CHAPTER I
1607
HENRY HUDSON’S FIRST VOYAGE
Practicalmen 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. Tohim, 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 Greenlandparts 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 crewshoots 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 therigging, 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 lonelyscreams 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 theUltima Thuleof 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 tumblingice, 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 floatingagainstthe 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.
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 plungeddown 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 driftingagainstthe 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 dearlife 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 chasingan 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 aGolden Threadbefore 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 togreater 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 willnotseek 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!