We don’t know where he died; we have only the suggestion of where he disappeared.

We don’t know what he looked like; we have only the imagined images of artists who drew his face after he was gone. Some of the most famous of the paintings of Hudson are incorrect fabrications that show icebergs and mountains where none existed; some of the most interesting paintings and artifacts have gone missing.

His ships, which went on to sail under different masters, have never been found. There is only one known substantial direct connection between Henry Hudson and today: the altar rail at St. Ethelburga’s Church in London at which he kneeled to receive communion before setting out on his first voyage in 1607: a piece of wood in a place where almost everything else has been changed or destroyed.

What we do have are famous places and monuments: one of the great rivers in the world, one of the largest and most significant bays, several towns with his name, and a few obscure statues and plaques.

Hudson’s Thin Resume

We know of only four voyages he made as master of a ship. There may have been others; captains do not often spring forth full-born, especially considering the expense and responsibility given these men by their sponsors. But his resume is remarkably short: the only verified details exist in the period between 1607 and 1610.

He probably served as a lower-ranked sailor on earlier voyages, and he had an education beyond the ordinary: he knew how to read and write and he conducted some of his own research among existing charts and logs of contemporary explorers.

Here are the four star-crossed expeditions of Henry Hudson:

• 1607. From London to Greenland and then north and east to the frozen arctic archipelago of Svalbard, in a torturous attempt to go from Europe to Asia over the North Pole.

• 1608. From London to bleak Novaya Zemlya, looking for a route across the top of northern Russia past Siberia and on to China.

• 1609. From Amsterdam, under orders from his new Dutch backers to go back to Novaya Zemlya. After a brief reacquaintance with the ice above Russia, he made a U-turn across the Atlantic for a tour of the North American coast. He worked his way down from Newfoundland and Nova Scotia, past the eventual sites of Boston and Plymouth, and all the way to a close approach to the British settlement of Jamestown in Virginia. Turning around again, he eventually made a hopeful but unsuccessful voyage 150 miles up the Hudson River in today’s New York in search of a shortcut to Asia.

• 1610. Back in the service of British investors, he sailed from London directly to northern Canada, through the icy Hudson Strait above Labrador and into the massive Hudson Bay. Then he turned away from a northwest bearing and headed south into James Bay—a geographic dead end and the place where he met his own cruel end at the hands of some of his crew.

For Exploration’s Sake

Henry Hudson was a ship’s captain and an explorer, not a conqueror. He made no claims of ownership.

He did not sail to Svalbard or Novaya Zemlya in order to claim these cold, rough places for England or for Holland. When he entered the North River (now the Hudson) he did not plant the Dutch flag at its deep mouth near Manhattan or its shallow navigable end near Albany.

And when he traveled to the north of Labrador and through the Furious Overfall and the floating ice and the treacherous tides of the strait that now bears his name, he did so as a private citizen.

The driving force behind Hudson—and many of the others who followed in his wake—was trade and commerce. Hudson’s financial backers were looking for a route from Europe to China and Japan. They wanted to sell finished goods from Great Britain and return with valuable spices, tea, and minerals.

Was he one of the greatest explorers of all time?

Was he merely an accidental tourist who stumbled into history?

Or was he the world’s worst ship’s captain, master of four failed expeditions, enabler of at least three mutinies, and creator of an atmosphere that lead to his own ignominious death?

Bloviators and Fablemongers

In my travels I ran into all sorts of people who had something to say about Hudson.

There were bloviators who knew exactly how Hudson had died, but not where. I met self-proclaimed experts who told of red-headed Cree who were direct descendants of the missing captain. I heard stories of the captain’s son held prisoner by natives. I was told of markings on rocks that indicated Hudson had survived and headed inland into the wilds of Ontario.

There were well-meaning natives who repeated stories they said had been passed down to them by elders but could have just as readily been third-hand retellings of imagined histories from school books.

And there were many people—in Svalbard, in London, in New York, and in Canada—who had no idea whatsoever of any true details of the explorer’s voyages and his fate.

Along the way I developed my own rule: anyone who claimed any certainty about Hudson’s fate had no facts to back up their story.

The full story of Henry Hudson—beginning, middle, and end—is probably lost to time.

But I did find a rich fabric of stories, events, and people in the 400 years since Hudson sailed to some of the most interesting places on the planet.

Retracing Hudson’s Path

Everywhere Hudson traveled has undergone extraordinary change, much more than just the ordinary passage of four centuries has brought to other places. I came to think of Captain Hudson as the original Forrest Gump, an accidental tourist who left a vacuum that has since been filled by remarkable occurrences.

