impracticability of the Arctic route. No longer did he hold to the
notion that because the sun shone continuously at the north pole for
five months of the year temperate waters for navigation would be found
there, that is, once the first belt of Arctic cold was pierced. Twice
before, for English merchants of the Muscovy Company, he had tried
for that northern route only to be frustrated by ice-choked seas--and
mutinous crews.
The mutinies went unpunished it appears. Certainly, this was a most
unusual outcome for the times. Such uncommon laxity on the part of
an English ship’s master, together with Hudson’s similar behavior on
subsequent occasions, could lead to the conclusion that he was too weak
a disciplinarian ever to have been trusted with command.
Or, maybe this famous explorer was both dissembling and highhanded
enough to manage always to have his way, even if it was necessary to
employ such devious means as fomenting rebellions to his authority to
achieve his secret purposes.
The latter is a tempting surmise. But if it is correct, Hudson may have
tried it once too often.
On a later expedition to America as master of an English ship he
perished at the hands of his crew. He and his young son along with a
few loyal sailors were set adrift in a shallop in the great bay that
bears his name, never to be heard of again.
Be all of this as it may, by fortunate circumstance or by
pre-meditation Hudson had with him on his memorable voyage in 1609 a
map that had been sent to him from Virginia by Captain John Smith. And
there was a letter that had come with the map from his adventurous
friend suggesting that a passage to China might be found in the west
above 40° where Smith himself had “left off.” Everything pointed to a
big sea on the backside of Virginia. Many of the Indians Captain Smith
met on his explorations had confirmed its existence (their version no
doubt of the Great Lakes). And there was much evidence of navigable
rivers paralleling the Susquehanna above 40°. They probably led toward
this sea!
So Henry Hudson, contriving to cooperate with the mutineers aboard his
ship and in flagrant disobedience to the specific instructions of his
Dutch employers, sailed west instead of northeast.
After surviving a storm that tore away her foremast the _Half Moon_
made a landfall in America off Newfoundland where she came among a
fleet of French fishing boats taking cod on the banks. Captain Hudson
salted a few fish for his own stores, and then put down the coast of
Nova Scotia to Maine. There, at Penobscot Bay, he had a new pine mast
cut and proceeded to relieve some French-speaking Indians of their
stock-in-trade without benefit of barter.
“We espied two French shallops full of the Countrey people come into
the Harbour,” his clerk wrote, “but they offered us no wrong, seeing we
stood upon our guard. They brought many Beaver skinnes, and other fine
Furres, which they would have changed for redde Gownes. For the French
trade with them for red Cassockes, Knives, Hatchets, Copper, Kettles,
Trevits, Beades and other trifles.... We kept good watch for feare
of being betrayed by the people, and perceived where they layd their
shallops.... In the morning we manned our Scute with foure Muskets, and
sixe men and tooke one of their Shallops and brought it aboard. Then we
manned our Boat and Scute with twelve men and Muskets, and two stone
Pieces or Murderers, and drove the Salvages from their Houses, and
tooke the spoyle of them, as they would have done of us. Then we set
sail....”
If the Dutchmen left hurriedly it was probably in fear of revenge.
Maybe the Indians showed signs of retaliating. After all, the natives
of this coast must have been getting annoyed by the ways of white men,
considering that this sort of thing had been going on, sporadically,
since the first Norsemen invaded their land some six hundred years
earlier.
The _Half Moon_ sailed on south to Cape Cod, which the crew noted had
been “discovered by Captain Bartholomew Gosnold in 1602.” Here, the
sailors made sport of an Indian they brought aboard, getting the savage
so drunk that “he leapt and danced.” After that Captain Hudson put out
to sea once more, to arrive off the Capes of Virginia about the middle
of August.
He nosed into the Chesapeake, possibly with the intention of visiting
his friend Smith, but caution seems to have won out over the risk of
exposing his Dutch-owned vessel to agents of the rival London Company.
Being an Englishman himself, Henry Hudson knew only too well that the
merchants of his native country made little distinction between a
foreign competitor and a foreign enemy, especially when they had guns
like those at Jamestown. He might risk disobeying his Dutch employers
but not losing their ship--not before he’d made his grand discovery of
a passage to the Orient. Perhaps, too, he turned a little sensitive
about sailing under a Dutch flag with information furnished by a fellow
Englishman.
