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From "The Third Voyage of Master Henry Hudson," by Robert Juet: Introduction

2009; University of Pennsylvania Press; Volume: 7; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/eam.0.0020

1559-0895

Daniel Richter,

Historical Geography and Cartography

From "The Third Voyage of Master Henry Hudson," by Robert Juet: Introduction Daniel K. Richter Only a few fragments of Henry Hudson's own journal of his 1609 voyage appear to survive, embedded in Johan de Laet's Nieuwe Wereldt, ofte Beschrijvinghe van West-Indien, first published in 1625. The fragments describe a pleasant country of "very good people" who were so devastated at the prospect that Hudson might be "afraid of their bows," that, "taking the arrows, they broke them in pieces, and threw them into the fire, etc."1 A more complicated tale appears in the sole surviving complete source on the voyage, originally published by Samuel Purchas in the same year as de Laet's work. We know next to nothing about its author, Robert Juet, except that he was an officer on Hudson's ship, de Halve Maen; that, less than two years after composing these words, he was among the mutineers who set Hudson adrift to die in frozen northern waters; and that subsequently he himself failed to make it back to Europe alive. The portion of Juet's text dealing directly with the 1609 exploration of the river that now bears Hudson's name is reprinted here, from J. Franklin Jameson's early twentieth-century edition.2 According to de Laet, "from all that they could judge and learn, there had never been any ships or Christians in that quarter before; so that they were the first to discover this river and ascend it so far."3 That statement was convenient for those asserting a right of first discovery, but there is no way to confirm it. Whatever the case, the Native people of the quarter were not the first whom Hudson and his crew had met after their long voyage across the [End Page 426] North Atlantic, as they wandered down the North American coast from today's Nova Scotia to North Carolina and finally back to New York Harbor. According to Juet, Indians of Maine, "seeming glad of our comming," had claimed "that there were Gold, Silver, and Copper mynes hard by us; and that the French-men doe Trade with them." Confirming the latter assertion were the facts that "one of them spake some words of French" and that, a few days later, the crew "espied two French shallops full of the Countrey people" trading furs "for red Cassockes, Knives, Hatchets, Copper, Kettles, Trevits, Beads, and other trifles."4 Something about all this set Hudson's crew on edge. Keeping "good watch for feare of being betrayed by the people," the Europeans seized the next canoe-load of Indians they saw, then set out in a "Boat & Scute with twelve men and Muskets, and two stone Pieces or Murderers, and drave the Salvages from their Houses, and tooke the spoyle of them, as they would have done of us."5 No further explanation for the violence seemed necessary, although a contemporary Dutch commentator admitted that "the crew behaved badly towards the people of the country, taking their property by force, out of which there arose quarrels among themselves."6 This was not, then, a happy ship exploring a pleasant country. Despite a more civil encounter near Cape Cod with a Native man brought on board de Halve Maen and offered food and drink before being sent back home with "three or foure glasse Buttons,"7 many of Hudson's men had concluded that, as Juet twice observes in this excerpt, they "durst not trust" Indians. These experiences make it unlikely that John Colman, said to have been killed in a skirmish in upper New York Bay, was an innocent victim of an unprovoked attack. Hudson's feuding crew expected trouble, and they tended to find it. Whether or not the varied Munsee-speaking inhabitants of New York Harbor and the Hudson Valley had yet laid eyes on Europeans, they seem to have had clear ideas about what to expect. Some of those who lived near the mouth of the river had probably seen European ships on the horizon or European people on their shores. Certainly all had heard tales of the dangerous, hairy-faced newcomers who had been sailing these waters...