Hudson Bay Canada 1610-11 Henry Hudson English sea explorer, adventurer and navigator | biography

Welcome to the History of North America, I'm Mark Vinette. In 1609, an English adventurer hired by the Dutch government led an expedition to find a path to Asia through North America. His expedition led to the European discovery of the Hudson River and the establishment of New Amsterdam, a colonial settlement that later became New York City. Henry Hudson was an English sea explorer and navigator during the early 17th century, best known for his explorations of present-day Canada and parts of the northeastern United States. Let's continue learning more about this titan of history with help from the Gone Podcast. By 1610, British explorer Henry Hudson had embarked on three voyages to find a northern passage to Asia via the waters north of Russia. While none of these missions were technically successful, he had a strong track record of finding valuable resources and reliably expanding navigation data for new regions. And now Hudson had a new idea. What if they looked for a northwest passage instead of a northeastern one? So in 1610, the British East India Company and the Muscovy Company joined together to back him for a new exploration attempt. They provided him with a ship called the Discovery, which had a surprising history of its own. It was one of three vessels used to found Jamestown in 1607 and had been previously employed by John Smith himself. The failure of both Jamestown and the mission to find the northwest passage has led some people to believe the Discovery was cursed. Whether or not that was actually true, the Discovery was a solid seafaring ship. This 38-foot boat was particularly popular for exploration because it could handle the open seas as well as the shallow waters of bays and rivers. It was equipped with both oars and sails and stored supplies barge-style, preventing it from sinking too low in the water. The boat didn't have a hull the crew could retreat to and was not equipped for harsh winter conditions. It was a summer ship. But that shouldn't have been a problem, given the journey was only supposed to last through the summer. But the journey did not go off as planned. What follows is the trajectory of the trip as best as we can determine from the testimony of the sailors who made it home to England. Because we still don't know Hudson's fate, we can only hypothesize based on the surviving account. In April of 1610, Henry Hudson set sail from London with a 22-man crew which included his teenage son and his old colleague Robert Jewett. As the trip began, spirits were high. Although Hudson's record of success wasn't stellar, he was known as a good captain who was kind to his crew. The funding was in place, the heading seemed solid, everyone was banking on a successful trip. However, as the crew progressed past Greenland into what's now called Canada's Hudson Strait, tensions began to mount. Sometime in August, four months after setting off from England, the crew discovered that the Strait gave way to what is now known as the Hudson Bay. There was no passage through. The journey, it seemed, had been for nothing and the crew began to feel the sting of disappointment. Adding to the frustration was the fact that Hudson was oddly evasive, withholding plans from the crew and refusing to answer questions. Some began to suspect he was hiding something or that the expedition had other motives. Worse, the ice was creeping in and supplies were beginning to dwindle. Hudson, who had been responsible and communicative on prior expeditions, drove his crew on without an explanation, only to reach a dead end. Hudson had recklessly gambled that the weather would hold and that the bay would give way to a northwest passage. He was wrong on both counts. It was late fall by this time and winter was coming in fast. The bay's surface was freezing over. The ship found itself at risk of being stuck in the ice. Hudson realized his mistake and tried to keep the men calm as they struggled to carve a path back to the Atlantic before winter set in. But it was too late. Ice blocked the route entirely and they were forced to spend the cold, dark winter in the Canadian Arctic. They were stuck on the ship in the freezing conditions for at least six months, waiting for the ice to thaw. It's likely that they began to starve during this time as they were already low on supplies when the ice set in. Not much is known about the day-to-day drudgery of the crew's time stuck on the ice, but by June of 1611, nearly a full year after they'd first arrived in Canada, tensions between Hudson and his men were reaching a boiling point. Many of the crew members, including Robert Jewett, were furious with Hudson for his poor decisions and their horrific winter. Despite Hudson's attempts to keep control, 16 crew members launched a mutiny, and the mutineers emerged victorious. Their retribution for Hudson, their failed leader, was harsh. He and the eight crew members who had stayed loyal through the mutiny were abandoned on the ice, left behind on a small boat with no supplies. Hudson sat with his son, a carpenter, and six others, dumbstruck as Discovery and the mutinous crew vanished over the horizon. Henry Hudson, master of the seas, had no boat. He was worse than helpless. He and his loyal crew members would have to wait for a rescue ship, which would most likely have to be dispatched from England. They were almost certainly looking at another long, cold winter in Canada, and this time they had no shelter and no supplies. Meanwhile, Jewett and the others reached England about two months later in August or September of 1611. When Hudson's investors realized what had happened, they immediately moved to dispatch a rescue mission. However, there would be no point in sending help at that time of the year. It was already