Henry Hudson faced a brutal mutiny—then disappeared. His fate remains a mystery.
The famed English explorer was abandoned centuries ago in the bay that now bears his name. Could he have survived?
On the morning of June 22, 1611, Captain Henry Hudson stepped out of his cabin on the Discovery. The 55-ton ship had recently broken free of winter ice at the frigid southern corner of the vast bay that would one day bear his name.
Now that the ship was free, Hudson faced a choice about where to sail next. Would he continue his search for a Northwest Passage from the Atlantic to the Pacific, which he was convinced was there to be discovered if it weren’t for the deadly ice? Or would Hudson admit he’d failed again—his fourth defeat in as many years—and direct his starving men to set sail for England and home?
His crew mutinied before he had the chance to decide.
When Hudson rose that morning, the mutineers were waiting for him. Two blocked his way onto the deck while William Wilson, whom Hudson had raised to the position of boatswain midway through the voyage, slipped behind the captain and bound his arms. When Hudson demanded to know what they were doing, he was told he’d find out once he was in the shallop, the shallow-drafted boat the sailors used for going ashore.
Also forced into the shallop were Hudson’s teenage son John, the ship’s “poor, sick, and lame men”—as described by surviving crewmember Abacuk Pricket in an account published in 1625—the carpenter, and the quartermaster, the latter two allies of the captain. The resourceful carpenter persuaded the mutineers to leave them with the chest containing his tools, as well as “a piece, and powder, and shot, and some pikes, an iron pot, with some meal, and other things.”
It wasn’t enough for them to survive for long.
The mutineers cut the line between shallop and ship. Some of them turned “to pillage, breaking up chests and rifling all places.” But when they saw the shallop attempting to follow them, the mutineers rushed to “let fall the mainsail, and out with their top-sails”—fleeing, Pricket reported, as if “from an enemy.” After that, “we saw not the shallop, or ever after.”
We don’t know what happened to Hudson and his eight abandoned shipmates. And we don’t know what drove the mutineers to such a cruel act. What we do know is that 23 men set sail on the Discovery on April 10, 1610, and only eight returned. And that everything we’ve learned about what happened on board that ship, with two notable exceptions, comes from the accounts and testimony of the survivors—four of whom were eventually charged with Hudson’s murder.
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Three failures
When Hudson vanished among the ice floes of Hudson Bay, the Spanish had already established the settlement of St. Augustine in Florida, the British had recently founded Jamestown in Virginia, and the French had just built the fur-trading post they called Québec City. Yet to many European merchants, North America was merely an impediment to lucrative trade with “Cathay” (China) and the “Spice Islands” (Indonesia). They wanted a northern route to the Pacific Ocean, and the race was on between countries, especially Britain and the Netherlands with their new East India Companies, to find it.
Hudson, who knew the North Atlantic better than most European mariners, made four attempts to find that passage. Three times he sailed northeast, thinking to navigate around Russia to China. Ice thwarted him each time, but not before his ship made it to the 80th parallel on the first voyage, farther north than any European would sail for another two centuries.
On his third attempt, stymied again by the ice and aware of dangerous discontent among his crew, Hudson offered the men a choice. They could search for a passage via the Davis Strait on the western coast of Greenland, or they could pursue a tip from his friend Captain John Smith, leader of the Jamestown colony, who claimed there was a likely passage just north of Virginia. The crew, desperate to escape the cold, opted for the southwesterly route to North America—and became the first Europeans to sail up the great waterway that would come to be called the Hudson River.
Yet this expedition, too, was viewed as a loss. Wide and deep as the river was at its mouth, it dwindled into shallowness as the oceangoing ship approached the site of present-day Albany; Hudson had again failed to find the elusive passage.
‘Our master was in despair’
We know how Hudson’s first three voyages went because, for each of them, the explorer kept a log or delegated the task to one of his officers. But on the fourth expedition, Hudson’s log ends nearly a year before the mutiny. And even in that short section, pages are missing.
