Now at that very time there chanced to be living a mariner named Henry Hudson, who commanded a small coasting vessel which was anchored near the mouth of the River Thames. He heard of the offer made by the Muscovy Company and offered his services. And partly because the merchants believed him to be a capable seaman and partly because no other sailor volunteered for this dangerous mission, Henry Hudson was given command of the little ship called the _Hopewell_, and with a small crew set out to find the way to China by the northeast, hoping to skirt the northern shore of Russia and then sail south into Oriental seas along the Asiatic coast.
Nobody knows to-day who Hudson was or what his life had been up to the time when he entered the service of the Muscovy Company. Over three hundred years ago he suddenly appeared as a brave and capable sailor and explorer, only to disappear in the great bay in northern Canada that now bears his name, when he was deserted and left to certain death by a mutinous and cowardly crew. We do not know what he looked like, for no portrait of him has been preserved; we do not know who were the members of his family, for no records of them have been kept. All we know is that this master mariner sailed farther north than any sailor of his day--farther north, indeed, than any sailor who succeeded him for nearly three hundred years--and what is still more important, that he explored the great river now called the Hudson, on whose shore stands one of the mightiest cities of the world.
The _Hopewell_ was a little ship, about the size of the smallest fishing vessels of to-day; and had been used many years before by another great explorer and a friend of Sir Francis Drake's named Martin Frobisher. That Hudson was able in this tiny craft to penetrate farther into the arctic wilderness than the great square-rigged ships and the strongly built steamers of the nineteenth century, is almost beyond belief. But the fact that he did so is not to be doubted, and the results of his voyages into those icy and deserted seas bore almost as great fruit as though he had discovered the passage to China that he hoped for.
First Hudson sailed north and then east, to the coast of what is now called Spitzbergen, after which he sailed along the shore of Greenland to the north. He tried to round the northern end of Greenland, but the great ice floes blocked his progress. Everywhere were icebergs and cliffs of solid ice, grinding against each other with a wicked roar on the great seas, and always was there fog born of the ice, or heavy gales that tossed the little _Hopewell_ like a feather. After trying for many days to sail where no ship has ever sailed, Hudson finally gave up the attempt, and, bitterly disappointed, turned his prow toward England, where he reported to the Muscovy Company that great numbers of whales sported in the icy waters near Spitzbergen--a report that afterward resulted in the great whale fisheries of that locality and untold wealth for the ships and companies that pursued them. But Hudson had done more than he realized. Not only had he reached a latitude of eighty-one degrees, fifty minutes, north, but he brought back important information that there was no hope of reaching Asia in the direction he had followed.