Thomas Hudson

“ Hudson has no cause to quarrel with the rating that has been fixed for him in the eternal balances. All that he lost (or seemed to lose) in life has been more than made good to him in the flowing of the years since he fought out with Fate his last losing round.
In his River and Strait and Bay he has such monuments set up before the whole world as have been awarded to only one other navigator. ”

“ HUDSON, CHARLES THOMAS (1828–1903) , naturalist, third of five sons of John Corrie Hudson, chief clerk of the legacy duty office (1795-1879) , and Emily (1794-1868) , daughter of James Hebard, of Ewell, Surrey, was born at Brompton, London, on 11 March 1828. The father in youth was an advanced radical and friend of William Godwin [q. v.] ”

“ The chests of Hudson and the rest were opened, and their clothes, and such things as they had, inventoried and sold by Grene and the others, and some of the clothes were worn.
Thomas Widowes was thrust out of the ship into the shallop, but whether he willed them take his keys and share his goods, to save his life, this examinate knoweth not.
At the putting out of the men, the ship's carpenter [Staffe] asked the company if they would be [wished to be] hanged, when they came to England. ”

“ For my own part, I much prefer to believe in the mermaid—and, by so believing, to create in my own heart somewhat of the feeling which was in the hearts of those old seafarers in a time when sea-prodigies and sea-mysteries were to be counted with as among the perils of every ocean voyage.
This belief of mine is not a mere whimsical fancy. Unless we take as real what the shipmen of Hudson's time took as real, we not only miss the strong romance which was so large a part of their life, but we go wide of understanding the brave spirit in which their exploring work was done. ”

“ Because of his full accomplishment of what others essayed and only partially accomplished, Hudson's name is the best known—excepting only that of Columbus—of all the names of explorers by land and sea. From Purchas's time downward it has headed the list of Arctic discoverers; in every history of America it has a leading place; on every map of North America it thrice is written large; here in New York, which owes its founding to his exploring voyage, it is uttered—as we refer to the river, the county, the city, the street, the railroad, bearing it—a thousand times a day. ”

“ Katherine, mariner, then master of the said ship The Discovery, and putting him thus bound, together with John Hudson, his son, Arnold Ladley, John Kinge, Michael Butt, Thomas Woodhouse, Philip Staffe, Adam Moore and Sidrach Fanner, mariners of the said ship, into a shallop, without food, drink, fire, clothing or any necessaries, and then maliciously abandoning them, so that they came thereby to their death and miserably perished. ”

“ The names have been preserved in legal records of three of the sons—Thomas, John and Edward—of this eminent Londoner: who flourished so greatly in life; who was given so handsome a send-off into eternity; and who, presumably, retains in that final state an undivided one-half interest in the lady whose comely figure was sculptured upon his tomb. General Read found record of a Henry Hudson, mentioned by Stow as a citizen of London in the year 1558, who may also have been a son of the alderman ”

“ The types are faithfully executed, and we will not say to whom shall go our chief praise. No. 91. Autumn on the Hudson, by Thomas Doughty. "Charming!" will be the exclamation when this picture is viewed in its faultless beauty. It makes us feel more than ever that the noble Hudson has a high claim upon our admiration—the rich autumnal tints coloring the trees in contrast with those yet untouched, and the sunshine falling here and there with brightest glow. ”

“ He was often in consultation with Hudson in Amsterdam and to his chapter on “Norumbega (said to be somewhere in New England) et Virginia” he added a map 47 which, imperfect in some respect—incorrect in its latitudes—was serviceable to Hudson in his westward voyage. The French map of about 1517 and the map of Thomas Hood, an Englishman, published in 1594, which shows under latitude 40° north (New York city is 40° 43′ north) the mouth of a river called Rio de San Antonio, the name given by the earliest Spanish discoverers to what later on became known as the Hudson river. ”