Hudson recorded in his log that the Discovery launched from London on April 17, 1610. By May 11, it had reached Iceland. On June 3, it encountered ice for the first time. On June 24, it entered the strait that leads to Hudson Bay. In mid-July, it entered the bay, and Hudson “found the sea more grown than any we had since we left England.” On August 3, he wrote, “I observed and found the ship at noon in 61 degrees, 20 minutes, and a sea to the westward.” That was his final entry.
Most of the rest of what we know comes from Pricket’s narrative. Though “lame” at the time of the mutiny, he was not abandoned in the shallop with the other injured and ill men. He claimed he wasn’t part of the mutiny: “On my knees I besought them, for the love of God, to remember themselves, and to doe [sic] as they would be done unto.” If what he wrote was true—and even his publisher questioned his veracity—Pricket was probably spared because he was the servant of one of the expedition’s primary backers.
According to Pricket, tensions had been simmering on the Discovery long before the mutiny. In the strait, ice had blocked the ship’s path so relentlessly that “our master was in despair.” Hudson told the sailors they could choose whether to continue, but “after many words to no purpose, to work we must on all hands, to get ourselves out and to clear our ship.” The ice was pressing so close they had to end the discussion. Pricket remarked ominously that some “spake [sic] words, which were remembered a great while after.”
When they finally made it through the ice, Pricket reported, Hudson was more concerned with finding the Northwest Passage than with ensuring that they replenished their supplies of food. Ordered to survey the landscape, Pricket led a team ashore to climb a high hill. They spied deer and a breeding ground for migrating birds, as well as sorrel and “scurvy grass,” the sailors’ name for spoonwort, which contains vitamin C, an ingredient that keeps the dreaded disease at bay.
They also discovered human-made stone structures in which bird carcasses had been stored. The people who lived in this region, whom the crew had not yet seen, clearly used this lush meadow as hunting grounds. But when the party returned to the ship and told Hudson “what refreshing might there be had,” he refused to stay another day, a refusal that would be remembered with much bitterness.
Pricket blamed two crewmembers for much of the strife aboard the Discovery, ironically the two, besides Hudson’s son, who seemed to be closest to the explorer. Robert Juet served as captain’s mate on three of Hudson’s voyages, including this one, while HenryGreene lived as a servant in Hudson’s home in London. The young Juet had, “by his lewd life and conversation … lost the good will of all his friends,” wrote Pricket; Hudson offered him a position on board without wages because he could write well. (No record exists of Greene’s writing.)
But Greene was volatile. In Iceland, Greene and the ship’s surgeon fought, which “set all the company in a rage” because the surgeon had to be persuaded to continue the voyage. Not too long after, a drunken Juet claimed that Hudson brought Greene on board “to cracke his credit that should displease him”—likely meaning to undermine the reputation of any crewmember who was causing trouble for Hudson. To spy, in other words.
Under the stress of navigating through labyrinths of ice floes, small disputes became magnified and then festered during the long, hungry winter.
When Hudson heard this charge, he was so enraged he threatened to dump Juet back in Iceland. Later, Hudson removed Juet from his position, docking his pay, and promoted Robert Bylot to mate and William Wilson to boatswain—a decision that poisoned the relationship between Hudson and Juet.
Greene remained Hudson’s ally until gunner John Williams died in November, just as they were preparing to winter over in James Bay, the southern offshoot of Hudson Bay. Williams’s death itself (for which Pricket lists no cause) didn’t prompt the rupture, but the distribution of his belongings afterward did, specifically of a “gray cloth gown.”
Greene begged for it, and Hudson gave it to him. But Greene then angered Hudson by going on land with the carpenter, who had refused Hudson’s order to build a shelter, citing the winter weather. The captain took the gown back and gave it to captain’s mate Bylot, railing at Greene “with so many words of disgrace.” From then on, Greene was set against Hudson. “You shall see how the devil out of this so wrought with Greene,” wrote Pricket, “that he did the master what mischief he could in seeking to discredit him, and to thrust him and many other honest men out of the ship in the end.”
Under the stress of navigating through labyrinths of ice floes, small disputes became magnified and then festered during the long, hungry winter. Pricket would not write about that winter, except to say that it “was so cold … it lamed the most of our company, and my self doe [sic] yet feel it.”
