. Birds were in myriads—their flacker but making the profound silence more cavernous. When a sailor uttered a shout, there was no answer but the echo of his own voice, thin and weird and lonely, as if he, too, would be swallowed up by those deathly silences. Men ran over the ice chasing a polar bear. Others went gunning for partridge. The hills were presently rocketing with the crash and echo of musketry. Prickett climbed a high rock to spy ahead. Open water lay to the southwest. It was like a sea—perhaps the South Sea; and to the southwest Hudson steered past Charles and Salisbury Islands, through “a whurling sea”—the Second Narrows—between two high headlands, Digges island on one side, Cape Wolstenholme on the other, eventually putting into Port Laperriere on Digges Island. Except for two or three government stations where whaling captains forgather in log cabins, the whole region from Ungava Bay to Digges Island, four hundred miles, practically the whole length of the Straits on the south—is as unexplored to-day as when Hudson first sailed those waters.

The crew went ashore hunting partridge over the steep rocks of the island and examining stone caches of the absent Eskimo. Hudson took a careful observation of the sea. Before him lay open water—beyond was sea, a sea to the south! Was it the South Sea? The old record says he was proudly confident it was the South Sea, for it was plainly a sea as large as the Baltic or Mediterranean. Fog falling, cannon were set booming and rocketing among the hills to call the hunters home. It was now August 4. A month had passed since he entered the Straits. If it took another month to go back through them, the boat would be winter-bound and could not reach England. There was no time to lose. Keeping between the east coast of the bay with its high rocks and that line of reefed islands known as The Sleepers, The Discovery pushed on south, where the lookout still reported “a large sea to the fore.” This is a region, which at this late day of the world’s history, still remains almost unknown. The men who have explored it could be counted on one hand. Towering rocks absolutely bare but for moss, with valley between where the spring thaw creates continual muskeg—moss on water dangerous as quicksands—are broken by swampy tracks; and near Richmond, where the Hudson’s Bay Fur Company maintained a post for a few years, the scenery attains a degree of grandeur similar to Norway, groves covering the rocky shores, cataracts shattering over the precipices and lonely vistas opening to beautiful meadows, where the foot of man has never trod. But for some unknown reason, game has always been scarce on the east side of Hudson Bay. Legends of mines have been told by the Indians, but no one has yet found the mines.

The fury of Juet the rebellious old mate, now knew no bounds. The ship had victuals for only six months more. Here was September. Navigation would hardly open in the Straits before June. If the boat did not emerge on the South Sea, they would all be winter-bound. The waters began to shoal to those dangerous reefs on the south where the Hudson’s Bay traders have lost so many ships. In hoisting anchor up, a furious over-sea knocked the sailors from the capstan. With a rebound the heavy iron went splashing overboard. This was too much for Juet. The mate threw down his pole and refused to serve longer. On September 10, Hudson was compelled to try him for mutiny. Juet was deposed with loss of wages for bad conduct and Robert Bylot appointed in his place. The trial showed Hudson he was slumbering over a powder mine. Half the crew was disaffected, plotting to possess themselves of arms; but what did plots matter? Hudson was following a vision which his men could not see.

By this time, Hudson was several hundred miles south of the Straits, and the inland sea which he had discovered did not seem to be leading to the Pacific. Following the south shore to the westernmost bay of all—James Bay on the west—Hudson recognized the fact that it was not the South Sea. The siren of his dreams had sung her fateful song till she had lured his hopes on the rocks. He was land-bound and winter-bound in a desolate region with a mutinous crew.

Le Moyne D’Iberville The famous bushranger who raided the English forts from New England to Hudson Bay and rose to be the first naval commander of France.

The water was too shallow for the boat to moor. The men waded ashore to seek a wintering place. Wood was found in plenty and the footprint of a savage seen in the snow. That night, November 2, it snowed heavily, and the boat crashed on the rocks. For twelve hours, bedlam reigned, Juet heading a party of mutineers, but next day the storm floated the keel free. By the 10th of November, the ship was frozen in. To keep up stock of provisions, Hudson offered a reward for all game, of which there seemed an abundance, but when he ordered the carpenters ashore to build winter quarters, he could secure obedience to his commands only by threatening to hang every mutineer to the yardarm. In the midst of this turmoil, the gunner died. Henry Greene, the vagabond secretary, who received no wages, asked for the dead man’s heavy great coat. Hudson granted the request. The mutineers resented the favoritism, for it was the custom to auction off a dead man’s belongings at the mainmast, and in the cold climate all needed extra clothing. Greene took advantage of the apparent favor to shirk house building and go off to the woods with a rebellious carpenter hunting. Furious, Hudson turned the coveted coat over to Bylot, the new mate.

So the miserable winter dragged on. Snow fell continuously day after day. The frost giants set the ice whooping and crackling every night like artillery fire. A pall of gloom was settling over the ship that seemed to benumb hope and benumb effort. Great numbers of birds were shot by loyal members of the crew, but the ship was short of bread and the cook began to use moss and the juice of tamarac as antidotes to scurvy. As winter closed in, the cold grew more intense. Stone fireplaces were built on the decks of the ship. Pans of shot heated red-hot were taken to the berths as a warming pan. On the whole, Hudson was fortunate in his wintering quarters. It was the most sheltered part of the bay and had the greatest abundance of game to be found on that great inland sea. Also, there was no lack of firewood. Farther north on the west shore, Hudson’s ship would have been exposed to the east winds and the ice-drive. Here, he was secure from both, though the cold of James Bay was quite severe enough to cover decks and beds and bedding and port windows with hoar frost an inch thick.

Toward spring came a timid savage to the ship drawing furs on a toboggan for trade. He promised to return after so many sleeps from the tribes of the South, but time to an Indian may mean this year or next, and he was never again seen. As the ice began to break up in May, Hudson sent men fishing in a shallop that the carpenters had built, but the fishermen plotted to escape in the small boat. The next time, Hudson, himself, led the fishermen, threatening to leave any man proved guilty of plots marooned on the bay. It was an unfortunate threat. The men remembered it. Juet, the deposed mate, had but caged his wrath and was now joined by Henry Greene, the secretary, who had fallen from favor. If these men and their allies had hunted half as industriously as they plotted, there would have been food in plenty, but with half the crew living idly on the labors of the others for a winter, somebody was bound to suffer shortage of food on the homeward voyage. The traitor thought was suggested by Henry Greene that if Hudson and the loyal men were, themselves, marooned, the rest could go home with plenty of food and no fear of punishment. The report could be spread that Hudson had died. Hudson had searched the land in vain for Indians. All unconscious of the conspiracy in progress, he returned to prepare the ship for the home voyage.

The rest of The Discovery’s record reads like some tale of piracy on the South Sea. Hudson distributed to the crew all the bread that was left—a pound to each man without favoritism. There were tears in his eyes and his voice broke as he handed out the last of the food. The same was done with the cheese. Seamen’s chests were then searched and some pilfered biscuits distributed. In Hudson’s cabin were stored provisions for fourteen days. These were to be used only in the last extremity. As might have been expected, the idle mutineers used their food without stint. The men who would not work were the men who would not deny themselves. When Hudson weighed anchor on June 18, 1611, for the homeward trip, nine of the best men in the crew lay ill in their berths from overwork and privations.