So, a convenient “storm” blew the _Half Moon_ back out to sea, and
Hudson made his way northward, first to penetrate the Delaware River to
shoal water, and then on to explore the river that now bears his name.
Numerous Europeans had visited this great river before him. The
Norsemen under the leadership of Thorfinn Karselfni in 1011 may have
been the first. Certainly in 1524 the Frenchman, Verrazano, and his
amorous crew stopped off there to mingle with the friendly natives. Not
many months afterward a Portuguese captain, Estevan Gomez, sailing for
Spain, probably put into the river’s mouth. In fact, Spanish archives
are said to indicate that during the sixteenth century many Spanish
ships used the harbor for watering and refitting on their fishing and
fur trading trips between Newfoundland and New Spain.
But Henry Hudson ascended the river as far as it was navigable and
recorded what he observed and what he did. He it was who took back
to Europe the first news of the vast store of fur skins to be had
there. And that is what opened the valley of the Hudson to trade and
settlement.
His memorable exploration of the river got off however to an
inauspicious start in the Lower Bay. Here, it was recorded, “the people
of the Countrey came aboord of us, seeming very glad of our comming,
and brought greene Tobacco, and gave us of it for Knives and Beeds.
They goe in Deere skins loose, well dressed. They have yellow copper.
They desire Cloathes, and are very civill.” Yet, Hudson did not trust
them, and mutual suspicion quickly clouded the atmosphere. There was
fighting and a sailor was killed. Later, some Indians who came aboard
were kidnapped. They were plied with liquor and dressed in red coats
while the sailors made crude sport of them. Two were kept prisoners.
But then, after passing the Narrows and entering the river, the
_Half Moon_ stopped off at Manhattan to find the natives there most
hospitable in spite of any news they may have had about the fights in
the Lower Bay. With their women and children they swarmed about the
little Dutch yacht in a bid for friendship and trade. Captain Hudson,
however, now believing that he had at long last entered on the strait
that led to “Zipangu where the palace roof was covered with gold,” did
not tarry long to barter for pelts.
Certainly, he didn’t let the escape of the two captive Indians delay
the passage of the _Half Moon_ upstream, even though these savages
swimming ashore made provocative signs of derision and scorn toward the
white men.
It wasn’t until it became disappointingly obvious that he had reached
the head of ship navigation that Hudson took time for barter. This
was in the vicinity of present-day Albany. Here he again found the
natives both hospitable and anxious to trade. In one instance, when
he went ashore to eat fat dog meat with a chief of the country, the
Indians broke their arrows and cast them into the fire to prove their
friendship. Later they came flocking aboard, bringing beaver and otter
skins which they exchanged for glass beads, knives and hatchets.
Still, the Englishman and his Dutch mate decided to test some of
the chief men of the country for possible treachery by getting them
intoxicated in the privacy of the _Half Moon’s_ cabin. One of them
got so drunk that he finally dropped to the floor unconscious. The
subsequent raising of this savage from the “dead” created such an
impression on his fellows that they brought tobacco, venison and shell
money to the white captain in gratitude. They also wanted to get drunk
again.
Indeed, after Captain Hudson had reluctantly turned his ship’s prow
downstream in disappointment over not finding the long sought passage
to the South Sea, he was besieged by chief men of the country who
wanted more _aqua vitae_. They brought women aboard who “behaved very
modestly,” and they made it clear to the captain that whatever he
wanted in their land was his.
So Hudson now concentrated on acquiring the only thing of value
he recognized--pelts. As the _Half Moon_ proceeded leisurely down
the river he traded in earnest with the “loveing countrey people,”
encouraging any who had furs to offer in exchange for knives and beads
to come aboard. The story is vividly logged.
On reaching the Highlands the “people of the Mountaynes came aboord
us, wondring at our ship and weapons. We bought some small skinnes of
them for Trifles.” But here real trouble started when an Indian in a
canoe “got up by our Rudder to the Cabin window,” and stole a couple of
shirts.
