Henry Hudson, Part 2

Published Dec 3, 2014, 4:14 PM

This episode picks up in the middle of Hudson's third voyage, as the Half Moon is making its way down North America's east coast. As Hudson doggedly pursues the idea of a northern sea route from Europe to Asia, he makes a number of poor decisions.

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Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from houseworks dot Com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly Fry and I'm Tracy V. Wilson. So this is the second of a two part episode on Henry Hudson. So to catch anybody back up if you don't recall exactly where we left off, Hudson and his men were in the midst of their third voyage. Uh. We should be clear that it was not all the same men from the previous two voyages. He had a lot of turnover, but a couple that remained consistent throughout, including his son John Uh. They had made it to North America after having some failure at trying to navigate the waters north of Russia in an effort to find a passage to uh Asia. And so they are in North America. They are traveling aboard their ship, the half Moon. They are mapping the coast from Nova Scotia and inlets further south, and at the point we pick up, they are in the river surround what would eventually become New York. The crew of the half Moon made a series of successful trades with Native Americans that they were trading knives and beads in exchange for things like tobacco and corn. On September six, Hudson sent crewman John Coleman and several other men on a mission to sound another nearby river. According to Jewet's journal, the expedition played out this way. The lands told us they were as pleasant, with grass and flowers and goodly trees as ever they had seen, and very sweet smells came from them. So they went in two leagues and saw an open sea and returned. And as they came back, they were set upon by two canoes, the one having twelve the other fourteen men. The night came on and it began to rain, so that their match went out, and they had one man slain in the fight, which was an Englishman named John Coleman with an arrow shot into his throat, and two more hurt. It grew oh dark that they could not find the ship that night, but labored to and fro on their oars. They had so great a stream that they're grapnel would not hold them. So, yeah, they're caught in current. They can't really anchor, uh, and they're just kind of floating about trying to stay away from shore. I'm not sure where their ship is and this entry leaves out whatever may have motivated or catalyzed this conflict that they had with the Native Americans who are said to have attacked them in these two canoes. It could have been the result of the ill behavior that had been going on prior to this. As we mentioned in the last episode, the crew of the Half Moon did some pretty horrible things to the Native Americans they encountered along the way. They would sort of trade with them in some cases, and in other cases they would set fire to things and steal all their stuff. They had even kidnapped some Native Americans, although it appears that most of them, if not all, were able to escape in some way or another. So we don't know if those previous events caused this problem or if they could have been some sort of incident that happened during this sounding mission, like an isolated incident during that So no mention has ever made of motive. We don't know really why all this went down. The surviving men got back to the Half Moon the next day and they had their slain comrade with them. Colman was buried and an exploration continued. And it's during this time, which was the first half of September six nine, that Henry Hudson ventured into the Wide River that would eventually be named after him. Hudson continued down the river, thinking this could be that elusive passage to the Pacific Ocean that he thought North America would have through it, but once the waterway became too shallow to continue. Uh. They were exploring throughout. There are many many detailed uh sort of lists and surveys that were going on and accounts of this that we're not getting into the nitty gritty details because it becomes sort of a list show at that point. UM. But eventually they realized they could not go any further because of these shallow waters they were hitting, and that they were just going to have to turn back and call this a successful voyage. On October four nine, Henry Hudson headed back to Europe. The half Moon arrived in Dartmouth on November seven. And it's unclear why Hudson decided to go to England rather than Holland, and there's been some speculation through the years that maybe he was actually working as a spy for the English interests while funding his explorations with Dutch money and Dutch maps. Yeah, that's one of those things that people really like to um you know, kind of put four theories about that. He may have been working as a spy all along. He may have been attempting to regain favor with the English after his first two failed missions by completing this mission, you know, under the auspices of being a Dutch company's ship but elite. No, really, I was getting stuff for you guys all along. We just don't know, but it is sort of odd that he was like, Hey, let's go to Dartmouth and go to the port there instead of hitting to Amsterdam. And while the while Hudson and his crew