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Henry Hudson

Starting on September 10, 1609 Capt. Henry Hudson, accompanied by the 16 to 20 sailors of his ship, the Half Moon, became the first European to sail up the broad river that would one day bear his name.

An Englishman, Hudson was working for England’s archrivals the Dutch. He had been hired by the Dutch East India Company and led a mixed Dutch and English crew. His assignment was to look for a northeast route to the Far East through the Arctic Ocean over Russia, but he was at least as interested in finding a northwest passage through North America. The shortcut from Europe to Asia through North America was searched for but never found.

The Half Moon set sail from Amsterdam in early April, heading due north. In mid-to-late May, bad weather, icy waters, and possibly a mutinous crew forced Hudson to turn his ship around near Norway. Ignoring his contract with the Dutch, he headed west across the Atlantic to seek his northwest passage there.

By the time the Half Moon entered what is now New York Bay, it had been plying North America’s eastern shoreline, from Newfoundland to Virginia, for two months. Sailing into New York Bay on September 3, Hudson and his men spent several days exploring the bay and its surrounding lands. On the September 4 the Half Moon sent its boat out to fish, and the sailors caught a ray so large it took four men to haul it in. On the same day, natives of the country came on board, “seeming very glad of our comming,” wrote Robert Juet, one of the ship’s mates and the trip’s primary journal keeper. Hudson returned the visit by going ashore, and the natives, he wrote, “all stood around and sang in their fashion.”

Hudson claimed the area for the Dutch, anticipating Holland’s subsequent settlement of New York. On September 6 he sent the ship’s boat out with five men for some quick exploring. The expedition reported that the land was “as pleasant with Grasse and Flowers, and Goodly trees, as ever they had seen.” But on the way back the boat was attacked by Indians, and one of Hudson’s men was killed by an arrow in the throat. For several nights thereafter the crew kept a careful watch. On September 9, two large canoes full of Indians came on board, “in shew of buying knives to betray us; but we percieued their intent,” Juet wrote. Whatever the natives’ intent, Hudson’s men took two of them prisoner and drove the rest away.

New York Indians Discover Dutchmen Whenever Indians and Europeans met, the process of discovery was usually reciprocal. In hindsight, these first encounters were asymmetrically momentous events, presaging catastrophic consequences for the native peoples of North America. Europeans wrote accounts of these meetings; Indians did not. Nevertheless, memories of such meetings passed from generation to generation within the tribes. Some traditions recalled dreams, premonitions, and prophecies that foretold the coming of powerful strangers, stories no doubt retold with increasing bitterness as Europeans kept coming. In some accounts people looked from the shore and thought the awesome approaching ships were giant white seabirds or floating islands. The hairy men onboard had firearms, armor, and metal goods. But, contrary to what European explorers frequently asserted, there is little evidence that Indians regarded them as gods. Early Europeans lacked the power and dominance they would later amass, and they did not always seem to pose an immediate threat. They relied on Indian guides, Indian foods, and Indian technology (birch-bark canoes, for instance) to travel inland. To native eyes, their pale skins made them look sickly. Henry Hudson and his Dutch crew met people who were probably from the Munsee branch of the Delaware or Lenni Lenape at Manhattan in 1609, and they met Mahican farther up the Hudson. The Moravian missionary John Gottlieb Ernestus Heckwelder (1743–1823), who lived for many years among Delaware and Mahican displaced into Ohio, recorded a native account of the meeting in 1765, in which Hudson features as a figure dressed in red. Heckwelder kept journals and wrote about native life, most notably his Account of the History, Manners and Customs of the Indian Nations, Who Once Inhabited Pennsylvania (1819). By the time he transcribed this tradition sometime in the 1760s, the Indians knew all too well the consequences of meeting Europeans who peddled alcohol, infected them with new diseases, waged war against them, denigrated their cultures, and stole their lands. “Loving people,” wrote the English captain Henry Hudson years later in describing for his Dutch employers the natives living in the valley of the Great River of the Mountains. The upstream cruise of his little vessel—Half Moon—was an early autumn idyl. The days were filled with sun-filtered mists, the nights with clear starlight. Indian summer has not changed upon the river since those September hours in 1609. Disappointed that the wide stream had not proved a northwest passage to China, the explorers sailed back southward. When the Half Moon lay at anchor beside the long narrow island at the river’s mouth, her crew saw in the twilight a cliff “of the colour of a white greene as though it were either [a] Copper or Silver Mync.” Their cruise, begun in wonder at the stream’s beauty, had ended in greedy speculation, setting an often repeated pattern.

The next day the Half Moon set sail upriver, passing through the Narrows of New York Bay the day after and anchoring that night off the northern tip of the island the Indians called Manna-hata. In the morning, 28 canoes of men, women, and children approached the Half Moon. “The people of the Countrey came aboard of vs,” Juet wrote, “making show of love, and gave vs Tobacco and Indian wheat and departed for that night; but we durst not trust them.” Casting his gaze ashore, Hudson considered this “as pleasant a land as one can tread upon.”

On the morning of the September 14 the Half Moon approached the wide part of the Hudson that would become known as the Tappan Zee. Impressed by its three-mile breadth, Hudson wondered if the river was indeed the elusive passage to the Pacific. The ship made good speed that day, reaching the highlands between Bear Mountain and West Point. “The land grew very high and mountainous,” Juet wrote, “and the river is full of fish.”