“ We cannot resist the temptation to give a few of Mr. Hudson's sentences, illustrative of his manner of stinging the minds of his readers and enforcing their attention. Speaking of Sir Thomas Lucy, on whose manor Shakspeare is said to have poached, Hudson remarks: "This Warwickshire esquire, once so rich and mighty, is now known only as the block over which the Warwickshire peasant stumbled into immortality." Referring to those purists who regard words more than things in their strictures on licentiousness, he calls them persons "whose morality seems to be all in their ears." ”

“ In the meane time Henrie Greene and another went to the carpenter [Philip Staffe] and held him with a talke till the Master came out of his cabbin (which hee soone did) ; then came John Thomas and Bennet before him, while Wilson bound his arms behind him. He asked them what they meant. They told him he should know when he was in the shallop. Now Juet, while this was a-doing, came to John King into the hold, who was provided for him, for he had got a sword of his own, and kept him at a bay, and might have killed him, but others came to helpe him, and so he came up to the Master. ”

“ Asher's excuse, I should add, refers more to concealment of food than to unfair apportionment.
I have no desire to play the part of devil's advocate; but—in the guise of that personage under his more respectable title of Promotor Fidei—it is my duty to point out that if Hudson deliberately did "keep up" himself and a favored few by putting the remainder on starvation rations—no matter what may have been his motives—he exceeded his ship-master's right over his crew of life and death. His doing so, if he did do so, did not justify mutiny. Mutiny is a sea-crime that no provocation justifies. ”

“ Hudson's name is not mentioned by Jeannin, but as no other navigator had been so far north as 80°, there can be no doubt as to who "the Englishman" was. The letter goes on to urge that the French king should undertake the "glorious enterprise" of searching for a northerly passage to the Indies, and that he should undertake it openly: as "the East India Company will not have even a right to complain, because the charter granted to them by the States General authorizes them to sail only around the Cape of Good Hope, and not by the north." ”

“ HENRY HUDSON I F ever a compelling Fate set its grip upon a man and drove him to an accomplishment beside his purpose and outside his thought, it was when Henry Hudson—having headed his ship upon an ordered course northeastward—directly traversed his orders by fetching that compass to the southwestward which ended by bringing him into what now is Hudson's River, and which led on quickly to the founding of what now is New York. ”

“ Prickett concludes this episode by showing that Hudson's eager desire to press on prevailed: "After many words to no purpose, to worke we must on all hands, to get ourselves out and to cleere our ship."
And so the "Discovery" went onward—sometimes working her way through the ice, sometimes sailing freely in clear water—until Hudson triumphantly brought her, as Purchas puts it, into "a spacious sea, wherein he sayled above a hundred leagues South, confidently proud that he had won the passage"! ”

“ Was the first Chairman of the Hull School Board, and has his memory perpetuated in the ‘Sir Henry Cooper Schools.’
Thomas Earle. Born at Hull in 1810. Was a gold medallist of the Royal AcademyAcademy, and designed the statue of George the Fourth in Trafalgar Square, London, and that of Queen Victoria in Pearson Park, Hull, beside many others.
Sir James Hudson, K.C.B. Born at Bessingby in 1810. Entered the Government Service and held many important posts in the United States, South America and Italy. Was created a Knight Commander of the Bath in 1855. ”

“ Therefore we may fall back upon the assured fact—in which I see again the touch of fatalism—that not until Hudson came at the right moment, and at the right moment gave an accurate account of his explorations to a power that was ready immediately to colonize the land that he had found, were our port and our river, notwithstanding their earlier technical discovery, truly discovered to the world. As for the river, it assuredly is Hudson's very own. ”

“ Out of those conditions came like results aboard Hudson's ship: discontent developing into insubordination; hatred of the commander; hatred of each other; petty squabblings leading on to tragedies—as minor ills were magnified into catastrophes and little injuries into deadly wrongs. Strictly in keeping with the mean traditions of the Arctic is the fact that the point of departure of the final mutiny was a wrangle that arose over the ownership of "a gray cloth gowne."
Prickett records: "About the middle of this moneth of November dyed John Williams our Gunner. ”