were living on the half Moon as it sat there important dart Smith, Hudson had written to his bosses at the Dutch East India Company proposing a new mission to find a northwest passage. He was really pretty chucked by the things he had gotten to explore in North America, and when the d E i c. Directors received Hudson's missive they immediately sent word that he should continue to Amsterdam immediately. There's a problem. The ship was detained at port by English authorities. Hudson and the other Englishmen on the crew were to be seized and forbidden to work with the Dutch any longer or ever again. Sailing under another nation's flag was basically treason, so the half Moon and all the Dutch sailors aboard were sent back home. And before we get to sort of how this plays out and how Hudson manages to launch one more voyage, do you want to take a word from a sponsor, Yes, So back to Henry Hudson. Despite the shame of having sailed under a Dutch flag, at least in the eyes of his English countrymen, hudson reputation was actually a little bit better in England than it had been after his second voyage, and this was thanks to this successful exploration he had had along the North American coast and his encounters with the natives in the area, even though they were pretty horrible to the natives in a lot of cases, and unlike in sixteen o eight, he was able to get backing for another trip. Sir Thomas Smith, who served as governor and treasurer of both the Virginia Company and the English East India Company, bankrolled the voyage along with Sir Dudley Diggs and John Wolstenholme, a new company, the Company of Gentleman, was formed by the three backers plus Prince Henry, under which the mission would be carried out, and as interest grew, other backers tried to get in on the action. Also. Yeah, once there were some wealthy guys and a prince involved in this whole thing, it seemed like it surely it was going to be lucrative, so other investors did try to jump on that bandwagon. The Company of Gentlemen purchased a ship called the Discovery for the voyage. She was larger than any of Hudson's previous vessels, and so Hudson and his crew sailed from England in April six ten. Robert Jewett was once again on board. This was a choice that would eventually be Hudson's undoing, as well as his son John once again, and this crew included twenty three men. It was the largest that Hudson had ever commanded, and the send off was quite grand, thanks in no small part to the Prince's involvement in this venture. The ship made a stop in Gravesend, where crewmember Master Colburn was dropped off and Henry Green was picked up to replace him. Colburn had been assigned by the backing merchants as an advisor. And while Hudson is said to have sent a letter to his back explaining his reasons for making the switch, that information has never been made public. No, And in uh Hudson's journals on it, he basically just says, oh, I put that guy in a small boat and send him back to London. He doesn't discuss the reasons. Uh. But Green, the man that they picked up after they had dropped off Colburn, was basically trouble Uh. He was a gambler. He was a troublemaker. He was known as a roustabout. He had known Hudson prior to the voyage, and he was actually listed as a passenger rather than a crewman. UH. By mid May, though, Green had already been causing problems on the ship. He got into a fist fight with the ship's surgeon in May, and Hudson immediately came to his defense and talked about what a hothead the surgeon had. But the rest of the crew backed up the surgeon, and this sort of seeded some problems. She had started openly speculating that Hudson had brought Green on specifically as a spy to keep an eye on the crew, which ray the tensions even further. While Hudson threatened to put you it off the ship, there was never any actual punishment for this insubordination. As with previous voyages, there was a great deal of ice to contend with. Uh, it's the first episode. This will be an ongoing theme, and it does indeed happen every time. As you may have also guessed from our discussion of the previous three voyages, tacking back and forth in icy water and getting nowhere while the conditions are miserable just to physically be in does not really make for a super delighted crew. By July seven, the crew was near mutiny, and at this point they rounded the tip of Greenland and attempted to enter what's now Hudson Straight. It was called the Furious Overfall at the time, and they dithered around in that area trying to figure out how to get through or around all the ice. They eventually got to what's now called Hudson Bay west of Quebec, but they were in a constant struggle and not taking any sort of real headway. Yeah, they were really just kind of it seemed too many people drifting to and fro UH. On July sixteenth, Hudson finally had this revelation apparently that he was in a bay that was a dead end and not in fact some sort of passage through North America. So he decided to head north in an attempt to get out of this dead end bay back into the Furious Overfall with the Discovery. And this is an incredibly difficult area to pass through, even for ships that know where they're going. UH and Hudson basically spent the next month and a half getting lost and going back and forth a month and a half. When September arrived, Discovery was in James Bay, and