which bodily wastes dropped into the sea.
Meals were often a daily fare of porridge, salt meat, hardtack biscuits, and cheese. On long voyages, the fresh water in the barrels would go scummy, and the biscuits would get wormy. The sailors received a daily ration of beer, but drunkenness was not allowed. After weeks at sea, the beer might turn sour.
By the end of May, Hudson found that his compass behaved erratically. “This day I found the needle to incline seventy-nine degrees under the horizon,” he recorded in his log. Hudson was no doubt mystified by this. Navigators in his time did not realize that the farther above the Arctic Circle they sailed, the less reliable the compass became. They had little understanding of the relationship between the Magnetic North Pole and the Geographic North Pole. Some navigators were not even aware of the difference between the two poles, let alone the fact that the Magnetic Pole drifts from place to place.
This made it very difficult for a northern explorer like Hudson to plot a course or determine his exact location. In more southerly positions, Hudson could easily determine latitude by the sun or stars. But in the Arctic, atmospheric distortions resulted in errors. What’s more, nobody had yet come up with a reliable method for determining longitude. For that, navigators had to use “dead reckoning,” a system based on the ship’s speed, the course steered, and the last observation of latitude. A ship’s speed could only be roughly estimated by tossing a marker over the side and measuring the time it took for the ship to sail past it. All this taxed Hudson’s skills as a navigator to the limit.
Meanwhile, the crewmen had their own hardships. As they sailed farther north they encountered thick fog, followed by rough, stormy seas. Ice crusted the rigging and the sails froze. Whenever adjustments were necessary, the men had to climb aloft with numb hands and on slippery footing. Men were soaked to the skin by driving rain and the spray of the sea, and once that happened there wasn’t much chance to dry clothes out and really feel warm again.
On June 13, Hudson sighted the east coast of Greenland. The world’s largest island, most of it sheathed in ice, was still a mystery to Europeans. No one was sure if it was one island or several, nor how far north it stretched.
For eight days Hudson followed the coast northward, always keeping land in sight. He saw some previously unrecorded geographic features and added them to his chart. He wrote in his journal of the relentlessly harsh weather and the desolate land he could see from his ship.
We saw some land on head of us, and some ice. It being a thick fog, we steered away northerly. In the morning our sails and shrouds froze. All the afternoon evening it rained, and the rain froze. This was a very high land, the most part covered with snow. The nether part was uncovered. At the top it looked reddish, and underneath a blackish clay, with much ice lying about it.
A current carried the Hopewell eastward and out of sight of the coast. This frustrated Hudson because of the difficulty in maintaining his bearings. In spite of the weather, he managed to hold his ship to a northerly course. The crew endured a miserable week of rain squalls and heavy seas. Then they sighted land again. Hudson noted it in his log as a newly discovered land, which he called Hold-with-Hope. He didn’t know it was a more northerly part of the Greenland coast.
Hudson was excited about this discovery, but he chose his words carefully as he made the entry in his log. He had gone quite a long way off the course the Muscovy Company directors had instructed him to take, and now he had to justify that to his employers. He expressed his satisfaction at finding that Robert Thorne’s theory seemed to be correct. The weather seemed to be getting warmer as he neared the North Pole.
“This land is very temperate to our feeling. It is a high mainland, nothing at all covered with snow; and the north part of that main highland was very high mountains, but we could see no snow upon them.”
Hudson apparently did not realize that the weather was warming simply because it was late June. He was surprised to find land here at all, because according to the charts he had studied in Richard Hakluyt’s house, it should have been open sea. In his log, Hudson gave this as justification for disobeying his orders and sailing so far to the west.
This might be held against us, being our fault for keeping such a westerly course. The chief reason for this course was our desire to see that part of Groneland [Greenland], which for all we knew, was unknown to any Christian; we thought it could as well have been open sea as land, in which case our passage to the Pole would have been mostly completed. We also hoped to have a westerly wind, which if we were closer to the shore would have been an onshore [easterly] wind. Considering we found land our charts made no mention of, we considered our labor so much more worthwhile. For what we could see, it appeared to be a good land, and worth exploring.
By now the Hopewell was sailing beneath the midnight sun. Hudson found it fascinating to have sunlight twenty-four hours a day. Some of the men in the crew complained that they could not sleep and became irritable. However, John Hudson and the younger crew members claimed that with the constant sunlight, they found they needed less sleep.
One afternoon John Colman, the first mate, excitedly called Hudson to the rail. A grampus, a fierce sea mammal related to dolphins and toothed whales, was swimming in circles around the ship. Soon the animal was joined by two others. Sailors of that time were notoriously superstitious, and several of the crew members immediately took the appearance of the three creatures as an evil omen. They wanted to return to England immediately. Hudson refused. He watched the animals for hours and made notes about them. Possibly they stayed close to the ship because the cook had thrown some galley garbage overboard.
Hudson sailed northeast from Greenland, setting a course for the North Pole. He constantly found his path blocked by ice. On June 27, Hudson spotted one of the islands of the Spitzbergen Archipelago. These islands had already been discovered by the Dutch explorer William Barents in 1596, but he had thought they were part of Greenland. Hudson decided to give the group the English name of Newland. Then he sailed in amongst the islands, hoping the archipelago might be a gateway through to that temperate sea that supposedly surrounded the Pole.
For two days the Hopewell tacked her way north through the barren, jagged, snow-covered islands. Shore ice and rocks forced Hudson to keep a safe distance, though he would have liked to have made a landing. Then on the evening of June 29, the worst storm the Hopewell had yet encountered came shrieking down from the north.
Hudson was in a trap! If a ship were caught in a storm out on the open ocean, she could ride out the turbulence. But in the midst of a group of islands, there was a great danger of the ship being smashed to pieces.
Hudson bellowed the order for all hands on deck. He took the Hopewell into an island cove that offered partial protection. Then he shouted to Colman to take in all sail, and Colman relayed the order to Collin. Men clambered up into the rigging and along the yards, clinging for dear life as they hauled in the sheets. If a man fell into that icy, swirling sea, he’d be lost forever.
Young was at the helm, and Hudson told him to lash the whipstaff down. Then the captain ordered the sea anchor to be cast out. This was not the big iron anchor that secured a ship in harbour. It was a huge canvas bag that acted something like a modern-day parachute. It trailed in the water behind the ship, filling up with water, and so acted as a drag, preventing the ship from being blown very far or very fast. Only when all of that was done did Hudson allow the men to go below in relays for some warmth and rest. He remained on his quarterdeck the whole time, watching to be sure his vessel did not drift out into the full onslaught of the storm, or be thrown against the island’s rocky shore.
The storm did not let up until the following morning, and then it was followed by fog and snow. Hudson spent the next two weeks picking his way through the islands, charting them, constantly fighting what he called “our troublesome neighbours, ice with fog.”