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Bloodstained decks and a secret note
The spring thaw in June 1611 found the Discovery crew alive but starving. They could not catch enough fish “for so many hungry bellies.” Hudson distributed what he said was the last of the bread and the cheese. Then he ordered a search of the ship for secret stashes of bread and discovered “thirty cakes in a bagge.”
Pricket implied that Hudson knew of the hidden bread and wondered why “he did not stop the breach at the beginning,” before the crew’s hunger became so dire and their thoughts turned to mutiny. Because now it was too late.
On the night of June 21, Greene and Wilson sneaked into Pricket’s cabin to announce their plans to abandon Hudson and the sick sailors. “They had not eaten anything these three days,” the two mutineers told him, and Hudson did not seem eager to head home. Anything would be better than their current situation. When Pricket urged them to consider the consequences, Greene replied that he would rather be hanged at home than starved abroad.
The mutiny went forward.
Afterward, as the mutineers ransacked the ship, they found meal, butter, pork, and peas in the hold and 200 “bisket cakes,” more meal, and beer in Hudson’s quarters. It seemed the captain had been hoarding food, if Pricket is to be believed.
When the Discovery returned to England some 16 months after first setting sail, Greene, Wilson, and Juet were not among the eight survivors.
On October 24, 1611, Trinity House, the regulatory body for English ships, opened an investigation. A search of the ship had revealed bloodstained decks and clothing, and a note hidden in the desk of Thomas Wydowse, one of the castaways.
The masters of Trinity House interviewed all the survivors, who echoed Pricket’s account. Hudson hid food, they said, and doled it out to his favorites. Greene and Wilson led the mutiny, which Juet joined. All three had conveniently died on the voyage home—Greene and Wilson were killed, along with two others, in an Inuit ambush, and Juet perished from starvation. Trinity House was satisfied with these explanations.
More than five years later, early in 1617, the High Court of the Admiralty began its own investigation. Pricket explained to the court that the bloodstains came from the crewmembers killed in the Inuit attack; he assured them that none of the castaways had been harmed before they were put in the shallop.
The rest of the crew gave similar testimony. Several said they didn’t see any signs of a mutiny until it happened, but Wydowse’s note contradicts them. In it, he describes a meeting that Hudson called on September 10, 1610, in which so many sailors testified to Juet’s “words tending to mutiny” that Hudson was forced to demote him, an incident that Pricket refers to only in passing. But it made enough of an impression on Wydowse that he recorded it and tucked it away, perhaps in fear or perhaps leaving it for someone else to find.
Stories about Hudson and his crew flourished long after their disappearance, especially about young John Hudson.
The High Court wasn’t as easy to convince as Trinity House. Within the year, four of the survivors—Pricket, Bennet Mathews, Francis Clemens, and surgeon Edward Wilson—were on trial for murder. They pleaded not guilty and were acquitted.
Could the castaways have survived? Peter C. Mancall makes the case in his book Fatal Journey: The Final Expedition of Henry Hudson that they may have lasted at least until winter—and longer if the local Cree helped them. The Hudson Bay region “supported those who knew how to hunt and fish there,” Mancall writes. The Cree language had words for 200 different species of birds, all of which nested nearby, and the waters teemed with fish, when they weren’t rife with ice. And Hudson’s previous journeys “proved he was a survivor.”
Stories about Hudson and his crew flourished long after their disappearance, especially about young John Hudson. He’d been adopted by the Cree, some said. Others claimed he’d traveled south to meet up with the explorer Samuel Champlain in New France. In the late 1950s, a construction crew near Deep River, Ontario, nearly 500 miles south of Hudson Bay, discovered a boulder inscribed with the phrase “HH 1612 Captive,” but it was probably a fake. A 1990s expedition based on Cree oral history about a “young Englishman’s grave” on the eastern shore of James Bay turned up nothing.
The most likely conclusion to Henry Hudson’s story involves a small island in James Bay. There, in 1671, a party from a later expedition discovered “an old wigwam not built by Indians” and guessed it “to be the place where poor Hudson ended his days.” They found bones on a nearby island, but those probably belonged to an expedition after Hudson’s.
Although the island was unnamed, Hudson himself is memorialized in the designations of the strait, the bay, and the river that he was the first European to navigate.