I went to Spitsbergen, part of the Svalbard archipelago 500 miles from the North Pole, a place that lives in total darkness for three months of the year, total daylight for three more, and somewhere in between for most of the rest of the time.

There were most likely no humans living there when Hudson arrived in 1607 on his first voyage of discovery, although the Vikings wrote about the islands in ancient Icelandic texts. Hudson got stuck in the ice and turned back to England, but his failure was followed almost immediately by a frenetic whaling boom that all but wiped out the whales and walruses that had populated the surrounding waters.

In boiling down the whale and walrus blubber, the lonely men who worked there discovered outcroppings of coal they could use to fire their tryworks. Three centuries later, an entrepreneur from Boston passed through the barren fjords on a ship—one of the first vacation cruises—and saw the coal. He returned to launch a mining enterprise that extracted and shipped coal from one of the most remote places in the world.

Literally a no man’s land until 1920 when an international treaty gave sovereignty of Svalbard (but not ownership) to Norway, the place also became the launching point for the first polar expeditions by airplane, airship, and sled, the location of one of the most bizarre small-scale battles of World War II, and the site of the final surrender of German troops some four months after the end of that war.

I sailed near Nova Zembla (now called Novaya Zemlya), the scarcely known set of islands that are an extension of the Ural Mountains in Russia’s western Siberia, separating the Barents Sea from the Kara Sea. Hudson came here in 1608 and again in 1609, ordered by his financial backers to pass through or beneath the islands and continue on to Asia. He was blocked by ice both times.

He never saw a native on the cold and mostly barren land, which is not surprising. Today the entire population consists of about 100 Nentsy people on 35,000 square miles, an outpost of a small tribe of about 40,000 indigenous people who live on the mainland in the far north. They were mostly ignored by the Soviet Union until the mid-1950s when the government decided to use the island as one of its primary nuclear test sites.

In 1961, at a place called Sukhoy Nos—at almost the exact place where Hudson tacked back and forth looking for a strait through the island to the Northeast Passage—the Soviets dropped the 50-megaton Tsar Bomba, the largest known airborne nuclear weapon ever detonated.

I sailed into the glorious harbor of Manhattan, past the point where Hudson first made landfall—ten years before the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock—and then up the magnificent Hudson River. I saw how the water was salty and the tides were strong; as we passed through the area called Tappan Zee—where the river widens to more than three miles—I could imagine Hudson’s hope. Somehow it seemed possible that this waterway was a strait that led through the inconvenient American continent that lay between Europe and Asia.

But then our little boat moved onward to near West Point where the river dramatically narrows and twists in an S-turn; from a mile out it seemed as if the waterway was coming to a dead end at the base of the mountains ahead. I could picture the crew’s concerns that this was nothing more than an unfrozen fjord like the ones they had tried to pass through in Svalbard and Novaya Zemlya.

Past West Point I could imagine cautious hope as the river straightened. But the final leg of the navigable Hudson River runs narrower and shallower until it shoals out in gravel, sand, and rapids near Waterford above Albany.

I traveled by car and on foot to near the tiny source of the grand river, a little splash of a pond called Lake Tear-of-the-Clouds that is fed by snowmelt from New York’s highest peak, Mt. Marcy. An explorer of poetic bent named the outflow the Opalescent River; the bubbling stream gives no hint of what it will become when it meets the Atlantic Ocean at New York City and makes no allowance for Hudson’s dream of a passage to China.

And then I went up to the Ungava Peninsula at the top of Canada’s immense province of Quebec and through the roiling waters of Hudson Strait in the company of icebergs, whales, and polar bears. I passed through the strait between the top of Ungava and the bottom of Baffin Island (still called Meta Incognita—the unknown shore—on 21st century maps) and approached the open but threatening waters that led to the northwest. But like Captain Hudson, my ship made a left turn south into the immense Hudson Bay and then further south into the dead end of James Bay.

I left the water and ventured into Inuit and Cree settlements that are still in their early years as an experiment in nation-building by the Canadians. Hudson and his men met only a few natives—some cautiously friendly and some aggressively warlike—when they entered in 1610 and when the survivors straggled out in 1611.

Then, the people were entirely hunter-gatherers. They lived in the bush and followed the crops: caribou, geese, fish, and plants. Their settlements were temporary gathering places for social and spiritual events a few times each year.