“Our Masters Mate shot at him, and strooke him on the breast, and
killed him. Whereupon all the rest fled away, some in the Canoes, and
so lept out of them into the water. We manned our Boat, and got our
things againe. Then one of them that swamme got hold of our Boat,
thinking to overthrow it. But our Cooke tooke a Sword, and cut off one
of his hands, and he was drowned.”
The next day as the _Half Moon_ approached Manhattan the savages
attacked in force. From their canoes and from the shore they launched
showers of arrows. Foremost among them was one of the two natives who
had been misused and held captive on the trip up the river until the
escape. He led repeated assaults on the yacht. But the red men’s fury
was feeble in its effect. The white men easily drove them off with
musket and falcon shot, killing ten or more of them, and proceeded on
their way.
Putting the river behind him Captain Hudson sailed for Europe, but
not without much debate on the high seas about the _Half Moon’s_
destination port. The crew once more threatened him brutally according
to Hudson’s reports.
Here again “mutiny” served to resolve an awkward situation. The captain
needed a safe haven while explanations were worked out, as much so
as his recalcitrant crew. Disobedience when crowned with success is
usually forgiven, but added to Henry Hudson’s disobedience was failure.
No passage to China had been found.
After having agreed to winter in Ireland, Hudson managed to put into
Dartmouth in England. From there he wrote a report of his voyage
for the Directors of the East India Company at Amsterdam. And then,
opportunely, his countrymen stepped in to rescue him. They “detained”
him in England as one who had information of value to his own country,
while the _Half Moon_ was returned to its owners in Holland.
The Dutch East India Company, preoccupied with its profitable spice
trade and its search for a shorter route to the East, promptly wrote
off the cost of the voyage and closed the account. It was said at the
time that all Hudson did in the west was to find a river and exchange
his merchandise for some furs. But it was precisely those furs and the
report of the harbor and river, all unexploited by any Europeans, that
brought independent Dutch fur traders to the Valley of the Hudson the
very next year.
* * * * *
Amsterdam merchants who bartered European and Eastern goods in Muscovy
for furs had quickly taken note of the new possibilities in the west.
There were no duties to pay the savages in America, such as those
imposed on trade by the Czar. And a shipload of pelts could be had on
Hudson’s River for an insignificant outlay of beads and trifles--as the
French were doing on their great river in Canada. No time was lost in
organizing a trial adventure.
In a ship loaded with “a cargo of goods suitable for traffic with the
Indians,” and manned by some of Hudson’s own crew of the previous
year, traders from Holland arrived at Manhattan in 1610. They found
the savages there no less capricious than before, just as dangerously
unpredictable, but obviously anxious to barter their pelts for the
white men’s goods. After driving a profitable trade, it is said, the
Dutchmen promised that “they would visit them the next year again, when
they would bring them more presents, and stay with them awhile,” adding
however that “as they could not live without eating, they should then
want a little land of them, to sow seeds, in order to raise herbs to
put in their broth.”
And so they did, coming each year, quite likely building a palisaded
truck house and huts on Manhattan Island as early as 1613 to serve
as a depot. Trading posts were established farther up the river and
light-drafted shallops invaded the creeks and bays of the interior.
Beavers were butchered wholesale by natives eager for hatchets, baubles
and liquor. Within a few years furs were being collected in such
quantity during the winter months that early spring ships from Holland
could count on being cargoed along Hudson’s River with as many as seven
thousand pelts.
To further this profitable trade and to encourage discovery in “New
Netherland” the States General at The Hague granted a temporary charter
of special privileges to merchants of Amsterdam and Hoorn who had
formed a western trading association known as the United New Netherland
Company.
By 1614 Hendrick Christiansen, a fur factor in the employ of Amsterdam
merchants, had established a permanent trading post on Hudson’s River
near the present site of Albany. Fort Nassau, as it was called, was
well palisaded and moated, equipped with two large guns and eleven
swivels, and garrisoned by a dozen armed traders. All were necessary
precautions. The trading post was located on the border of the fiercest
of all Indian tribes, the dreaded Mohawks of the Iroquois Confederacy.
