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some sea captain who would undertake a voyage of discovery to find a
quicker way to the Far East than around the Cape of Good Hope in
southern Africa.

Now at that very time there chanced to be living a mariner named Henry
Hudson, who commanded a small coasting vessel which was anchored near
the mouth of the River Thames. He heard of the offer made by the
Muscovy Company and offered his services. And partly because the
merchants believed him to be a capable seaman and partly because no
other sailor volunteered for this dangerous mission, Henry Hudson was
given command of the little ship called the _Hopewell_, and with a
small crew set out to find the way to China by the northeast, hoping to
skirt the northern shore of Russia and then sail south into Oriental
seas along the Asiatic coast.

Nobody knows to-day who Hudson was or what his life had been up to the
time when he entered the service of the Muscovy Company. Over three
hundred years ago he suddenly appeared as a brave and capable sailor
and explorer, only to disappear in the great bay in northern Canada
that now bears his name, when he was deserted and left to certain death
by a mutinous and cowardly crew. We do not know what he looked like,
for no portrait of him has been preserved; we do not know who were the
members of his family, for no records of them have been kept. All we
know is that this master mariner sailed farther north than any sailor
of his day--farther north, indeed, than any sailor who succeeded him
for nearly three hundred years--and what is still more important, that
he explored the great river now called the Hudson, on whose shore
stands one of the mightiest cities of the world.

The _Hopewell_ was a little ship, about the size of the smallest
fishing vessels of to-day; and had been used many years before by
another great explorer and a friend of Sir Francis Drake's named Martin
Frobisher. That Hudson was able in this tiny craft to penetrate farther
into the arctic wilderness than the great square-rigged ships and the
strongly built steamers of the nineteenth century, is almost beyond
belief. But the fact that he did so is not to be doubted, and the
results of his voyages into those icy and deserted seas bore almost as
great fruit as though he had discovered the passage to China that he
hoped for.

First Hudson sailed north and then east, to the coast of what is now
called Spitzbergen, after which he sailed along the shore of Greenland