One night Greene came to the cabin of Prickett, who had acted as a sort of agent for the ship’s owners. Vowing to cut the throat of any man who betrayed him, Greene burst out in imprecations with a sort of pot-valour that “he was going to end it or mend it; go through with it or die”; the sick men were useless: there were provisions for half the crew but not all——

Prickett bade him stop. This was mutiny. Mutiny was punished in England by death. But Greene swore he would rather be hanged at home than starve at sea.

In the dark, the whole troop of mutineers came whining and plotting to Prickett. The boat was only a few days out of winter quarters and embayed in the ice half way to the Straits. If such delays continued, what were fourteen days’ provisions for a voyage? Of all the ill men, Prickett, alone, was to be spared to intercede for the mutineers with Sir Dudley Digges, his master. In vain, Prickett pleaded for Hudson’s life. Let them wait two days; one day; twelve hours! They called him a fool! It was Hudson’s death, or the death of all! The matter must be put through while their courage was up! Then to add the last touch to their villainy, they swore on a Bible to Prickett that what they contemplated was for the object of saving the lives of the majority. Prickett’s defense for countenancing the mutiny is at best the excuse of a weakling, a scared fool—he couldn’t save Hudson, so he kept quiet to save his own neck. It was a black, windy night. The seas were moaning against the ice fields. As far as human mind could forestall devilish designs, the mutineers were safe, for all would be alike guilty and so alike pledged to secrecy. It must be remembered, too, the crew were impressed seamen, unwilling sailors, the blackguard riffraff of London streets. If the plotters had gone to bed, Prickett might have crawled above to Hudson’s cabin, but the mutineers kept sleepless vigil for the night. At daybreak two had stationed themselves at the hatch, three hovered round the door of the captain’s cabin. When Hudson emerged from the room, two men leaped on him to the fore, a third, Wilson the bo’swain, caught and bound his arms behind. When Hudson demanded what they meant, they answered with sinister intent that he would know when he was put in the shallop. Then, all pretense that what they did was for the good of the crew was cast aside. They threw off all disguise and gathered round him with shouts, and jeers, and railings, and mockery of his high ambitions! It was the old story of the Ideal hooted by the mob, crucified by little-minded malice, misunderstood by evil and designing fools! The sick were tumbled out of berths and herded above decks till the shallop was lowered. One man from Ipswich was given a chance to remain but begged to be set adrift. He would rather perish as a man than live as a thief. The name of the hero was Phillip Staffe. With a running commentary of curses from Henry Greene, Juet, the mate, now venting his pent-up vials of spleen, eight sick men were lowered into the small boat with Hudson and his son. Some one suggested giving the castaways ammunition and meal. Juet roared for the men to make haste. Wilson, the guilty bo’swain, got anchors up and sails rigged. Ammunition, arms and cooking utensils were thrown into the small boat. The Discovery then spread her sails to the wind—a pirate ship. The tow rope of the small boat tightened. She followed like a despairing swimmer, climbing over the wave-wash for a pace or two; then some one cut the cable. The castaways were adrift. The distance between the two ships widened. Prickett looking out from his porthole below, caught sight of Hudson with arms bound and panic-stricken, angry face. As the boats drifted apart the old commander shouted a malediction against his traitor crew.

“Juet will ruin you all——”

“Nay, but it is that villain, Henry Greene,” Prickett yelled back through the porthole, and the shallop fell away. Some miles out of sight from their victims, the mutineers slackened pace to ransack the contents of the ship. The shallop was sighted oars going, sails spread, coming over a wave in mad pursuit. With guilty terror as if their pursuers had been ghosts, the mutineers out with crowded sails and fled as from an avenging demon! So passed Henry Hudson down the Long Trail on June 21, 1611! Did he suffer that blackest of all despair—loss of vision, of faith in his dream? Did life suddenly seem to him a cruel joke in which he had played the part of the fool? Who can tell?

What became of him? A silence as of a grave in the sea rests over his fate. Barely the shadow of a legend illumines his last hours; though Indians of Hudson Bay to this day tell folk-lore yarns of the first Englishman who came to the bay and was wrecked. When Radisson came overland to the bay fifty years later, he found an old house “all marked by bullets.” Did Hudson take his last stand inside that house? Did the loyal Ipswich man fight his last fight against the powers of darkness there where the Goddess of Death lines her shores with the bodies of the dead? Also, the Indians told Radisson childish fables of a “ship with sails” having come to the bay; but many ships came in those fifty years: Button’s to hunt in vain for Hudson; Munck, the Dane’s, to meet a fate worse than Hudson’s.

Hudson’s shallop went down to as utter silence as the watery graves of those old sea Vikings, who rode out to meet death on the billow. A famous painting represents Hudson huddled panic-stricken with his child and the ragged castaways in a boat driving to ruin among the ice fields. I like better to think as we know last of him—standing with bound arms and face to fate, shouting defiance at the fleeing enemy. They could kill him, but they could not crush him! It was more as a Viking would have liked to die. He had left the world benefited more than he could have dreamed—this pathfinder of two empires’ commerce. He had fought his fight. He had done his work. He had chased his Idea down the Long Trail. What more could the most favored child of the gods ask? With one’s task done, better to die in harness than rot in some garret of obscurity, or grow garrulous in an imbecile old age—the fate of so many great benefactors of humanity!

It needed no prophet to predict the end of the pirate ship with such a crew. They quarreled over who should be captain. They quarreled over who should be mate. They quarreled over who should keep the ship’s log. They lost themselves in the fog, and ran amuck of icebergs and disputed whether they should sail east or west, whether they had passed Cape Digges leading out of the Straits, whether they should turn back south to seek the South Sea. They were like children lost in the dark. They ran on rocks, and lay ice-bound with no food but dried sea moss and soup made of candle grease boiled with the offal left from partridge. Ice hid the Straits. They steered past the outlet and now steered back only to run on a rock near the pepper-colored sands of Cape Digges. Flood tide set them free. They wanted to land and hunt but were afraid to approach the coast and sent in the small boats. It was the 28th of July. As they neared the breeding ground of the birds, Eskimo kyacks came swarming over the waves toward them. That day, the whites rested in the Indian tents. The next day Henry Greene hurried ashore with six men to secure provisions. Five men had landed to gather scurvy (sorrel) grass and trade with the fifty Indians along the shore. Prickett being lame remained alone in the small boat. Noticing an Eskimo boarding the boat, Prickett stood up and peremptorily ordered the savage ashore. When he sat down, what was his horror to find himself seized from behind, with a knife stroke grazing his breast. Eskimo carry their knives by strings. Prickett seized the string in his left hand and so warded off the blow. With his right hand he got his own dagger out of belt and stabbed the assailant dead. On shore, Wilson the bo’swain, and another man had been cut to pieces. Striking off the Indians with a club, Greene, the ringleader, tumbled to the boat with a death wound. The other two men leaped down the rocks into the boat. A shower of arrows followed, killing Greene outright and wounding the other three. One of the rowers fainted. The others signaled the ship for aid, and were rescued. Greene’s body was thrown into the sea without shroud or shrift. Of the other three, two died in agonies. This encounter left only four well men to man the ship home. They landed twice among the numberless lonely islands that line the Straits and hunted partridge and sea moss for food. Before they had left the Straits, they were down to rations of half a bird a day. In mid-ocean they were grateful for the garbage of the cook’s barrel. Juet, the old mate, died of starvation in sight of Ireland. The other men became so weak they could not stand at the helm. Sails flapped to the wind in tatters. Masts snapped off short. Splintered yardarms hung in the ragged rigging. It was like an ocean derelict, or a haunted craft with a maimed crew. In September, land was sighted off Ireland and the joyful cry of “a sail” raised; but a ship manned by only four men with a tale of disaster, which could not be explained, aroused suspicion. The Discovery was shunned by the fisher folk. Only by pawning the ship’s furniture could the crew obtain food, sailors and pilot to take them to Plymouth. Needless to say, the survivors were at once clapped in prison and Sir Thomas Button sent to hunt for Hudson; but Hudson had passed to his unknown grave leaving as a monument the two great pathways of traffic, which he found—Hudson River and the northern inland sea, which may yet prove the Baltic of America.

