Henry Hudson. Edward Butts
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The crew endured a miserable week of rain squalls and heavy seas. Then they sighted land again. Hudson noted it in his log as a newly discovered land, which he called Hold-with-Hope. He didn’t know it was a more northerly part of the Greenland coast.
Hudson was excited about this discovery, but he chose his words carefully as he made the entry in his log. He had gone quite a long way off the course the Muscovy Company directors had instructed him to take, and now he had to justify that to his employers. He expressed his satisfaction at finding that Robert Thorne’s theory seemed to be correct. The weather seemed to be getting warmer as he neared the North Pole.
“This land is very temperate to our feeling. It is a high mainland, nothing at all covered with snow; and the north part of that main highland was very high mountains, but we could see no snow upon them.”
Hudson apparently did not realize that the weather was warming simply because it was late June. He was surprised to find land here at all, because according to the charts he had studied in Richard Hakluyt’s house, it should have been open sea. In his log, Hudson gave this as justification for disobeying his orders and sailing so far to the west.
This might be held against us, being our fault for keeping such a westerly course. The chief reason for this course was our desire to see that part of Groneland [Greenland], which for all we knew, was unknown to any Christian; we thought it could as well have been open sea as land, in which case our passage to the Pole would have been mostly completed. We also hoped to have a westerly wind, which if we were closer to the shore would have been an onshore [easterly] wind. Considering we found land our charts made no mention of, we considered our labor so much more worthwhile. For what we could see, it appeared to be a good land, and worth exploring.
By now the Hopewell was sailing beneath the midnight sun. Hudson found it fascinating to have sunlight twenty-four hours a day. Some of the men in the crew complained that they could not sleep and became irritable. However, John Hudson and the younger crew members claimed that with the constant sunlight, they found they needed less sleep.
One afternoon John Colman, the first mate, excitedly called Hudson to the rail. A grampus, a fierce sea mammal related to dolphins and toothed whales, was swimming in circles around the ship. Soon the animal was joined by two others. Sailors of that time were notoriously superstitious, and several of the crew members immediately took the appearance of the three creatures as an evil omen. They wanted to return to England immediately. Hudson refused. He watched the animals for hours and made notes about them. Possibly they stayed close to the ship because the cook had thrown some galley garbage overboard.
Hudson sailed northeast from Greenland, setting a course for the North Pole. He constantly found his path blocked by ice. On June 27, Hudson spotted one of the islands of the Spitzbergen Archipelago. These islands had already been discovered by the Dutch explorer William Barents in 1596, but he had thought they were part of Greenland. Hudson decided to give the group the English name of Newland. Then he sailed in amongst the islands, hoping the archipelago might be a gateway through to that temperate sea that supposedly surrounded the Pole.
For two days the Hopewell tacked her way north through the barren, jagged, snow-covered islands. Shore ice and rocks forced Hudson to keep a safe distance, though he would have liked to have made a landing. Then on the evening of June 29, the worst storm the Hopewell had yet encountered came shrieking down from the north.
Hudson was in a trap! If a ship were caught in a storm out on the open ocean, she could ride out the turbulence. But in the midst of a group of islands, there was a great danger of the ship being smashed to pieces.
Hudson bellowed the order for all hands on deck. He took the Hopewell into an island cove that offered partial protection. Then he shouted to Colman to take in all sail, and Colman relayed the order to Collin. Men clambered up into the rigging and along the yards, clinging for dear life as they hauled in the sheets. If a man fell into that icy, swirling sea, he’d be lost forever.
Young was at the helm, and Hudson told him to lash the whipstaff down. Then the captain ordered the sea anchor to be cast out. This was not the big iron anchor that secured a ship in harbour. It was a huge canvas bag that acted something like a modern-day parachute. It trailed in the water behind the ship, filling up with water, and so acted as a drag, preventing the ship from being blown very far or very fast. Only when all of that was done did Hudson allow the men to go below in relays for some warmth and rest. He remained on his quarterdeck the whole time, watching to be sure his vessel did not drift out into the full onslaught of the storm, or be thrown against the island’s rocky shore.
The storm did not let up until the following morning, and then it was followed by fog and snow. Hudson spent the next two weeks picking his way through the islands, charting them, constantly fighting what he called “our troublesome neighbours, ice with fog.” The men saw whales, seals, and evidence of polar bears. As they sailed in and out of inlets, they had to be careful not to become “embayed”; trapped by ice that prevented them from sailing out to open water.
As the July days passed, the weather improved, though the Hopewell had to constantly steer clear of ice. Then on July 14, Hudson took the ship into a large bay. What he and the men saw was absolutely astounding. The bay was teeming with whales! Hundreds of them! The whales lay in pods or frolicked in the bay. They seemed to have no fear of the ship. As Hudson noted in his journal:
In this bay we saw many whales, and one of our company having a hook and line overboard to try for fish, a whale came under the keel of our ship and made her held. Yet by God’s mercy we had no harm, but the loss of the hook and three parts of the line.
Now Hudson had information that would delight his employers. Whaling was an extremely profitable business. Almost every part of a whale was marketable. Whale meat was considered a delicacy. Whale blubber produced oil that had hundreds of uses.
Whale bone was a versatile building material. Whale teeth were as valuable as ivory. Most valuable of all were two products that came from sperm whales: One was spermaceti, which was used in the manufacture of candles, soap, cosmetics, and machine oil. The other was ambergris, a waxy substance that came from the sperm whale’s digestive system. Ambergris was used in the manufacture of perfume, and was every bit as valuable as spices from the Far East.
Hudson could practically see the smiles on the faces of the Muscovy Company directors. Even if he did not find a Northeast Passage, this voyage would prove to be very profitable indeed. No one else knew about Whale Bay, the name he had already chosen. The Muscovy Company could send its own whaling ships up here. There were many seals, too, and seal pelts were valuable.
Hudson took the ship to within one hundred feet of the shore and dropped anchor. The Muscovy Company would need practical information about this island if they were to establish a whaling station here. He sent Collin, Colman, and two others ashore in the ship’s gig, a small rowboat. The other sailors watched enviously as the four men rowed to the island. They hadn’t set foot on dry land in two-and-a-half months, and longed for a chance to get off the ship, even for just a couple of hours.
But no sooner did the shore party scramble up onto the rocks and haul the gig up after them than there was a dramatic turn in the weather. One minute it had been pleasant, almost balmy. Then a raging gale blew in, almost out of nowhere. A howling wind tore across the sea outside the bay and piled up mountains of green water. Watching the massive swells in awe, Hudson was thankful that the Hopewell was not still out there.
Within the bay the waters rolled from the effect of the seething ocean beyond the entrance, but the island’s high cliffs shielded this pocket of calm from the fury of the tempest. Nonetheless, Hudson decided to call the shore party back as a precaution. Before he could do that, a fog descended upon the bay as swiftly as darkness falling after sundown. The fog was so dense that Hudson could not see the tops of the masts, nor the prow of the ship.
Hudson was worried about the men who had gone ashore. The island was a strange, new place, and who knew what dangers might be lurking in this fog. Sailors lined the rail and called out. A few times Hudson thought he heard calls in response. But fog can play tricks with sound, and Hudson was not sure if he heard the voices of his men on shore, or the voices of