Henry Hudson was not wild, erratic, nor a rover. Perhaps no one whom Hudson met in London so much determined his course as did Captain John Smith, a very remarkable English adventurer—a daring rover in early life, entering military service in several of the European governments, captured, imprisoned, and escaped to play such a prominent part in establishing the first permanent English settlement in Virginia in the United States. Captain John Smith’s name is almost always associated with that of Pocahontas (the daughter of the famous Chief Powhatan) who while yet a girl but twelve years is said to have interposed her body and thereby saved the life of Captain Smith from the uplifted war clubs of the Indians about to descend upon him. Captain Smith also corresponded with Hudson, gave him maps of North America and advised him as to the course to be pursued in seeking a westward watercourse to India. Perhaps the maps most serviceable to Hudson in his voyage westward in 1609 were those of New France, which plainly represented the Grande river (subsequently called the Hudson river), and were published in the sixteenth century. Hudson was also a theorist. He believed in an “Open Polar Sea” and so far as is known was the first to promulgate that theory, entertained and followed by searchers after the North Pole. Hudson made the acquaintance and won the friendship of learned geographers in Amsterdam, prominent among them was the Reverend Peter Plancius, who said it was reasonable that the sea should be open near the Pole where the sun shines incessantly for months though with less heat than where it shines only a few hours by day and the hours of the night intervening, cooling. Hudson said his experience convinced him, for after passing beyond a certain line (about 66° north latitude) the sea became more open as he went further north. This Doctor Peter Plancius was a member of the Reformed Church and as such driven from his Belgian home by the Spaniards, he heartily co-operated with Usselinx in his plan to form a West India Company. He was often in consultation with Hudson in Amsterdam and to his chapter on “Norumbega (said to be somewhere in New England) et Virginia” he added a map which, imperfect in some respect—incorrect in its latitudes—was serviceable to Hudson in his westward voyage. The French map of about 1517 and the map of Thomas Hood, an Englishman, published in 1594, which shows under latitude 40° north (New York city is 40° 43′ north) the mouth of a river called Rio de San Antonio, the name given by the earliest Spanish discoverers to what later on became known as the Hudson river. In this connection it may not be amiss to call attention to the historical fact that Giovanni da Verrazano, a Florentine navigator in the employ of Francis I, King of France, entered the New York bay and saw at least the mouth of the river which the French called the “Grande river” in 1524, eighty-five years before Henry Hudson saw it.