DATA FOR HUDSON’S VOYAGES

Purchas’ Pilgrims contains the bulk of the data regarding Hudson’s voyages. The account of the first voyage is written by Hudson, himself, and by one of the company, John Playse, Playse presumably completing the log-book directly from Hudson’s journal. This is supplemented by facts taken from Hudson’s manuscripts (long since lost) now to be found in Edge’s Discovery of the Muscovy Merchants (Purchas III, 464) and Fotherby’s statement concerning Hudson’s journals (Purchas III, 730), the whole being concisely stated with ample proofs in the Hakluyt Society’s 1860 publication on Hudson by Doctor Asher. The account of the second voyage is given by Hudson, himself. On the third voyage, the journal was kept by Juet, the mate. The story of the last voyage is told in An Abstract of Hudson’s Journals down to August 1610; and in an account written by that Prickett who joined the mutineers, plainly to excuse his own conduct. Matter supplementary to the third voyage may be found outside Purchas in such Dutch authorities as Van Meteren and De Laet and Lambrechtsen and Van der Donck. Also in Heckewelder and Hessel Gerritz. Every American historian who has dealt with the discovery of Hudson River draws his data from these sources. Yates, Moulton, O’Callaghan, Brodhead are the earliest of the old American authorities. Supplementary matter concerning the fourth and last voyage is to be found in almost any account of Arctic voyaging in America, though nothing new is added to what is told by Hudson, himself, and by Prickett. Both the New York Historical Society and the Hakluyt Society of England have published excellent and complete transcripts of Hudson’s Voyages with translations of all foreign data bearing on them including the voyages of Estevan Gomez and Verrazano past New York harbor. For data bearing on the navigation of Hudson Straits, the two reports of the Canadian Government on two expeditions sent to ascertain the feasibility of such a route—are excellent; but not so good, not so detailed and beautifully unguarded as the sailing records kept by the old sea captains in the service of the Hudson’s Bay furriers. The Government reports are too guarded. Besides, the ships stayed only one season in the straits; but these old fur company captains sailed as often as forty times to the bay—eighty times in all through the straits; and I have availed myself of Captain Coat’s sailing directions especially. In the Hudson’s Bay Company Archives, London, are literally shelf loads of such directions. That modern enterprise will ultimately surmount all difficulties of navigation in the straits cannot be doubted. What man sets himself to do—he does; but the difficulties are not child’s play, nor imaginary ones created by politicians who oppose a Hudson Bay route to Europe. One has only to read the record of three hundred years’ sailing by the fur traders to realize that the straits are—to put it mildly—a trap for ocean goers. Still it is interesting to note, it is typical of the dauntless spirit of the North, that a railroad is actually being built toward Hudson Bay. Not the bay, but the straits, will be the crux of the difficulty.

When I speak of “Wreckers’ Reef” Sable Island, it is not a figure of speech, but a fact of those early days—that false lights were often placed on Sable Island to lure ships on the sand reefs. Men, who waded ashore, were clubbed to death by pirates: See Canadian Archives.

The Indian legends of Hudson’s Voyage to New York are to be found in early missionary annals: see New York History, 1811.

The report of the Canadian Geologic Survey of Baffins Land and the North was issued by Mr. A. P. Low as I completed this volume.

All authorities—as seen by the map—place Hudson’s wintering quarters off Rupert River. From the Journals, it seems to me, he went as far west as he could go, and did not come back east, which would make his wintering quarters off Moose. This would explain “the old house battered with bullets,” which Radisson records.

My authority for data on Moose Factory is Bishop Horden.

CHAPTER V

1619

THE ADVENTURES OF THE DANES ON HUDSON BAY—JENS MUNCK’S CREW

Though Admiral Sir Thomas Button came out the very next year after Hudson’s death to follow up his discoveries and search for the lost mariner—the sea gave up no message of its dead. Button wintered on the bay (1612-13) at Port Nelson, which he discovered and named after his mate who died there. With him had come Prickett and Bylot of Hudson’s crew. Hudson’s old ship, The Discovery, was used with a larger frigate called The Resolution. No sooner had the ships gone into winter quarters on the west coast at Port Nelson than scurvy infected the camp. The seaport which was destined to become the great emporium of the fur trade for three hundred years—became literally a camp of the dead. So many seamen died of scurvy and cold, that Button had not enough sailors to man both vessels home. The big one was abandoned, and for a second time Hudson’s ship, The Discovery, carried back disheartened survivors to England. Button’s long absence had raised hopes that he had found passage westward to the South Sea. These hopes were dashed, but English endeavor did not cease.

In 1614, a Captain Gibbon was dispatched to the bay. Ice caught him at Labrador. Here, he was held prisoner for the summer. Again hopes were dashed, but national greatness sometimes consists in sheer dogged persistence. The English adventurers, who had sent Button and Gibbon, now fitted out Bylot, Hudson’s former mate. With him went a young man named Baffin. These two spent two years, 1615-1616, on the bay. They found no trace of Hudson. They found no passage to the South Sea, but cruised those vast islands of ice and rock on the north to which Baffin’s name has been given.

The English treasure seekers and adventurers of the high seas took a breathing space. Where England left off, the trail of discovery was taken up by little Denmark. Norse sailors had been the first to belt the seas. Before Columbus was born, Norsemen had coasted the ice fields from Iceland to Greenland and Greenland to the Vinelands and Marklands farther south, supposed to be Nova Scotia and Rhode Island. The lost colonies of eastern Greenland had become the folk-lore of Danish fireside.

King Christian IV, himself, examined the charts and supervised the outfitting of two ships for discovery in America. The Unicorn, named after a species of whale, was a frigate with a crew of forty-eight including chaplain and surgeon. The Lamprey was a little sloop with sixteen of a crew. There remained the choice of a commander and that fell without question on the fittest man in the Danish navy—Jens Munck, such a soldier of fortune as the novelist might delight to portray.

Iberville’s Ship run aground off Nelson in a Hurricane—from La Potherie.