“ At the very last, where we most want the clear truth, we have only the one-sided account presented by his murderers: and murderers, being at odds with moral conventions generally, are not, as a rule, models of veracity. And so it has fallen out that what we know about the end of Hudson's life, save that it ended foully, is as uncertain as the facts of the earlier and larger part of his life are obscure. ”

“ As the direct result of breaking his orders, Hudson was the discoverer of our river—to which, therefore, his name properly has been given—and also was the first navigator by whom our harbor effectively was found. I use advisedly these precisely differentiating terms. On the distinctions which they make rests Hudson's claim to take practical precedence of Verrazano and of Gomez, who sailed in past Sandy Hook nearly a hundred years ahead of him ”

“ Though the paper he has left us is in form a narrative, the author's real intention was much more to defend the mutineers than to describe the voyage. As an apologetic essay, the 'Larger Discourse' is extremely clever. It manages to cast some, not too much, shadow upon Hudson himself. The main fault of the mutiny is thrown upon some men who had ceased to live when the ship reached home. Those who were then still alive are presented as guiltless, some as highly deserving. Prickett's account of the mutiny and of its cause has often been suspected. ”

“ The important fact is that Hudson entertained it: and so was led to offer for first choice to his mutinous crew that they should "go to the coast of America in the latitude of forty degrees." His readiness with that proposition, when the chance to make it came, confirms my belief that his own desire was to sail westward, and that he made the most of his opportunity. ”

“ It was a brave fight that they made; and Henry Greene's last recorded word, "Coragio!" was worthy of the lips of a better man. But he and the others eminently deserved the death that the savages gave them, and it is good to know that Hudson's murder so soon was avenged. Juet's equally exemplary punishment, equally deserved, came a little later. On the homeward voyage the whole company got to the very edge, and Juet passed beyond the edge, of starvation. When the ship was only sixty or seventy leagues from Ireland, where she made her landfall, Prickett tells that he "dyed for meere want." ”

“ To the second voyage belongs the often-quoted incident of the mermaid. The log of that voyage that has come down to us was kept by Hudson himself; and this is what he wrote in it (June 15, 1608) with his own hand: "All day and night cleere sunshine. The wind at east. The latitude at noone 75 degrees 7 minutes. We held westward by our account 13 leagues. In the afternoon, the sea was asswaged, and the wind being at east we set sayle, and stood south and by east, and south southeast as we could. ”

“ Asher made the exculpating comment: "But even if this charge be a true one, Hudson's motives were certainly honorable; with such men as he had under his orders it was dangerous to deal openly. Their crime had no other cause than the fear that he would continue his search and expose them to new privations: and it seems that in providing for this emergency, he had even increased his dangers." ”

“ By September, the "Discovery" was come into James Bay, at the southern extremity of Hudson's Bay; and then it was that the serious trouble began. By Prickett's showing, there seems to have been a clash of opinions in regard to the ship's course; and of so violent a sort that strong measures were required to maintain discipline. The outcome was that "our Master took occasion to revive old matters, and to displace Robert Juet from being his mate, and the boatswaine from his place, for the words spoken in the first great bay of ice." ”

“ The Carpenter told him that hee knew what belonged to his place better than himselfe, and that he was no house carpenter. So this passed, and the house was (after) made with much labour, but to no end. The next day after the Master and the Carpenter fell out, the Carpenter took his peece and Henrie Greene with him, for it was an order that none should goe out alone, but one with a peece and another with a pike. This did move the Master soe much the more against Henrie Greene, that Robert Billot his Mate [who had been promoted to Juet's place] must have the gowne, and had it delivered unto him ”

“ Even Purchas himself and Fox speak of it with distrust. But Prickett is the only eye-witness that has left us an account of these events; and we can therefore not correct his statements, whether they be true or false."
My fortunate finding of contemporary documents, unknown to Hudson's most authoritative historian, has produced other "eye-witnesses" who have "left us an account of these events"; but, obviously, their accounts—so harmoniously in agreement—do not affect the soundness of Dr. Asher's conclusions. ”