On September 15 the ship’s two captive Indians escaped and swam ashore; after the ship was safely headed upriver, they stood on the bank and shouted derisively. That evening the explorers found a settlement with a “very loving people,” Juet wrote, “where we were well vsed [taken care of].” On September 18, approaching what is now Albany, Hudson went ashore with the chief of a small tribe. He was wined and dined on freshly killed pigeon and “a fat dog.” The land, he wrote, “is the finest for cultivation that I ever in my life set foot upon. . . . The natives are a very good people, for when they saw that I would not remain, they supposed that I was afraid of their bows, and taking the arrows, they broke them in pieces, and threw them into the fire.”

The river grew steadily shallower, and the captain’s hopes of discovering a waterway to Asia were dimming. On September 20 “the people of the Countrie came flocking aboord,” Juet wrote. Some brought grapes and pumpkins; others brought beaver and otter skins, which Hudson’s men traded for. A day later canoes again flocked to the Half Moon. A bit distrustful, Hudson invited some of the chiefs aboard, plying them with wine and brandy to see if alcohol brought out any treachery. It didn’t; all that happened was that several of the Indians got very drunk. “That was strange to them,” Juet wrote, “for they could not tell how to take it.” One native, too drunk to move, spent the night on board the Half Moon. Returning the following morning, his tribesmen were immensely relieved to find him well.

That day, September 22, Hudson sent the Half Moon’s boat upriver, north of present-day Albany, to sound the water’s depth. The boat returned with bad news: A few miles up, the river was too shallow—a mere seven feet—for a ship to navigate. After sailing 150 miles up the “River of Mountains,” as he’d come to call it, Hudson regretfully decided to turn back. The northwest passage, if it existed, lay elsewhere.

On September 23 the Half Moon started its journey back downstream. A week passed with little incident. Hudson and his crew evidently had an eye out for future settlement; going ashore on the twenty-fifth, Juet wrote that “we found good land for Corne, and other Garden herbs and great store of Slate for houses, and other good stones.” On the thirtieth, near what is now Peekskill, he wrote that “this is a very pleasant place to build a Towne on. Nothing about anchorage,” and the surrounding mountains’ barren, treeless slopes hinted at the presence of valuable minerals.

The Half Moon’s river journey had a violent conclusion. On October 1 an Indian climbed up the ship’s rudder and on board, and he stole Juet’s pillow, two shirts, and two bandoleers. The first mate shot and killed him. The next day two war canoes filled with Indians shooting arrows pursued the Half Moon. Hudson ordered his men to shoot back, and musket fire from the Half Moon killed two or three Indians. Farther downriver the Half Moon found some hundred natives crowded on a spit of land waiting to rain arrows on the ship. Juet fired a light cannon and killed two; four or five more, chasing the Half Moon in canoes, were killed by cannon and musket fire. Fifteen years later, when the Dutch came to settle Manhattan, the Indians still remembered that river battle.

After sailing six miles and crossing the river, the Half Moon lay at anchor off Manhattan on the night of October 2. The third was stormy, but the fourth brought fair weather. “Wee weighed,” Juet wrote, “and came out of the River into which we had run so farre.” By noon, clear of New York Bay, “we tooke our Boat, and set our mayne-sayle and sprit-sayle, and our top-sayles, and steered away . . . into the mayne sea.”

In 1610, Hudson managed to get backing for yet another voyage, this time under the English flag. The funding came from the Virginia Company and the British East India Company. At the helm of his new ship, the Discovery, he stayed to the north (some claim he deliberately stayed too far south on his Dutch-funded voyage), reaching Iceland on May 11, the south of Greenland on June 4, and then rounding the southern tip of Greenland.

Excitement was very high due to the expectation that the ship had finally found the Northwest Passage through the continent. On June 25, the explorers reached the Hudson Strait at the northern tip of Labrador. Following the southern coast of the strait on August 2, the ship entered Hudson Bay. Hudson spent the following months mapping and exploring its eastern shores. In November however, the ship became trapped in the ice in James Bay, and the crew moved ashore for the winter.

When the ice cleared in the spring of 1611, Hudson planned to continue exploring but his crew wanted to return home. Matters came to a head and the crew mutinied in June 1611. They set Hudson, his teenage son John, and eight crewmen - either sick and infirm, or loyal to Hudson - adrift in a small open boat. According to Abacuck Prickett's journal, the castaways were provided with powder and shot, some pikes, an iron pot, some meal, and other miscellaneous items, as well as clothing. However Prickett's journal is disingenous, favoring the point of view of the mutineers, who knew they would be tried in England. Some argue that the abandoned men were provided with nothing and expected to die. The small boat kept pace with the Discovery for some time as the abandoned men rowed towards her but eventually Discovery's sails were let loose. Hudson was never seen again.

Only eight of the thirteen mutinous crewmen survived to return to Europe, and although arrested, none were ever punished for the mutiny and Hudson's death. One theory holds that they were considered valuable as sources of information, having travelled to the New World.

Tony Scherman. Hudson Discovers the Hudson. American Heritage. Tuesday September 12, 2006. Colin G. Calloway. Native Americans First View Whites from the Shore. American Heritage. Monday March 23, 2009.

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