Munck’s father was a nobleman, who had suicided in prison, disgraced for misuse of public funds. Munck’s mother was left destitute. At twelve years of age Jens was thrown on the world. Like a true soldier of fortune, he took fate by the beard and shipped as a common sailor to seek his fortunes in the New World. When a mere boy, he chanced to be off Brazil on a Dutch merchant ship. Here, he had his first bout with fate. The Dutch vessel was attacked off Bahia by the French and totally destroyed. Of all the crew, seven only escaped by plunging into the water and swimming ashore in the dark. Of the seven survivors, the Danish boy was one. He had succeeded in reaching shore by clinging to bits of wreckage through the chopping seas. Half drowned, friendless, crawling ashore like a bedraggled water rat, here was the boy, utterly alone in a strange land among a strange people speaking a strange tongue.

Such an experience would have set most boys swallowing a lump in their throat. The little Dane was too glad to get the water out of his throat and to set his feet on dry land for any such nonsense. For a year he worked with a shoemaker for his board, and incidentally picked up a knowledge of Spanish and Portuguese over the cobbler’s last. The most of young Danish noblemen gained such knowledge from tutors and travel. Then Munck became apprentice to a house painter. Not a yelp against fate did the plucky young castaway utter, and what is more marvel, he did not lose his head and let it sink to the place where a young gentleman’s feet ought to be—namely the pavement. Toiling for his daily bread among the riffraff and ruff-scuff of a foreign port, Munck kept his head up and his face to the future; and at last came his chance.

Munck was now about eighteen years old. Some Dutch vessels had come to Bahia without a license for trade. Munck overheard that the harbor authorities intended to confiscate both vessels. It was Munck’s opportunity to escape, and he seized it with both hands. Jostling among the sailors of the water-front, keeping his intentions to himself, Munck waited till it was dark. Then, he stripped, tied his clothes to his back, and swam out to warn the Dutch of their danger. The vessels escaped and carried Munck with them to Europe. Within five years he was sailing ships for himself to Iceland and Nova Zembla and Russia—keeping up that old trick of picking up odds and ends, knowledge of people and things and languages wherever he went. Before he was thirty he had joined the Danish navy and was appointed to conduct embassies to Spain, and Russia where his knowledge of foreign languages held good. When the traders of Copenhagen and King Christian looked for a commander to explore and colonize Hudson Bay, Munck was the man.

Sunday, May 16, 1619, the ships that were to add a second Russia to Denmark, sailed for Hudson Bay. Sailors the world over hate the Northern seas. Some of Munck’s crews must have been impressed men, for one fellow promptly jumped overboard and suicided rather than go on. Another died from natural causes, so Munck put into Norway for three extra men.

Greenland was sighted in twenty days—a quick run in those times and evidence that Munck was a swift sailor, who took all risks and pushed ahead at any cost, for the Hudson’s Bay fur trade captains considered seven weeks quick time from London to the Straits of Hudson Bay. A current sweeps south from Greenland. Lashing his ships abreast, Munck ran into the center of a great field of soft slob ice, that would keep the big bergs off and protect the hulls from rough seas. Then lowering all sails, he drifted with the ice drive. It came on to blow. Slob ice held the ships safe, but sleet iced the rigging and deck till they were like glass and life lines had to be stretched from side to side to give hand hold, every wave-wash sending the sailors slithering over the icy decks as if on skates. Icicles as long as a man’s arm would form on the cross-trees in a single night. The ropes became like bolts—cracking when they were bent, but when the heat of mid-day came, both ships were in a drip of thaw.

What with the slow pace of the ice drift and the heaviness of the ships from becoming ice-logged, it was the middle of July before they reached the Straits. Eskimos swarmed down to the islands of Ungava Bay, but seemed afraid to trade with Munck’s crew. It was on one of the islands here that the Eskimo two centuries later massacred an entire crew of Hudson’s Bay Company fur traders, who had been wrecked by the ice jam and escaped across the floes to the island. It was, perhaps, as well for Munck that the treacherous natives took themselves off, bounding over the waves in skin boats, so light they could be carried by one hand over the ice floes. The collision of the Atlantic tide with the eastward flowing current of the Straits created such a furious sea as Munck had never seen. It was no longer safe to keep The Lamprey lashed to the frigate, for one wave wash caused by an overturning iceberg lifted the little ship almost on the masts of The Unicorn.

The ships then began worming their way slowly through the ice drift. A grapnel would be thrown out on an ice floe. Up to this, the ships would haul by ropes. Both crews stood on guard at the deck rails with the long iron-shod ice poles in their hands, prodding and shoving off the huge masses when the ice threatened a crush. Six hours ebb and six hours flow was the rate of the tide, but where the Straits narrowed and the inflow beat against the ice jam, the incoming tide would sometimes last as long as nine hours. This was the time of greatest danger, for beaten between tide and ice, the Straits became a raging whirlpool. It was then the ships had to sheer away from the lashing undertow of the big bergs and stood out unsheltered to the crush and jam of the drive. Sometimes, a breeze and open passage gave them free way from the danger. At other times, the maelstrom of the advancing tide caught them in dead calm. Then the men had to leap out on the icepan and tow the ships away. Soaked to their armpits in ice water, toiling night and day, one day exposed to heat that was almost tropical, the next enveloped in a blizzard of sleet, the two crews began to show the effects of such terrible work. They were so completely worn out, Munck anchored on the north shore to let them rest. At Icy Cove off Baffin’s Land, one seaman—Andrew Staffreanger—died. Where he was buried, Munck remarked that the soil showed signs of mica and ore. To-day—it is interesting to note—those mica mines are being worked in Baffin’s Land.

One night toward the end of July, ice swept on the ships from both sides. Suddenly the crew were tumbled from their berths by the dull rumbling as of an earthquake. The boards of the cabin floors had sprung. Ice had heaped higher than the yardarms—the ships were like toys, the sport of grim Northern giants. When the ships were examined, a gash was found in the keel of The Lamprey from stem to stern as broad as one’s hand. Barely was this mended when the rudder was smashed from The Unicorn. A great icepan tossed up on end and shivered down in splinters that crashed over the decks like glass. A moment later a rolling sea swept the ships, sending the sailors sprawling, while the scuppers spouted a cataract of waters. Munck felt beaten. Again he ran to the north shore for shelter. While the sailors rested, the chaplain held services and made “offerings to God” beseeching His help. Munck, meanwhile, went ashore and set up the arms of the Danish King—a superfluous proceeding, as Baffin had already set up the arms of England here.

On the ebb of the tide the sea calmed, and Munck succeeded in passing the most dangerous part of the Straits—the Second Narrows. An east wind cleared the sea of ice. Sails full blown, Munck’s ships shot out on the open water of Hudson Bay in the first week of September. Munck was six weeks traversing the Straits. It should not have taken longer than one.

The storm pursued Munck clear across the bay. The ships parted. Through the hurricane of sleet, the man at the masthead discerned land. A small creek seemed to open on the long, low, sandy shore. Through the lashing breakers The Unicorn steered for the haven. A sunken rock protruded in midcurrent. Munck sheered off, entered, drove upstream and found himself in a land-locked lagoon such as he could not have discovered elsewhere on the bay if he had searched every foot of its shores. By chance, the storm had driven him into the finest port of Hudson Bay, called by the Indians, River-of-the-Strangers or Danish River, now known as Churchill.

