When the gig was in the water with six strong oarsmen in it, Colman started to climb over the rail to take his place in the little boat’s stern. Hudson pushed him aside.
“Get to the quarterdeck, Mr. Colman,” Hudson ordered. “We’ll tow her out of danger. You keep her steady.”
Hudson climbed into the gig and told the rowers, “Now lads, if you want to see England again, put your backs to it.”
Soon the gig was in front of the Hopewell, and the rope between them was stretched taut. The prow of the ship came around as the rowers warped her to starboard. But they seemed to be making no headway against the ceaseless movement of the swells.
Hudson told the men to row harder, and they did. But what was their strength against the power of the sea? The Hopewell was getting closer to the grinding jaws of ice, dragging the gig and its struggling rowers.
From his place on the quarterdeck Colman saw that the ship had been drawn into the outer fringes of the ice pack. White slabs bumped against the hull. They were like teeth that threatened to chew the timbers into splinters. Colman sent men to the rails to push the ice away with pikes and oars. The mate also said a silent prayer, because he was certain that the Hopewell and all her company would soon be at the bottom of the sea.
In the gig, Hudson urged the men on. But chunks of ice surrounded the boat and got in the way of the oars. The rowers lost their rhythm as each man struggled to get his oar in the water without striking ice. The thunder of the surf was almost deafening. Then the line that attached the gig to the ship went slack. “Captain!” one man cried in alarm. “They’ve cut us loose!”
Standing on the Hopewell’s quarterdeck, Colman looked up in thankful astonishment as the sails billowed. “God has answered my prayer!” he said to himself. A strong wind had suddenly blown in from the northwest. The sails that Hudson had ordered unfurled now bloomed full, and the Hopewell surged forward, away from the ice. The line to the gig had fallen slack because the ship was overtaking the boat. Soon the men who had tried so heroically to tow the ship clambered aboard and hauled in the gig. Later, when the ice and its horrific noise were far behind, Hudson made an entry in his log.
If not for the delivery by God of a northwest by west wind — a wind not commonly found on this voyage — it would have been the end of our voyage. May God give us thankful hearts for so great a deliverance.
Hudson had to admit defeat. It was not possible to sail past the North Pole to reach China. When he announced to the crew that they were returning to England, the men raised such a loud cry of joy that seabirds near the ship were frightened away.
But Hudson’s course did not take the Hopewell directly home. He made a four hundred-mile detour to the west, and discovered a previously uncharted island, which he called Hudson’s Tutches. Today it is called Jan Mayen Island.
Hudson’s journal offers no explanation as to why he went so far off course. It’s not likely that bad weather was the cause. It could be that Hudson intended to spend a winter on the coast of Greenland, and then sail west to seek the Northwest Passage through the Furious Overfall. If that was his plan, one thing could have prevented him from following it. His men refused to go!
It will never be known if Hudson’s crew threatened mutiny on his first important voyage, and demanded that he take them home. They had been to what was then considered the ends of the earth, and had fulfilled the obligations they had agreed to when they signed aboard. If Hudson did indeed try to push his men into a voyage of discovery to the west, he would have been demanding too much of them. On September 15, the Hopewell docked at Tilbury on the River Thames.
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
