A bearded man sat in a small boat, waves gently lapping against the wooden hull.
In the distance, he watched the last of his ship disappear over the horizon.
Over a year ago he had left his home on a quest to find fame, fortune and the Northern Passage.
It had all come crashing down.
Now, with several men dying of scurvy, and his young son sitting next to him, he knew he would never see home again.
He was surrounded by water where he was Left here to die by his mutinous crew.
He could only hope that his small group of marooned sailors would survive the rest of the summer, perhaps the autumn.
But without assistance, they would never last the winter.
(Beat).
I’m Craig Baird, this is Canadian History Ehx, and today I’m sharing a story that much of it has been lost to time… the facts surrounding the bearded man are hazy and mysterious… Regardless, this is……
The life and times of Henry Hudson!
The name might sound familiar…that’s because though Henry Hudson might be shrouded in mystery, Hudson’s Bay on the other hand is a defining feature of Canada.
More an inland marginal sea than a bay, it covers 1.2 million square kilometres from northern Ontario, western Quebec, northeast Manitoba and southeast Nunavut.
The river catchment area of the bay is even larger and stretches for 3.9 million square kilometres, from the Rockies to the Great Lakes to Northern Labrador.
The Eastern Cree called the Bay, Winipekw, meaning muddy or brackish water because of the low salinity of the water and its low evaporation rate.
As for its modern name, that comes from one man:
Henry Hudson.
It is not known exactly when Henry Hudson was born but it was sometime between 1565 and 1570, most likely in London, England.
He was married to a woman named Katherine, and had three sons, Oliver, Richard and John.
He didn’t enter the historical record until 1607 when he was commissioned by the Muscovy Company to embark on a mission to find the North Pole and the Northeast Passage.
The Northeast Passage was a theorized route over Europe and Russia that reached the Pacific, the opposite of the Northwest Passage over North America.
During the 17th century, it was believed that since the Arctic had so much daylight in the summer, the ice melted completely allowing for passage.
The Muscovy Company was an English trading company first chartered in 1555, as an offshoot of the Company of Merchant Adventurers to New Lands.
That original company was founded by Richard Chancellor, Sir Hugh Willoughby and Sebastian Cabot.
Sebastian was John Cabot’s son, the man who reached Newfoundland in 1497.
The company’s first attempt at finding the Northeast Passage was in 1553, when Sir Hugh Willoughby ventured to the mouth of the Varzina River, near present-day Murmansk, Russia.
Willoughby and his crew were never seen alive again.
Years later, Russian fishermen stumbled upon their bodies, frozen solid.
Richard Chancellor was the next adventurer seeking the Northeast Passage in a custom-built ship in 1553.
He reached the Northern Dvina River in northern Russia and then walked 970 kilometres on foot to Moscow.
After those failed attempts, the Muscovy Company was established, and its directors embarked on a mission to find the Northeast Passage once again.
Steven Borough reached Novaya Zemlya in the Arctic Ocean over northern Russia but was unable to penetrate the ice.
The next attempt came three decades later, when the company looked to a young mariner making a name for himself.
Henry Hudson
There is some speculation that Hudson was related to someone in the Muscovy Company, who gave him the contract to find the passage.
As I said at the start facts are a little hazy, but it can be assumed that Hudson,
likely learned how to be a sailor while working on English ships for two decades until he was given his own command.
In 1587, he may have sailed with John Davis, an English explorer who not only sought the Northwest Passage but was also the first European to reach the Falkland Islands.
On May 1, 1607, Hudson and his crew of 11 men sailed out of England on the Hopewell. They were joined by Hudson’s young son John, who would join him on every voyage he made from this point on.
They reached Greenland on May 13th and explored northward until May 22 when Hudson turned east.
He eventually reached islands off the north coast of Norway, and then turned south to return to England arriving on Sept. 15. 1607.
While he was unsuccessful in finding a Northeast Passage, his expedition did find plentiful whaling grounds which began the whaling industry in the waters off northern Norway.
But this did not impress the Muscovy Company, who never hired him again.
Two years later, in 1609, the Dutch East India Company hired him to find passage to Asia over Russia.
The Dutch East India Company was formed on March 20, 1602, and had a monopoly over trade activities in much of Asia.