Heaving out all anchors, the toil-worn Danes rested and thanked God for the deliverance. But the little Lamprey was still out, and the storm raged unabated for four days. Taking advantage of the ebb tide, the men waded ashore in the dark and kindled fires of driftwood to guide The Lamprey to the harbor. At Churchill, the land runs out in a long fine cape now known as Eskimo Point. Here signal fires were kept burning and Munck watched for the lost ship. Such a wind raged as blew the men off their legs, but the air cleared, and on the morning of September 9, the peak of a sail was seen rising over the tumbling billows. The sailors of The Unicorn ran up their ensign, hurrahed and heaped more driftwood. By night the little Lamprey came beating over the waves and shot into the harbor with flying colors.

The Danes were astonished at the fury of the elements so early in the season. Snow flew through the air in particles as fine as sand with the sting of bird-shot. When the east wind blew, ice drove up the harbor that tore strips in the ship’s hull the depth of a finger. Munck moved farther up stream to a point since known as Munck’s Cove.

To-day there are no forests within miles from the rocky wastes of Churchill, but at that time, the country was timbered to the water’s edge, and during the ebb tide the men constructed a log jam or ice-break around the ship. Bridge piles were driven in the freezing ooze. Timber and rocks were thrown inside these around the hulls. Six hawsers moored each ship to the rocks and trees of the main shore. Men were kept pumping the water out of the holds, while others mended the leaky keels.

It was October before this work was completed. Then Munck and his officers looked about them. Plainly, they must winter here. Ice was closing the harbor. Inland, the region seemed boundless—a second Russia; and the Danish officers dreamed of a vast trans-atlantic colony that would place Denmark among the great nations of the earth.

Churchill Harbor as drawn by Munck, the Dane, from the Hakluyt Society Proceedings, 1897. Note the woods close to the sea front, long since destroyed; drawn about 1620.

Three great fireplaces of rock were constructed on the decks. Then, every scrap of clothing in the cargoes was distributed to the crews. Used to the damp temperate climate of Denmark, the men were simply paralyzed by the hard, dry, tense cold of America and had no idea how to protect themselves against it. Later navigators compelled to winter in Churchill, have boarded up their decks completely, tar-papered the sealed boarding and outside of this packed three feet of solid snow. Had Munck’s men used furs instead of happing themselves up with clothing, that only impeded circulation, they might have wintered safely with their miserable make-shifts of outdoor fireplaces, but they had no furs, and as the cold increased could do nothing but huddle helpless and benumbed around the fires, plying more wood and heating shot red-hot to put in warming pans for their berths.

Beer bottles were splintered to shivers by the frost. Most of the phials in the surgeon’s medicine chests went to pieces in nightly pistol-shot explosions. Kegs of light wines were frozen solid and burst their hoops. The crews went to their beds for warmth and night after night lay listening to the whooping and crackling of the frost, the shrieking of the wind, the pounding of the ice—as if giants had been gamboling in the dark of the wild Northern storms. The rest of Munck’s adventures may be told in his own words:

October 15—Last night, ice drift lifted the ship out of the dock. At next low water I had the space filled with clay and sand.

October 30—Ice everywhere covers the river. There is such a heavy fall of snow, it is impossible for the men to go into the open country without snowshoes.

November 14—Last night a large black dog came to the ship across the ice but the man on the watch shot him by mistake for a black fox. I should have been glad to have caught him alive and sent him home with a present of goods for his owner.

November 27—All the glass bottles broken to pieces by the frost.

December 10—The moon appeared in an eclipse. It was surrounded by a large circle and a cross appeared therein.

December 12—One of my surgeons died and his corpse had to remain unburied for two days because the frost was so terrible no one dared go on shore.

December 24, 25—Christmas Eve, I gave the men wine and beer, which they had to boil, for it was frozen to the bottom. All very jolly but no one offended with as much as a word. Holy Christmas Day we all celebrated as a Christian’s duty is. We had a sermon, and after the sermon we gave the priest an offertory according to ancient custom. There was not much money among the men, but they gave what they had, some white fox skins for the priest to line his coat.

January 1, New Year’s Day—Tremendous frost. I ordered a couple of pints of wine to the bowl of every man to keep up spirits.

January 10—The priest and the other surgeon took to their beds. A violent sickness rages among the men. My head cook died.

January 21—Thirteen of us down with sickness. I asked the surgeon, who was lying mortally ill, whether any remedy might be found in his chest. He answered he had used as many remedies as he knew and if God would not help, there was no remedy.

It need scarcely be explained that lack of exercise and fresh vegetables had brought scurvy on Munck’s crew. In accordance with the spirit of the age, the pestilence was ascribed not to man’s fault but to God’s Will.

January 23—This day died my mate, Hans Brock, who had been in bed five months. The priest sat up in his berth to preach the sermon, which was the last he ever gave on this earth.

January 25—Had the small minute guns discharged in honor of my mate’s burial, but so exceedingly brittle had the iron become from frost that the cannon exploded.

February 5—More deaths. I again sent to the surgeon for God’s sake to do something to allay sickness, but he only answered as before, if God did not help there was no hope.

February 16—Nothing but sickness and death. Only seven persons now in health to do the necessary work. On this day died a seaman, who was as filthy in his habits as an untrained beast.

February 17—Twenty persons have died.

February 20—In the evening, died the priest. Have had to mind the cabin myself, for my servant is also ill.

March 30—Sharp frost. Now begins my greatest misery. I am like a lonely wild bird, running to and fro waiting on the sick.

April 1st—Died my nephew, Eric Munck, and was buried in the same grave as my second mate. Not one of us is well enough to fetch water and fuel. Have begun to break up our small boats for fuel. It is with great difficulty I can get coffins made.

April 13—Took a bath in a wine-cask in which I had mixed all the herbs I could find in the surgeon’s chest, which did us all much good.

April 14—Only four beside myself able to sit up and listen to the sermon for Good Friday, which I read.

May 6—Died John Watson, my English mate. The bodies of the dead lie uncovered because none of us has strength to bury them.

Doom seemed to settle over the ship when Munck, himself, fell ill in June. On the floor beside his berth, lay the cook’s boy dead. In the steerage were the corpses of three other men. On the deck lay three more dead, “for”—records Munck—“nobody had strength to throw them overboard.” Besides himself, two men only had survived. These had managed to crawl ashore during ebb tide and had not strength to come back.

Spring had come with the flood rush that set the ice free. Wild geese and duck and plover and curlew and cranes and tern were winging north. Day after day from his port window the commander watched the ice floes drifting out to sea; drifting endlessly as though from some vast inland region where lay an unclaimed empire, or a passage to the South Sea. Song birds flitted to the ship and darted fearfully away. Crows perched on the yardarms. Hawks circled ominously above the lifeless masts. Herds of deer dashed past ashore pursued by the hungry wolves, who gave over the chase, stopped to sniff the air and came down to the water’s edge howling all night across the oozy flats. More ... need not be told. The ships were a pest house; the region, a realm of death; the port, a place accursed; the silence, as of the grave but for the flacker of vulture wings and the lapping—the tireless lapping of the tide that had borne this hapless crew to the shores of death. Artist brush has never drawn any picture half so terrible as the fate of the Danes on Hudson Bay.... Nor need the symptoms of scurvy be described. Salt diet and lack of exercise caused overwhelming depression, mental and physical. The stimulants that Munck plied—two pints of wine and a pint of whiskey a day—only increased the languor. Nausea rendered the thought of food unendurable. Joints swelled. Limbs became discolored. The teeth loosened and a spongy growth covered the gums....

