THE ICE AT LAST BEGAN TO WITHDRAW FROM THE BAY in which the grounded Discovery had been frozen into place. Now that there was a measure of open water, Hudson moved to replenish stores, sending out some of the company’s members, including Henry Greene, in the ship’s boat with a seine. They reaped a marvellous catch on their first day: “five hundred fish, as big as good herrings and some trouts,” according to Prickett. But they never again had a catch quite so bountiful, and there were twenty-two famished mouths to feed.
Meanwhile, Philip Staffe assembled the shallop, which had remained in pieces aboard the Discovery since their departure from London. Emboldened by the survival of his company, Hudson was not about to abandon his secretive surveying. Refastening the shallop’s planks to ribs and keel, hanging its rudder, laying aboard its oars, and rigging its sails and spars was a signal from Hudson that he was not through with his unexplained probing of James Bay. He now had a separate vessel, seaworthy, capacious, and with a much shallower draft than the Discovery, for scouting the coast.
The sight of the little vessel taking shape under Staffe’s expert direction would have been both disheartening and tempting to the crewmembers who had had enough of Hudson’s passage-seeking. According to Prickett’s account, Henry Greene had been able to forge alliances within the crew. He began plotting with William Wilson, whom Hudson had promoted to boatswain the previous September, “and some others” to take the shallop and the fishing net and strike out for themselves.
It might have seemed a rash plan. But the men who survived Barentsz’s overwintering at the tip of Novaya Zemlya had successfully made their escape in two open boats. While Barentsz had perished on the return journey, most of the men were able to complete an exceptional passage of hundreds of miles down the west coast of Novaya Zemlya and then across the White Sea to the Kola Peninsula, where they were at last rescued and transported back to Amsterdam. With luck and good seamanship, the shallop’s thieves might make it to the Labrador coast or Newfoundland and find a passage home with fishermen or whalers.
With the ice receding, his men going hungry, and the plague of scurvy (somewhat attenuated by the spruce drink) still among them, Hudson was balanced on a thin edge of opportunity. Although he could not have known of the plan hatched by Greene and Wilson, he well understood his own vulnerability in an expedition with such a history of dissension. He was back aboard the Hopewell at Novaya Zemlya, carefully calculating his own security.
June 30, 1608: Henry Hudson was behaving as a gentleman would in a disreputable Southwark tavern, choosing a seat that placed his back safely to the wall and afforded a view of everyone in the room. Henry and his son John remained together, alone, aboard the Hopewell as she swung at anchor while the rest of their shipmates—all accounted for, all in plain view—stroked for Novaya Zemlya in the shallop.
“At the island where we rode lieth a little rock,” Hudson noted in the voyage journal, “whereon were forty or fifty morses [walruses] lying asleep, being all that it could hold, it being so full and little. I sent my company ashore to them, leaving none aboard but my boy with me.”
Hudson consistently made a point of staying aboard the Hopewell, and otherwise never wandering far from it for any length of time. He made no mention of having left the Hopewell during the 1607 voyage, and the 1608 expedition was no different. The ship was both his command and his sanctuary. He would not permit himself to be separated from it. The shore party of June 30 was the third he had dispatched to the western shores of the Russian archipelago, and the third that he had declined to join. And, as on this occasion, he might always have kept John close by him.
Two years earlier, sailors aboard this same ship had watched a very similar scene, of John Knight and his companions rowing away to an island. Hudson could not have taken more care not to repeat John Knight’s possible error.
The assignment of leading this party was given to Robert Juet, and the shallop drew up to the rock where the walruses were sleeping, warming themselves in the summer’s never-setting sun, which coaxed their hides to a cinnamon brown as blood engorged their skin. These animals were massive enough to justify the name “sea oxen”: the males were upwards of ten feet long and three thousand pounds, the females still formidable at perhaps half their size. Calving would have ended in June; females would have been nursing pups they bore only every two to three years.
