But Hudson’s men were obdurate to arguments all up in air. They will _not_ seek the passage by Greenland. Hudson must turn back. To a great spirit, obstructions are never a stop. They are only a delay. Hudson sets his teeth. You will see him go by Greenland one day yet—mark his word! Meantime, home he sails through what he calls “slabbie” weather, putting into Tilbury Docks on the 15th of September. If money bags counted up the profits of that year’s trip, they would write against Hudson’s name in the Book of Judgment—Failure! CHAPTER II 1608 HUDSON’S SECOND VOYAGE Henceforth Hudson was an obsessed man. First, _he_ possessed the Idea. Now the _Idea_ possessed him. It was to lead him on a course no man would willingly have followed. Yet he followed it. Everything, life or death, love or hate, gain or loss, was to be subservient to that Idea. That current drifting across the Pole haunted him as it was to haunt Nansen at a later date. By attempting too much, had he missed all? He had gone to Spitzbergen in the Eighties. If he had kept down to Nova Zembla Islands in the Seventies, would he have found less ice? The man possessed by a single idea may be a trial to his associates. To himself, he is a torment. Once he becomes baffled, he is beset by doubts, by questions, by fears. If his faith leaves him, his life goes to pieces like a rope of sand. Hudson must have been beset by such doubts now. It is the place where the adventurer leaves the milestones of all known paths and has not yet found firm footing for his own feet. Hundreds, thousands, have struck out from the beaten Trail. Few, indeed, have blazed a new path. The bones of the dead bleach on the shores of the realm ruled by the Goddess of the Unknown. It is the place where the beginner sets out to be a great artist, or a great scientist, or a great discoverer. Thousands have set out on the same quest who should have rested content at their own ingle-nook, happy at the plow; not good plowmen spoiled. The beginner balances the chances—a thousand to one against him! Is his vision a fool’s quest, a will-o’-the-wisp? Is the call the tickling of his own restless vanity; or the voice of a great truth? He can learn only by going forward, and the going forward may take him over a precipice—may prove him a fool. This was the place Hudson was at now. It is a place that has been passed by all the world’s great. Nine Dutch boats had at different times passed between Nova Zembla and the main coast of Russia. To be sure, they had been blocked by the ice beyond, but might not Hudson by some lucky chance follow that Polar Current through open water? The chances were a thousand to one against him. Who but a fool would take the chance? Nansen’s daring plan to utilize the ice-drift _to lift_ his ship above the ice-crush—did not occur to Hudson. Except for that difference, the two explorers—the greatest of the early Arctic navigators and the greatest of the modern—planned very much the same course.