Four days Munck lay without food. Reaching to a table, he penned his last words:

“As I have now no more hope of life in this world, I request for the sake of God if any Christians should happen to come here, they will bury my poor body together with the others found, and this my journal, forward to the King.... Herewith, good night to all the world, and my soul to God....”

“Jens Munck.”

The stench from the ship became unendurable. The Dane crawled to the deck’s edge. It was a mutual surprise for him to see the two men ashore alive, and for them to see him. Coming over the flats with painful and labored weakness, they helped him down the ship’s ladder. On land, the three had strength only to kindle a fire of the driftwood, which kept the wolves off, and lie near it sucking the roots of every green sprout within reach. This was the very thing they had needed—green food. From the time they began eating weeds, sea nettles, hemlock vines, sorrel grass, they recovered.

On the 18th of June, they were able to walk out at ebb tide to the ships on the flats. By the 26th they could take broth made of fish and fresh partridge. “In the name of Jesus after prayer and supplication to God, we set to work to rig The Lamprey,” records Munck. The dead were thrown overboard. So were all ballast and cargo. Consequently, when the tide came in, the sloop was so light it floated free above the ice-break of rocks and logs constructed the year before. Munck then had holes drilled in the hull of The Unicorn to sink her till he could come back for the frigate with an adequate crew. “On the 16th of July,” writes Munck, just a year from the time they had entered Hudson Straits, “Sunday in the afternoon, we set sail from there in the name of God.” Neither a kingdom nor a Northwest Passage had they found for King Christian of Denmark, but only hardships unspeakable, the inevitable fate of every pioneer of the New World, as though Nature would test their mettle before she began rearing a new race of men, pioneers of a new era in the world’s long history.

If it had been difficult for crews of sixty-five to navigate the ice floes, what was it for an emaciated crew of three? Forty miles out from Churchill, a polar bear strayed across the ice sniffing at The Lamprey when the ship’s dog sprang over in pursuit with the bold spirit of the true Great Dane. Just then the ice floe parted from the sloop, and for two days they could hear the faithful dog howling behind in dismay. A gale came banging the ship against the ice and smashed the rudder, but Munck out with his grapnel, fastened The Lamprey to the ice and drifted with the floe almost as far as the Straits. A month it took to cross the bay to Digges Island at the west end of the Straits. For a second time, the brave mariner worked his way through the Straits by the old trick of throwing out the grapnel and hauling himself along the floes. This time he was drifting with the ice, not against it, and the passage was easier. Once out of the Straits, such a gale was raging “as would blow a man off his legs,” records Munck, but the wind carried him forward. Off Shetland a ship was signaled for help, but the high seas prevented its approach and the little Lamprey literally shot into a harbor of Norway, on September 20th. Not a soul was visible but a peasant, and Munck had to threaten to blow the fellow’s brains out before he would help to moor the ship. With the soil of Europe once more firmly under their feet, the poor Danes could no longer restrain their tears. They fell on their knees thanking God for the deliverance from “the icebergs and dreadful storms and foaming seas.”

Le Moyne d’Iberville’s French Rangers and Canadian Wood-runners Besieging Fort Nelson—photographed from the copy of La Potherie in Archives, Ottawa, Canada.

As Munck did not record the latitude of his wintering harbor—presumably to keep his ship in hiding till he could go for it—doubt arose about the port being Churchill. This doubt was increased by an erroneous account of his voyage published in France, but the identity of Munck’s Cove with Churchill has been trebly proved. The drawing which Munck made of the harbor is an exact outline of Churchill. Besides, eighty years afterward when the Hudson’s Bay Fur Company established their fort at Churchill, brass cannon were dug from the river flats stamped with the letter C 4—Christian IV. Strongest confirmation of all were the Indian legends. The savages called the river, River of Strangers, because when they came down to the shore in the summer of 1620, they found clothing and the corpses of a race they had never seen before. When they beheld the ship at ebb tide, they could hardly believe their senses, and when they found it full of plunder, their wonder was unspeakable. But the joy was short-lived. Drying the cargo above their fires, kegs of gunpowder came in contact with a spark. Plunder and plunderers and ship were blown to atoms. Henceforth, Churchill became ill omened as the River-of-the-Strangers.

The same erroneous French account records that Munck suicided from chagrin over his failure. This is a confusion with Munck’s father. The Dane had seen enough to know while there was no Northwest Passage, there was an unclaimed kingdom for Denmark, and he had planned to come back to Churchill with colonists when war broke out in Europe. Munck went back to the navy and was in active service to within a few hours of his death on June 3, 1628.

Many nameless soldiers go down to death in every victory. The exploration of America was one long-fought battle of three hundred years in which countless heroes went down to nameless graves in what appeared to be failure. But it was not failure. Their little company, their scouts, the flanking movement—met defeat, but the main body moved on to victory. The honor was not the less because their division was the one to be mowed down in death. So it was with Jens Munck. His crews did their own little part in their own little unknown corner, and they perished miserably doing it. They could not foresee the winning of a continent from realms as darkly unknown as Hades behind its portals. Not the less is the honor theirs.

By what chances does Destiny or Providence direct the affairs of nations and men? If Munck had not been called back to the navy and had succeeded in bringing the colonists as he planned back to Hudson Bay, Radisson would not have captured that region for the Hudson’s Bay Company. Though Hudson, an Englishman, had discovered the bay, one might almost say if Munck had succeeded, as far as the Northwest is concerned, there would have been no British North America.

NOTES ON MUNCK

Munck’s Voyages, written by himself and dedicated to the King of Denmark, appeared in Copenhagen in 1624. Unfortunately before his authentic account appeared, stories of his voyage had been told in France from mere hearsay, by La Peyrére. It is this erroneous version of Munck’s adventures that appears in various collections of voyages, such as Churchill’s and Jeremie’s Relation in the Bernard Collection. Of modern authorities on Munck, Vol. II of the Hakluyt Society for 1897, and the writings of Mr. Lauridsen of Copenhagen stand first. Data on the topography of the Straits and Bay and Baffin’s Land may be found in the Canadian Government Reports from 1877 down to 1906. But best of all are the directions of the old sailing masters employed by the Hudson’s Bay Company, which are only to be found in the Archives of Hudson’s Bay House, London. In English reports—though all English accounts of Munck except the Hakluyt Society’s are limited to a few paragraphs—his name is spelled Munk. He, himself, spelled it Munck.

PART II

1662-1713

How the Sea of the North is Discovered Overland by the French Explorers of the St. Lawrence—Radisson, the Pathfinder, Founds the Company of the Gentlemen Adventurers of England Trading to Hudson’s Bay and Leads the Company a Dance for Fifty Years—He is Followed by the French Raiders Under d’Iberville.

