Henry Hudson, Part 2

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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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
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

(00:21):
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

(00:45):
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

(01:06):
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

(01:29):
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

(01:52):
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

(02:12):
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

(02:35):
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

(02:58):
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

(03:20):
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

(03:42):
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

(04:06):
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

(04:27):
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

(04:50):
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

(05:11):
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

(05:37):
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

(05:58):
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

(06:18):
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

(06:41):
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

(07:04):
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

(07:27):
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

(07:49):
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,

(08:10):
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

(08:33):
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

(08:56):
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

(09:19):
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

(09:40):
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,

(10:02):
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

(10:26):
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,

(10:46):
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.

(11:09):
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

(11:30):
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,

(11:51):
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

(12:13):
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,

(12:34):
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

(12:55):
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

(13:16):
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

(13:37):
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

(13:58):
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

(14:20):
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

(14:43):
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

(15:06):
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

(15:28):
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

(15:49):
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

(16:09):
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

(16:30):
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

(16:52):
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

(17:13):
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

(17:34):
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

(17:57):
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

(18:17):
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

(18:40):
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,

(19:00):
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

(19:21):
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

(19:43):
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

(20:04):
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,

(20:27):
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,

(20:50):
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

(21:12):
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

(21:35):
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

(21:57):
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

(22:18):
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

(22:41):
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,

(23:02):
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,

(23:25):
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

(23:48):
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

(24:10):
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

(24:34):
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,

(24:55):
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

(25:16):
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

(25:38):
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

(25:59):
would like to us, you can't do so. If you
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people have that as cool, or just share personal stuff
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(26:20):
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(26:42):
words Henry Hudson in the search part. You get articles
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We have all of our back episodes there as well
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cup in the last year and a half or so
with his treacy and I came on, and we encourage

(27:03):
you to visit to both house to works dot com
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