Relatively peaceful tribes, Algonquian Mohegans and others, occupied
most of the Hudson Valley east of the river and south of Fort Nassau
along both banks. But the interior to the north and west was the home
of the Five Nations, the terrible Iroquois: Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga,
Cayuga and Seneca. From palisaded forts deep in this hinterland their
bloodthirsty young warriors sallied forth regularly to terrorize their
neighbors.
Humbling every foe they met into complete submission the Iroquois
enforced tribute and left a trail of carnage wherever they paddled
their war canoes. They carried their conquests to the sea in the east,
scourging the valleys of the Hudson and the Connecticut. Their chilling
war cries sounded over the Great Lakes among the Eries, in the lower
valley of the Delaware where lived the gentle Lenni Lenape, and down
the length of the Susquehanna to the waters of Chesapeake Bay. War
parties from their ancient forts forayed far to the south in the Valley
of Virginia and crossed the Blue Ridge to follow the Piedmont plateau
even into Carolina to take Catawba scalps and women.
For many generations the supremacy of the Iroquois had been
acknowledged wherever their warriors went in search of victories and
their national pride had grown with every conquest.
But now their own country was being invaded, from the north, from New
France, by Huron and Algonquin enemies with the help of Champlain’s
arquebusiers. And the Five Nations had sworn by the blood of the bear
their undying enmity to these Frenchmen who first surprised them at
Lake Champlain with their death-dealing firesticks.
It was the Mohawks, the proudest and bravest of the Iroquois and now
the near neighbors of the Dutch, who had taken the brunt of that first
Iroquois disgrace in 1609. Their portage path coming from the west
terminated near Fort Nassau, and the Dutch traders didn’t find it
difficult to cultivate them. Rankling with hatred against the French,
the Mohawks were in a mood to be friendly with any gun-carrying white
men who might become their allies.
Revenge of course is a powerful motive in the savage breast. On the
other hand so is self-preservation. The risk of having enemies with the
astonishing fireguns on both their flanks no doubt also entered into
the Mohawks’ calculations.
In any case it wasn’t long before Dutch traders were fearlessly
visiting villages deep in the country of the dreaded Five Nations,
peacefully driving a great trade in furs while the savages learned to
drink their fire-water and became better acquainted with the awesome
weapons they carried.
In the meantime, late in 1615, the Iroquois did gain some satisfaction
when Champlain and his Indian allies, after driving deep into their
territory by way of Lake Ontario, were forced to withdraw in temporary
defeat. A galleried and thickly palisaded fort at Lake Onondaga
withstood the arquebuses, even though a movable tower was built by
the attackers so that the Frenchmen might shoot down into the fort.
Attempts by the Canadian force to fire the stockade proved unsuccessful
too, due to contrary winds. And Champlain himself was so badly wounded
during the battle that he had to be carried from the field on a litter
of wickered branches.
After Fort Nassau was destroyed by a freshet of ice and water in
1617, a new trading post was established by the Dutch in the same
vicinity but in a more secure position. This was on a commanding rise
overlooking the Hudson at the mouth of the Tawasentha, later known
as Norman’s Kill. It was here, as tradition has it, that the tacit
agreement of friendship and trade between the Dutch and the Iroquois
was actually formalized as a treaty of alliance and peace.
The Mohawks were the prime movers of the pact, sending invitations to
a grand council of the sachems of the Five Nations as well as their
subjugated neighbors in the east and south. With the smoking of the
calumet a binding covenant was made between the factors of the Holland
merchants and all the Indian tribes represented at the council. The
supremacy of the Five Nations over their aboriginal neighbors was
confirmed, and the Dutch promised “firegun” reprisals against any who
broke the peace on the frontiers of New Netherland.
And there was peace of a sort--while the merchants in Holland filled
their coffers and the Indians acquired guns. Only occasionally did
armed fur factors find it necessary to enforce the pact and then often
to their sorrow. Once, for instance, when a detail from the fort took
the part of some offended Mohegans, the Mohawks retaliated fiercely.
They managed to kill the Dutch commander and three of his men.
Capturing the remainder of the party, they cooked and ate one of them
and burned the others.