CHAPTER VI

1662-1674

RADISSON, THE PATHFINDER, DISCOVERS HUDSON BAY AND FOUNDS THE COMPANY OF GENTLEMEN ADVENTURERS

For fifty years the great inland sea, which Hudson had discovered, lay in a silence as of death. To the east of it lay a vast peninsular territory—crumpled rocks scored and seamed by rolling rivers, cataracts, upland tarns—Labrador, in area the size of half a dozen European kingdoms. To the south, the Great Clay Belt of untracked, impenetrable forests stretched to the watershed of the St. Lawrence, in area twice the size of modern Germany. West of Hudson Bay lay what is now known as the Great Northwest—Keewatin, Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Alberta, Mackenzie River and British Columbia—in area, a second Russia; but the primeval world lay in undisturbed silence as of death. Fox and James had come to the bay ten years after Jens Munck, the Dane; and the record of their sufferings has been compared to the Book of Lamentations; but the sea gave up no secret of its dead, no secret of open passage way to the Orient, no inkling of the immeasurable treasures hidden in the forest and mine and soil of the vast territory bordering its coasts.

A new era was now to open on the bay—an era of wildwood runners tracking the snow-padded silences; of dare-devil gamesters of the wilderness sweeping down the forested waterways to midnight raid and ambuscade and massacre on the bay; of two great powers—first France and England, then the Hudson’s Bay Fur Company and the Nor’Westers—locked in death-grapple during a century for the prize of dominion over the immense unknown territory inland from the bay. Hudson and Jens Munck, Vikings of the sea, were to be succeeded by those intrepid knights of the wilderness, Radisson the pathfinder, and d’Iberville, the wildwood rover. The third era on Hudson Bay comes down to our own day. It marks the transition from savagery with semi-barbaric splendor, with all its virtues of outdoor life and dashing bravery, and all its vices of unbridled freedom in a no-man’s land with law of neither God nor man—to modern commerce; the transition from the Eskimo’s kyack and voyageur’s canoe over trackless waters to latter-day Atlantic liners plowing furrows over the main to the marts of commerce, and this period, too, is best typified in two commanding figures that stand out colossally from other actors on the bay—Lord Selkirk, the young philanthropist, and Lord Strathcona, whose activities only began at an age when other men have either made or marred their careers. For three hundred years, the history of Hudson Bay and of all that region for which the name stands is really the history of these four men—Radisson, d’Iberville, Selkirk and Strathcona.

While Hudson Bay lay in its winter sleep, the world had gone on. The fur traders of New France had pushed westward from the St. Lawrence to the Great Lakes and Mississippi. In fact, France was making a bold bid for the possession of all America except New Spain, and if her kings had paid more attention to her colonies and less to the fripperies of the fool-men and fool-women in her courts, the French flag might be waving over the most of America to-day. In New England, things had also gone apace. New York had gone over from Dutch to English rule, and the commissioners of His Majesty, King Charles II, were just returning from revising the affairs of the American plantations consequent upon the change from Cromwell’s Commonwealth to the Stuart’s Restoration. In England, at Oxford, was Charles himself, fled from the plague of London. Majesty was very jaded. Success had lost its relish and pleasure had begun to pall from too much surfeit. It was a welcome spur to the monarch’s idle languor when word came posthaste that the royal commissioner, Sir George Carterett, had just arrived from America accompanied by two famous Frenchmen with a most astonishing story.

They had set sail from America on August 1, 1665, Carterett bearing a full report of conditions in the American plantations. When off Spain, their boat had been sighted, pursued, captured and boarded by a Dutch privateer—The Caper. For two hours, hull to hull, rail to rail, hand to hand, they had fought, the men behind the guns at the portholes of one ship looking into the smoke-grimed faces of the men behind the guns on the other ship till a roaring broadside from The Caper tore the entrails out of Carterett’s ship. Carterett just had time to fling his secret dispatches overboard when a bayonet was leveled at his breast and he surrendered his sword a captive. Likewise did two French companions. Taken on board The Caper, all three were severely questioned—especially the Frenchmen. Why were they with Carterett? Where were they going? Where had they come from? Could they not be persuaded to go to Holland with their extraordinary story. One—Medard Chouart de Groseillers—was a middle-aged man, heavily bearded, swarthy, weather-worn from a life in the wilderness. The other—his brother-in-law—Pierre Esprit Radisson, was not yet thirty years of age. He was clean-shaved, thin, lithe, nervous with the restlessness of bottled-up energies, with a dash in his manners that was a cut between the courtier and the wilderness runner. These were the two men of whom such famous stories had been told these ten years back—the most renowned and far traveled wood-runners that New France had yet produced. It was they, who had brought 600,000 beaver skins to Quebec on a single trip from the North. How they had been robbed by the governor of New France and driven from Quebec to Cape Breton, where, out of jealousy, they were set upon and mobbed, escaping only with the clothes on their backs to Port Royal, Nova Scotia—was known to all men. In vain, they had appealed to France for justice. The robber governor was all powerful at the French court and the two explorers—penniless nobodies pitting their power against the influence of wealth and nobility—were dismissed from the court as a joke. They had been promised a vessel to make farther explorations in the North, but when they came to Isle Percé, south of Anticosti, to await the vessel, a Jesuit was sent to them with word that the promise had been a put-off to rid the court of troublesome suitors—in a word, a perfidious joke. There had followed the flight to Cape Breton, the setting to work of secret influence against them, the mob, the attempted murder, the flight to Port Royal, Nova Scotia. Port Royal was at this time under English rule, and an English captain, Zachariah Gillam, offered his ship for their trip North, but when up opposite Hudson Straits, the captain had been terrified by the ice and lost heart. He turned back. The season was wasted. The two Frenchmen had then clubbed their dwindling fortunes together and had engaged two vessels on their own account, but fishing to lay up supplies at Sable Island, one of the vessels had been wrecked. For four years they had been hounded by a persistent ill-luck: First, when robbed by the French governor on pretense of a fine for going to the North without his permission; second, when befooled by the false promises of the French court; third, when Captain Gillam refused to proceed farther amid the Northern ice; and now, when the wreck of the vessel involved them in a lawsuit. In Boston, they had won their lawsuit, but the ill-luck left them destitute. Carterett, the Royal Commissioner, had met them in Boston and had persuaded them to come to England with him.

The commander of the Dutch ship listened to their story and took down a report of it in writing. Could they not be persuaded to come on with him to Holland? The two Frenchmen refused to leave Carterett. Groseillers, Radisson and Carterett were then landed in Spain. From Spain, they begged and borrowed and pawned their way to France, and from France got passage to Dover. Here, then, they had come to the king at Oxford with their amazing story.

