It is like a great sewer of humanity, this river tide with its city’s traffic of a thousand years. Farmers rafting down loads of hay, market women punting themselves along with boat loads of vegetables, fishing schooners breasting the tide with full-blown sails, high-hulled galleons from Spain, flat-bottomed, rickety tubs from the Zee, gay little craft—barges with bunting, wherries with lovers, rowboats with nothing more substantial than silk awnings for a sail—jostle and throng and bump each other as Hudson’s crew shoots down with the tide. Not a man of the crew but wonders—is he seeing it all for the last time? But here is the Muscovy Company’s ship all newly rigged waiting at Gravesend, absurdly small for such a venture on such a sea. Then, in the clanking of anchor chains and sing-song of the capstan and last shouts of the noisy rivermen, apprehensions are forgotten. Can they but find a short route to China, their homely little craft may plough back with as rich cargo as ever Spanish caravel brought from the fabulous South Sea. The full tide heaves and rocks and bears out; a mad-souled dreamer standing at the prow with his little son, who is very silent. The air is fraught with something too big for words. May first, 1607, Hudson is off for the Pole. He might as well have been following the Flying Dutchman, or ballooning to the moon. * * * * * The city along the banks of the Thames has presently thinned to towns. The towns slide past into villages. The villages blur into meadow lands with the thatch roof of the farmer’s cot; and before night, the last harbor light has been left in the offing. The little ship has headed her carved prow north. The billows of the North Sea roll to meet her. Darkness falls with no sound but the swish of the waters against the ports, the hum of the wind through the rigging, and the whirring flap of the great sails shifting to catch the breeze.