this is a smaller bay at the southern tip of Hudson Bay. The crew was just beyond angry. Jewett challenged Hudson, and the pairs ongoing tension finally just hit a boiling point. Hudson ordered that Jewett be tried for mutiny and demoted him. Yeah, and with that demotion he took away a lot of his pay and gave it to somebody else, which you can imagine how delightfully that went. On September ten, there were testimonies heard regarding Jewet's intentions in his behaviors, and it was all really pretty damning crew members, even though that basically got along with Jewett, had been listening to him, threatened Hudson and almost everyone else on board in some way or another for the entirety of the journey, and so everybody a lot of people had bad things to say about Jewet's actions, even if they weren't necessarily against him, so to speak. But it was as though Hudson new sort of like, Hey, I need every possible man. We're still struggling. So he offered Jewett and any of his supporters pardon in exchange for the promise of good behavior from that point on, once all the furor over the mutiny trial died down, Hudson may have gained some points with some of the crew, but the men at this point where odds with each other, and Hudson quickly squandered any good will that he had gotten with them by continuing to meander around James Bay for the next two months, and that basically sentenced the entire group to be stuck there through another freeze, and as October came to a close, uh Hudson sent two of his men ashore to see if they could find a place to live out the winter. They ended up camping near the mouth of the Nottaway River, which was utterly miserable for them. One account written by crewman Prickett states, quote, to speak of all our trouble would be too tedious, and before we get into this winter of misery, because it really was quite awful. Uh, do you want to do a word from a sponsor, because it seems odd to stick it in the middle of a lot of horrible things happening. Let's do that. So, as we were saying, before we went into our sponsor break. From November three of sixteen ten to June of sixteen eleven the discovery, Hudson and his entire crew were stuck in the freezing cold, and it is not a big jump of logic to suspect that things went horribly. In the middle of November, one of the crew died of exposure and had to be buried in a shallow grave because the soil was too frozen to dig ad actual grave. When Henry Green, the gambling troublemaker who he mentioned earlier, said that he wanted the dead crewman's coat, Hudson gave it to him, and this was a problem. Yeah, Normally, when a crewman died, his belongings would be auctioned and the proceeds of those sales would be given to his family when the ship returned to port. This would have been the honorable way to handle it, uh terms of like tradition of the wayfarers. And when Hudson handed over the deceased coat to Green, the crew was incense. He had basically completely thrown out all of their usual protocols, and moreover, he had given the coat to a person that was not even a crew member, just this guy who was kind of a pain in the neck to begin with. Then Hudson ordered Staff, who was the ship's carpenter, to build them a house on shore. So Staff told him number one, that was impossible, and number two, he was not a house carpenter, and Hudson struck him and threatened to have him hanged. The two of them eventually cooled off, and Staff did build a makeshift house, but he also became friends with Green, which really seems to infuriate Hudson. And so this starts to really read like a playground argument, except when you consider the fact that these people are starving they are freezing, and like their lives are basically at stake. It really puts a kind of startling perspective on the whole thing. So Hudson took the coat that he had given Green back and instead he gave it to crewman Robert by a lot Like. He was mad that Green was now friends with this carpenter who had made him angry before. H Uh and Green and Hudson had a massive fight about it. Some pretty ugly insults about Green's personal life were exposed and thrown about by Hudson. Remember, they had been friends prior to this, they knew each other, and after this point that was pretty much the end of their friendship. They were never friends again. Once the shelter was built, there was a decent stab at survival going on. The men were able to shoot about a hundred dozen birds for food and catch a lot of fish, but after a few months all of the animals had either migrated to warmer areas or already been eaten, and so as winter wore on, they were running out of food and a lot of the men developed scurvy from malnutrition. At one point, one of the area natives came to trade with them, and brought pelts but no food, and Hudson made a fairly demanding trade, and while the native acquiesced and sort of suggested that he would be back, he never came back again, and in a desperate as to get more food, Hudson actually took a small boat out with a net and attempted to fish. Incidentally, that same boat had been sort of the focus of some plans by some of the men to just run and strike out on their own. They're like, let's just take the boat and go. We're gonna leave these guys and do our own thing. We have a better chance of survival. But Hudson took the boat out uh to try to get some fish, and he also tried