Mariners with an experienced eye for marketable pelts came to Virginia in increasing numbers--hardy, courageous men who were prepared to take incredible risks in the pursuit of beaver, otter, bear and the big Virginia muskrat. By 1620 there were nearly one hundred fur traders operating in and about the Chesapeake Bay, according to an official of the colony. They plied their shallops and pinnaces up unexplored tidewater streams and rivers to find the villages of the unpredictable savages, hazarding their very lives to learn the ways and language of the aborigines, and to trade with them. They established wilderness trading posts, building palisaded forts which later came to be occupied by merchants and farmers and became permanent settlements. These fur traders found the profits attractive enough to offset the dangers--not only those posed by their early contacts with the red men but those threatened by rival Englishmen during much of the seventeenth century. At times rival traders proved much more dangerous than the aborigines. The Englishmen were to fight among themselves, often with piratical and bloody fury, over the fur trade of the Chesapeake tidewater and for possession of the Susquehanna and Potomac River routes to the lush lake country of the north where the Frenchmen bartered for pelts. But while the Englishmen were thus engaged among themselves on the backside of Virginia some foreign traders moved in as their neighbors on the coast, first on the Hudson and then on the Connecticut and Delaware Rivers. These were the Dutchmen, who forthwith enjoyed a most profitable commerce in pelts with the natives and began settling themselves in complete possession of all those parts of “Virginia.” VII _The Dutch Profit by a Mutiny_ In the late summer of 1609 a Dutch ship, the _Half Moon_, was cruising the coasts of America. It had an English master. The merchants of the Dutch East India Company had engaged the Englishman, Captain Henry Hudson, to search for a northeastern passage to China over the frozen top of the world. Instead, he sailed their ship west. A mutiny compelled him to change his course, or so he later claimed. It seems that his twenty-man crew, mostly Dutch, had been accustomed to warmer seas. They refused to brave the northern cold. Henry Hudson himself probably had come to recognize the impracticability of the Arctic route. No longer did he hold to the notion that because the sun shone continuously at the north pole for five months of the year temperate waters for navigation would be found there, that is, once the first belt of Arctic cold was pierced. Twice before, for English merchants of the Muscovy Company, he had tried for that northern route only to be frustrated by ice-choked seas--and mutinous crews.