Finding the Northeast passage would cut down travel, thereby increasing the company’s profits.
While Hudson was in Amsterdam waiting on supplies, he heard rumours of a possible passage over North America, but The Dutch East Indian Company insisted that Hudson go over Russia to reach Asia because the theory stated that the trip would be shorter that way.
On April 4, 1609, Hudson left Amsterdam and sailed over northern Scandinavia and into Russian waters on the Halve Maen, or Half Moon but when he reached the northern coast of Russia, they could go no further as ice blocked their path.
Faced with two choices. To go back to Amsterdam as he had been instructed if there was ice, or venture west, over the Atlantic and towards North America.
Hudson chose the second option.
On July 2, 1609, the Halve Maen reached the Grand Banks of Newfoundland.
Hudson continued west.
Around this time, he recorded in his journal that the crew reported seeing a mermaid. Quote
“As big as one of us. Her skin very white and long hair hanging down behind, of colour black. In her going down they saw her tail, which was like the tail of a porpoise, and speckled like a mackerel.”
It is likely they mistook a beluga whale for a mermaid, and they continued on
Towards present-day Nova Scotia, where Hudson’s ship nearly struck Sable Island.
Located 175 kilometres off the coast, the island measures 43 kilometres long but only 1.21 kilometres across at its widest point.
The first shipwreck happened decades before Hudson arrived, in 1583, when the English ship Delight struck the island.
For the next three centuries, over 350 vessels shipwrecked on the island and its sand bars.
With a wreck averted, Hudson reached LaHave, Nova Scotia, on July 14.
Located in Lunenberg County on the southeast coast of the province this is where Hudson first came across the Mi’kmaq People who signaled that they were willing to trade beaver pelts, but Hudson instead chose to remain in the area for the next 10 days, where his crew fished and conducted repairs on the ship.
Then, Hudson did something very odd.
Despite no indication that the Mi’kmaq were hostile towards him, Hudson had a dozen men take muskets and a small cannon ashore.
They attacked the Mi’kmaq village and drove the inhabitants away. Then they raided the settlement’s pelts, boats and supplies.
The Mi’kmaq never forgot that attack.
Two years later, the Mi’kmaq of that area took six men from a Dutch expedition captive.
The men were never seen by Europeans again.
Meanwhile with his loot on board Hudson left the area soon after the pillaging of the settlement and turned south towards present-day United States.
On Aug. 4, Hudson reached Cape Cod.
Johannes de Laet, a director of the West India Company, in 1625 using Hudson’s journal wrote,
“They bent their course to the south until, running south-southwest and southwest by south, they again made land, which they supposed to be an island and gave it the name of New Holland but afterwards discovered that it was Cape Cod.”
Hudson sailed around Chesapeake Bay and Delaware Bay, and then reached a river in a natural harbour on Sept. 3.
He named the river Mauritius, but it became known by another name, the Hudson River.
Believing he was on the coast of a small island and the river was the straight passage he was looking for Hudson took the ship into the river.
On Sept. 6, second mate John Colman was sent with a group of five men to scout the area in a rowboat. As they explored, two canoes filled with Lenape people emerged and attacked the scouting party.
Two of Hudson’s men were wounded, and John Colman was hit in the throat by an arrow. He died soon after.
The survivors returned to the ship at 10 a.m. the next day with Colman’s body.
His death is commemorated at the Hudson County Courthouse, and records show him the first recorded murder in what became metropolitan New York.
Colman was then buried on either Coney Island, Staten Island or Sandy Hook. Over the subsequent centuries, the people who lived in the nearby Hudson Highlands believed that the spirit of Colman became a Dwerg, or goblin, who wears Dutch clothing and causes storms to sink ships.
Meanwhile Hudson began to trade with the Indigenous Peoples of the area near Upper New York Bay, and the first transaction occurred on Sept. 12.
For the next 10 days, Hudson journeyed up the river hoping to find a passage to the other side of the continent but instead he reached present-day Albany before he realized he could go no further.
He turned around and on Sept. 23, left for Europe arriving in Dartmouth, England. On Nov. 7, 1609.
Hudson may not have found a passage to the Pacific, but his explorations of present-day New York gave the Dutch claims to the region.
