Just as Magellan set out to discover a way through America from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean, so Henry Hudson determined to find a northwest passage from ocean to ocean. The reason for wishing to cross in the north from one ocean to the other was to save going “round the Horn,” as sailors call the long voyage around Cape Horn, the southern point of South America. We now know that there is no northwest passage; at least, if there is such a waterway it is so near the North Pole that it is always frozen up. But Henry Hudson, like all sailors in his time, thought that it would be a simple matter to sail through the open polar sea and pass from the Atlantic to the Pacific north of North America. In 1607 this bold British navigator undertook a voyage in the employ, as he wrote in his journal, of “certain worshipful Merchants of London.” The object of this voyage was to explore the coast of Greenland and, as he explained, “for to discover a passage by the North Pole to Japan and China.” His crew numbered only twelve persons, including one boy, his own son John. After sailing about for five months, suffering great hardships, Hudson returned to London without discovering that northern passage. The next year he started out again, this time sailing north-east along the coast of Norway, and returned after four months without finding anything but hardships. Hudson’s third voyage was made in the employ of the Dutch East India Company. He sailed from Amsterdam, Holland, with a crew of twenty men and his young son, on the _Half Moon_. He started out a second time for a north-east passage, but he found so many difficulties that he turned his prow westward again, determined to discover the way past North America. About the 4th of July, 1609, he came to the Grand Banks of Newfoundland, where he saw a fleet of Frenchmen fishing for cod. After catching over a hundred of these fish for themselves, the crew of the _Half Moon_ proceeded to the southwest, as Hudson had heard from his friend, Captain John Smith, that there was an open way to the Pacific south of Virginia. After wandering down the coast and back, the _Half Moon_ entered a broad bay and anchored beside an island which the natives called Manhattan. Hudson took possession of this region in the name of his Dutch employers and named it New Netherland. Here he traded with the Indians and sailed a little way up the beautiful river which now bears his name. “Here,” one of his men wrote in the journal, “the land grew very high and mountainous.” Hudson and his crew were afraid of the Indians. They captured two red men and tried to hold them as prisoners. They thought that the other Indians would treat the white men well for fear that Hudson would kill these two prisoners. But they made their escape through a porthole and swam to the shore. As the _Half Moon_ got under way again, the two Indians and their friends stood on the bank, war-whooping, brandishing tomahawks, and calling for vengeance.