Walruses are wary animals, easy to startle. Slow and lumbering on shore, the beasts scattered into the sea at the arrival of the shallop, heaving their bodies in panic over the rocks. Henry and John Hudson, maintaining a secure distance on the deck of the Hopewell, would have heard the thunderous splashes, the squealing of the pups, the barking of the adults, the shouting of the men, the flailing oars smacking on stone as blades sought to bite water, the clatter of pikes seeking a mark, the percussion of muskets.
The single killing was, as Hudson related, a male. Walrus hunters never brought the whole animal back aboard their ship but rather butchered them ashore, their tusks sawn off and their blubber rendered into train oil in kettles at land stations.
While some of the men went off to bludgeon nesting murres and gather eggs to replenish the ship’s larder, others would have begun to work on the walrus, slicing through the tough hide of the neck, which could be more than an inch thick, then quickly through several inches of blubber and down into powerful muscle.
When Juet returned to the Hopewell, the shallop and the men in it would have been slathered and speckled with blood, the very picture of dark deeds, bearing sacks full of birds that would provide fresh meat. They came aboard, Hudson noted, with the severed head, a grisly trophy of the shore party. Its ivory tusks, and the implicit promise of more of them, were about the only things of any value that Hudson took back to his sponsors. But the sight of the cruel competence of Robert Juet must have stayed with Hudson to the end of his days.
The shallop was assembled, but the Discovery was still beached. Only after the ship was refloated could she be readied for sea. If Hudson permitted a large portion of the ship’s company to go fishing with the shallop, with the Discovery not yet prepared to sail, they might not come back, leaving him stranded with a handful of companions and a ship they could not put to sea. But so long as the Discovery was not ready to sail, he could seize the opportunity to command the shallop himself, to ends that were not entirely understood.
Prickett thought that Hudson wanted to make contact with the people their lone Cree visitor had told them lived nearby, in hope of securing fresh meat. Yet Hudson provided no firm date for his return—and what is more, he took the extraordinary step of ordering the men who remained behind actually to prepare the Discovery to sail: “They that remained aboard were to take in water, wood and ballast, and to have all things in a readiness against [i.e., for when] he came back,” Prickett related. The Discovery would be fully operational, fully capable of being sailed home, while Hudson was off in the shallop.
Perhaps there was still enough pack ice in James Bay that Hudson felt assured the Discovery could not leave before he returned. But no aspect of the Discovery voyage was stranger, and would be less appreciated for its strangeness, than this single, seemingly reckless decision by Hudson. He provided would-be mutineers with an unparalleled opportunity to sail away without him. And not in the shallop, but in the main ship.
Hudson was proposing to take an unknown number of the ship’s crew with him in the shallop. Prickett wrote that the master took out of the Discovery enough food to last the men in the shallop for “eight or nine days.” Hudson could have intended to stay away from the Discovery much longer, by fishing and hunting, as he also took the seine with him. He could not count on the men left with the Discovery waiting for him to return. But he also could not help himself: he was absolutely determined to make the journey in the shallop.
If Hudson’s sole intention was to contact the Cree to secure food from them, it would have been far less risky for him, and for the venture overall, if others were sent, in a smaller party, to accomplish the same thing. As both Prickett and Woodhouse independently asserted an essential air of mystery around Hudson’s persistent interest in the southern extreme of the bay, they appear not to have appreciated what Hudson surely was up to: a last-gasp attempt to find the passage south. For it was not without coincidence that, given the choice between steering north or south to find the Cree camps, Hudson went south.
Why did Hudson not just continue to investigate with the relaunched Discovery? After the grounding the ship suffered before the overwintering, Hudson must have known that any further coastal surveying should be done in the shallow-draft shallop. And he probably had held the crew together by assuring them (as Prickett understood) that as soon as the ice was clear, they would sail north, to replenish their stores at the murre colony. Using the Discovery to explore south now could have ignited the mutiny he had thus far held at bay. If he were to make one last attempt to find the passage south to Lake Tadouac, which would then connect to the one Champlain avowed led to the Pacific, it would have to be on his own, in the shallop, while the Discovery was being prepared to sail for the murre colony. Hudson might never again get the chance to find the route, and he was more than likely prepared to die trying if necessary.