But in the main there was the kind of armed peace that permitted the
fur traders to extend the frontiers of New Netherland and by their
discoveries gain additional trading privileges under their charter.
This they had to do if they were to beat the French and the English to
the vast untapped fur stores of the interior.
Early in the history of Fort Nassau, a party of three adventurous
traders, led by one “Kleynties,” penetrated deep into the hinterland.
Travelling west up the Mohawk Valley, they appear to have stumbled upon
the headwaters of the Susquehanna River and eventually to have reached
Carantouan, a palisaded town of the Susquehannock Indians.
Carantouan, now known as Spanish Hill, was just south of the
present-day border between New York and Pennsylvania. It was built
about the terraced slopes of a gigantic mound. The platter-like top of
this mound with its man-made entrenchments was said by the Indians to
have been occupied once by awesome spirits who spoke with thunder and
killed men by making holes through their bodies. The spirits could have
been sixteenth century Spanish explorers from Chesapeake Bay taking
refuge there while searching for gold.
Only a short time before the advent of the three Dutchmen in this
vicinity Carantouan had been visited by a Frenchman, Etienne Brule.
With a delegation of Hurons he safely traversed the country of the Five
Nations to reach this stronghold of the Susquehannocks in 1615. He
wanted them as allies for Champlain’s pending attack on Fort Onondaga.
Like the Hurons, the Susquehannocks were kinsmen but bitter enemies of
the Five Nations, and they agreed readily enough to help in the attack.
However their war dances took too long and they arrived too late--after
Champlain’s defeat.
Etienne Brule returned to Carantouan with his savage friends to do a
bit of bartering and to examine into the possibilities of extending the
fur trade of Canada to the Susquehanna. In fact he descended the length
of that river into the upper waters of Chesapeake Bay. But because
of the temperate climate there he took it to be the coast of Spanish
Florida and discreetly turned back.
[Illustration: THE MERCHANTS FILLED THEIR COFFERS, WHILE THE INDIANS
ACQUIRED GUNS.]
After his return up the river to Carantouan, Brule set out for home.
This time he was captured in the country of the Five Nations. When
those savages discovered he was a Frenchman, they plucked his beard
hair by hair, tore his nails loose with their teeth, and staked him
out for fire-brand torture. But then, just before it was too late,
Brule mysteriously won their favor, was roundly feted, and in the end
was permitted to escape back to Huron lands. In 1618 he made his way
to Three Rivers in Canada, where Champlain at the time was driving a
trade for beaver pelts with the Indians, and there he reported his
discoveries.
However, getting through the Iroquois country to Carantouan--and
getting back to Canada--had been a dangerous exploit, one that not many
French traders would desire to emulate, not unless Champlain first
brought the Five Nations to complete submission by force of arms. That,
of course, the great French captain was never able to do; if he had,
probably the French would have overrun the valleys of the Susquehanna,
the Delaware and the Hudson.
In the meantime, if the three lost Hollanders from Fort Nassau did
wander into the Susquehannock stronghold, they managed to get out of
it with their whole skins. Maybe, having missed Brule, they posed as
friendly Frenchmen, or even as Englishmen with whom the Susquehannocks
had previously enjoyed such satisfactory dealings through Captain John
Smith. Eventually, however, they were taken by other Susquehannock
Indians, or “Minquas,” and ended up on the lower reaches of the
Delaware River as captives held for ransom.
From there, it appears, word of their predicament reached Manhattan and
Fort Nassau.
At the time, the spring of 1616, the Dutch factors on Hudson’s River
were anxious to explore this other great river to the south that
Captain Hudson had also discovered. Already investigated were the
rivers to the east and north. Captain Cornelis Jacobsen May, a trader
in the employ of Hoorn merchants, had sailed east along the coast as
far as Martha’s Vineyard. Another trader out of Amsterdam, Captain
Adrien Block, went even farther in a small 16-ton yacht called the
_Onrust_ which he had built in New Netherland following the loss of his
employers’ ship by fire. The little _Onrust_ sailed through Long Island
Sound, ascended the Connecticut, explored other streams and the bays
along the coasts, and rounded Cape Cod northward to latitudes above
present-day Boston.