Although the white man brought about some changes in these patterns through the establishment of the trading empires of the Hudson’s Bay Company and the North West Company, the Cree and Inuit mostly ignored (and were certainly ignored by) the Canadian government until the second half of the twentieth century. The biggest changes have come in the past few decades as Quebec has discovered and begun to harness a vast source of energy in the Ungava and James Bay region: not oil, but huge flows of water.

I met with some of the Cree who are engaged in a difficult fight with the government and the massive Hydro Quebec power dams and reservoirs that have flooded their traplines and drained some of their fishing rivers. In return, Canada has offered money and prefab houses and community centers with hockey rinks to people with a culture that had no use or want of any of these material possessions then, and in many cases, now.

New York’s Almost-Invisible Man

In New York’s ornate Federal-style layercake of a City Hall is a small, formal reception area called the Governor’s Room. The space is directly across the hallway from the office of the mayor, a job some call the second most difficult elected position in the nation.

City Hall is just off Chambers Street, less than half a mile from the original eastern shoreline of the Hudson River.

Completed in 1816, the three connected rooms have been visited by dignitaries from the Marquis de Lafayette to Albert Einstein. President-elect Abraham Lincoln was a guest in 1861, and his coffin was laid in state there four years later.

On one wall is President George Washington’s writing table of 1789; we know that because some long-ago government functionary inlaid that information on a plaque in its top. Nearby is another piece of furniture, the desk of flamboyant Mayor Fiorello H. LaGuardia; did the “Little Flower” rest his elbows here when he read the comic strips over the radio during the newspaper strike in 1945?

The walls of the governor’s room are covered with fine formal portraits of notables and some ordinary works of very obscure mayors and governors of New York. As I stood there it was obvious that the organizing principle for the room was finding works of art that fit the nooks and crannies.

Each of the rooms has a grand fireplace, and space for a major painting above. In the first room there is a large painting of Dewitt Clinton, very deserving of the place of honor for a room decorated at that time. Clinton had served in the state assembly, state senate, and U.S. Senate before being elected mayor of New York and serving from 1803 to 1815; during that time, in 1812, he narrowly lost the race for President to James Madison. He went on to be governor of New York from 1817 to 1823, and again from 1825 to 1828.

And, of course, he championed “Clinton’s Ditch”: the Erie Canal that runs west from the top of the navigable Hudson River to the Great Lakes and which established New York City as one of the world’s most important harbors and cities.

To Clinton’s right is a small painting of Christopher Columbus by the eminent artist and telegraph inventor Samuel F.B. Morse. Columbus, of course, never visited New York; Morse, though, lived at an estate called Locust Grove near Poughkeepsie, 75 miles up the Hudson River.

And to Clinton’s left, squeezed into a perfectly sized space twelve feet off the floor, between the lintel above the door and the white plaster trim below the ceiling, is a dark and murky painting. It is the only portrait of Henry Hudson in New York’s City Hall.

Actually, we’re not even sure it is a portrait of Hudson. To begin with, no one has ever uncovered a picture of Hudson made before his death; every one of the hundreds of commemorative and tragic-heroic portraits of Hudson come from the imagination of some seventeenth-century artist or a painter who embellished on the theme in the four hundred years that followed.

Here’s what we do know about the painting tucked away above the door in City Hall: it is about 24 inches wide and 30 inches tall, oil paint on canvas. It shows a middle-aged man with short hair and a beard, his neck surrounded by a formal ruff of pleated fabric, in the style of a western European gentleman.

We’re not even sure it is supposed to be Henry Hudson, and the archivists of the Art Commission of the City of New York can’t explain how it came to hang on the wall. Conservators report they found a monogram in the lower left corner similar to the one used by Paul Van Somer on other portraits hanging in the National Portrait Gallery in London, and in Hampton Court Palace in London. There was also a date: 1620, nine years after Hudson’s disappearance.

Paul van Somer was born about 1577; he was a successful painter of historic scenes and portraits in Amsterdam, and came to London about 1616, settling in St. Martin’s Lane—the city’s art district. He was a favorite of King James I, and most of his later works included royal portraits and women of the court. He died in 1621 or 1622. There is no documentation that said he ever painted a portrait of Henry Hudson, but nothing that says he didn’t.

With that information in hand, the Art Commission of the City of New York contacted one Lionel Cast, retired “Surveyor of the King’s Pictures” at Hampton Court Palace near London, who muddied up the answer once and for all: Cast wrote a letter to the Art Commission 1929 saying that the picture hanging on the wall was not of Henry Hudson, but rather of “a Spaniard of high position.”

I can testify to the high position, twelve feet off the floor. Like almost everything else about Henry Hudson, the rest of the story seems lost in the fog.

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