On August 7, Hudson was abreast New York harbor; but a mist part heat, part fog, part the gathering purples of coming autumn—hid the low-lying hills. Sliding idly along the summer sea, mystic, unreal, lotus dreams in the very August air, the world a world of gold in the yellow summer light—the _Half Moon_ came to James River by August 18, where Smith of Virginia lived; but the mutineers had no mind to go up to Jamestown settlement. There, the English would outnumber them, and English law did not deal gently with mutineers. A heat hurricane sent the green waves smashing over decks off South Carolina, and in the frantic fright of the ship’s cat dashing from side to side, the turbaned pirates imagined portent of evil. Perhaps, too, they were coming too near the Spanish settlements of Florida. All their bravado of scuttled Spanish ships may have been pot-valor. Any way, they consented to head the boat back north in a search for the passage above the Chesapeake. Past the swampy Chesapeake, a run up the Delaware burnished as a mirror in the morning light; through the heat haze over a glassy sea along that New Jersey shore where the world of pleasure now passes its summers from Cape May and Atlantic City to the highlands of New Jersey—slowly glided the _Half Moon_. Sand reefs gritted the keel, and the boat sheered out from shore where a line of white foam forewarned more reefs. Juet, the mate, did duty at the masthead, scanning the long coast line for that inlet of the old charts. The East India men lay sprawled over decks, beards unkempt, long hair tied back by gypsy handkerchiefs, bizarre jewels gleaming from huge brass earrings. Some were paying out the sounding line from the curved beak of the prow. Others fished for a shark at the stern, throwing out pork bait at the end of a rope. Many were squatted on the decks unsheltered from the sun, chattering like parrots over games of chance.