The stirring adventures of these two explorers, I have told in another volume, and an exact transcript of their journals I am giving elsewhere, but their story was one to make King Charles marvel. How Radisson as a boy had been captured by the Mohawks and escaped through the Dutch settlement of New York; how, as a youth, he had helped the Jesuits to flee from a beleaguered fort at Onondaga; how before he was twenty-five years old, he had gone overland to the Mississippi where he heard from Cree and Sioux of the Sea of the North; and how before he was thirty, he had found that sea where Hudson had perished—all those adventures King Charles heard. The King listened and pondered, and pondered and listened, and especially did he listen to that story of the Sea of the North, which Henry Hudson had found in 1610 and from which Radisson sixty years later had brought 600,000 beaver. Beaver at that time was worth much more than it is to-day. That cargo of beaver, which Radisson had brought down from Hudson Bay to Quebec would be worth more than a million dollars in modern money.

“We were in danger to perish a thousand times from the ice runs,” related Radisson, telling how they had passed up the Ottawa to Lake Superior and from Lake Superior by canoe seven hundred miles north to Hudson Bay. “We had thwarted (portaged) a place forty-five miles. We came to the far end at night. It was thick forest, and dark, and we knew not where to go. We launched our canoes on the current and came full sail on a deep bay, where we perceived smoke and tents. Many boats rush to meet us. We are received with joy by the Crees. They suffer us not to tread the ground but carry us like cocks in a basket to their tents. We left them with all possible haste to follow the great river and came to the seaside, where we found an old house all demolished and battered with bullets. The Indians tell us peculiarities of the Europeans, whom they have seen there. We went from isle to isle all summer. We went along the bay to see the place the Indians pass the summer. This river comes from the lake that empties in the Saguenay at Tadoussac, a hundred leagues from where we were in the Bay of the North. We left in the place our mark and rendezvous. We passed the summer coasting the sea. This is a vast country. The people are friendly to the Sioux and the Cree. We followed another river back to the Upper Lake (Lake Superior) and it was midwinter before we joined the company at our fort” (north of Lake Superior).

When King Charles moved from Oxford to Windsor, Radisson and Groseillers were ordered to accompany him, and when the monarch returned to London, the two Frenchmen were commanded to take chambers in town within reach of the court, and what was more to the point, the King assigned them £2 a week maintenance, for they were both destitute, as penniless soldiers of fortune as ever graced the throne room of a Stuart. At Oxford, too, they had met Prince Rupert, and Prince Rupert espoused their cause with the enthusiasm of an adventurer, whose fortunes needed mending. The plague, the great fire in London, and the Dutch war—all prevented King Charles according the adventurers immediate help, but within a year from their landing, he writes to James, Duke of York, as chief of the navy, ordering the Admiralty department to loan the two Frenchmen the ship Eaglet of the South Sea fleet for a voyage to Hudson Bay, for the purpose of prosecuting trade and extending their explorations toward the South Sea. I have his letter issuing the instructions, and it is interesting as proving that the initiative came from King Charles, as Prince Rupert has hitherto received all the credit for organizing the Adventurers of England trading to Hudson Bay. Prince Rupert and half a dozen friends were to bear the expense of wages to the seamen and victualling the ships. During the long period of waiting, Charles presented Radisson with a gold medal and chain. To Groseillers—if French tradition is to be accepted—he gave some slight title of nobility. During this time, too, Radisson and Groseillers heard from the captain of the Dutch ship, who had questioned them. There came a spy from Amsterdam—Eli Godefroy Touret, who first tried to bribe the Frenchmen to come to Holland, and failing that, openly accused them of counterfeiting money. The accusation could not be proved, and the spy was imprisoned.

Bienville, founder of Louisiana, who took part with his brother Le Moyne d’Iberville, in the famous naval battle for possession of Hudson Bay.

The year 1667-8 was spent in preparations for the voyage. In addition to The Eaglet under Captain Stannard, the ship Nonsuch under Captain Gillam, who had failed to reach the bay from Nova Scotia—was chartered. As far as I could gather from the old documents in Hudson’s Bay House, London, the ships were supplied with provisions and goods for trade by leading merchants, who were given a share in the venture. The cash required was for the seamen’s wages, running from £20 to £30 a year, and for the officer’s pay, £3 a month to the surgeons, £50 a trip to the captains, with a bounty if the venture succeeded. With the bounty, Gillam received £160 for this trip, Stannard, £280. Thomas Gorst, who went as accountant, and Mr. Sheppard as chief mate, were to assume command if anything happened to Radisson and Groseillers. All, who advanced either cash, or goods, or credit for goods, were entered in a stock book as Adventurers for so many pounds. There was as yet no company organized. It was a pure gamble—a speculation based on the word of two penniless French adventurers, and in the spirit of the true gambler, gay were the doings. Captain Gillam facetiously presents the Adventurers with a bill for five shilling for a rat catcher. The gentlemen honor the bill with a smile, order a pipe of canary, three tuns of wine, “a dinner with pullets,” dinners, indeed, galore, at the Three Tunns and the Exchange Tavern and the Sun, at which Prince Rupert and Albermarle and perhaps the King, himself, “make merry like right worthy gentlemen.” Everybody is in rare, good humor, for you must remember Mr. Radisson brought back 600,000 beaver from that Sea of the North, and the value of 600,000 beaver divided among less than a dozen Adventurers would mean a tidy $100,000 of modern money to each man. Then, the gentlemen go down to Gravesend Docks to see the ships off. Each seaman shakes hands heartily with his patron. Then the written commission is delivered to the captains:

“You are to saile with the first wind that presents, keeping company with each other to your place of rendezvous (the old mark set up by Radisson when he went overland to the bay.) You are to saile to such place as Mr. Gooseberry (Groseillers) and Mr. Radisson shall direct to trade with the Indians there, delivering the goods you carry in small parcells no more than fifty pounds worth at a time out of each shipp, the furs in exchange to stowe in each shipp before delivering out any more goods, according to the particular advice of Mr. Gooseberry (Groseillers) and Mr. Radisson.”

Then follows a cryptogramatic order, which would have done credit to the mysterious cipher of pirates on the high seas.

“You are to take notice that the Nampumpeage which you carry with you is part of our joynt cargoes wee having bought it for money for Mr. Gooseberry and Mr. Radisson to be delivered by small quantities with like caution as the other goods.”

No more drinking of high wines, my gentlemen! Strict business now, for it need scarcely be explained the mysterious Nampumpeage was a euphemism for liquor. Fortifications are to be built, minerals sought, the cargo is to be brought home by Groseillers, while Radisson remains to conduct trade, and

“You are to have in your thought the discovery of the passage into the South Sea and to attempt it with the advice and direction of Mr. Gooseberry and Mr. Radisson, they having told us that it is only seven daies paddling or sailing from the River where they intend to trade unto the Stinking Lake (the Great Lakes) and not above seven daies more to the straight wch. leads into that Sea they call the South Sea, and from thence but forty or fifty leagues to the Sea itselfe.”

Exact journals and maps are to be kept. In case the goods cannot be traded, the ships are to carry their cargoes to Newfoundland and the New England plantations, where Mr. Philip Carterett, who is governor of New Jersey, will assist in disposing of the goods.

“Lastly we advise and require you to use the said Mr. Gooseberry and Mr. Radisson with all manner of civility and courtesy and to take care that all your company doe bear a particular respect unto them, they being the persons upon whose credit wee have undertaken this expedition,

Which we beseech Almighty God to prosper.”