The Adventurers of England on Hudson Bay: A Chronicle of the Fur Trade in the NorthLaut, Agnes C.
History
The Adventurers of England on Hudson Bay: A Chronicle of the Fur Trade in the North
Laut, Agnes C.
Fur trade -- Canada; Hudson's Bay Company; Northwest, Canadian -- History
Was that tide from the Pacific? How easily does a wish become father to
the thought! Ice lay north, open water south and west; and so south-west
steered Hudson, standing by the wheel, though Juet, the old mate, raged
in open mutiny because not enough provisions remained to warrant further
voyaging, much less the wintering of a crew of twenty in an ice-locked
world. Henry Greene, a gutter-snipe picked off the streets of London, as
the most of the sailors of that day were, went whispering from man to
man of the crew that the master's commands to go on ought not to be
obeyed. But we must not forget two things when we sit in judgment on
Henry Hudson's crew. First, nearly all sailors of that period were
unwilling men seized forcibly and put on board. Secondly, in those days
nearly all seamen, masters as well as men, were apt to turn pirate at
the sight of an alien sail. The ships of all foreign nations were
considered lawful prey to the mariner with the stronger crew or fleeter
sail.
[Illustration: THE ROUTES OF HUDSON AND MUNCK
Map by Bartholomew.]
The waters that we know to-day as the Pacific were known to Hudson as
the South Sea. And now the tide rolled south over shelving, sandy
shores, past countless islands yellowing to the touch of September
frosts, and silent as death but for the cries of gull, tern, bittern,
the hooting piebald loon, match-legged phalaropes, and geese and ducks
of every hue, collected for the autumnal flight south. It was a
yellowish sea under a sky blue as turquoise; and it may be that Hudson
recalled sailor yarns of China's seas, lying yellow under skies blue as
a robin's egg. At any rate he continued to steer south in spite of the
old mate's mutterings. Men in unwilling service at a few shillings a
month do not court death for the sake of glory. The shore line of rocks
and pine turned westward. So did Hudson, sounding the ship's line as he
crept forward one sail up, the others rattling against the bare masts in
the autumn wind--doleful music to the thoughts of the coward crew. The
shore line at the south end of Hudson Bay, as the world now knows, is
cut sharply by a ridge of swampy land that shoals to muddy flats in
what is known as Hannah Bay.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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