d Moran.]

VI.

HENRY HUDSON ENTERING NEW YORK BAY, SEPTEMBER 11, 1609.[I]

Previous to his discovery of the Hudson River, Henry Hudson, an
Englishman, sometimes erroneously called Hendrick Hudson because the
ship in which he sailed was fitted out under the auspices of the Dutch
East India Company and the Amsterdam Chamber of Commerce, had made three
voyages to find a northwest passage to China and India. To reach those
shores _via_ the Atlantic seems to have been the goal of all the early
discoverers, including Columbus and also De Soto, who, before his
Florida expedition, had explored the coast of Central America, on the
Pacific Ocean, in search of a passage through the American continent;
and even Hudson sailed up the Hudson River in the expectation that it
would lead on to the Pacific Ocean and thus to Asia. Hudson was not the
only Englishman who had received encouragement and assistance from
Holland when his own land had failed him, the same as did the Pilgrims
soon thereafter, when they sought refuge in that enlightened and
enterprising country.

He sailed from Amsterdam on April 6, 1609, in a clumsy, two-masted craft
with square sails called the "Half Moon," a Dutch galiot of only ninety
tons, with a crew of twenty men, in an extreme northwesterly direction,
but being driven back by the ice, skirted along the Atlantic coast,
passing through Casco Bay, Maine, as far south as Chesapeake Bay, and
thence again northward, and entered Raritan Bay, south of Staten Island,
on September 11, 1609, into the present harbor of New York, and, on
September 14th, sailed up the Hudson River almost as far as Albany.

The return voyage down the Hudson to its mouth, owing to adverse winds,
occupied eleven days, and on November 7, 1609, he landed at Dartmouth,
England, where, owing to the jealousy of the English Government, the
crew was detained and his ship seized, although she had borne the Dutch
flag and Hudson had claimed the sovereignty of the soil for that country
over that portion of the American continent which he had discovered. It
was to all intents and purposes a discovery, as the first definite
historic account of the existence of this part of the new world dated
from this voyage, of which he kept a careful journal, however probable
it may be that, before him, other Europeans had looked upon Manhattan
Island and the Hudson River, in view of the many expeditions to America
during the long period from the tenth