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this unknown land. "Then we went into the woods, hills, and valleys--and the moss and the frog were not
spared." Not till the month of May did the ice begin to melt and the men could fish. The first day this was
possible they caught "five hundred fish as big as good herrings and some trout," which revived their hopes
and their health. Hudson made a last despairing effort to find a westward passage. But now the men rose in
mutiny. "We would rather be hanged at home than starved abroad!" they cried miserably.
CHAPTER XXXVII 133
So Hudson "fitted all things for his return, and first delivered all the bread out of the bread room (which came
to a pound apiece for every man's share), and he wept when he gave it unto them." It was barely sufficient for
fourteen days, and even with the fourscore small fish they had caught it was "a poor relief for so many hungry
bellies."
With a fair wind in the month of June, the little Discovery was headed for home. A few days later she was
stopped by ice. Mutiny now burst forth. The "master" and his men had lost confidence in each other. There
were ruffians on board, rendered almost wild by hunger and privation. There is nothing more tragic in the
history of exploration than the desertion of Henry Hudson and his boy in their newly discovered bay. Every
detail of the conspiracy is given by Prickett. We know how the rumour spread, how the crew resolved to turn
the "master" and the sick men adrift and to share the remaining provisions among themselves. And how in the
early morning Hudson was seized and his arms bound behind him.
"What does this mean?" he cried.
"You will know soon enough when you are in the shallop," they replied.
The boat was lowered and into it Hudson was put with his son, while the "poor, sick, and lame men were
called upon to get them out of their cabins into the shallop." Then the mutineers lowered some powder and
shot, some pikes, an iron pot, and some meal into her, and the little boat was soon adrift with her living freight
of suffering, starving men--adrift in that icebound sea, far from home and friends and all human help. At the
last moment the carpenter sprang into the drifting boat, resolved to die with the captain sooner than desert
him. Then the Discovery flew away with all sail up as from an enemy.
And "the master" perished--how and when we know not.
Fortunately the mutineers took home Hudson's journals and charts. Ships were sent out to search for the lost
explorer, but the silence has never been broken since that summer's day three hundred years ago, when he was
deserted in the waters of his own bay.
CHAPTER XXXVIII 134
CHAPTER XXXVIII
BAFFIN FINDS HIS BAY
Two years only after the tragedy of Henry Hudson, another Arctic explorer appears upon the scene. William
Baffin was already an experienced seaman in the prime of life; he had made four voyages to the icy north,
when he was called on by the new Company of Merchants of London--"discoverers of the North-West
Passage"--formed in 1612, to prepare for another voyage of discovery. Distressed beyond measure at the
desertion of Henry Hudson, the Muscovy Company had dispatched Sir Thomas Button with our old friend
Abacuk Prickett to show him the way. Button had reached the western side of Hudson's Bay, and after
wintering there returned fully convinced that a north-west passage existed in this direction. Baffin returned
from an expedition to Greenland the same year. The fiords and islets of west Greenland, the ice-floes and
glaciers of Spitzbergen, the tidal phenomena of Hudson's Strait, and the geographical secrets of the
far-northern bay were all familiar to him. "He was, therefore, chosen as mate and associate" to Bylot, one of
the men who had deserted Hudson, but who had sailed three times with him previously and knew well the
western seas. So in "the good ship called the Discovery," of fifty-five tons, with a crew of fourteen men and
two boys, William Baffin sailed for the northern seas. May found the expedition on the coast of Greenland,
with a gale of wind and great islands of ice. However, Baffin crossed Davis Strait, and after a struggle with
ice at the entrance to Hudson's Strait he sailed along the northern side till he reached a group of islands which
he named Savage Islands. For here were Eskimos again--very shy and fearful of the white strangers. "Among
their tents," relates Baffin, "all covered with seal skins, were running up and down about forty dogs, most of
them muzzled, about the bigness of our mongrel mastiffs, being a brindled black colour, looking almost like
wolves. These dogs they used instead of horses, or rather as the Lapps do their deer, to draw their sledges [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]