Precisely that fear on the part of the East India Company did undercut the French envoy's plans. In a postscript to his letter he adds: "This letter having been terminated, and I being ready to send it to your Majesty, Le Maire has again written to me.... Some members of the East India Company, who had been informed that the Englishman had secretly treated with him, had become afraid that I might wish to employ him for the discovery of the passage. For this reason they have again treated with him about his undertaking such an expedition in the course of the present year. The directors of the Amsterdam Chamber have written to the other chambers of the same Company to request their approval; and should the others refuse, the Amsterdam Chamber will undertake the expedition at their own risk." In point of fact, the other chambers did refuse (although, before Hudson actually sailed, they seem to have ratified the agreement made with him); and the Amsterdam Chamber, single-handed, did set forth the voyage. In view of the fact that the French project in a way was realized, a curiously subtle interest attaches to Jeannin's showing of how narrow were the chances by which Hudson missed being taken into the French service, and was taken into that of the Dutch. A French ship, under the command of a captain whose name has not been preserved, did sail for the North--almost precisely a month later than Hudson's sailing--on May 5, 1609. Beyond the bare fact that such a voyage was made, nothing is known about it: whence the inference is a reasonable one that it produced no new discoveries. But suppose that Hudson had commanded; and, so commanding, had not sailed that unknown captain's useless course but had brought his French ship into what now are our bay and our river; and that the French, not the Dutch, had founded the city here that now is--but by those hair-wide chances might not have been--New York? V Mr. Henry C. Murphy--to whose searchings in the archives of Holland we owe so much--found at The Hague a manuscript history of the East India Company, written by P. van Dam in the seventeenth century, in which a copy of Hudson's contract with the Company is preserved. The contract reads as follows: