No one knows where Henry Hudson’s bones lie.
They may have been beneath the keel of my ship as I sailed in James Bay. They may have been under my feet as I hiked on one of the hundreds of little islands in Canada’s cold northern territory of Nunavut. Or they may have been buried in the tundra below the stubby wings of a small plane as I flew over the mostly untouched vast wilderness of Nunavik and northern Quebec.
This book is about Henry Hudson and his voyages, about the remote places he visited in the early 1600s, and about the still-astounding sights and people I found when I retraced his steps four centuries later.
My journey took me to Hudson’s home base in bustling London, to the end-of-the-world settlement of Longyearbyen in Svalbard near the North Pole, to New York City and up the Hudson River to its navigable top; and through the roiling Hudson Strait into Canada’s Hudson Bay and down into the dead end of James Bay.
Henry Hudson made four trips in three different small wooden ships that were dependent on the winds and the currents, and all but defenseless against the unforgiving ice that blocked the northeast and northwest passages. He had only the most primitive of navigational instruments and charts and almost no knowledge of the scattered groups of people he met in North America.
I made my trips by jumbo jet, luxury cruise ship, spartan icebreaker, cold and wet inflatable raft, freighter canoe, shallow-draft riverboat, twin-engine bush plane, car, ferry, train, bus, subway, taxi, and in the back seat of a police paddy wagon. I hitched a ride in the cargo basket of an all-terrain beach buggy driven by an elderly Inuit woman, and I explored an unpopulated island in Hudson Bay with an Inuit rifleman by my side as we kept the proper distance from a hungry polar bear.
This book is a form of time travel. I am not an historian and this is not a history. The bones of Henry Hudson’s story are based on the relatively thin written record: some logbooks, mostly by members of his crew; some contracts and correspondence, and snippets of court documents.
Four hundred years later, I went where Hudson went, touching an altar rail where he sought communion, walking on frozen Arctic and subarctic tundra where he explored, and sailing through waters where he ventured.
Lector, circumspice
Beneath St. Paul’s Cathedral in London lies the tomb of Christopher Wren, the architect who helped rebuild the city after the great fire of 1666. Near his grave marker a tablet advises: Lector, si monumentum requiris, circumspice. Reader, if you seek his monument, look around you.
Henry Hudson walked the streets of London before the great fire. We don’t know exactly where he lived, but the offices of his financial backers and the church where he took communion before his first voyage were not that far from St. Paul’s.
Hudson was one of history’s great explorers, though every one of his voyages failed to meet their common goal: finding a northern route from England and Europe to China and Asia. He had four voyages as master and at least three mutinies, the last of which resulted in his abandonment and probable death in a small boat in the icy waters of James Bay.
There is no gravestone raised to Henry Hudson because his bones have never been found. If there was one, though, here’s what it might say:
If you seek his monument, look at New York City. The Big Apple, the financial and cultural capital of the world and home to eight million people, was beach and forest in 1609 when Henry Hudson was the first European to sail through the Narrows at the mouth of the river that today bears his name.
If you seek his monument, look at the Hudson River. One of the most beautiful rivers in the world, the broad and deep harbor at its southern end gave birth to New York City. Hudson explored 150 miles up the river to its navigable top near modern-day Albany. Two centuries later that region flourished when the Erie Canal was dug by hand to continue navigation to the breadbasket of Chicago and the midwest.
If you seek his monument, see and hear the art. The Hudson Valley’s palisades, mountains, and vistas inspired artists like Thomas Cole and Frederic Edwin Church, authors like Washington Irving, and musicians from Aaron Copland to Pete Seeger.
If you seek his monument, look at Svalbard and Novaya Zemlya and Bear Island. There are not many more remote places on this planet; Hudson’s two voyages above the Arctic Circle were in many ways as daring and dangerous as voyages to the moon.
If you seek his monument, look at Canada. Within a few years of Hudson’s failed voyage, the British owners of what became known as the Hudson’s Bay Company became de facto landlords and governors of the vast natural riches of Canada. And the reclusive hunter-gatherer peoples of the far north, the Inuit and the Cree, began a spiral that eventually marginalized and weakened them. More recently the demand for different natural resources has brought them back to the table as a political and economic force.
This book is about the remarkable connections between disparate people and places across a span of 400 years.
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