Even in the last extremity Staffe kept his head, exerted his personal influence with the mutineers for the good of the eight men who were to be cast adrift with the master. Declining the proferred chance of personal safety, he asked the mutineers to give means of prolonging life in the wild. He thus secured his tools, pikes, a pot, some meal, a musket with powder and shot. Then he quietly went down into the boat. Wilson, a mutineer, testified that "Philip Staffe might have staid still in the ship, but he would voluntarily go into the shallop for love of the master (Hudson)." Rather than cast in his life with mutineers, thus insuring present comfort with prolonged life, this plain, illiterate English sailor stood fast by his commander, and faced a lingering death while caring for his sick and helpless comrades in a desolate, far-off land. Death with unstained honor among his distressed shipmates was to Philip Staffe preferable to a life of shame and dishonor among the mutineers of the _Discovery_. Surely he belongs to those described by the Bishop of Exeter: "Men who trample self beneath them, Men who make their country wreathe them." The heroic loyalty of Philip Staffe was fittingly embalmed in quaint historic prose by the incomparable English chronicler of the principal voyages of famous navigators. Purchas, in "His Pilgrimage," relates: "But see what sincerity can do in the most desperate trials. One Philip Staffe, an Ipswich man, who, according to his name, had been a principal staff and stay to the weaker and more enfeebled courages of his companions in the whole action, lightening and unlightening their drooping darkened spirits, with sparks from his own resolution; their best purveyor, with his piece on shore, and both a skilful carpenter and lusty mariner on board; when he could by no persuasions, seasoned with tears, divert them from their devilish designs, notwithstanding they entreated him to stay with them, yet chose rather to commit himself to God's mercy in the forlorn shallop than with such villains to accept of likelier hopes." The mutineers, having deposed and marooned the great navigator Hudson, looked forward to a homeward voyage of plenty and of comfort. But under the rash and untrained directions of Henry Greene, William Wilson, and Robert Juet, the wretched, luckless seamen were in turn harried by hostile savages and distressed by deadly famine.