HE followed the eastern shore [south] to James Bay, where, greatly to his disappointment, he found that the coast-line turned northward and barred his passage to Asia.* He was compelled to spend the winter on the southern shores of James Bay. When the supplies became so low that there remained only a pound of bread and a small quantity of cheese and biscuits for each, the men mutinied, placed Hudson, his young son, and eight loyal members of the crew in a small boat, and abandoned them to the caprice of wind and wave on the lonely, ice-bound sea.* What befell the intrepid explorer, discoverer of two great commercial highways,* remains a mystery to this day. The mutineers paid dearly for their treachery; only four survived to tell the thrilling story of the wanderings of the Discovery.
Other explorers followed Hudson in the quest for the western strait, and soon the shores of Hudson Bay were clearly outlined. Thus the way was opened up for the work of the great Company of Merchant Adventurers to New Lands,* with which the name of Hudson is associated, and the basis was laid for the conflict of two great empires in the northern part of North America.*
* Hudson could not know that, beneath the almost year-round ice, up in the bay’s north there are channels that do lead into the Beaufort Sea, and thence to the Arctic and Pacific Oceans. They are so icebound that the first man to navigate the Northwest Passages in a boat was Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen as recently as 1903-1906, and they remain impractical for international trade — unless more of them open up as a consequence of the current warming phase.
* Hudson and his party were last seen on June 23rd, 1611.
* That is, the Hudson Strait and Hudson Bay in Canada, and the Hudson River at New York.
* McArthur here wrote ‘the Company of Merchant Adventurers of England’, surely a slip of the pen. That company was founded in the early 15th century in an attempt to break the economic stranglehold of the Hanseatic League on the near Continent: see An Odious Monopoly. What he had in mind was ‘the Company of Merchant Adventurers to New Lands’, founded in 1551, and in 1555 re-founded as the Muscovy Company because its first success had been the establishment of trade between England and Russia: see Merchants of Muscovy. It was the Muscovy Company that sent Hudson on his fateful journey to look for the Northwest Passage in 1609, owing to disappointments with the Northeast Passage.
* That is to say, the French and the British. The tussle rumbled on throughout the eighteenth century, but the interest of the French government effectively ended during the disastrous Seven Years’ War (1756-1763) with Great Britain’s capture of Quebec in 1759.