to make contact with the natives in the area, but when the Native Americans saw him coming, they apparently set fire to the woods so that he could not approach. At this point, the ice was cracking and melting, and the crew started gathering supplies to leave. They were also collecting wood and water and materials to use this ballast. And as June came and the Discovery was at last ready to leave North America and return home, Hudson reportedly weeping distributed the remaining food that they had left evenly among the men, and several of the men, including Green, who was a troublemaker UH, consumed their rations far too quickly, and then when they were out of their own food, they accused Hudson of hoarding additional food for himself. Some of the men came forward to say they had seen additional food that had not been distributed, but Hudson showed the rest of the food to the crew, and it hadn't been distributed because it was spoiled and rancid. But even so, the tensions only got worse. So after the ship was able to make way, Hudson then made what seems like a really odd decision. It appears, instead of heading straight back to England, which is what every man on board wanted, he wanted to try again to find a northwest passage to the Pacific. He also seemed to kind of want to dither around in James Bay UH and this has actually led to some theories that there was a whole separate secondary plot going on that he was looking for something specific, such as treasure of some sort, possibly as a secret mission from his boss's back home, possibly based on some other information he had received, because some historians will say, no, it looks like he was really pretty methodically, like sounding this coastline over and over in four passes, and that comes up a couple different times where he makes what looks like four passes through weird areas, like why would you just be hanging out there? So there are some that think there was actually a method to his madness, but quite frankly, it could also just as easily be the poor decisions of a man that had been addled by an incredibly grueling year. Regardless of the reasons for his admittedly odd choices, they were just too much for the crew, and a full on mutiny took place on July twenty sixteen eleven. Henry Hudson, his son John, and seven others were put on a boat and left to fend for themselves, and as that boat was set adrift, Hudson is said to have called back to one of the mutineers that they should be aware of Jewett, but the man shouted back that it had not and jew It, but in fact had been Green that led the mutiny. So it was apparently Hudson's friend who had turned on him, who really turned on him, and for a while all the small boat that Hudson and his son and these other men were in attempted to follow the discovery just using oar power, but once they ship gained some speed and the sales were fully deployed, that was a pretty fruitless effort. The mutineers immediately went in search of the food that they still believed Hudson had been hoarding, but they only found a very few paltry items, and initially Green was the leader of the mutineers once they had dumped their commander Hudson, but it really didn't matter very much. Before long they had run a foul of Native Americans that they encountered and of each other. There was a lot of infighting. Green, along with several other mutineers, was killed in one of many skirmishes that they had with Native Americans. Jewitt eventually died of starvation on the voyage home. Once they had kind of cleared North America and we're headed out across the Atlantic Ocean, and all of the ringleaders in this mutiny perished before they could return to England. Eight survivors made it to Ireland on September six, sixteen eleven. They sold their cable and anchor there for food, and all of them were really close to death from starvation. They had subsisted for the last leg of their journey on bird bones fried in candle grease, and the birds, which were most mostly gulls, had all been consumed long before the remaining men finally got home to London on October twenty after one year, four months and three weeks away, and all of those men were charged with mutiny, all of the surviving men, but the trial didn't take place for nearly seven years, so sixteen eighteen before the trial started, and in that time several of the men had already died. Uh. The rest, seemingly just because at that point it was a hassle and there really wasn't much to go on, were acquitted and freed. Although two of the men returned to North America to try to find a Hudson or any other members of the party they abandoned, nothing was ever found, and it's presumed that they all died of exposure. Yeah, there are actually some folk tales that have built up around it. There's one tale that I think it's um I'm may be wrong. I'm doing this from memory. I did not put into my notes. I think it's an Inuit tale that there was a a young English child found in a boat that then was raised uh Inuits, and some people have speculated that that is in fact John Hudson, but that's really there's no evidence. It's all just folklore at that point. And there are a few other folklorish chyle tales about no the men survived and they settled, and but we really don't have any evidence to back that up. It's just sort of fun speculation at that point. So Henry Hudson was very successful at