The second document is styled by Purchas:  “A Note Found in the Deske of Thomas Wydowse, Student in the Mathematickes, hee being one of them who was put into the Shallop.”  Concerning this poor “student in the mathematickes” Prickett testified before the court:  “Thomas Widowes was thrust out of the ship into the shallop, but whether he willed them take his keys and share his goods, to save his life, this examinate knoweth not.”  Practically, this is an assurance that he did make such an offer; and his despairing resistance to being outcast is implied also in the pathetic note following his name in the Trinity House list of the abandoned ones:  “put away in great distress.”  There is nothing to show how he happened to be aboard the “Discovery,” nor who he was.  Possibly he may have been a son of the “Richard Widowes, goldsmith,” who is named in the second charter (1609) of the Virginia Company.  His “Note”—­cited in full later on—­exhibits clearly the evil conditions that obtained aboard the “Discovery”; and especially makes clear that Juet’s mutinous disposition began to be manifested at a very early stage of the voyage.

The third document is the most important, in that it gives—­or professes to give—­a complete history of the whole voyage.  Purchas styles it:  “A Larger Discourse of the Same Voyage, and the Successe Thereof, written by Abacucks Prickett, a servant of Sir Dudley Digges, whom the Mutineers had Saved in hope to procure his Master to worke their Pardon.”  Purchas wrote that “this report of Prickett may happely bee suspected by some as not so friendly to Hudson.”  Being essentially a bit of special pleading, intended to save his own neck and the necks of his companions, it has rested always under the suspicion that Purchas cast upon it.  Nor is it relieved from suspicion by the fact that it is in accord with his sworn testimony, and with the sworn testimony of his fellows, before the High Court of Admiralty when he and they were on trial for their lives as mutineers.  The imperfect record of this trial merely shows that Prickett and all of the other witnesses—­with the partial exception of Byleth—­told substantially the same story; and—­as they all equally were in danger of hanging—­that story most naturally was in their own favor and in much the same words.  From the Trinity House record it appears that Prickett was “a land man put in by the Adventurers”; and in the court records he is described, most incongruously, as a “haberdasher”—­facts which place him, as his own very remarkable narrative places him, on a level much above that of the ordinary seamen of Hudson’s time.

Dr. Asher’s comment upon Prickett’s “Discourse,” is a just determination of its value:  “Though the paper he has left us is in form a narrative, the author’s real intention was much more to defend the mutineers than to describe the voyage.  As an apologetic essay, the ‘Larger Discourse’ is extremely clever.  It manages to cast some, not too much, shadow upon Hudson himself.  The