While meeting his Dutch backers, Hudson told them about the beavers he saw and it was enough for the Dutch, who only a few years later established New Amsterdam on Manhattan Island.
That settlement eventually became known as New York City.
Realizing the potential to exploit North America, King James I of England forbade Hudson from working with the Dutch again.
Instead, the Virginia Company and British East India Company hired him in 1610 to find the Northwest Passage.
The Virginia Company was established in 1606 with the objective of colonizing the eastern coast of North America while the British East India Company was slightly older.
It was established in 1600 to trade in the Indian Ocean.
In the spring of 1610, Hudson prepared to embark on his grandest voyage to date aboard the Discovery.
Alongside him was a crew that can only be described as a hodgepodge of personalities.
Robert Juet was his first mate and disliked Hudson. Who felt the same about Juet?
Robert Bylot joined the crew as one of the ship’s navigators. He was known for his courage in the face of danger and his skill as a navigator.
John King, described as a troublemaker, was made quartermaster.
Among the rest of the crew was Edward Wilson, who came aboard as the surgeon, and Abacuk Pricket, a serving-man to Sir Dudley Digges, a politician and investor in the Viriginia Company of London. He served as a record keeper.
Thomas Woodhouse joined the crew as a mathematician.
Philip Staffe was on board as the ship’s carpenter.
There was also William Wilson, no relation to Edward, another man described as a troublemaker.
And of course, John Hudson, his son, was aboard as well as the Discovery left London on April 17, 1610.
It stopped to pick up Henry Greene who the crew felt was essentially plucked out of nowhere..
He was described as a dissolute young man, who had been disowned by family but had a good education that impressed Hudson.
Despite having no sailing experience, Hudson promised him a full seaman’s wages when they returned to England.
It did not take long for rumours saying that Greene was Hudson’s spy to spread through the ship.
And as they swirled, Hudson and his crew reached Iceland on May 11.
This is where Henry Greene attacked Edward Wilson and beat him severely. It is not known why he did it or if he was punished for it and as the ship passed Iceland, another altercation.
Robert Juet, while intoxicated, accused Greene of being a spy for Hudson which threw the captain into a rage.
He threatened to return to Iceland to throw Juet off the ship but was convinced by the crew to press on and on June 4, the Discovery reached Greenland.
Instead of sailing south as he had done previously, Hudson continued west over present-day Labrador and Quebec.
On June 25, he reached what is now the Hudson Strait, which runs between Quebec and Baffin Island.
And although it bears his name, he was not the first European to reach this area.
Martin Frobisher arrived there in 1578, during his explorations of Baffin Island.
Meanwhile Hudson faced more troubles…
At Akpatok Island, located south of Baffin Island in Quebec’s Ungava Bay, Juet instigated a crew mutiny against Hudson.
Before things got completely out of control, and with the support of Philip Staffe, Hudson was able to convince the crew not to mutiny and to accept his leadership once again.
At Digges Island, scouts were sent to the island located off the coast of northern Quebec just before the entrance of what became Hudson Bay. They reported seeing hundreds of birds on the island.
Abacuk Pricket begged Hudson to remain in the area for two days in the hopes of refreshing the crew and stocking food supplies.
Hudson refused.
According to his calculations, he expected to be in Asia, and he believed they were about to reach the Pacific. A week later, on Aug. 2, Hudson reached a huge expanse of water that brought him immense joy because they firmly believed they had just navigated through the Northwest Passage.
Hudson took this moment to put Robert Juet on trial for mutiny.
He was convicted of inciting disobedience and reduced his rank.
Robert Bylot became the new first mate.
Hudson began to navigate south along what he believed was the Pacific coast but really was Quebec, which eventually turned to the west.
Progress was slow, as he took his time to map the coast.
Each day, the Discovery only covered 16 kilometres.
Then, after passing what he believed to be a southern outlet, the coast started to turn to the north and most distressing of all, slowly back to the east.
The brutal realization dawned on him.
He was not in the Pacific. He was in a huge bay.
Worst of all …winter was coming.
[PAUSE]
Discovery turned back east, but Hudson was blocked to the north by the growing field of sea ice spreading southward.
Remembering that he had passed what seemed like a large outlet in the south weeks earlier, he took Discovery towards it.