finding a passage to Asia, but his exploration of North America is often credited with catalyzing interest and colonization for both Dutch and English settlers. His name, as many of you listening probably know, has not only been given to bodies of water, but also schools, towns. You can find it on bridges and their memorials to these men throughout the US and Canada. So while he was not really a success in his primary mission, he did leave quite a legacy, though we don't know what happened to him in the end. There seems to be folklore surrounding just about every lost party of explorers. Oh yeah, we recently put up a link about the latest confirmation of UH findings in what Happened to Amelia Earhart, and somebody commented, I grew up in so and so, and there's all kinds of local lore about a woman who came to live with us after ditching an airplane. And then somebody replied, I live and so and so, and we have the exact same story. Yeah. I mean, part of that I think is sort of the there's a wishful thinking element to it. You want to think that these guys survived, and in like the case of Amelia air Heart, that woman survived. You want to think that people make it through these horrible times. But you know, often that is probably not the case. Although it is all you never know, you know. I tend to be an Okham's razor kind of girl. We're the most likely explanation is probably what happened. I imagine they died of exposure. That is a rough part of the world, to just be set adrift alone in with no supplies, but onto more delightful things. I have a couple of pieces of listener mail, So the first one is from our listener Colleen and she uh sent us this lovely little booklet which is included in a note card, and I it made me giggle because Colleen, you and I use the exact same note cards to have kiddies on them. It just says something to what your appetites to do a little of research on this topic. Don't let the port writing in the booklet fool you. It's an interesting and inspired chapter in our history. And the museum is great, uh. And it is about women pilots of World War Two, and it is a really cute little booklet. And what I really like is that there are lots of great photographs and uh it makes me want to do uh more vintage adorable bomber jackets and cute outfits. And there's also UM. One of the things that really struck me in this booklet is an image of UM. This mascot called Fifi and it was designed by Walt Disney Studios as the Wasp mascot. So the mascot of women pilots related to my Disney love. I love that. We also got this amazing calendar from one of our listeners. It is from our listener, Yvonne, and she um I will read her whole letter because it's a little bit lengthy, but I wanted to talk about the calendar a bit. First of all, she has a daughter named Robin, who uh is in the service, so I want to thank Robin for her service. Uh. And also she sent us this great calendar because it is it is related to her daughter, Sarah's work as a roller derby girl. So Sarah's a roller girl and her group, which is the Hellgate roller Girls, did this calendar and they did it all as um. All of the pictures are them posing as women in history, and they're really wonderful. There's like sort of really cute ones. There's one that's an Andrey Hepburn style breakfast at Tiffany's photo. There's a Buddhica in there, there is a Joan of Arc. They're all really really lovely and I just love it, so thank you Van. It made Tracy and I just giggle with delight as we were flipping through the calendar. Uh. And I also wanted to mention we got a letter from our listener Mac and he wrote about our Halloween candy episode UH and how it made him think about his mom, who would dress as a witch and serve coolated trick or treaters on Halloween, and he actually lost his mother recently, so I wanted to send my condolences and say that I am glad we could help you with some happy memories during this time. So if you would like to us, you can't do so. If you want to send us crazy and wonderful things like these people have that as cool, or just share personal stuff with us also cool, you can do that at History podcast at house stuff Works dot com. You can also visit us at missed in History on Twitter. You can go to Facebook dot com slash missed in History or missed in History dot tumbler dot com. We're also at pinterest dot com slash missed in History, and you can visit our spreadshirt store if you would like to purchase stuff you missed in history class related items such as shirts, cups, topebags, etcetera that hasn't missed in History dot spreadshirt dot com. If you would like to learn a little bit more about what we talked about today, you can go to our parents site, house stuff Works and type in the words Henry Hudson in the search part. You get articles on Hudson Bay and Hudson River, so those are related to him of course, And if you want to visit us at missed in history dot com that would be grand. We have all of our back episodes there as well as show notes for all of the episodes. Been a cup in the last year and a half or so with his treacy and I came on, and we encourage you to visit to both house to works dot com and missed in History dot com for your researching and just general knowledgy for more on this and thousands of other topics. Is it how staff works dot com. M

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