fall. Given that it took anywhere from two to three months to sail from England to the New World, any journey that went after Hudson wouldn't reach Canada until the dead of winter, when the ice would be impossible to navigate. A rescue mission would have to wait until the So, in May of 1612, search parties made it to Canada and attempted to locate the commander and crew. But they found nothing. No bodies, no shelter, not even the remains of the small boat Hudson and his men were abandoned on. In 1613, the search parties went out again and again. They found no trace of the famed explorer. Stranger still, both Muscovy and the British East India Trading Company called off the search, and they never pressed charges against the mutinous crew, despite the fact that mutiny was considered a crime. Regardless of Hudson's fate, the men, by all accounts, should have been punished. This oversight was odd, given that Hudson was such an experienced and generally well-liked sailor. He had friends in high places who would have wanted to see justice served to the men who abandoned him. Some historians suspect foul play, but there are hardly any records to confirm or deny these theories. Robert Jewett's journals provide the only firsthand accounts of what happened. They are, unfortunately, not very detailed. It's possible that Jewett intentionally kept things vague in order to protect himself against legal action as a mutineer. But it's also entirely likely that Jewett's brief journaling style led him to write the bare-bones facts of the event, with little room left for embellishment or emotion. From Jewett, we do know that Hudson and his eight men were abandoned in June and that they were given a small boat. This is an important factor in the mystery, as summer would have been just starting, meaning conditions would have been hospitable for several months to come. We know from Hudson's previous expeditions that he was resourceful, adaptable, and willing to do whatever it took to get his men home. He also had ample experience navigating the difficulties of winter conditions. Furthermore, one of the abandoned men was the It's likely that he would have been able to build shelter or patch their boat. And yet, 400 years later, neither bones nor shelters have been found to indicate the crew was ever there. So the question remains, how did nine experienced explorers just vanish? And what happened to them? For 400 years, the only account of what happened came from the mutineers, and unfortunately unreliable group of narrators. In the absence of any other evidence, all people could do was speculate about the fate of Hudson, his son, and his small band of loyal men. A number of flimsy theories emerged to explain their whereabouts. The first and simplest of them was that the mutineers were much more vicious. Rather than leave Hudson and his loyal crewmen in a ship, they actually threw the wayward captain overboard and left them behind to drown. However, if this had really happened, then at least one of the bodies surely would have been washed ashore at some point after the ice melted in the following summer. The more common theory, which we've already discussed, was that Jewett and the others really did abandon Hudson and his crew in a small boat or on the shores of the Hudson Bay, leaving them to face the elements. But again, no material remains have ever been found to confirm or deny this theory. While it's possible that the bodies of Hudson and the rest may have been swept out to sea and lost forever, the wreckage of their boat should have turned up somewhere. Regardless, this course of action is considered most likely due to Jewett's journal and the mutiny practices of the time. What happened next is the source of countless debates. There's a line of thinking that proposes Hudson and his men actually survived for much longer than previously expected. This theory posits that the survivors built a shelter to wait for the rescue they knew was coming. It was standard practice to retrieve company employees and Hudson would have known that even if they couldn't sail the Atlantic in their tiny boat, someone should have been coming for them. He would have stayed put. However, something could have simply gone terribly wrong in the year between this point and when rescuers actually arrived. But what could that be? If Hudson and his men had lived long enough to make a shelter in the Canadian wilderness, then some trace of them would have been left behind. It's odd that the search parties never found remains of shelter or bodies, especially with a cold winter, to preserve any physical remains. Some take a more romantic approach and believe that Hudson and his men were absorbed by local Native American tribes and lived out their days in these communities, now hidden in plain sight in the gene pool of Canada. Others insist that Hudson and his men survived the first summer only to be killed in conflict with Native Americans. Their bodies would have been buried or scattered. People have argued over the fate of Hudson and his crew ever since they vanished 400 years ago, but it wasn't until the 1950s that substantial evidence ever came to light. Enter the Hudson Stone. In 1959, a construction crew was repaving Highway 17 near the Ottawa River. Workers removed a number of stones from the bank as was routine, but one caught their eye. Carved into the side of this stone near the top was the inscription, HH 1612, Captive. HH, Henry Hudson, and 1612 would have only been a year after he and his loyal crewmen were left behind by the mutineers on board the Discovery. It looked like a tombstone or an inscription on a prison wall. And that very well might have been what it was. Join me next time as we continue our mini-series on Henry Hudson, one of the greatest explorers of the New World. I'm Mark Vinette, and I hope you're enjoying the ride.