most fruitful of all his adventurings, since the planting of our city was the outcome of it—­was a failure.  Hessel Gerritz (1613) wrote:  “All that he did in the west in 1609 was to exchange his merchandise for furs in New France.”  And Hudson himself, no doubt, rated his great accomplishment—­on which so large a part of his fame rests enduringly—­as a mere waste of energy and of time.  I hope that he knows about, and takes a comforting pride in—­over there in the Shades—­the great city which owes its founding to that seemingly bootless voyage!

IX

What happened to Hudson when he reached Dartmouth has been recorded; and, broadly, why it happened.  Hessel Gerritz wrote that “he ... returned safely to England, where he was accused of having undertaken a voyage to the detriment of his own country.”  Van Meteren wrote:  “A long time elapsed, through contrary winds, before the Company could be informed of the arrival of the ship [the “Half Moon”] in England.  Then they ordered the ship and crew to return [to Holland] as soon as possible.  But when they were going to do so, Henry Hudson and the other Englishmen of the ship were commanded by government there not to leave England but to serve their own country.”  Obviously, international trade jealousies were at the root of the matter.  Conceivably, as I have stated, the Muscovy Company, a much interested party, was the prime mover in the seizure of Hudson out of the Dutch service.  But we only know certainly that he was seized out of that service:  with the result that he and Fate came to grips again; and that Fate’s hold on him did not loosen until Death cast it off.

Hudson’s fourth, and last, voyage was not made for the Muscovy Company; but those chiefly concerned in promoting it were members of that Company, and two of them were members of the first importance in the direction of its affairs.  The adventure was set forth, mainly, by Sir Dudley Digges, Sir Thomas Smith, and Master John Wolstenholme—­who severally are commemorated in the Arctic by Smith’s Sound, Cape Digges, and Cape Wolstenholme—­and the expedition got away from London in “the barke ‘Discovery’” on April 17, 1610.

Purchas wrote a nearly contemporary history of this voyage that included three strictly contemporary documents:  two of them certainly written aboard the “Discovery”; and the third either written aboard the ship on the voyage home, as is possible, or not long after the ship had arrived in England.

The first of these documents is “An Abstract of the Journal of Master Henry Hudson.”  This is Hudson’s own log, but badly mutilated.  It begins on the day of sailing, April 17th, and ends on the ensuing August 3d.  There are many gaps in it, and the block of more than ten months is gone.  The missing portions, presumably, were destroyed by the mutineers.