But he there found the sea as full of ice as he had found it in the preceding year, so that he lost the hope of effecting anything during the season.  This circumstance, and the cold which some of his men who had been in the East Indies could not bear, caused quarrels among the crew, they being partly English, partly Dutch; upon which the captain, Henry Hudson, laid before them two propositions.  The first of these was, to go to the coast of America to the latitude of forty degrees.  This idea had been suggested to him by some letters and maps which his friend Captain Smith had sent him from Virginia, and by which he informed him that there was a sea leading into the western ocean to the north of the southern English colony [Virginia].  Had this information been true (experience goes as yet to the contrary), it would have been of great advantage, as indicating a short way to India.  The other proposition was to direct their search to Davis’s Straits.  This meeting with general approval, they sailed on the 14th of May, and arrived, with a good wind, at the Faroe Islands, where they stopped but twenty-four hours to supply themselves with fresh water.  After leaving these islands they sailed on till, on the 18th of July, they reached the coast of Nova Francia under 44 degrees....  They left that place on the 26th of July, and kept out at sea till the 3d of August, when they were again near the coast in 42 degrees of latitude.  Thence they sailed on till, on the 12th of August, they reached the shore under 37 deg. 45’.  Thence they sailed along the shore until we [sic] reached 40 deg. 45’, where they found a good entrance, between two headlands, and thus entered on the 12th of September into as fine a river as can be found, with good anchoring ground on both sides.”

That river, “as fine as can be found,” was our own Hudson.

Van Meteren’s account of the voyage, although not published until the year 1614, was written very soon after Hudson’s return—­the slip that he makes in using “we” points to the probability that he copied directly from Hudson’s log—­and in it we have all that we ever are likely to know about the causes which led to the change in the “Half Moon’s” course.  For my own part, I believe that Hudson did precisely what he had wanted to do from the start.  The prohibitory clause in his instructions, forbidding him to go upon other than the course laid down for him, pointedly suggests that he had expressed the desire—­natural enough, since he twice had searched vainly for a passage by Nova Zembla—­to search westward instead of eastward for a water-way to the Indies.  As Van Meteren states, authoritatively, he was encouraged to search in that direction by the information given him by Captain John Smith concerning a passage north of Virginia across the American continent—­a notion that Smith probably derived in the first instance from Michael Lok’s planisphere, which shows the continent reduced to a mere strip in about the latitude of the river that Hudson found; and that he very well might have conceived to be confirmed by stories about a great sea not far westward (the great lakes) which he heard from the Indians.