The decision as to who should stay with the Discovery and who should come with him in the shallop must have sorely tried Hudson. He would have wished to take every able-bodied and dutifully subordinate hand he thought he could draw away from the Discovery. But if he left behind too few loyal men, the likelihood of a mutiny was all the higher, and the Discovery could be lost. He could try to divide up the known troublemakers, taking a potential ringleader or two with him, but he had to be sure they would not then be in a position to wrest command of the shallop.
Prickett, who apparently remained with the Discovery, did not say how the crew was divided or how many accompanied Hudson. The mate, Robert Bylot, also would have stayed behind, overseeing the outfitting of the ship. Hudson would never have parted willingly with his son John; perhaps he also took along the trusted quartermaster, John King. The carpenter, Philip Staffe, was an especially valued hand, but Hudson may not have been able to spare him from his primary duty of ensuring the Discovery was fit to return to sea. The boatswain, William Wilson, who was responsible for the physical state of the ship, also would have stayed behind to supervise her refitting. And the barber-surgeon, Edward Wilson, would have remained with the Discovery, to tend to the dead weight of the lame like Prickett.
Those whom Hudson left behind could be forgiven for thinking that they might not ever see their master again. It was not only because he might come to harm, or because mutineers in the shallop might abandon him, or because mutineers left aboard the Discovery would seize the chance to make off with the ship. It was because, in pursuing an unknown and possibly illusive goal, he simply might never turn around. They were the first crew in the history of seafaring to bear witness to a master who, in sailing away from his main command in a shallop, was quite possibly leading his own mutiny.
An untold number of days passed without any sign of Hudson. How far he went, and what he saw, is unknowable. If he was wintering in the vicinity of whatever constituted Rupert Bay in 1611, he may have steered deeper into it, hoping one of several feeder rivers could provide the passage south. Then as now, he would have found rapids blocking his way on every one of them. Alternatively, he may have left the shelter of his wintering place and steered farther south, to Hannah Bay, where the Harricanaw River enters James Bay at its (now) southernmost point, or searched farther west, gaining the mouth of the Moose River. Neither one of these rivers, their outflows cutting through extensive mud flats, their lower courses impassable by a ship at low tide, would have provided the passage he was hoping for.
This was how and where Hudson’s quest to find a passage out of the Northern Sea and on to the Pacific may well have ended: in a shallop anchored in mud flats against an outflowing tide that was draining a river’s lower reaches dry, with yellowlegs striding delicately across the slick, exposed bay bottom, and clouds of mosquitoes tormenting him and his men.
The chart published by Hessel Gerritsz in 1612, based on Hudson’s own cartography, would show the lower reaches of James Bay ending at latitude 50. Four hundred years later, the bay would not quite reach latitude 51. Even with the land some sixteen feet lower at the time of Hudson’s visit, he could not have reached that lower measure. But he still would have progressed much farther south than anyone who would follow him, than anyone possibly could in the coming centuries. With the bay shrinking and retreating north, Hudson retreated with it.
In Hudson’s absence, the able-bodied hands under Bylot readied the Discovery for her return to sea and, as all likely prayed, a speedy return to England. A few aboard her may have been prepared to take the Discovery now, if the bay’s ice cover permitted, but the balance of power must have rested still with men who were willing to wait for Hudson’s return in the shallop and allow him to make good on his understood promise to sail for the murre colony.
Hudson “returned worse than he went forth,” according to Prickett. He had been unable to make any contact with the native people. Prickett reported that they set the woods alight whenever the shallop approached. The ridgeline of spruce was transformed into a bonfire of fear and hostility.
Nothing further was ever reported on what Hudson had seen or done.