He did not realize at the time that the bay he was in was so large, it had its own little bay within it, James Bay.
Hudson was heading straight into a dead end.
Believing that could escape through this southern outlet he spent days crisscrossing it to find a way out.
With each passing day, the ice ventured further to the south.
Abacuk Pricket wrote,
“A labyrinth without end. We had a storm, and the wind brought the ice so fast upon us, that in the end we were driven to put her into the chiefest of the ice and there to let her lie.”
To add tragedy to the situation, crew member John Williams died of unknown reasons.
His possessions were auctioned off to the crew, as per naval tradition. Agrey cloth gown was highly prized because it was one of the few pieces of warm weather clothing among the crew.
Rather than auction it off, Hudson took it and gave it to Greene.
This didn’t help the mood onboard as days later, the ice seized the ship and completely blocked their path.
They were not going home.
Philip Staffe suggested to Hudson to build a house for the winter.
Hudson refused, still thinking he could find a southern outlet.
A week later, Hudson ordered the crew to build a house.
Staffe told him that now it was too cold to build and in response, Hudson threw him out of his cabin, berated him and threatened to hang him.
When Henry Greene treated Staffe with civility it enraged Hudson so much that he tore the warm cloth off Greene’s body and gave it to Robert Bylot.
Two days later, a house was built.
The winter was long and full of sorrow as none of the sailors were dressed for the weather.
They believed they were going to be in Asia within months of their departure from England and now they were forced to survive frigid temperatures with mostly summer clothes.
Pricket wrote of the winter,
“To speak of all our troubles would be too tedious.”
Amazingly, everyone survived the winter.
The ice broke free in the spring of 1611, and the crew believed they were finally going to head home.
But Hudson, though, had other plans.
As the ice melted and the Discovery was freed from its clutches, an Indigenous man, likely Cree, arrived at the small house the crew had built to trade two deer skins and two beaver skins for a knife, a looking glass and buttons.
This was likely the first transaction of furs in the Hudson Bay area in Canadian history.
By 1670, the Hudson’s Bay Company was established, and fur trading would become the biggest industry of the entire region.
Once the trade with Hudson was done, the Indigenous man promised to return in a few days.
He never came back.
After several more days of waiting, Hudson took a boat to find him and found a settlement a few days travel away.
When he reached it, the Indigenous people refused to trade with him. To keep him away from their settlement, they lit the forest on fire.
Hudson returned to the crew, only to find that in his absence, fishing was poor and rations were low.
With the ice now gone, he could venture onwards with months to spare to find his route to the Pacific.
Hudson truly believed he was close to finding the Northwest Passage, but the crew begged him to return home. In early-June 1611, he told the crew they were on their way to England but as the days went on, the crew realized he had lied.
With only two weeks of supplies left, and the crew wanting to go back to Digges Island to hunt birds, open talk of mutiny began to circulate on the ship led by Robert Juet once again. Several crew members were immediately in favour, but the problem was Robert Juet could not pilot the ship home, he needed the navigational skills of Robert Bylot who was completely loyal to Hudson, …at least for a time.
For reasons unknown as talk of mutiny grew on the ship, Hudson stripped Bylot of his rank and gave it to John King, an illiterate crew member.
With that Bylot joined the mutineers’ cause
As the crew readied itself to take over the ship, Hudson split up the remaining rations among them.
Food that was nearly rancid.
Rumours swirled that Hudson kept the best food for himself in his cabin.
On the night of June 23, 1611, Henry Greene and William Wilson went into Abacuk Pricket’ cabin to inform him of the mutiny.
The plan was to put Hudson, his son and the scurvy-sickened men into a boat and leave them in the bay.
Pricket protested but told them he would join if they swore an oath that they would do no harm to Hudson, his son, or the crew members suffering from scurvy. At daybreak, the crew made their move.
Henry Hudson, his son John, mathematician Thomas Wydose and five crew members sick with scurvy were thrown overboard into a boat.
Philip Staffe remained loyal to Hudson and volunteered to follow him.
The crew then gave them clothing, powder and shot, pikes, an iron pot, food and other items.
After getting rid of their captain and the others, the crew on the Discovery went into Hudson’s cabin and found a concealed horde of food.
They began to gorge themselves on it.
