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. Adventuring into tempests in their cockle-shell ships they took as a matter of course--and were brave in that way without any thought of their bravery. As a part of the day's work, also, they took their wretched quarters aboard ship and their wretched, and usually insufficient, food. Their highest courage was reserved for facing the fearsome dangers which existed only in their imaginations--but which were as real to them as were the dangers of wreck and of starvation and of battlings with wild beasts, brute or human, in strange new-found lands. It followed of necessity that men leading lives so full of physical hardship, and so beset by wondering dread, were moody and discontented--and so easily went on from sullen anger into open mutiny. And equally did it follow that the shipmasters who held those surly brutes to the collar--driving them to their work with blows, and now and then killing one of them by way of encouraging the others to obedience--were as absolutely fearless and as absolutely strong of will as men could be. All of these conditions we must recognize, and must try to realize, if we would understand the work that was cut out for Hudson, and for every master navigator, in that cruel and harsh and yet ardently romantic time. IV It is Hudson's third voyage--the one that brought him into our own river, and that led on directly to the founding of our own city--that has the deepest interest to us of New York. He made it in the service of the Dutch East India Company: but how he came to enter that service is one of the unsolved problems in his career.