Henry Hudson. Edward Butts
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the many items loaded into the Hopewell’s hold were several barrels of salt for preserving fish. When crewmen were not busy with shipboard duties, they would spend some of their off-time fishing. The fish they caught would be cleaned and salted down for when the Hopewell returned to England. The Muscovy Company would then sell the fish to help defray the cost of the expedition.
Hiring a crew for the voyage would not have been difficult. London was a commercial maritime centre, and there were always sailors looking for work. Some of those who made up the Hopewell’s crew might very well have sailed with Hudson previously. Little is known about them except their names, but no doubt they were experienced seamen. First mate was William Collin, who had his master’s license and so was qualified to be a captain. James Young was the bos’un (boatswain), a ship’s junior officer. The other crewmen were John Colman, John Cooke, James Beuberry, James Skrutton, John Playse, Thomas Baxter, Richard Day, and James Knight. Young John Hudson was aboard as the ship’s boy. As the captain’s son, John Hudson would be entitled to the respect of the common sailors, but he had no authority. He did not share his father’s cabin or table, but slept and ate with the men. Besides Hudson, only the first mate had his own cabin. The rest of the men slept in the crew’s cramped quarters below decks.
On April 19, 1607, a special service was held for the ship’s company in tiny St. Ethelburga’s Church on Bishopsgate Street in London. Crowded into the smallest church in the city were Hudson, Katherine, his crewmen and the wives of any who were married, the directors of the Muscovy Company, and all of their servants. The clergyman delivered a sermon titled “God’s Known Realm,” and offered up prayers for the safe return of the ship and men. Hudson and the crew took Communion. They expected to weigh anchor in four days.
In spite of the prayers for fair weather, the elements did not cooperate. For two weeks unusually thick fog, followed by a storm with gale-force winds, kept the Hopewell in harbour at Gravesend, twenty-six miles downriver from London. This was not a good beginning, because in the short navigation season of the Far North every day counted. Finally, on May 1, the Hopewell sailed from Gravesend.
Contrary winds made the going slow. Twenty-six days after setting sail, Hudson was eighteen miles east of the Shetland Islands off northern Scotland. Over the next four days he covered only ninety miles. Another week passed before he crossed the Arctic Circle.
Life aboard ship was one of routine and monotony when seas were calm, and great danger when they weren’t. Every man had a duty to perform, from menial tasks like swabbing the decks, to the more hazardous job of climbing up to the yardarms to furl or unfurl sails. Orders came from the captain or the mate to the bo’sun or the bo’sun’s mate, who passed them on to the crew. The safety of the ship depended upon every man doing his job promptly and efficiently.
Almost all common seamen came from the lower class. In general, sailors were illiterate and superstitious. No matter how tough a sailor was, like all working class people he learned at a very young age to be submissive to authority and humble in the presence of people considered to be his social superiors.
Sailors on privately owned vessels were not necessarily subjected to the brutal discipline that existed on naval ships. Nonetheless, aboard any ship the captain was the law and his authority was not to be questioned. A captain had the right to promote men or demote them, and with demotion came a reduction in pay. If a sailor failed to do his job properly or was insubordinate, the captain could mildly reprimand him, or subject him to harsh punishment.
With men living together in close quarters for extended periods of time, it was inevitable that disputes and quarrels would break out. Some captains kept such situations in check by running a “tight ship.” That meant the captain would tolerate no slacking, no squabbling, and no trouble. Troublemakers were punished. However, the captain had to be consistent in his dispensation of punishments and rewards. To be inconsistent could be taken as a sign of weakness. A captain also had to avoid showing favouritism, as that could breed jealousy and trouble.
At some point early on this voyage something must have happened to cause Hudson to be unhappy with the performance of his ship’s officers. He did not record any details in his log, but there was a sudden flurry of promotion and demotion. William Collin was demoted from mate to bo’sun. This would have been humiliating to a man who had his master’s license. The former bos’un, James Young, was demoted to common seaman. Mariner John Colman was given the rank of mate. This was a major shift in the hierarchy of such a small company of men, and in a severely restricted environment in which there were so many potential threats to harmony.
A wooden sailing ship was not a comfortable place for the common sailor. The work was hard and often dangerous. There were scores of different ways a man could be killed or seriously injured. Merchant ships did not usually carry doctors. If a man was injured, the ship’s carpenter might do duty as a surgeon. He had the tools for splinting a broken bone, hacking off a shattered or infected arm or leg, or pulling out an aching tooth. The part of the ship below decks where sailors worked, slept, and ate was cramped, damp, and gloomy. It smelled of tar, bilgewater, rotting food, and unwashed men, clothing, and bedding. There was no toilet on the ship. The men urinated over the side, or they went to a location at the bow of the ship called the “seat of easement” through which bodily wastes dropped into the sea.
Meals were often a daily fare of porridge, salt meat, hardtack biscuits, and cheese. On long voyages, the fresh water in the barrels would go scummy, and the biscuits would get wormy. The sailors received a daily ration of beer, but drunkenness was not allowed. After weeks at sea, the beer might turn sour.
By the end of May, Hudson found that his compass behaved erratically. “This day I found the needle to incline seventy-nine degrees under the horizon,” he recorded in his log. Hudson was no doubt mystified by this. Navigators in his time did not realize that the farther above the Arctic Circle they sailed, the less reliable the compass became. They had little understanding of the relationship between the Magnetic North Pole and the Geographic North Pole. Some navigators were not even aware of the difference between the two poles, let alone the fact that the Magnetic Pole drifts from place to place.
This made it very difficult for a northern explorer like Hudson to plot a course or determine his exact location. In more southerly positions, Hudson could easily determine latitude by the sun or stars. But in the Arctic, atmospheric distortions resulted in errors. What’s more, nobody had yet come up with a reliable method for determining longitude. For that, navigators had to use “dead reckoning,” a system based on the ship’s speed, the course steered, and the last observation of latitude. A ship’s speed could only be roughly estimated by tossing a marker over the side and measuring the time it took for the ship to sail past it. All this taxed Hudson’s skills as a navigator to the limit.
Meanwhile, the crewmen had their own hardships. As they sailed farther north they encountered thick fog, followed by rough, stormy seas. Ice crusted the rigging and the sails froze. Whenever adjustments were necessary, the men had to climb aloft with numb hands and on slippery footing. Men were soaked to the skin by driving rain and the spray of the sea, and once that happened there wasn’t much chance to dry clothes out and really feel warm again.
On June 13, Hudson sighted the east coast of Greenland. The world’s largest island, most of it sheathed in ice, was still a mystery to Europeans. No one was sure if it was one island or several, nor how far north it stretched.
For eight days Hudson followed the coast northward, always keeping land in sight. He saw some previously unrecorded geographic features and added them to his chart. He wrote in his journal of the relentlessly harsh weather and the desolate land he could see from his ship.
We saw some land on head of us, and some ice. It being a thick fog, we steered away northerly. In the morning our sails and shrouds froze. All the afternoon evening it rained, and the rain froze. This was a very high land, the most part covered with snow. The nether part was uncovered. At the top it looked reddish, and underneath a blackish clay, with much ice lying about it.
A current carried the Hopewell eastward and out of sight of the coast. This frustrated Hudson because of the difficulty in maintaining his bearings. In spite of the weather, he managed to hold