As they ate Hudson put up a sail on the small boat and was quickly catching up to the Discovery when it unfurled its sails and quickly left Hudson and the others behind.
Pricket wrote,
“Now were the sick men driven out of their cabins into the shallop. They stood out of the ice, the shallop being fast to the stern of the ship and so they cut her headfast from the stern, and towards the east they stood in a clear sea and fly as from an enemy.”
The men left behind were never seen by Europeans again.
For the Discovery crew, it was not an easy journey back to England.
Henry Greene took over the ship soon after the mutiny and made Robert Bylot his first mate.
Abacuk Pricket later learned Greene was going to maroon them but was thwarted by the rest of the crew who hoped to get a pardon for the mutiny from Pricket’s friend Sir Dudley Digges.
When the Discovery reached Digges Island, they found birds but also the Inuit.
As they arrived on the island, the frightened Inuit attacked.
Two men were mortally wounded as Greene, in a classic scene of redemption from a movie, fought the Inuit with a broken staff of a pike so the other members could escape to the ship.
Greene was shot in the back with an arrow as he climbed aboard, and his journey came to an end.
The survivors found another island and killed enough birds to stock up supplies and make their way back to England.
But not before they did Juet died of an unknown cause and in the end only eight of the 13 mutinous crew members made it back thanks to Bylot’s skills as a pilot.
When they arrived, they were arrested and put on trial, but no punishment was levied against them for the mutiny.
One theory for why they were spared is because of the experience they gained traveling to North America, which could be used on future expeditions.
But this is an episode on Henry Hudson… and he was left behind in a bay that would once bear his name…
So, What about Hudson and the rest?
What ever happened to them?
The first expedition to find Henry Hudson was conducted in 1612 by Thomas Button.
He sailed into Hudson Bay aboard the Discovery, the same ship that Hudson watched disappear over the horizon in 1611.
Another expedition was conducted by Zachariah Gillam between 1668 and 1670, but nothing was found of the lost men.
There were rumours that Hudson was never cast adrift but murdered on the ship.
The accounts of Hudson being marooned, comes from Pricket’s journal and those accounts could be biased since Pricket knew they would be tried for mutiny when they returned to Europe.
He would want to put the mutiny in the best light, and murder was not a good look.
If Hudson had been marooned there is no reason to think they wouldn’t survive
Hudson was a tough and determined man, who was an experienced sailor and explorer.
At the time Hudson and his small crew were no further than 75 kilometres from shore, something that could be easily navigated.
In addition, they were set adrift on June 23, well into warmer weather which increased their chances of their survival.
In 1631, Captain Thomas James found the remains of a shelter on Danby Island, located in southeast Hudson Bay.
Since the ship’s carpenter, Philip Staffe, was one of the men marooned with Hudson, it is possible that he helped build a shelter to protect the stranded men through another cold winter.
According to the report of Captain James, there were several sticks standing in the ground, with chip marks from a steel blade.
One Inuit legend talks about a small boat that was found in the water, filled with dead white men but one living boy who may have been John Hudson.
They did not know what to do about the boy, so he was tied up outside with the dogs.
Cree oral histories speak of a group of white men with bloated faces and limbs who arrived on the shore. They called the leader Firebeard because of his red hair. He apparently married a Cree woman and had children with her.
So, the true ending of Henry Hudson and his crew is unknown… but
There is one more story, and it involves another famous explorer, Samuel de Champlain.
At the time that Hudson was marooned by his crew, Samuel De Champlain was in the Ottawa River Valley area.
In 1613, two years after the mutiny, Champlain found out that the Algonquins had captured an English child, who they said was the survivor of a wreck in the northern sea.
They wanted to make a gift out of him.
He turned down the gift and never saw the child, but the story inspired Champlain to journey up the Ottawa River in 1613 in the hopes of reaching Hudson Bay.
That is where the story ends, but perhaps that child was John Hudson, who survived with the Indigenous Peoples and found his way to what is now southern Ontario.
John Hudson was marooned in 1611 and could have easily been transported down to the Ottawa River over the next two years. Going from Hudson Bay down the Harricana River to the Ottawa River to Deep River is possible in that amount of time.
As with so much to do with history, much of it is only speculation and theories.
That is how the story of Henry Hudson, his son and the other crew will remain.
