About 480 B. C., Pindar, the greatest of the lyric poets of Greece, declared that “Beyond Cades (Cadiz in Spain) no man, however bold and brave, could pass; only a god might voyage those waters.” The Atlantic was deemed a dangerous ocean. Thus we are reminded of some of the obstacles which delayed European discovery of the western world. All that is known of the life, education, pursuits and achievements of Hudson, the Navigator, whose name is perpetuated in monuments (“more enduring than brass”) upon the face of nature (its waters and land) in North America, is contained in the brief period of five years, or from 1606 to 1611, and is almost entirely contained in his log-books of his four voyages. That so little about Hudson is known is not because efforts have not been made by competent and zealous investigators. It is greatly to be regretted that Richard Hakluyt and Samuel Purchas, Englishmen and contemporaries of Hudson, so greatly condensed in their writings the material they had and which is the chief source of information. Hessel Gerritsz and Emanuel Van Meteren, Hollanders, also contemporaries of Hudson, historians, geographers, map-makers and publishers, threw much side-light upon the discoveries which had been made in search of an all-water route to India (describing and illustrating by maps) before Hudson made any of his four famous voyages. Coming down to the nineteenth century we find prominent among Hudson’s biographers, Henry R. Cleveland’s Life of Hudson, in Sparks’ Library of American Biography, vol. 10, 1838; Henry Hudson in Holland, by the Hon. Henry C. Murphy, United States Minister at The Hague in 1859; Gen. John Meredith Read, Jr.’s elaborate historical research about Hudson published in 1866; Dr. G. M. Asher’s article on Henry Hudson, printed for the Hakluyt Society in London, 1860; and John Knox Laughton, Professor of Modern History in Kings College since 1885, whose article appears in the Dictionary of International Biography, vol. 28, pp. 147-149, stating that Dr. Asher’s article of 400 pages covers almost everything known about Henry Hudson, and Justin Winsor’s America, eight volumes, in 1889; John Brodhead’s History of New York, 1871, etc., etc. _We do know that Hudson, the Navigator’s name was Henry and not Hendrick_, as so often called and even now blazoned on the newest and finest steamboat on the Hudson river, as evidenced in his contract with the Amsterdam directors of the Dutch East India Company, a copy of which follows. _We know that he was and remained an Englishman when on his return from his third voyage_ (for the Dutch) the English government forbade him and all the Englishmen with him to enter any service other than for her own country. As Hudson did not understand the Dutch language he employed, as his interpreter in his conference with the two Amsterdam directors of the Dutch East India Company, a learned Hollander named Jodocus Hondius, who signed the contract as a witness.