Henry Hudson. Edward Butts
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As Hudson had predicted, the Muscovy Company was overjoyed to hear about the whales, walruses, and seals at Spitzbergen. The directors immediately began preparations for a whaling expedition the following year. Word got out, and the value of Muscovy Company stock tripled. If he accomplished nothing else, Hudson would go down in history as the father of the English whaling industry. Spies carried the news of Hudson’s discovery to The Netherlands, France, Spain, and Portugal. Those countries would send whaling fleets of their own to the far north. The Dutch government sent a formal letter of protest to King James I, claiming that the islands were Dutch by right of prior discovery. James ignored the letter, and issued a royal decree claiming the islands for England (the islands are now under the jurisdiction of Norway).
The Muscovy Company and its shareholders profited enormously from Henry Hudson’s voyage, but Hudson did not. There was nothing in the contract he had signed that said he was entitled to share in any wealth his discoveries generated, and the Muscovy men did not feel compelled to offer him anything. They made the king a gift of two thousand pounds worth of shares, but that was a matter of diplomacy. It was always a good idea to be in good favour with the king. Hudson, on the other hand, was a sea captain who had been paid to do a job.
Hudson probably wasn’t concerned about being left out of the financial windfall his discovery had generated, though Katherine might have had a few things to say about it. Whatever faults Hudson had, avarice wasn’t one of them. Getting rich was not as important to him as exploration.
After making his report to the Muscovy Company, Hudson went to Bristol to confer with Richard Hakluyt. Because he had been unable to penetrate the ice pack and sail to the North Pole, Hudson thought his voyage had been a failure. Hakluyt did not agree. He believed Hudson had made a considerable contribution to knowledge about the Arctic. He had disproven some old theories about the north, and he had filled in some of the empty spaces on the map of the world. To Hakluyt, that was more valuable than gold.
Hudson could easily have had a job with the Muscovy Company as captain of the Spitzbergen whaling fleet. But Hakluyt knew that employment of that nature would be too routine and tame for a man like Hudson, who had the urge to explore in his blood. He had some charts and documents that he thought might be of interest to his friend. They had to do with a mysterious place called Novaya Zemlya, a possible key to the Northeast Passage.
Novaya Zemlya consists of two large islands north of Russia. They are an extension of the Ural Mountains, which are considered the dividing line between Europe and Asia. These islands, which would make a long peninsula were they not separated from the mainland, have the Barents Sea to the west and the Kara Sea to the east. The southern island (Yuzhny) is separated from the larger northern island (Severny) by a narrow channel called the Matochkin Strait. To the south of Yuzhny is the Kara Strait (also called the Burrough Strait). Then there is a small island called Vaigach, which is separated from the mainland by Pet Strait.
Devices that were used by mariners and geographers in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
Sir Hugh Willoughby, an English explorer, had reported on the existence of Novaya Zemlya in 1553, and another Englishman, Stephen Borough, had landed there in 1556. William Barents had been there in 1596. Nonetheless, very little was known of this frozen land in an icy sea. Western Europeans knew almost nothing about the Kara Sea. The one fact they were certain of was that a six hundred mile long land mass north of Russia was a barrier in the path of a Northeast Passage to Cathay. Hakluyt had sent an emissary to St. Petersburg to see if he might learn more about the place. But people in Tsarist Russia were forbidden to give foreigners any information about their country. To break that law was to risk having your tongue cut out. If anyone in St. Petersburg had valuable information on Novaya Zemlya, they kept it to themselves.
Hakluyt and his Dutch colleague, Peter Plancius, had ignored the rivalry that now existed between their countries, and shared what sketchy information they had on Novaya Zemlya. Much of that came from ancient Norse legends. But Plancius knew that Barents (who had died in 1597) had seen the Kara Sea, though he did not know if Barents had actually sailed around Novaya Zemlya or had crossed it overland.
Most of Stephen Borough’s log had been lost, but Hakluyt had a copy of a surviving fragment in which Borough claimed that a “placid sea”lay to the east of Novaya Zemlya. Hakluyt felt he had sound reason to believe in the existence of that ice-free sea. He knew that a mighty Russian river, the Ob, flowed into the sea east of Novaya Zemlya. Might the Ob be a potential route to China?
Hakluyt knew something else. Someone had found a six foot long ivory horn on Vaigat Island. This was actually the tusk from a narwhal, an Arctic sea mammal that was practically unknown to Western Europeans. Hakluyt and most of his contemporaries who knew of this fantastic object believed it was a unicorn’s horn. According to an account written at that time, the unicorn horn was proof that, “there must of necessity be a passage out of the said Oriental Ocean into our Septentrional (northern) seas.” It was a well-known fact, the report said, “that unicorns are bred in the lands of Cathay, China and other Oriental Regions.” In the early seventeenth century, even a learned man like Richard Hakluyt could be taken in by a myth.
Hakluyt shared all of this information with Hudson. The explorer was especially excited by the chart William Barents had made of the western shore of Novaya Zemlya. The eastern shore had not yet been mapped, but Barents’ chart showed what appeared to be the entrance of a channel (the Matochkin Strait). No one knew if it connected to the Kara Sea. Hudson wanted to find out. He was willing to risk his life on another voyage of discovery. Would the Muscovy Company be willing to risk some money?
Aside from the fact that Hudson had meetings with Richard Hakluyt, nothing is known of his time in England after his first major voyage. No doubt he and John spent long hours at home, telling the family about their adventures in northern seas. Katherine and the others probably listened breathlessly to the story about the ice pack that almost took the Hopewell and all of her crew. They would have believed, as Hudson did, that the hand of God had spared them. Indeed, this might have given the family some comfort. The Hudsons would have been thankful in their belief that God was watching over Henry and John. No sailors needed divine protection more than those who sailed into the unknown. Henry Hudson was about to do just that again.
Hudson was confident when he met the Muscovy Company directors in their headquarters on Budge Row. He knew very well how valuable the Whale Bay discovery was to them. But he also knew that these were men for whom there could never be enough money. The possibility of trade with the Far East was still a golden beacon to them. Hudson did not tell them everything he had learned from Hakluyt. His nuggets of information were his best cards. He told them only that he possessed secret information about a Northeast Passage.
The businessmen conferred. Hudson had done well by them on his first voyage. If there was a chance he could still find a Northeast Passage, it was worth taking a chance with him again. They asked Hudson if he would be willing to make the voyage in the Hopewell, and for the same amount of money he had been paid for the first voyage. Hudson agreed, but this time he had some conditions of his own.
Hudson said he would need a larger crew. Arctic sailing added to the sailors’ hardships and duties. He asked for five extra men. The directors frowned at the idea of having to pay another five sailors. They protested that a little ship like the Hopewell did not need so many men. They finally, grudgingly, agreed to increase the crew by three.
Then Hudson said he wanted the hull of the Hopewell reinforced with extra planking for protection from ice. Once again the directors howled with indignation. They asked Hudson if he was aware of the costs this would involve. Could he not simply sail around the ice? Hudson reminded the merchants that he had been up there, and knew better than they the hazards ice presented. Would it not be better, he asked, for them to spend whatever it cost to strengthen the ship, than to have the hull pierced by ice and lose the entire ship? Again, with much grumbling, the Muscovy men said they would strengthen the Hopewell’s hull.