When Hudson stepped from the wheel-house or cabin next morning, they leaped upon him like a pack of wolves. No oaths on Scripture and Holy Cross this break of day! Oaths of another sort--oaths and blows and railings--all pretence of clean motives thrown off--malice with its teeth out snapping! Somewhere north of Rupert, probably off Charlton Island, Hudson, his son, and eight loyal members of the crew were thrown into one of the boats on the davits. The boat was lowered on its pulleys and touched sea. The _Discovery_ then spread sail and sped through open water to the wind. The little boat with the marooned crew came climbing after. Somebody threw into it some implements and ammunition, and some one cut the painter. The abandoned boat slacked and fell back in the wave wash; and that is all we know of the end of Henry Hudson, who had discovered a northern sea, the size of a Mediterranean, that was to be a future arena of nations warring for an empire, and who had before discovered a river that was to be a path of world commerce. [Illustration: THE LAST HOURS OF HUDSON From the painting by Collier] What became of Hudson? A famous painting represents him, with his little son and the castaway crew, huddling among the engulfing icebergs. That may have been; but it is improbable that the dauntless old pathfinder would have succumbed so supinely. Three traditions, more or less reasonable, exist about his end. When Captain James came out twenty years later seeking the North-West Passage he found on a little island (Danby), south-east from Charlton Island, a number of sticks standing in the ground, with the chip marks of a steel blade. Did the old timbers mark some winter house of Hudson and his castaways? When Radisson came cruising among these islands fifty years later, he discovered an old house 'all marked and battered with bullets'; and the Indians told Radisson stories of 'canoes with sails' having come to the Bay. Had Indians, supplied with firearms overland from Quebec traders, assailed that house where nine white men, standing at bay between starvation and their enemies, took their last stand? The third tradition is of a later day. A few years ago a resident of Fort Frances, who had spent the summer at the foot of James Bay, and who understood the Indian language, wrote that the Indians had told him legends of white men who had come to the Bay long long ago, before ever 'the Big Company came,' and who had been cast away by their fellows, and who came ashore and lived among the Indians and took Indian wives and left red-haired descendants. It is probable that fur traders had told the Indians the story of Hudson; and this would explain the origin of this tradition. On the other hand, in a race utterly isolated from the outside world, among whom neither printing nor telegraph ever existed, traditions handed down from father to son acquire peculiar value; and in them we can often find a germ of truth. The legends are given for what they are